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NYACK. N. Y, JOURNAL-rjFvVS YOflX CITY MARKET AliCAI P. zc.ooo MAR 14 19/6 ^-One Man's Rockland-------------------------------------------n Picking the bones V. By Grant Jobsonf IT TAKES a crisis every now and then to draw attention once more to the abused fishing potential of the Hudson. No one ever seems to believe, except the commercial fishermen themselves and a clutch of customers, that the river can produce delectable eating, particularly a specialty called the shad. There is. moreover, a tendency to be snobbish about the Hudson's finfish, yet their edibility (given the assurance of a re asonable environment) will rank with ta ble-grace catches taken from a compara. ble body of water anywhere. But. alas, how I many Rockland County restaurants can you count that have put the shad on the menu when the species runs in these waters? THE SIIAD has never been promoted ex cept as some bony bloke that has a deposit of roe fit only for Tabby, and even in the most knowledgeable of fishermen's coun cils I have heard the buck shad described as a piece of driftwood that would be shun-> ned by a shark coming off a fast. For shame. Unless we in the Hudson en virons begin to protect our finfish. and hold at least one course at Rockland Communi ty College on them, the river may be reso lutely dismissed as fit for nothing except gambling boats out of Albany and 40 Luna Parks from Sneden's Landing to Athens. Commercial fishermen, now outraged by the fishing ban imposed because of the .PCBs emanating from G.E.'s toaster-man ufacturing plants further upriver, have been excised from the shad industry (or these many years. And neither the old state Department of Conservation nor the Department of Commerce wet a sein to do anything about it. I TAKE note in Search, the quarterly publication of the State University of New York, that the annual catch of finfish in this state declined from 32 million pounds in 1939 -- the record year -- to I? million today. While four million pounds of shad were caught in 1945 -- the year I was intro duced to this wonderful fish off Cap'n Tug Wilson's dock in Haverstraw -- Search re ports flatly that "the shad fishery in the Hudson is all but dead, unable to revive." But if 1 were a commercial fisherman I would be just as outraged by bow our state's braintrusl let the shad industry flounder as by the infusion of PCBs. Search reports that the shad industry died not because of scarcity "but low prices brought on by new national transpo rtation patterns and technology devel oped" during the post-war years when the Hudson's pollution thickened. IN SOUTHERN rivers. Search noted, shad start to run as early as January and thus are able to get into New York markets all during the late winter. Our shad come too late, the seasonal demand has been sa tis!fied, and there's no profit because prices, necessarily, have been lowered. Tug Wilson, who loved shad, Uie com panionship of independent rivermen and good corn distilled, never was an aggres sive shad salesman. Perhaps he should have been because Hudson River shad has lost out to another version of the syndicite. MQNS 037175