Environmentalists everywhere were saddened to hear that Derrickson W. (Dery) Bennett died last December. He was 79. An icon in the environmental movement, he became the first director of the American Littoral Society in 1968 and retired in 2003. Still, he came to the Littoral Society office at Sandy Hook every day in his beatup pickup truck, acknowledging to me once that “now I can do just what I want to do.” And what he wanted to do was represented by stacks of papers cluttering his office but never lost to Dery. He’d find whatever he was looking for within five minutes. “They’re here somewhere,” he’d mumble.

His tenure at the Littoral Society predated the Earth Day movement. He was there “before the Creation.” He once told me “the society represents the fish.” He never missed an opportunity to go crabbing or hit the beach when the blues were running, and he relished cooking seafood snacks at the society’s office.

I make no claim to being an intimate of Dery’s. My first contact with him was back in the early 1970s when I was bored with my job and wrote to him, asking if he needed any help at the society. He said he didn’t, a decision that I believe set the marine environmental movement back about 10 years. Coincidentally, he got the director’s job the same way about 10 years before, by writing to the Littoral Society cold turkey. Timing, timing, it’s all about timing.

Later, I finally met him when I was doing a newspaper story about beach access — his favorite issue. We irritated a few beach club managers as we trudged along the federally constructed seawall through their properties. In Monmouth Beach, we met a man who said he spent $40,000 to build his own seawall, and we spent a pleasant time discussing the very scary hazards of living on the edge of the ocean. My series on beach access had absolutely no impact in Trenton, but at least I spelled Dery’s name correctly.

I bumped into Dery off and on after that, and I remained a member of the society whenever I remembered to send in my check.

Afew years ago, I wrote a bunch of marine tutorials for the society’s website. Dery was to edit them, but apparently I wrote faster than Dery read. Only a few made it to the website. Whenever I’d try to push him along, he’d look up sheepishly and mumble, “They’re here somewhere.” In recompense for the delays, he made me a lifetime society member.

Occasionally his trademark optimism had limits. At the close of the Bush years, he asked me at the edge of Raritan Bay, “Do you sometimes think it’s only getting worse?” Without Dery, it would have been.

A memorial for this remarkably effective yet gentle servant of the fish will be held 2-4 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 27, at the Fort Hancock Chapel at Sandy Hook. There we can tell lies, darned lies and even the truth about Dery. The latter will be the most interesting.

And my tutorials? It will take a hazmat team to find them, but “they’re here somewhere.”

George Moffatt

Oceanport