Of lions, pulpwood 

 And the scallop king 



Stretched across the foreground in a borderless 

 color photograph is the body of a large male lion. 

 Its eyes are closed. Its head rests undisturbed be- 

 tween two paws, as if the King of the Forest were 

 only sleeping. 



But kneeling over the shape is William R. Lam- 

 bert. His jaw juts, his smile is cocked and rakish as 

 his hat. His right hand is gripping a gunstock. 



If there exists another photograph of Bill Lam- 

 bert, he won't admit it. He's a moving target, and 

 he says photographers don't often get a clear shot 

 at him. 



He has sent the photograph along, though, be- 

 cause he hunts big game and shellfish for some of 

 the same reasons. "I've got to have a challenge," he 

 says. "I always have." 



So Bill Lambert's story has a lion in it. It also has 

 pulpwood, calico scallops and no small amount of 

 controversy. The setting is first North Carolina, 

 then Cape Canaveral, Florida, where NASA 

 launches the space shuttle and Bill Lambert 

 launches this story: 



"Ten years ago, I didn't know a scallop when I 

 saw one," he says. "I was in the lumber and 

 pulpwood business in Greensboro, and coming 

 down to Emerald Isle for vacations. At the time, I 

 owned the Southern Pulpwood Company. We 

 sawed a lot of trees and made a lot of money, but 

 after a while I just ran out of things to do. So I 

 retired at forty-two, sold the company, and moved 

 on down to Emerald Isle." 



Retirement didn't take, and Lambert began 

 hanging around the docks and seafood plants on 

 Bogue Banks. Nobody paid the outsider much 

 mind when he came around to study a shucking 

 machine or ask a few questions. 



"After six months, I learned you just can't go sit 

 down with a rod and reel," Lambert says. "I got to 

 looking around and saw that the scallop industry 

 then was in the dark ages. The machinery was no 

 good, they were losing half of what they tried to 

 shuck, and about twenty-five gallons a hour was 

 the best they could do. Well sir, I was businessman 

 enough to see a dollar sign." 



Today, at 52, Lambert is being called the King of 

 Scallops. His Southern Seafood Company is 

 thought to be the largest producer of scallops in the 

 world. Last year, Lambert sold a million gallons of 

 scallops, about 7.2 million pounds. This year, he'll 

 most likely sell more. 



His shucking machines work around the clock, 

 six days a week, each at a rate of about 200 gallons 

 of scallops a day. His payroll carries 180 dock- 

 workers and processors, and his contractors keep 30 

 boats and some 190 crewmen busy fishing, day and 

 night. The crews hail from Florida, North and 

 South Carolina and Georgia. Three of the boats are 

 his own. 



Since early last year, Lambert has been riding 

 the crest of big landings from calico scallop beds off 

 Cape Canaveral. His $3 million processing plant at 

 the Cape runs three complete sets of patented 

 machines, designed and constructed in Lambert's 

 own machine shop. If the Florida beds give out, 

 Lambert's confident he'll find scallops elsewhere. 

 Two mobile processing plants, built into tractor- 

 trailer trucks, are ready to roll anywhere scallops 

 are being landed. 



From the first, Lambert saw that machines could 

 make scalloping pay. He began with a small plant 

 on the waterfront on Bogue Banks, tinkering with 

 his equipment and hiring some old friends. Later he 

 built newer, better machines into a plant near Cape 

 Carteret. He operated two years there, until the 

 calico beds off North Carolina quit producing, and 

 he left to set up shop in Florida. The North 

 Carolina plant now takes the overload his Florida 

 plants can't handle. 



During a string of years when scalloping was off- 

 and-on, others in the industry swung toward dif- 

 ferent quarry. Lambert kept chasing his scallops, 

 paying bounties to East Coast fishermen willing to 

 tip him off to new scallop beds. 



"In the last eight years, I've only been out of 

 scallops two months," he says. "I've kept looking 

 for them, and I've found scallops where there 

 wasn't supposed to be any." 



When he found the scallops, his new-fangled gear 

 could turn them out in a hurry. Before Lambert, 

 unshucked scallops were hand-shoveled from the 

 decks of fishing boats into bushel baskets, then 

 winched slowly toward the dock. Lambert 

 borrowed a crane-like tool from the pulpwood in- 

 dustry, fitted it with a scoop, and could soon make 



