I saw in the news this week that the last sardine cannery in the United States has closed. What a shame! The cannery fell victim to fishing quotas, changing customer taste, and competition from lower-cost countries. The Stinson Seafood Plant was located in Prospect Harbor, Maine, and had been in operation for a hundred years. The first sardine cannery in Maine was built in 1875 and the production peaked in 1950 with 350 million cans being packed that year. The intensely fish smell of herring has been the smell of money for generations of workers in Maine who have snipped, sliced and packed the small fish into billions of cans of sardines on their way to America’s lunch buckets and kitchen cabinets.

The Stinson cannery was owned by Bumblebee Foods, and their sardines were packaged under the brand name, Beachcliff. Being a connoisseur of sardines, I purchased and ate the Beachcliff brand and did not like them. They were not the small, silvery fish that people knew as sardines. When you opened a can of Beachcliff it looked as if someone had hacked a Perch half-in-two and stuffed it in the can. They had no taste and very little smell about them. They did not resemble in any way the small, oily, silvery sardines that we ate while growing up out in the Blackburn community.

When we wanted sardines, we went to Dude Hudson’s store and brought a dime can of Possum. If you remember, the can had a picture of a possum hanging upside-down on the front. Possum sardines had a strong, fishy taste and a peculiar smell about them. They were delicious. I think they were the best sardines ever packed.

Sardines were so handy. You could carry a can of sardines in your back pocket while chopping or picking cotton. Whenever we got hungry, we could pull out our can of sardines, get your sardine key out of your pocket, and open the can. A sardine just fit on a cracker and the oil would glisten in the sun. A liberal dose of Louisiana Hot Sauce would add so much to the sardine and cracker. When the sardines were eaten and washed down with an RC or Double Cola, you could crumble a cracker into the oil and eat that. You could then flatten the can and nail it over rat holes in the corn crib.

Ladies could carry a can in their purse. I knew ladies who ate sardines, but you never saw ladies eating them in public like the men and boys. My daughters and granddaughters are about the only ladies that I ever saw enjoy them in public. I think many ladies ate sardines because they are supposed to be a good source of nutrition for the body.

Sardines can save your life. Several years ago I traveled to Japan with Stanley Menefee and Charles Durham on an industrial tour. Jenny Brownlow, at Mountain Lakes, told me to carry some kind of food with me because Japanese food may not be to my liking. I carried a big jar of peanut butter, a big box of crackers, a bottle of hot sauce, and about 20 cans of Possum. This food from home saved our three lives. Stanley and Charles didn’t carry anything to eat, and were shameless in their raids upon my food cache. I did get to where I liked the Japanese food, but those Possums kept me from starving to death in the meantime.

I think many people never ate sardines because they caught a whiff when someone opened a can nearby. I never understood why people thought that was a bad smell because it smelled like fish. Well, maybe sometime they smelled like fish that had been out of the water too long.

I guess this may be the end of my enjoyment of the sardine. I think there are still sardines that will be imported from foreign countries like Norway. I have eaten some of Norway’s products and they are good, but they are not Possum. It has been several years since I have seen the Possum brand. The last can I was ever able to find was at our local Walmart. I purchased all the cans in the shelf and never saw them anymore. If anyone knows where Possum still exists, please buy them up and bring a few cans to all us Possum lovers.