Farewell, My Lobster Queen

I first found out about the legend that is Virginia Oliver in 2021 while walking through Copley Square in Boston. The Boston Press Photographers Association had a Photos of the Year display, and one of them, captured by the Boston Globe’s Jessica Rinaldi, featured Oliver standing in a boat wearing a heavy-duty fisher’s apron. She was holding a ruler in one hand and hurling a lobster out of the vessel in the other.

 

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I stood for about twenty seconds laughing at the contrast between the no-nonsense Oliver and the lobster that looked both shocked and betrayed to be cast from her grip (apparently, it was too small to keep), and later read the accompanying Globe piece that profiled her work as a lobsterwoman. Known across the world as the “Lobster Lady,” Olivia was a Maine legend recognized for her bright lipstick, loud earrings, and bad-ass lobstering. She died at the age of 105 on Jan. 21 in a hospital near Rockport, Maine, where she grew up and spent her life.

Oliver spent 80 years trapping crustaceans across the Gulf of Maine, an arduous job that requires predawn hours, patience, and grit (lobster season takes place from June to December in New England, and requires a 2:30 a.m. start time). She was born to two lobster dealers before beginning to fish at the age of eight, and she began lobstering when very few women worked in the industry. She didn’t get bitten until she 100…and it was by a crab. Her doctor reportedly scolded her, asking what she was doing lobstering at her age. “Because I want to!” she replied. She needed seven stitches as a result.

Virginia was 101 when the Globe profiled her, and wrote that she was the “oldest licensed lobsterer in Maine, and possibly the planet.” Speaking to the outlet, she said that trapping lobsters is what she “grew up with.” “It’s not hard work for me. It might be for somebody else, but not me.” She wanted to continue lobstering until her death, but after falling at 103 and needing to use a walker, she could no longer go on her boat, the “Virginia.” (The vessel belonged to her late husband, who named it after her.)

“[She] was a spark,” Barbara Walsh, a friend of Oliver’s who wrote a children’s book about her, told CBC Radio. “She taught us all that there’s no reason to stop doing what you love, no matter how old you are.”

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