Fifty years after being dubbed the “Muhammad Ali Of Sardine Packers,” Maine’s greatest has hooked another title.
Rita Willey, 87, of Rockland was named the celebrity of choice for the state’s first Sardine Festival.
The Penobscot Marine Museum Searsport featured Willey as the drawing card for “Sardine Fest 2025.”
The museum held its opening Oct. 4, introducing Willey to younger generations born after the state’s sardine fishery heyday.
In the 1970s and early ’80s, Willey’s deft fingers got her on “Johnny Carson Tonight” and “What’s My Line?”
She had gained a reputation at the Rockland Seafood Festival’s marquee event, the sardine-packing championship, which she won over and over again, year after year, leaving everyone else in the dust.
Kind of like Muhammad Ali did in the ring, ergo her nickname.
Between 1970 and 1983, she won five of the eight competitions that were held, using scissors to snip heads and tails off of sardines and stuffing them into tins at a pace of one fish per second.
Sardine Queen Willey now lives in a Rockland trailer with her forever sardine king, fellow snipper and lifetime spouse Lanny Wiley, 89.
Despite her age, “I don’t sit still,” she recently told Midcoast Villager. “I’ve always been moving, all the time.”
Willey is a living testament to the industry that helped put Maine on the map as arguably the fishing capital of the U.S.
The nation’s first sardine cannery opened in Eastport in 1875 and at one point nearly 90 canneries were operating along Maine’s coast, employing roughly 8,000 people.
But the industry declined over the last century, as tastes in U.S. seafood changed and the demand fell for canned sardines.
The last cannery closed in 2010, when Bumble Bee Foods shuttered Prospect Harbor’s.
Nonetheless, legends like Willey the snipper – and her adopted namesake Ali – will forever be etched in history as “The Greatest.”
