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Virginia Oliver, Maine’s legendary ‘lobster lady,’ dies at 105
At an age when most of her contemporaries were measuring their retirement years in decades, Virginia Oliver’s days began at 3 a.m., when she rose to go lobstering with her son Max off Maine’s coast.
Some 95 years passed from the first time she worked on a lobstering boat, as an 8-year-old, to when she was 103 and health issues made it necessary for her to remain on shore.
“I grew up with this,” she told the Boston Globe in 2021, when at the age of 101 she was still joining Max on their boat three mornings a week. “It’s not hard work for me. It might be for somebody else, but not me.”
Mrs. Oliver, famous around the world as Maine’s legendary “lobster lady,” had lived for years in her Rockland home next to the house where she was born. She was 105 when she died Wednesday in a nearby hospital.
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“She was a hard worker and a good mother,” Max said by phone Saturday evening. The two had spent countless hours out on the waves.
For years Mrs. Oliver was the oldest licensed lobster trapper in Maine, and probably anywhere.
“Virginia was more than a local icon,” the Maine Lobster Festival said in a statement on its website. “She was a living piece of Maine’s maritime history.”
On X, Maine Governor Janet Mills posted that she was “saddened to hear of the passing of my friend, Ginny Oliver — but what an amazing life Maine’s ‘Lobster Lady’ led!”
When media attention arrived, around the time that the pandemic and Mrs. Oliver’s 100th birthday coincided, her resilience in a line of work dominated by men made her renowned across the country and around the world.
“Conversations With the Lobster Lady,” a documentary by Wayne Gray and Dale Schierholt, helped spur interest in her story.
National TV networks featured Mrs. Oliver in segments, radio stations broadcast interviews, magazines put her on covers, and numerous newspapers published articles.
Cards and letters arrived regularly from countries and continents thousands of miles away.
“She was pretty popular,” Max said by phone. “She was known everywhere.”
In interviews, Mrs. Oliver often downplayed her late-in-life celebrity, saying she was just as content to be well known at the local Hannaford supermarket she visited nearly every day.
Max said, though, that she was pleased the world had taken notice of her accomplishments. “She loved it,” he said of the steady stream of mail.
Mrs. Oliver was also the subject of books, including “The Lobster Lady: Maine’s 102-Year-Old Legend,” by Barbara A. Walsh and Shelby J. Crouse.
“I always teared up when I hugged Ginny goodbye, wondering if it would be the last time I would hear her laughter,” Walsh posted on Facebook after Mrs. Oliver died.
“I stopped by her Rockland home in October when I learned she had been hospitalized after a bout of COVID and pneumonia,” Walsh wrote. “She was still recovering, but that didn’t stop her from smiling. Ginny didn’t believe in complaining. She believed in living, laughing, and doing what she loved.”
During lobstering seasons that usually stretched from May to November, Mrs. Oliver was a study in economical motion as she and her son checked traps while navigating the waves aboard a boat named Virginia.
“That was my husband’s boat,” she said in the documentary while speaking about Maxwell Oliver Sr., who died in 2006.
Her work included piloting the boat, filling bait bags, and measuring lobsters. Mrs. Oliver would fling undersized lobsters overboard, often without a glance in the water’s direction. Using pliers, she tightened bands around the claws of those that measured up.
“She might give me hell once in a while, though,” her son Max said with laugh in 2021, when a Globe reporter accompanied them lobstering. “She’s the boss.”
Mrs. Oliver and Max usually went out to check their traps three days a week “when the weather was good,” she said in the documentary, which is posted on a PBS website.
“I don’t want to go five days,” she added with a laugh. “You know, that’s a regular job and I don’t need that.”
The youngest of three siblings, Virginia Rackliff was born in Rockland in her family’s home on June 6, 1920, and grew up there, a daughter of Alvin Rackliff, a lobsterman and lobster dealer, and Julia Buttomer Rackliff.
In the documentary, Mrs. Oliver spoke about spending summers during her youth on Andrews Island off Maine’s coast, where her father had a store. She would wait on fishermen and pump gas.
Virginia went to high school in Rockland and married Maxwell Oliver.
“I think he lived across the street from where she grew up,” their son said.
During World War II, Maxwell Sr. worked about an hour away at the Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine, then resumed full-time lobstering and lobster selling.
Earlier in her life, Mrs. Oliver had done office work, but “she decided she didn’t want to work for nobody and gave that up and went to work with my father,” their son Max said. “That way she could be her own boss.”
“My husband started lobstering in 1945,” Mrs. Oliver said in the documentary. “I went with him all the time until he passed away.”
She said she had “probably lived a different life than most” — a path that included choosing to become a licensed lobsterwoman.
“When I first started, there weren’t any women but me,” Mrs. Oliver told the Globe in 2021. “My husband and I used to go out in all kinds of weather.”
In later years, she and her son Max did their lobstering in the mornings.
“If we haul 200 traps, that’s a good trip,” she said in the documentary, adding that she and Max had about 400 traps in all between the two of them.
“She and I, we were usually done by noontime,” Max said in the phone interview.
Back on shore in the afternoons, Mrs. Oliver took care of matters around her house and usually stepped out to visit the post office or run other errands.
“She always liked to go upstreet in the afternoon,” Max said. “It worked out pretty good.”
His home was across the street from hers and he visited his mother regularly. When he did, she often doled out a few chores.
Her daily trips to the supermarket, meanwhile, were a way “to get out and, you know, see people,” she said in the documentary.
Max said his mother’s survivors include a daughter, Margaret Hilt of Rockland; two other sons, Bill of South Thomaston, Maine, and Charles of St. George, Maine; and two grandchildren.
A graveside service is planned in June, just after what would have been Mrs. Oliver’s 106th birthday, Max said.
“I do what I want to do,” Mrs. Oliver said in the documentary, adding: “You know, I’m really independent.”
In response to a question, she conceded that some people who met her would ask what her secret was, staying healthy as she approached 100.
“I say, ‘Well, you’ve got to keep busy. You’ve got to keep working. It’s not easy,’” she said. And then she broke into laughter.
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.
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