The place to go for rubies and squid
Owner tries to lure customers with gem of a bait
QUINCY - Rick Newcomb has the damnedest bait and tackle shop you've ever seen. It's the white clapboard affair that must have been at the rotary by the Fore River Bridge since the fall of Byzantium.
Inside, his Fore River Fishing Tackle shack is short on space and crammed with stuff, as all bait and tackle shops should be: Rows of rods mounted from the ceiling. Reels galore. Lures and lines of all persuasions all over the walls and vast amounts of strange paraphernalia. (Don't start with me on fishing.)
The eel tank sits prominently by the cash register, and a handwritten sign on a freezer lists bait in stock that day for salt and fresh water fishing.
But look to your right and you find rubies, sapphires, and emeralds mounted in settings. Silks, filigreed silver earrings, hand carved and painted bars of soap that are replicas of lush Asian flowers. It goes on.
Welcome to the strange and wondrous second life of Rick Newcomb. He's had a few. The 52-year-old with a serious ponytail has, by his own count, been a private investigator, massage therapist, and miner. He worked for the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington of all things at one point. I'm guessing there's more. And now he traffics in shiners and precious stones.
His pieces are modest things - we're not talking Harry Winston here - nor are they of size. But they're lovely in their settings. Besides, you don't see their likes in these parts, let alone a bait shop, without paying a lot more.
Newcomb, it turns out, has traveled to Southeast Asia for the last 15 years after the end of each fishing season. He fell in love with the culture there ages ago. Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia - he can't get enough of them. He stays at least three months when he goes. (I'd stay six if I had a tub of eels to come home to.)
As we chat, a man comes in looking for a fresh water rod for his daughter. Newcomb cites the merits of one made by the same company that produces the vaunted Shakespeare Ugly Stik, a name so captivating that I may just get one as objet d'art.
Another comes for a dozen sea worms and disappears. Still another pokes his head in the door to tell Newcomb that flounder are big around the harbor islands.
And so it goes. When he's working, it's seven days a week, close to 12 hours a day. His business is brutal for eight months or so and then it drops dead until spring.
"Whenever I meet someone who wants to go into the business, I ask three things," he says: " 'Are you married? Do you have kids? What kind of relationship do you have with your wife?' A wife must realize that she will be number two for nine months."
(His girlfriend, Cathy McKenna, works with him and says this: "I walked in here five years ago and never left.")
Anyway, eight years ago he decided to bring some gems back with him and see what would happen. He has tried trade shows and crafts fairs without earth-shattering success. By the looks of things, this stratagem has not make him rich.
But he loves the Asian connection, and he's refining his import business. At the beginning of March, for the first time, he brought his product into the bait shop, where sales are picking up.
"Cambodia and Burma are the ruby and sapphires capitals of the world," he says. "But you've got to find the right family that you can trust to do business with. It's all about families."
As he visited different ones, he'd ask to examine their stones. No problem until he'd bring out his stereo microscope, a gemologist's instrument. Most would then react like a vampire to garlic, which told him they were selling fakes.
(Did I mention Newcomb worked in the open mines in Jessieville, Ark., for five years mining quartz crystals? Or that he spent time in a remote sapphire-rich spot in Colorado called Yoga Gulch?)
"I finally found a family in rubies and sapphires in Phnom Penh that was happy to let me examine their stones with my microscope," he says. "I now work with the eldest daughter, who runs their business."
Together, they go to Burma and buy lots of rough stones - a lot, he says, is the informal term used there for about a handful - and bring them back to the family business in Bangkok, where they are ground and polished and mounted in settings crafted by the family silversmiths.
Newcomb also works with a business agent in Bangkok. He traveled by himself to a village in northern Thailand for two-tone silks.
To a village in the Cambodian highlands for silver jewelry. And to a Cambodian village about 20 miles from Ankhor Wat for patterned silk tablecloths.
The truth is, Newcomb wants out of his day job within the next five years or so and to move full-time into the import biz. His mother has owned the place for 33 years. He's run it for the last 14 of them and that's plenty.
Besides, bait and tackle shops are disappearing.
There used to be about 30 of them within a 30-mile radius, he says.
Now, he counts five on the South Shore. The old-timers who owned these places retired or sold their businesses, and younger pups with families don't last long given the hours.
For now, though, he pursues his arresting business plan: Bring in customers for rubies and squid.
Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com
Correction: In last Sunday's Sam Allis column, Yogo Gulch was misspelled and located in the wrong state. It is in Montana.
