California, 1958. Cannery Row, Monterey. The last sardine cannery on the row shut its doors in October. The fish had been going since 1945, and the last boat came in nearly empty, and the owner looked at the numbers and locked the building on a Friday afternoon without a meeting, without a notice, without a word to the men who had worked the line.
Manuel Avero had been the floor foreman for 19 years. He found out when he showed up Monday morning and the lock was changed. Here is the story. In 1921, a man named João Avero came to Monterey, California from the island of Faial in the Azores with $12, a seaman’s card, and the name of a cousin who worked the sardine boats out of the Monterey wharf.
The cousin was real. The boats were real. The sardines that season ran heavy, and João signed on with a fishing company and worked the bay for the next 31 years. Through the boom years of the ’30s, when the row ran 24 hours and the canneries took everything the boats brought.
Through the war years, when the sardines fed the armies and the canned fish went to the Pacific in quantities that João, who had grown up in a village of 400 people on a volcanic island in the Atlantic, could not fully imagine. Through the first lean years after the war, when the schools began to thin and the boats came in lighter each season, and the men on the docks began to talk about it in the way men talk about a thing they can see coming and cannot stop.
He saved what he could. He bought a small house on the hill above the row in 1934, a white stucco building with a red tile roof and a kitchen window that looked down at the water. He sent his son Manuel to school and then to the floor of the cannery, where Manuel became a line worker and then a crew leader, and then, in 1939, the floor foreman of the Del Mar Packing Company, the last cannery that kept its doors open after the others began to fold.
Manuel Avero was 54 years old in October of 1958. He had worked on the floor of the Del Mar Packing Company for 27 years, the last 19 as foreman. He knew every machine in the building and every man on the line and the particular sound of the cannery running at capacity, the conveyors and the sealers and the steam cookers running together in a noise that was not pleasant, but that meant the boats had come in heavy and the work was good.
He had not heard that sound in several years. The sardines had not come in heavy since the late 40s. The boats went out and came back with less each season and the cannery scaled back and scaled back again. And by 1958, there were nine men left on the line where there had been 42 in 1945. On a Friday afternoon in October, the owner of the Del Mar Packing Company drove down from San Francisco and locked the building.
He left a note on Manuel’s car. The note said the cannery was permanently closed effective that date. Final paychecks would be mailed. It did not say when. Manuel stood in the parking lot and read the note twice. He had driven to the row every working day for 27 years. He looked at the building for a long time.
The smell of brine and fish oil was in the air, worked into the wood of the dock over decades, permanent by now. Then he got in his car and drove home. His father João had died in 1953 in the house on the hill above the row. He died the way men who have worked the sea their whole lives tend to die, quietly, in a bed facing a window that looked at the water.
He left the house, which was paid for, and a savings account at the Bank of Monterey with $1,100 in it. Manuel had not touched the savings account in 5 years. He thought of it as Juana’s money and left it where it was. Manuel’s son, Daniel, was 18 years old in the fall of 1958. He had grown up in the house on the hill, the grandson of a man who had fished the bay, the son of a man who processed the fish, and he had spent 4 years in school writing papers about why the fish were gone.
His biology teacher at Monterey High School had called the papers exceptional and submitted his senior thesis on sardine population dynamics to the admissions office at Stanford University with a personal letter. Stanford had offered Daniel a full academic scholarship covering tuition beginning in the fall of 1958.
The scholarship did not cover room and board. Room and board for the first semester at Stanford was $180 due the 1st of November, Harry. Manuel had been planning to pay it from his October paycheck. His October paycheck, when it arrived in the mail 2 weeks after the cannery closed, was $137. The owner had deducted the final week of October, the week after the closure, on the grounds that no work had been performed.
Manuel sat at the kitchen table with the paycheck and the Stanford invoice and did the arithmetic. He did it twice. The gap was $43. He had the money in Juana’s savings account. He would not touch it. He looked at the two pieces of paper for a long time and then put them in the kitchen drawer and went to bed. He had not told Daniel about the gap.
He had been trying to solve it for 2 weeks and had not solved it. He could take it from Juana’s account, but he could not make himself do that. Juana had saved that money on the water, a dollar at a time, over years. It was not Manuel’s to spend on a problem that was the cannery owner’s fault and the fault of the fish that had left and the fault of nobody that Manuel could name without being unfair.
Daniel was already in Palo Alto on campus on a 30-day provisional enrollment while the financial office waited for the room and board payment. Manuel did not want to have the conversation over the phone. On a Sunday morning in November of 1958, John Wayne walked down to Cannery Row from the hotel in Carmel where he was staying between film locations.
Someone at dinner the previous night had told him the light on the water before the fog burned off was worth seeing and he had nothing he needed to do until the afternoon. He walked the row alone, which was the way he preferred to see places he had not been. The row was quiet. Most of the buildings had been dark for years.
The big canneries that had run through the boom decades now locked, windows painted over or broken, the rusting hoists still hanging above empty loading docks. The Del Mar building at the far end still had equipment visible through a dirty window, but the dock was padlocked. A man was sitting on the edge of the dock with a black lunch pail between his feet.
Wayne stopped. The man was 54 years old, broad through the shoulders with the hands of someone who had spent decades managing heavy machinery and the men who ran it. Canvas work jacket, canvas trousers, boots with fish oil worked into the leather at the seams. He was looking at the water with the stillness of a man who has come to a familiar place out of habit and found it has changed while he was not watching.
