Oysters made Jon Rowley’s world revolve

Oysterdom is a state of mind, and believers deemed a fellow named Jon Rowley as the “Johnny Appleseed of Ostréiculture” (oyster farming).

 

A native of Warrenton, Ore., Rowley’s reputation as an oyster whisperer spread across the country from west to east. He’s the guy who took native East Coast Virginicas oysters and got them to grow and thrive in Totten Inlet, part of Puget Sound near Seattle, Wash.

 

In 2006, Rowley told R.W. Apple Jr. of The New York Times that the Totten Inlet Virginicas are “uncommonly plump and sweet, simply the best oyster on the planet.”

 

Apple said that Rowley was “a bit of an oyster zealot. He hates undersize oysters, condemning them as ‘a few tablespoons of membranous seawater’ that have not been allowed to reach full sweetness and complexity. They belong in the same gastronomic league, he insists, with baby carrots.” 

“He is a chewer, not a swallower, who asks with an air of bewilderment, ‘What’s the point of eating an oyster if you don’t release its flavors by chewing and chewing well?’” 

Apple added that Rowley was to oysters exactly what P.T. Barnum was to his circus – an extraordinary promoter. Clearly, Rowley helped create Seattle’s reputation for seafood supremacy. 

“As recently as the late 1970s, almost no oysters were served on their own half shells in Seattle,” Apple wrote. “Instead, oysters were eaten in ‘cocktails,’ shucked and swathed in red sauce laced with so much horseradish that any tang of the sea was largely conjectural, or taken from a jar, plopped on washable shells and served to be impaled on a dinky oyster fork.” 

Writing for The Seattle Times, Nancy Leson said that Jon Rowley “hatched plans for his future as a boy while reading Mark Twain’s accounts of Huck Finn’s adventures on the Mississippi River. “When I grow up, I’m going to be a fisherman,” he declared. 

“The dream was spurred on by the fishermen who populated the docks near his home in Warrenton (where the Columbia River flows into the Pacific Ocean), offloading their catch while telling fish tales and sea stories,” Leson said. 

“He started young, pulling yellow perch from a slough with a simple pole and reel,” she said. “As a teen, he plied his services as a deckhand and cleaning people’s fish for a quarter apiece.” 

Rowley attended Reed College in Portland, Ore., but dropped out in the late 1960s in order to become a commercial fisherman in Alaska. That was the first chapter in Rowley’s meteoric career, said Terry Halverson, chair of Seattle’s famous Metropolitan Market. “A food astronaut, Jon Rowley went where no one else had been.” 

Rowley died in 2017 at age 74, due to kidney failure. Leson, who offered a eulogy, referred to Rowley as a “culinary evangelist” who had a lifelong obsession with oysters. She said: “He was a teacher and a preacher, a character and connector, a slow talker and a deep thinker.” 

On the day before he died, Rowley re-read for the umpteenth time his favorite passage from the novel “A Moveable Feast,” by Ernest Hemingway that was published posthumously in 1964.

 

Hemingway had written: “As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and…succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.” 

That would always serve as a reminder for Rowley to “make plans” to have plenty of oysters on hand. Always and always.