November 3, 2014 — Thursday’s passing of longtime Boston Mayor Thomas Menino has sparked countless stories about the beloved mayor’s dealings with fellow politicians and citizens alike.
And those stories stretch to Gloucester, where Angela Sanfilippo, president of the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association and head of the regional Fishing Partnership Support Services, recalled Friday how Menino helped the Fishermen’s Wives get an inside track to The White House in their fight against federal fishing regulations.
It was 1994, Sanfilippo said Friday, and she and others in the local fishing community had not yet even met the “new” Boston mayor who had just been elected the previous fall.
But Boston Harbor had become a flashpoint in a fight over NOAA’s push at the time for new fishing regulations that would limit fishermen’s days at sea and cast other limits most saw as a real threat to the industry. As a show of strength, Sanfilippo recalled, New Bedford fishermen had taken their boats to protest in a jammed Boston Harbor, some Gloucester fishermen followed suit, and it was “chaos,” she said.
Sanfilippo knew the fishing community had to take its case not to the city of Boston, but right to the feds. And she read a report that then-President Clinton was coming to Boston for a fund-raiser.
“We talked about going to that, what it might cost to go to that, and we found out if as something like $5,000 a plate — so we said forget that,” she recounted. Then she learned that the president would be speaking publicly at Boston Harbor Hotel, and set about plans for having some of the fishermen’s wives attend.
Those plans were set, but would anyone be able to get access to the president, to tell him of the fishermen’s plight?
Read the full story from the Gloucester Daily Times