Petty Officer Farrell walked to the end of the station pier in the pale morning light and stood for a long time in front of the forty five foot rescue boat tied there, with the orange stripe down her side. The name on her bow, in black letters taller than his hand, was NORMA JEAN. He turned around slowly. I am Norma Jean Pruitt, seventy nine years old, and I was sitting on an upturned bucket at the edge of the pier with a fishing line in the water. Behind him the chief had begun walking again, and the sailors who had been coiling the lines had stopped to watch.
In the winter of 1978, I was thirty one years old and ran a bait shop on the harbor with my husband Eddie. On the third of January a charter fishing boat out of Wildwood capsized in a northeast gale two miles off the point, with seven men aboard. The Coast Guard boat at the station was out on another call. I took the little skiff of Eddie and went out alone into the surf with a coil of rope and a thermos of coffee. I pulled five men aboard and towed the other two on a line. It took four hours. I did not feel my hands until the next day.
The Coast Guard gave me the Silver Lifesaving Medal, the first ever awarded to a civilian woman on the Jersey shore, and the gold ship wheel pin from the district, which I have worn on my fishing hat ever since. In 1996, when the station took delivery of a new boat, the commandant named her for me without any ceremony at all. The chief at the end of the pier, who had been sixteen years old and a cadet in the stands that day, took off his cap and held it to his chest.
A boat name on a bow gave one old bait shop owner the morning to bring a young petty officer back to the sea at Cape May.
I gave my terms when Farrell came back down the pier with his shoulders squared. “Young man, I am not angry. You were doing your job, and you were doing it by the book. The book says you challenge a civilian on a federal pier. It does not say you must assume she is a liar. What I ask is that you take me aboard the Norma Jean this afternoon, and let me hold the wheel for one minute. And that you learn the name of every boat at this station, and who she is named for.”
The face of Farrell crumpled. “Madam,” he said, “I walked past that bow every day for two years, and I never read it. My mother is a fisherman from Wildwood. She told me about a woman who rowed out into a gale, and I thought it was a story.” He swallowed. “It was you.” I shook my head. “It was a skiff,” I said. “And a great deal of coffee.” The two young sailors by the line began to laugh, and then quickly stopped, and one of them wiped his eyes with his sleeve.
But Farrell, in a final panic, could not stand to have the whole station staring. He snatched my fishing hat off the bucket with the gold pin still on it and bolted down the pier toward the shore, evidently meaning to run it up to the station commander and have it verified in private, before anyone else could see how foolish he had been. He got halfway. The chief stepped in front of him with his cap in his hand, and the two sailors, one on each side, quietly closed the gap with a coiled line held taut between them.
Farrell hit the rope at the height of his knees, stumbled forward in a graceless hop, and the chief caught him by the shoulders. The hat flew through the air in a lazy arc. A gull wheeled out of the way. The chief, who is a tall man, reached up one long hand and caught it before it touched the water. He walked back and handed it to me, and bowed from the waist. “Madam,” he said, “it is an honor to see you on this pier again.” Behind him a dozen sailors came to attention.
The consequences were warm. That afternoon Farrell took me aboard the Norma Jean, with the chief at the helm, and out to the end of the breakwater, where I held the wheel for much longer than one minute. The station commander invited me to speak at the family day the following summer, and the station has a plaque now that tells the story of the skiff, hung in the mess hall. Farrell reads it to every new recruit, and he has not been late for a shift in a year.
In the name of my husband Eddie, who passed in 2015, I started the Eddie Pruitt Fund. It pays for swimming lessons for children and for the repair of small fishing boats for retired watermen, in Cape May, Atlantic and Cumberland counties. In the first year we taught three hundred and twelve children to swim and repaired twenty one skiffs. One was a seven year old girl from Wildwood who had been afraid of water, and who now dives off the end of the jetty every Saturday.
On a Saturday in August, family day at the station, I sat at the end of the pier on my upturned bucket, with a line in the water and my gold pin on my hat. Petty Officer Farrell sat beside me with a rod of his own, and he caught a flounder the size of a dinner plate, and let out a yell. I laughed so hard my line tangled. He grinned and handed me his net. “Madam,” he said, “this pier is for station personnel.” I tipped my hat. “So I hear,” I said.
