During World War II, my husband, Chub, was waiting for reassignment with the Coast Guard, and we lived in an apartment at Winthrop Beach, Mass., which overlooked the Atlantic Ocean. During a storm, the salt water sprayed our second-floor windows. Fisherman that I claim to be, I was eager to try my luck in the ocean.

My friend Millie Elliott, a major’s wife, said, “I know a place at Nahant where we can fish from a high crag without poles.”

We bought heavy salt water tackle, including coils of stiff line, heavy sinkers and large barbed hooks that would have surrounded a half dollar without touching. Bait? I can’t recall what it was, but we must have had the right stuff. Millie said, “I’ll put Glen -- age 6 or 7 -- in the movie, and we’ll take Lucy Cobb -- about 3 -- with us.” We drove north to Nahant, parked and climbed a long, rocky path to the point where we were to fish. The ocean was far below and the waves lashed the vertical rock bluffs. It would take a good throw to get the hooks and sinkers out far enough to hit the water.

The little girl was no problem at all; she made up some games with her dolls and several tiny rocks. Millie and I rewound the tackle so we could sling the loops out, the way a lifeguard slings a ring buoy. Soon we had a couple of ugly ocean catfish.

Each time I rewound and slung, I was thinking how much this was like throwing a buoy, but one time, when I let go of the coils, the big hook caught my wool slacks and the back of my leg behind my knee. I grabbed the heavy sinker and held it to relieve the pain. Millie turned pale; there I stood, on one leg, my driver about to faint, a tiny little girl to consider and a fish hook buried in my leg. We were miles from a town where we’d find a doctor .

I comforted Millie and said, “Reach into my right-side pocket and get my knife to cut off this heavy sinker.” Her color improved a little, and I helped her cut off the sinker, rip the seam of the pants and cut the green wool pant leg away except where the hook held it against my flesh. Surprisingly, there was no bleeding and it didn’t hurt much because the barb went all of the way through the flesh. We gathered our tackle and lunch stuff -- even the three worthless catfish, and we walked down the rocky path to the car. I worried more about Millie’s being able to drive than about my leg.

It was doctors’ day off so we went to the hospital, and a young fellow tried to back the hook out, with the barb hurting me a lot. “I’ve heard that you can cut the barb off,” I said. Without a word, he tried to grind the hook off with a surgical instrument. “Millie has some cutters in her car,” I prompted. Without reply, he sent his nurse to the boiler room for a tool with which he snapped the barb off. He removed the other part and said, “Iodine and a band aid,” and he disappeared. There was no charge!

I wrote this incident to my dad, ending it with “...so I caught a 131 pound fish.~ He misunderstood -- two weeks later he went around the neighborhood to retell the story, “Sue was the 131 pound fish she caught.”