THE STORY GOES that the menhaden fisherman, while taking a break from hauling in heavy nets of fish, met his wife at a movie theater near where his boat was moored for the night.

The couple were enjoying the show when an usher tapped the fisherman on the shoulder and asked him to step out into the lobby.

“Sir, there have been several complaints about the smell of fish on you,” the usher said of the invasive odor that comes from working around the bony fish. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to leave.”

Used to reactions from landlubbers about the smell that comes from such work, the fisherman was resigned to sitting outside until his wife had seen the movie.

After about 10 minutes, however, the same usher, now red-faced and a little agitated, motioned the fisherman to come back into the theater.

“You may as well come back on in,” he said. “Nothing could smell any worse than that woman who was sitting near you.”

It was, of course, his wife, whose own person and clothes had been permeated by the odor of an industry that might have been icky to some, but smelled like money to those who made it a way of life.

I heard that story last week with a group of museum officials and press folks gathered to see the Reedville Fishermen’s Museum get its skipjack back.

More precisely, to see the shallow-draft sailboat, The Claud W. Somers, gets its mast reinstalled.

Reedville’s largest employer, Omega Protein Corp., which now operates the sole menhaden fleet and processing plant in the Northern Neck, was providing the use of a large crane.

We visited the plant aboard a cabin cruiser, compliments of a former menhaden captain and museum official named Wendell Haynie.

The trip provided a chance to hear Haynie and another former menhaden fisherman and boat pilot, Donald George, talk about the heyday of an industry that at one point was the lifeblood of many in the Northern Neck.