Nancy Harding

Nancy (Drucker) Harding

Nancy (Drucker) Harding moved to New Bedford after journalism school and worked at the Standard-Times, covering the waterfront and fishing industry. She covered the 1985-86 fishermen’s strike, and environmental issues like PCBs in New Bedford Harbor.

“When I first started there, we didn’t even have computers yet. We had manual typewriters, and we had scrolls of paper that had three sheets with a sheet of carbon paper in between. Then it would get edited by hand and when you were done, they’d roll it up, put it in a tube and send it up the to the composing room upstairs to typeset it and lay it out. It was a really, really busy newsroom, big, wide open, all kinds of people in there. No one had offices or anything. It was noisy. Everyone was on deadline. We had all these young reporters who were mostly single and from somewhere else. So, it was an exciting and fun place to be at the time.”

“I met some real characters. I would go wander around the waterfront. You know, that’s the best way to learn about anything like that.”

“There were a few people who became real mentors to me. Paul Swain and John Linehan, they were both just wonderful men. Working for NOAA, Paul was a fisheries statistician, and John was the local liaison for the National Marine Fisheries Service. Both men have passed away.”

“I went out on a fishing boat with one of the Avila family. They were a name in the fishing industry. There are a lot of brothers and cousins. They are a big fishing family. So, I went out with them for a couple of days, just got a taste of it.”

“I made some good sources. Then there were some people, like a lot of the boat owners and seafood producers, did not like the Press very much. So, they would talk to me if they had to, but some of them were kind of gruff. Many of the fishermen were friendly. Then came the big Seafarers International Union strike in 1985-86, and that was a really tense time that was pretty fraught, for me and for everybody.”

“During the 1985-86 Seafarers International Union strike, I remember a march up to City Hall. I walked with them, and then they had all kinds of speakers outside of City Hall. The Union reps from the National Union came to town and they were speaking. There was a lot of tension. The Union fishermen were picketing Pier 3 around the auction house, so to try to prevent people from going in, they didn’t hold the auction for a while, and then the auction was moved to private property in the South Terminal. I couldn’t get in.”

Seafarers International Union strike in 1985-86: