Oxymoron (ox-y-mo’-ron): Placing two ordinarily opposing terms adjacent to one another. A compressed paradox.
It was the Hot Cooler! It would keep your beer icy cold for a week! It was originally invented by a guy from Maine to chill his kipper snacks while he was out hauling his lobster traps. Not many people care if their kippers are chilled. In fact, it was an idiosyncrasy borne by this particular lobster fisherman. The long and short of it is, he liked his kippers chilled.
I was working in the summer as a writer for the Boothbay Register in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. I finally got a chance to interview him for a story on the genesis of the Hot Cooler as an extension for the kipper cooler. It was part of a series on progress. My first question was “Do you really like chilled kippers?” He said “A-yuh,” and jumped in his lobster boat and pulled away from the dock full throttle. What was I going to do for my story? Ah ha! I could interview the guy who took the kipper chiller to the next level—the inventor of the Hot Cooler himself. His name was Randal Damon and he started lobstering when he was nine.
He was living out his final years at the Old Lobstermen’s Home in South Bristol, Maine. He’d hauled his first trap when was nine, and a dory was used for transportation, to get around to check the traps. They got their lobster bait from the Co-op, and would paint their traps’ buoys with stripes or polka dots, making sure they didn’t duplicate anybody else’s buoys. Randal’s were a little different. He just dipped his buoys in a bucket of pant. One year, he used the paint he had just painted his house with. The other lobstermen called him lazy. He didn’t care.
His fifth wife Tina was his stern man and worked her ass off every day—Sunday included. She had biceps like a prizefighter. Randal would pick up their bait bucket at the dock pretty much the same time every morning. Randall didn’t give a damn about the tide. He’d come roaring into the dock full throttle and slam the engine into reverse, bringing the boat to a full stop inches from the dock, and then, he would burp “Bow, wow, wow” and take a puff off his Swisher Sweet cigar. Usually, at least one person would jump off the dock for fear Randall was going to ram it and break it to pieces. Randall never hit the dock. He had been a Commander in the Navy. He knew what he was doing, but he had a drinking problem. His career ended when his ship, the USS Thomas Jefferson, found its way to Rte. 95 near Kittery, Maine. It was listed over on its side and Randall, wearing a grass skirt and an aloha shirt, was directing traffic around it with a beer in his hand. Randall was courtmartialed and sentenced to 5 years hard labor, working in the forests of Northern Maine as a member of the Beaver Control Corps, tearing up beaver dams.
But what about the Hot Cooler?
After he got out of prison, Randall returned to lobstering, and drinking at least six beers per day. Randall bought a lobster boat from the inventor of the kipper chiller, who had just purchased a new boat. Randall named his boat “Bow, Wow, Wow.”
One feature of the chiller was its tray for holding kipper tins. Randal simply replaced the kipper tin cooling trays with trays with beer-can shaped indentations—like a muffin tray for beer cans. With the lid open, the cooler would keep cooling either because it was plugged in or packed with dry ice. Randall could set the Hot Cooler on the flat spot behind the boat’s wheel, and have enough cold beers for hauling all his traps. He could get drunk without risking falling overboard, bending over for a beer off the boat’s deck. He made Hot Cooler trays in his garage in his spare time and sold them to beer drinkers with kipper coolers, and eventually, the kipper cooler evolved solely into the Hot Cooler, and the kipper cooler went extinct.
Randall made a lot of money. He gave most of it to Dunton’s Dog House in Boothbay Harbor, Maine on the condition Dunton kept everything the same and used the gifted money for winter vacations in warm places. Dunton’s Dog House remains unchanged—a little hut and a couple of picnic tables with damn good food.
Randal died of COVID last year. He was 96.
Randal’s legacy is commemorated at the Lobstermen’s Co-op by a statue of a Piels beer can with a Swisher Sweet cigar resting atop it. It has a plaque that says “Bow, Wow, Wow.” People say that sometimes, on a warm summer night, when the harbor’s calm, if you walk to end of the public dock, the lapping water sounds like “bow, wow, wow.”
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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