PEABODY — Forty years ago, a catastrophic blizzard buried New England, but Maureen Quirk Ouellette doesn’t remember the snow.
Instead, she remembers sitting beside her mother in the family’s Peabody living room, clutching a radio and listening anxiously for calls from her father, Frank Quirk, Jr.
The captain of the pilot boat Can Do was lost at sea during a mission to voluntarily rescue others. He and four of his friends braved the treacherous waters where they had taken many voyages before.
The skipper was known in the North Shore for the countless times he had risked his life to save others.
“We just figured it was just another time that he was going out with the Coast Guard,” she said. “The last thing we heard my father saying was that the windows broke and he was hurt. My father was bleeding. We still thought he would call and we’d deal with fixing the boat in the morning.”
But the boat never returned home.
Rescuing the rescuers
Quirk, who spent his days beside his two sons guiding ships into Gloucester Harbor, heard that a Coast Guard boat had set out to rescue the Global Hope, a 682-foot Greek oil tanker that run aground off Salem Harbor, and was in serious distress. He decided to help guide the Coast Guard’s vessel into the safety of Beverly Harbor, something he had done many times before.
“The guys on the Coast Guard boat were 19 and 20 years old,” said his son, Frank Quirk III. “They were like sons to my dad and they lost all engine power. For him to go out that night, he was involved with so many rescues, it was second nature.”
The three-time recipient of the Mariner’s Metal once saved a young boy whose pant leg got caught in his bicycle chain, leading to his plunge into the ocean. The man who dove into aide in the child’s rescue had an epileptic episode in the water. Frank saw that neither of them had resurfaced, and jumped from his boat to pull them from the water.
A year before the Blizzard, he was instrumental in the rescue of six men from the foundering tanker Chester Poling off the coast of Gloucester.
A mid-Blizzard mission
The day before he died, Quirk gathered four of his friends, many of whom were Coast Guardsmen, and took off aboard the 47-foot pilot boat Can Do. Donald Wilkinson of Rockport, Norm Curley, Ken Fuller, and Charles Bucko of Gloucester all volunteered to aid Quirk in the rescue.
As the Coast Guard boat made it to safety, the Can Do took a large wave to the bow, and the crew found themselves in grave danger without radar, said his son Frank Quirk III. The Can Do crew tried to turn the boat around and head back to Gloucester off the coast of Baker’s Island. Quirk Jr. believed he was making strides towards the destination, but the fierce winds and 30-foot waves pushed the vessel back into the dangerous area near Baker’s and Misery islands, and Magnolia, where the vessel would rise and fall violently with the 30-to-50 foot waves.
A wall of water crashed over the bow and punched out the window, giving Quirk a blow to the head. He was temporarily knocked unconscious and had to be patched up by another man. Bucko took the wheel and the radio to call in a mayday.
The Coast Guard couldn’t determine where the boat was and couldn’t safely look for it.
When the captain came to, he grabbed the radio to put a stop to the call.
“He said ‘give me the mic,'” said Frank Quirk III. “He knew my family was listening.”
Mattresses from the cabin were stuffed into the gaping hole where a windshield once guarded the captain from the sea.
Residents lined their cars up on singing beach and on the Beverly-Salem bridge to shine their headlights into the open water in hopes of giving the captain an idea of where the shore was. Among them was Gard Estes, who parked on a beach at Magnolia.
“People wanted to feel like they were doing something to help,” said Frank Quirk III.
Radio contact with the pilot boat was reportedly lost when an antenna was knocked down. A civilian named Melrose Cole picked up contact with a jury-rigged multi-element beam, and was the only person able to communicate with the crew. Cole asked for a corpsman to give advice on treating hypothermia and wetness. He reported the crew was trying to stay warm and quiet in sleeping bags.
During his final broadcast, Frank Quirk, Jr. told Cole they were going to “try to move aft,” they were wet and cold, and the hatch was starting to come loose. Cole reassured him there were about two hours until dawn and help would be on the way.
The final sacrifice
Four of the men’s bodies were found ashore the next morning in Nahant and Marblehead. Bucko was missing for several days, until the sunken Can Do was located and his body was found in the engine room.
Frank Quirk III said his father’s close friend was likely trying to get the engines running when the boat rolled over and the upper portion of the vessel was torn off.
“He’s definitely our hero,” said his son. “My dad and those other men sacrificed their lives to save others and they didn’t have to. It wasn’t their job to. That’s just what he did and he didn’t want the recognition for it.”
“He’s a man’s man,” said Ouellette. “We ate a lot of lobster growing up. He would help people and wouldn’t accept any payment. They’d always be giving us fish.”
Since their father’s death, the captain’s children have received countless letters from people who knew their dad and said they wanted to live their lives in a way that would honor his legacy.
“I’ve never met anyone like him since,” said his son. “But I hope there are others out there like him.”
Photos by Spenser R. Hasak.
