Holland and Swarthmore; Stevenson, Harvard; Wooleyhan, stingray

People in the news; they’re the best. This week I’m featuring Delaware Supreme Court Justice Randy Holland of Milford and Rehoboth Beach; Bryan Stevenson, a Cape Henlopen High School graduate; and Roger Wooleyhan, a lifelong Delaware coast surfer and commercial waterman.

First Judge Holland. In May this year, Holland’s alma mater, Swarthmore College near Philadelphia, conferred on him an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.  It was presented during graduation, and Interim President Constance Cain Hungerford called Holland “a legal scholar and public servant of the highest order.” A 1969 graduate of Swarthmore, Holland was appointed to Delaware’s Supreme Court in 1986 as the state’s youngest-ever justice and is now the longest-serving justice in Delaware history. He was appointed to an unprecedented third 12-year term in 2011.

Stevenson at Harvard

Meanwhile, at Harvard University in May, Bryan Stevenson received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the Cambridge, Mass. institution. He added that to the law degree he earned from Harvard earlier in his life following graduation from Eastern University in Pennsylvania. Founder and prime mover in the Equal Justice Initiative in Mobile, Ala., Stevenson has spent his legal career representing disadvantaged prisoners - particularly on death row - who he felt didn’t receive adequate legal representation during their trials. His best-selling book “Just Mercy” details his experiences, initiatives and accomplishments during the years. Stevenson has been designated one of the most influential men in the world because of his work. His class of honorary degree recipients at this year’s Harvard graduation also included, among others, famed opera soprano Renée Fleming, 2014 Nobel Laureate in Physiology and Medicine Linda Buck, and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval L. Patrick.

Wooleyhan and the stingray

Seven weeks back, veteran Delaware surfer and waterman Roger Wooleyhan wrestled a 150-pound stingray out of the gill net he was fishing on Little Gull shoal east of Ocean City Inlet. Roger bested the ray in terms of boat versus sea but not before the winged creature’s poisonous stinger caught him in the ankle. That was it for Roger for several weeks.

“Stingrays have a neurotoxin in their stingers, and that’s what got me. The stinger actually hit one of my arteries, and a surgeon had to sew me up. After two trips to Beebe and then to Christiana, they finally got the poison under control with antibiotics. I still have a hole in my ankle. The swelling’s gone down, but the infection’s the real problem, and I can’t go in the water yet.”

Roger said he feels lucky his sting came now instead of back in the 1940s when people stung by stingrays often died.

“There was this guy called Luca, the Italian Stallion, who worked around the water in Ocean City. A real character. He had a friend named John he used to hang around with in the bar. John told him his grandfather was fishing a pound net that he had out on Little Gull Shoal when he was stung in the hand by a stingray. They didn’t have the antibiotics then and he died. That’s back when lots of people put pound nets out along the beach. They catch everything.”

This was a good time of the year to get stung, if there is such a thing. “There’s nothing really going on in the dead of summer,” said Wooleyhan.  “Winter time’s how we make most of our money. We’ll catch blues in the fall and then the monkfish. Right now I’m getting ready to go croaker fishing.”

Wooleyhan’s stingray experience puts him in league with famed Chesapeake explorer John Smith. When Smith was exploring in the area of Powhatan (father of Pocahontas) and his Rappahannock River empire in the southern Chesapeake, he received a sting from a ray while wading in the shallows near present-day Deltaville. The poison took hold of Smith - who had more lives than a cat (remember Pocahontas’s legendary intervention on his behalf) - and feeling himself declining quickly, ordered crew members to begin digging his grave.

What happened next depends on whether you want to go with what historians insist or with legend. Historians say Smith’s crew included a surgeon who knew - as did the doctors at Beebe - that soaking a stingray wound in hot water can draw out the toxins and save the victim’s life. When he finally tracked down the ailing captain, the surgeon went to work with a fire, a pot and water, and kept up the treatments until Smith began to recover.

Local legend, however, tells us that the natives of the area told crew members to gather mud from a certain bank in a certain creek just north of the Rappahannock on the eastern face of the Northern Neck. They instructed crew members to use the mud as a poultice to draw out the poison. According to legend, the mud prescription worked, and to this day that creek is still noted on official charts of the Chesapeake as Antipoison Creek. The sandy point where Smith was wading and was stung?

Stingray Point.