Worms

On the Southern coast of Maine between Portland and Penobscot Bay, scores of tidal inlets snake from the sea between mud-flat peninsulas, crab-haunted and reedy. In these shallows live salt water worms by the billion, more worms than can be found in any similar region on the Atlantic Coast. For years Maine clamdiggers made a sideline of digging worms for bait, considered them chiefly a damnuisance because during the breeding season from April to June salt water blood-worms sting like bees. Then somebody discovered that when properly packed the worms would stay alive for two days, could be shipped to fishermen in other States. In the last five or six years Maine's worm business has grown by leaps & bounds until this summer it has a turnover of 2,500,000 worms a month.

Salt water worms are of two principal varieties, the smooth-sided bloodworm, which stings, and the fringed sandworm, which pinches. Average length is from six to eight inches, but full-grown sandworms are sometimes a foot long. As bait for flounders, weakfish and porgies they have no peers, the sandworm being especially alluring in spring and autumn, the blood worm in deep summer. Few years ago when salt water worms were rare, fishermen in Long Island Sound were willing to pay as much as 75-c- a dozen for them. Standard price in this year's well-organized market is 35-c- per doz.

Around Boothbay harbor and Wiscasset last week wormdiggers were working night and day to meet the demand of an unusually good fishing season. At low tide the diggers wade around in knee-deep mud, combing wrigglers to the surface with long-tined clam rakes. A lucky day's haul is 1,000 worms but the average is 500 or less, paid for by worm dealers at the rate of 75-c- per hundred. In night digging the men wear dazzling electric spot lights on their foreheads, and have a slightly greater advantage over the quarry, whose custom is to bask on the surface in the dark. While the tidal mudflats, owned by the Government, show no signs of worm depletion, vigilant Maine has an anti-poaching law with a $50 fine for out-of-Maine worm poachers. Unlike oyster beds which require occasional reseeding, Maine's worm muds seem inexhaustible. But Maine is taking no chances.

Leading Maine wormster is tall, shrill, husky Kenneth Ely Stoddard, 24, who began digging worms five years ago when he was broke and could get no other job. Now he employs 44 diggers and one packer at Boothbay harbor, supplies nearly half the total market. Because mud is a worm's fighting element, Stoddard worms are dropped in buckets of fresh salt water and kept swimming to prevent them from killing each other off before shipment. They are packed on layers of seaweed in small hampers, 100 worms to the hamper with five thrown in "to take care of the breakage." Specially cooled freight cars take three tons of worms into Manhattan every week. Though all other Maine worm dealers quit from October to April, smart Kenneth Stoddard works the year round, hopes "some day to organize the whole business from here to wherever worms are found on the Atlantic Coast.''

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