Wayne asked if he could sit on the dock. Manuel Olivera looked at him. He recognized the face and set the recognition aside and made room. Wayne sat. He looked at the bay. The water was flat and gray in the early light, calm the way the bay is calm on November mornings before the wind comes up.
The fog still sitting on the horizon in a long white line. Pelicans working the surface in slow glides, barely moving their wings. He asked how long the dock had been dark. “Three weeks.” Manuel said. Wayne asked if he’d worked there. 19 years as foreman, before that, eight on the line. Wayne looked at the padlocked door. He asked about the fish.
Manuel said the sardines had been going since 1945, and nobody had done enough about it soon enough, and now they were nearly gone from the bay. He said his son had been writing papers about why since he was 14. He said his son was at Stanford on a scholarship studying marine biology. He said it the way a man says the best thing in his life.
Wayne asked what was next for Manuel. Manuel looked at his hands. He said he did not know yet. He said there was a gap in his son’s room and board payment that he was working through. He said it without complaint, stating a condition the way a foreman states a line problem. Wayne asked the size of the gap.
Manuel looked at the water. $43, he said. Then he said it was not Wayne’s business and stopped and said he was sorry, that was rude. Wayne said it was not rude. He asked the total. 180, Manuel said. Wayne looked at the bay for a moment. The fog was still on the horizon. Two pelicans crossed in front of them low over the water and disappeared around the point.
He asked about the father who had fished it. Manuel told him about João, the island of Faial in the middle of the Atlantic, a place of volcanic rock and fishing boats and not much else. The $12 and the seaman’s card and the cousin who had written saying there was work. The 31 years on the Monterey war. The house on the hill he had bought in 1934 with money saved over 13 years of fishing.
He told it the way João had told it to him, in order, without embellishment, the way a man tells the story of another man’s life when he has been carrying it long enough to know which parts matter. Wayne listened to all of it. He said, “Your father fished this bay for 31 years, and your son is going to study why the fish left.
” He paused. “That’s a long conversation between two men across a generation.” Manuel looked at the water. He said, “Joao would have liked the boy’s questions.” He said it quietly to the bay as much as to Wayne. Wayne took the long brown leather wallet from his jacket. He opened it on the dock.
He counted out $180 in bills and set them on the dock planks beside the lunch pail, flat in the gray morning light. Manuel looked at the money. He said, “I will not take that.” Wayne said, “Your son is going to spend his career trying to bring the sardines back to this bay. The men who fished this water for 40 years fed half of California and most of the army in the Pacific.
Somebody ought to pay for the education of the man who’s going to figure out how to bring them back.” He paused. “Consider it an investment in the fish.” Manuel looked at the bills. He looked at the bay. He said, “An investment wants something back.” Wayne said, “I want your son to finish at Stanford.
That is all.” Where are you watching from? Drop your state in the comments. I want to see how far this story reaches. Manuel picked up the bills. He held them a moment. He said, “My father came here with $12.” He said it to the water. Wayne said, “I know.” He stood from the dock and looked at the fog on the horizon. It was lifting.
The light on the water was exactly what the man at dinner had described. He walked back up the row without looking back. Manuel sat on the dock another hour. Then he drove to the Western Union on Alvarado Street and wired $180 to Stanford University Financial Office for the account of Daniel Rivero, first semester room and board.
He kept the receipt. He put it in the kitchen drawer with the paycheck and the Stanford invoice. He called Daniel that evening and said it was taken care of. Daniel asked how. Manuel said he would explain at Christmas. At Christmas he told Daniel most of it and did not tell him the name. He said a man on the dock had helped him see the arithmetic differently.
Daniel Abaro graduated from Stanford in 1962 and went on to a doctorate at Scripps Institution of Oceanography studying Pacific sardine population dynamics. His doctoral dissertation, published in 1967, was among the first academic papers to argue that the Monterey sardine collapse was recoverable given time and regulatory protection.
It was cited 41 times in the five years after publication. He spent 30 years as a research biologist at the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, 11 miles up the coast. He came home to the house on the hill above the row on weekends. Manuel lived in the house until 1979 and died at 75 in the same room where Joao had died, facing the same window.
The sardines began returning to Monterey Bay in the 1980s. By the late 1990s, the schools were measurable again. In 1997, the first commercial sardine boat went out from Monterey and came back with a catch worth calling a catch. Daniel Abaro was 60 years old. He had been waiting for it for 30 years.
He retired from Moss Landing in 2001. He had published 61 papers in his career, attended more international fisheries conferences than he could count, and testified twice before the California State Assembly on sardine management policy. He donated four items to the Cannery Row Foundation in 2004. A photograph of Joao on a fishing boat in 1938, his hands on the gunwale, looking at the camera with the expression of a man who has been on the water long enough not to perform anything for a photograph. Daniel’s Stanford diploma. The Western Union receipt from November 1958, $180, sender Manuel Avero. And the first paper Daniel had ever written on sardine population dynamics, typed on his father’s kitchen table at age 14, one page, single-spaced. The display is in the west room of the Cannery Row Foundation building on Wave Street. The placard reads, “The Avero
family, João, Manuel, Daniel. Three generations, one bay, the fish left. One of them went to find out why.” He found out. Then he waited. They came back. The photograph of João is at the center. His hands on the gunwale are large and scarred. The light in the photograph is Monterey morning light, flat and gray and silver on the water behind him.
The same light that has been coming off that bay every morning since long before the sardines arrived and long after they left and long after they came back. If this story reached you, pass it on. Share it with a veteran in your life. Hit that subscribe button if you haven’t already. There are more stories coming and unfortunately they don’t make men like John Wayne anymore.
