Mary McMenamin, in bare feet as usual, tells of her angling adventures
Mary McMenamin is just crazy about fishing, has been since her younger days and still is at age 91.
McMenamin, the first woman to belong to the Sunset Beach Sportsmen’s Club, is one of its longest-standing members.
“I was a fishing nut,” the Lower Township resident said. “I seem to have a feel for it.”
Still 16 at heart, she added, “I’d go fishing again if somebody asked me.”
She’d gotten so used to life getting into and out of boats that she still rarely wears shoes, she said.
McMenamin was born in 1932 in the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia. She said her father, Michael Christopher Allen, was born in County Tipperary, Ireland, and joined the Irish Republican Army to fight against the British. After the Second World War he married a woman who was English and Welsh.
In 1953, her father bought a nearly 20-acre parcel on Sunset Boulevard as the result of foreclosure on a tax sale certificate going back to 1938. She said the property’s first house, which still exists, was essentially four walls with a roof – but that was all they needed. The house had no running water or bathroom.
McMenamin said they had a pot-bellied stove for heat, when needed, but the main thing was just to have a roof over their heads when they came down from Philadelphia to go fishing. They eventually built a cinder block house, “in bits and pieces,” that had a living room, kitchen, bathroom and bedroom.
She was apparently the apple of her father’s eye, being an only child. He would bring her for fishing trips even when her mother, Anna Mostin (Kadwell) Allen, remained home due to her rheumatoid arthritis.
McMenamin wanted to come because she enjoyed fishing more than most people.
She said she would fish with the guys who came from Southwest Philadelphia. She said they used to hang out on Sunset Beach and ended up calling themselves the “Sunset Beach Sportsmen’s Club” before there was a clubhouse; the club was formed in the early 1940s. The clubhouse was moved to its current site in 1957.
She said the Sportsmen’s Club really started as a gathering spot and a place to store a boat.
She remembers the concrete ship SS Atlantus, which grounded off Sunset Beach on June 8, 1926, when there was much more of it to look at. She recalled the ship being used to hold advertising, such as, “For Boat Insurance – A.M. Blanche, 201 N. Broad St., Philadelphia.”
“I’m probably the only one who’s taken a boat through the ship,” she said.
McMenamin explained that she went through the split in the hull by shutting off her motor, tilting it forward and drifting through at low tide with the current. She recalled there being a tremendous echo inside.
She said she used to fish all around the ship and knew all the holes and spots for catching fish, mostly flounder and bluefish, not many weakfish, a few sharks. She had her own boat and would go fishing every day.
McMenamin said there were rollers on Sunset Beach so they could roll the boats down to the water. She said they would use cars to pull the boats back up the beach.
She used to put her boat in the Cape May Canal, and as was common on the Delaware Bay, she would wiggle a docking post into the mud, the mud would grip it, and she used a pulley and rope attached to it and to another pole on the shore to pull the boat to her to get in and then go fishing.
Family History
She said her father was a bartender who didn’t drink, a lifeguard, a fire truck driver and her fishing buddy; yet, true to the Irish spirit, there were times they would fight like cats and dogs. Even so, she said, they were “as thick as mud,” and her father told her she was a better carpenter than he was.
“I still have all my tools,” she said.
During high school she worked at a uniform shop at 1311 Walnut St. in Philadelphia, and graduated from Little Flower Catholic Girls High School in 1950. She met Hugh McMenamin, whom she married one or two years after high school.
She and “Hughie” had four children: Dee (Dierdre), Jimmy (James), Reenie (Maureen) and Jack (John Michael). She worked for a time for the Sears and Roebuck Co. The family, however, would come down and spend time at the house on Sunset Boulevard, piling into the small house.
“We managed,” she said. “We roughed it.”
She said they added to the house from time to time. As the kids got older, they would want to stay home at times, and from time to time the McMenamins would have Irish kids staying at their house.
“I’m still in touch with a girl named Grainne,” she said.
Hughie also became involved in the Sportsmen’s Club, becoming the financial secretary. She helped with some of the bookkeeping.
When her husband retired in 1994, the McMenamins moved to their shore home permanently. He died in 2020, and in November 2023 she sold their home in Mount Airy.
One of her most cherished possessions, if you can call it that, is an old holly tree that grows on the edge of her property. She said her father saved the tree many years ago, when an arborist told him it was more than 300 years old.
That being around 50 years ago, she believes the tree is now about 400 years old. Her concern is that some day her neighbor will start trimming the branches.
Teddy Bears
It’s easy to spot McMenamin’s house on Sunset Boulevard. She has an assortment of teddy bears outside, including one on a swing, that remain there in all sorts of weather. Asked about the bears, she said, “It’s a very short story.”
McMenamin said she used to go to yard sales and one day saw a swing and thought of a branch on a tree on her property that bent out toward the roadway.
“I bought the swing, and I thought it would be neat on that branch,” she said.
After she put the swing on the branch, she got to thinking that some kid would come along and want to swing on it, and before too long someone might fall off and she would be sued. The very next week she went yard-saling again and found a bear that was about the size of a kid. She bought the bear and tied it to the swing.
“I was just protecting myself,” she said.
After a while, in addition to her finding more bears at yard sales, people began to start dropping bears off.
“We ended up with a bear collection,” McMenamin said.
Contact the author, Christopher South, at csouth@cmcherald.com or 609-886-8600, ext. 128.
