The daily auction was in full swing Sunday morning at the Portland Fish Exchange. Lot after ice-covered lot, buyers snapped up 62,000 pounds of fresh pollock, hake, cod, cusk, redfish and more.

Yet through it all, save the occasional click of a computer space bar, you could hear a pin drop.

"I've become a white elephant," Paul Dewey, the exchange's longtime auctioneer, said with a rueful grin.

He's got that right. Late last month, the man who for two decades has overseen the movement of countless tons of fish through Portland was replaced by, you guessed it, a computer.

And while Dewey, 76, has stuck around to help the often-befuddled fish wholesalers adjust to the changing times, his last day, Dec. 1, is fast approaching.

"The only thing that would drag me out of here would be a computer program," said Dewey, his voice not much more than a whisper above the clicking keyboards. "Which is what's happening."

He showed up on Portland's waterfront shortly after retiring in 1985 as police chief in Deerfield, N.H., where he still lives. A collector of antique knives and razors, Dewey had stopped by a yard sale one day and got to chatting with Ken Martin, a licensed auctioneer who had just landed a job with the Portland Fish Exchange and needed a backup.

Martin moved on a short time later, and the auctioneer's job, complete with its 142-mile daily commute, has been Dewey's ever since.

Back when he started, Dewey stood out on the display floor atop a small ladder surrounded by two dozen buyers and row after row of plastic tubs brimming with freshly landed fish. Occasionally, if the bidding got really hot, someone might toss a clipboard across the room or explode with a string of profanities at a lost lot of cod or haddock.

Now the auction takes place in a small room just off the fish floor. Fewer than a dozen buyers sit silently over their assigned computers, tracking the bidding without so much as a raised eyebrow.

Back in the day, up to 30 million pounds of groundfish moved through Portland's auction in a given year. This year, the catch is expected to top out at a mere 8.5 million pounds.

"Times change," Dewey said as he strolled between 200 pounds of monktails and a solitary ocean catfish. "It used to be a guy could go out 365 days a year if his boat and his body could take it. Now it's down to 40 or 50 days and a lot of boats have been sold. It's amazing that any of them are still in business."

Dewey understands the inevitability of his obsolescence. Fish auctions in places like Gloucester and New Bedford, Mass., went electronic a long time ago, and if the Portland Fish Exchange is to survive – an open question in some quarters - it has to catch up with the times.

Still, it won't be the same – and everyone knows it.

By the end of the year, the buyers will be able to bid remotely from their offices. Gone will be the Sunday-through-Thursday daily gathering of wholesalers who, while competitors, are also good friends.

And gone will be Dewey, who occasionally used to start off his live auctions by "roasting" one of the buyers with a gag gift and a monologue he wrote himself. (He's also written some 17 short stories – the latest is about a fisherman who drags up a genie in a bottle.)

"He'll be missed," said Joe Cooper, vice president of sales and marketing for Bristol Seafood. "I know we have to grow. But on a personal side, I hate to see it for Paul's sake. He's a real gentleman."

He's also tough as nails. One day three years ago, Dewey started feeling a little woozy just before opening the auction, but decided to press ahead anyway.

Turns out he was having a heart attack. Halfway through the auction, he finally stepped away from the podium and let one of the women in the office drive him to the hospital. Within hours, he was in open-heart surgery.

"If I had my...