Well Worth Her Weight : Rosie Cadman Has the Only Official Scale in the Town of Avalon, and Her Heart Is as Big as Some of the Marlin and Other Fish She Has Hoisted in More Than 30 Years

Rosie Cadman had hoisted much bigger critters onto the scale at the end of the pier, but none so precious as the one she weighed on a recent warm and breezy morning, long before the tourists had flocked to the beaches to soak up the Catalina sunshine.

Megan Marie Fullmer, born Aug. 11 at 4:30 a.m., tipped Rosie’s scale at 7 pounds 9 ounces and measured 20 inches long.

For Rosie, it was grandchild No. 9, all provided by her 35-year-old daughter, Janet Fullmer, one of four of Rosie’s children still living on the island.

“(Janet) squirts them out like little melon seeds,” says Kay Spurgeon, an Avalon resident and longtime friend, stopping by the pier to congratulate Rosie. “She doesn’t even go to the hospital anymore.”

There are so many of the Cadman clan running around Avalon, it would be hard to walk a city block without bumping into one of them. But then there are only so many city blocks, Avalon proper covering only one square mile. The permanent population is 2,700. And all of them know Rosie Cadman, who has been weighing and selling fish here for more than 30 years.

But Rosie Cadman, a petite, salt-and-pepper haired, energetic 69-year-old, is known around town--and on the mainland, for that matter--for more than her ability to operate a scale. Practically everyone she meets becomes an immediate friend.

The Catalina Islander, one of a few newspapers on the island, once dubbed Rosie “the Grand Dame of Pleasure Pier,” saying she had “the largest heart of anybody in Avalon.”

Rick Macklin, 45, a Newport Beach fisherman and member of Avalon’s prestigious Tuna Club, says: “Rosie knows everybody on the island by their first name and they all know her. Rosie’s always there for you, which is really nice.”

Nice, because Rosie operates the only official scale in town, which every year puts her in contact with hundreds of fishermen who ply the productive waters around Catalina. Many of them belong to clubs, either here or on the mainland, and all rely on Rosie to weigh and record their catches.

And Rosie rarely lets them down. She can be found at the end of the pier from sunrise to sunset, seven days a week.

“The green pier and Rosie go together,” says Robbie Ford, 44, a longtime family friend visiting for the summer. “Everybody knows it. All the old fishermen that come here every year--they want to see Rosie.”

Rosie came to Catalina with her husband, Earl, in 1946, and they have lived here since, Earl working first as a fisherman and then with the Harbor Department.

In 1965, the couple took over Avalon Seafood at the end of Pleasure Pier and, as a courtesy to the city, claimed the title of official weighmasters.

Earl Cadman, 77, retired years ago, but Rosie still walks out to the end of the pier every morning, and with the help of a few of her grandchildren--she has five working for her--and two sons, she opens the restaurant and prepares for her visitors, many of them friends who walk out to the pier every day to check on Rosie.

“And if we don’t see them, we call and check on them, “ Rosie says. “I get worried if I don’t see them. I really do.”

The pier is indeed a busy place during the summer, with people strolling out to book trips aboard the glass-bottomed boat or merely for some of Rosie’s fish and chips.

But when the cannon sounds, the pier becomes a madhouse. People march to Rosie’s like an army of ants.

“When the cannon goes off, we know it’s either a marlin or a murder,” says Roger Cadman, 45, one of Rosie’s sons.

When Macklin brought in the season’s first marlin on July 31, he found himself surrounded by a virtual sea of people.

“I couldn’t count them all,” he recalls. “There were hundreds. They had the place roped off.”

In the middle was Rosie, who still lowers the pulley to the boat, ties the billfish by the tail, tapes its mouth shut, hoists it up and over the rail, and displays it in front of her restaurant.

She usually lets some of the more curious children guess the weight of the fish before putting it on the scale. She then ventures a guess herself. And more often than not, Rosie wins.

“Sugar, you get lucky sometimes,” she says.

Luck has nothing to do with it.

Rosie has seen more marlin than most of the old men of the sea.

“I know in my mind I’ve weighed over 5,000 marlin,” she says, sipping a lemonade outside her restaurant, waving at friends as they pass by. “The most I weighed in a season was 320 and the least I weighed was 27. That was an easy summer, that 27.”

The biggest Rosie has had to deal with was a 339-pound striped marlin--still a state record--caught by Gary Jasper in 1985. The fish is mounted on a wall inside Catalina’s waterfront museum.

Not long ago, a 700-pound blue marlin was brought to the pier, but Rosie was on a rare trip to the mainland because of a medical emergency and her two sons were also away, leaving no one capable of operating the hoist and scale.

The fisherman had to haul the marlin to the mainland to have it weighed.

“We were so upset we missed that fish,” Rosie says, shaking her head.

But she hasn’t missed many.

Rosie weighs everything from sea bass to swordfish. There is only one fish she refuses to haul onto the pier, the one wearing a gray suit and flashing a dangerous smile: the shark.

“People would see that thing hanging there and start screaming, ‘Where’s my baby?’ ” Rosie says.

Rosie remembers an incident several year ago involving a great white shark and a city official.

“They drug it 10 miles and had shot it several times and brought it here and wanted to hoist it up,” Rosie says of the shark. “I said, ‘No way.’

“But the city official said, ‘Go ahead, hoist it.’ ”

The fish was winched over the rail of the pier and hung high for everyone to see, its teeth seemingly biting into the wooden slats of the pier.

People were in awe of the beast, but there was concern as well. The city was deluged with inquiries regarding the safety of the beaches.

There has been no such excitement at the scales this summer, as marlin season has been slow to take off. Only a few dozen marlin and a couple of swordfish have been brought to the scales.

And as far as Rosie is concerned, only one day really stands out, the day she weighed in a little melon seed named Megan Marie.