The recent burying of a washed-up fin whale in Barnegat Light had me pulling up some related pics from my black and white photo archives. They showed Island times, circa 1920, when a washed-up whale carcass meant a quick call to the dead whale people at the Guttridge Rendering Co. in Edison. The company would rush to coastal towns to remove every iota of a stranded cetacean … free of charge.
The coolest photo shows company owner Robert L. Guttridge supervising the removal of a beached humpback whale in Ship Bottom. It had been manually sectioned, seemingly done with hand saws. The sections were lifted onto cool old trucks, modified for the taxing beach-driving task at hand. They would not have passed inspection in our times.
According to ancestry.com, “Because whale fat was exceptionally valuable for their rendering and hydrogenation…
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