Best of Beth Ashley: Being smart has nothing to do with education

Editor’s note: The IJ is reprinting some of the late Beth Ashley’s columns. This is from 2015. My son Jeff was a truck driver, and an amazing one. He could back a huge semi, loaded with a shipping container, into a narrow space as easily as you or I could drive a baby VW. He […]

Editor’s note: The IJ is reprinting some of the late Beth Ashley’s columns. This is from 2015.

My son Jeff was a truck driver, and an amazing one. He could back a huge semi, loaded with a shipping container, into a narrow space as easily as you or I could drive a baby VW.

He also had a great gift for taking apart the most intricate items — a fountain pen, for instance — or putting together a model airplane without missing a beat.

His skills amazed me.

At the same time, he usually got middling grades academically, and his father and I spent a lot of time pushing him to try harder.

I had been a Phi Beta Kappa at Stanford, and his dad had made it into Stanford law school, so our standards were different from his.

It took me years to acknowledge that different people have different kinds of intelligence.

In many ways, Jeff was much smarter than I.

In Maine this summer, I got new lessons in “smart.”

Jimmy, our landlord, spent most of his life as a lobsterman. When he talks, he slaughters the English language; if you weren’t paying attention you might think he is stupid.

He was born in Boothbay Harbor, across the bay from his home in the small village of Five Islands.

He served in the Army during the Korean War, and, after being discharged, applied for a job at the telephone company.

“I was turned down,” he says, “because I didn’t have no education.”

Jimmy finished eighth grade in the one-room schoolhouse in Five Islands, but after that he dropped out.

He had fished for lobster as a teenager, and now, with no alternative in sight, he bought his own boat and became a lobsterman full time.

“It was the smartest thing I ever done,” he says. “I love the ocean.”

Once committed, he went at his job whole hog. He went fishing at 5 a.m. every morning, usually six days a week and once for 94 days in a row.

Somewhere along the way, tuna became valuable; the Japanese were buying them at exorbitant prices.

Jimmy rigged his boat with an elevated pulpit from which he could harpoon any tuna that swam by. When tuna fishing was particularly good on Cape Cod, he took his boat to Gloucester and fished there.

Jimmy tells mind-boggling stories about the ones that got away as well as the ones he brought home. Fishing is no sissy sport, he concedes; a lot of fellow fishermen have lost their lives, “but I never had no real trouble.”

When the weather turned bad in the winter, he stayed home and used the time to fix his gear.

“I made my own lobster traps,” he says.

Jimmy married a woman from the neighboring city of Bath. Over the years they raised three sons, all of them lobstermen, too.

With his earnings, Jimmy bought six boats, two cars, a large house next to the bay and, years later, an even bigger house on the water. It is the kind of house we all dream of owning — big, clean-lined, with extensive porches, its own pier and glorious views of the bay. He and his wife also built a small cottage on their property, the one we rent from them each summer.

Now 84, Jimmy retired more than 20 years ago, but he sometimes acts as stern man for one of his sons. He frets about nothing. He still gets up at 5 a.m. every morning and joins other retirees at the Grange Hall for a pre-dawn game of cribbage.

He knows everyone who lives in Five Islands, and all of them know him, too.

Jimmy’s got “no education,” but he uses the brains he has. He’s a happy man, a successful man, and in ways that all of us could envy, he’s very, very smart.