The Vineyard - 1960

Our last summer on the Vineyard more than made up for the boredom of Block Island. The summer started out much differently than other Vineyard summers because the Massachusetts ferries were on strike. Some entrepreneurial fishermen chartered out their trawlers to take cars across to the island. One car could fit on each boat. A crane would pick up the car and set it down cross-ways on the deck. My grandmother's station wagon barely fit due to its length. The weight of the car made the trawler top-heavy. Luckily, the seas were calm or the car might easily have caused the boat to capsize. My grandmother would have been happy if it had. The car was a Studebaker Lark and was always in the repair shop. There was a reason Studebakers were affectionately known as "steadybreakers."

Nootka and Bjarni at the Norton House 1960 - Mr. B is gnawing on a baseball

Janice and Ricky Norton 1960

We rented a house on a working farm, Buttonwood Farm, in Tisbury. It was a strange set-up. The driveway to the house was more than a half-mile long through the woods. The farm owner's original house was another half-mile farther up the driveway. It had partially burned down so he built another house on the same property and hadn't even moved his family into the new house before renting it out for the summer. The farm owner, Robert Norton, and his son Ricky still lived in the partially burned-down house. Mable, his wife, lived in the back room of a bakery stand located on State Road at the entrance to the farm. She sold home-made pies from there. The two daughters, Joyce and Janice, lived in a small shed across from the cow barn. They were identical twins and their father truly could not tell them apart. It took a while for John and I to figure out which girl was which but we were finally able to do so. Like the Block Island rental house the year before, the Norton house was in the middle of nowhere, not close to the beach or town, but unlike Block Island, this summer was far from boring. Being on a farm was fun. John and I got to milk cows and ride horses. Joyce and Janice were tomboys, just our age, and we hung out together most days. John and I lived upstairs in the house, everyone else was on the first floor. We would blast our radio and sing along to Roy Orbison's "Only the Lonely" and the Safari's "Image of a Girl." Straw hats were in vogue that summer. The ones we wore were outrageous.

John and Rob 1960

Some of the farm animals had cool, alliterative names such as Buttonwood Booted Bettina and Buttonwood Bewitching Belle. The horses we rode were named Cadet and Bucky. We used to ride bareback, double, John with Joyce and me with Janice. We rode all over the place, through the fields and woods, sometimes pretty fast. One time Janice and I galloped around the barn too fast and came upon an unsuspecting calf. The horse jumped over the calf, I fell off and the calf landed on top of me. Janice thought it was hilarious. I didn't think so at the time but do now. Another thing we liked to do was ride over to Rozie Thaxter's, one of the neighbors. She had several peacocks and we liked to go there to collect feathers. I learned not to get too close to them; peacocks are noisy and have a mean streak.

We didn't spend 24-7 on the farm. John and I managed to get in plenty of fishing trips. We liked to take the party-fishing boats out of Oak Bluffs. One day we were out with maybe 10 other fishermen. I was fishing off the stern with everyone except John and nobody was catching much. John, thinking the stern was too crowded, was by himself up by the bow. I went up to see how he was doing and he was catching fish like crazy. Naturally, I stayed with him. Together we filled a large garbage can. The two of us caught more than everyone else combined. I think it had to do with the way we were drifting. The bait from the fishermen on the stern was acting like chum and attracting the fish but they found our hooks first.

We didn't go to the beach daily as had been our summer habit for years; the beaches closest to the house faced Vineyard Sound and weren't that good. But when my older brothers came to visit, they would take John and I to Barnhouse Beach. You won't find Barnhouse Beach on any map of the Vineyard. It was a well-kept secret of the surfing crowd. Barnhouse Beach was on the south shore of the island near Chilmark. You had to park on the shoulder of South Road and walk about a half mile through the dunes to get to the beach. The waves were awesome, many too big to ride. We'd often get bounced off the bottom when the waves broke. It was probably dangerous but I was 13 and didn't know any better.

I was sorry to see the summer end. We did not summer on the Vineyard again, opting instead for its sister island, Nantucket, a new frontier.

Block Island - 1959

Block Island lies due south of Rhode Island and east of Long Island, almost equidistant from both. We rented a house in the middle of nowhere; the beach wasn't close, the town wasn't close, the fishing wasn't close, but it was a small island, maybe 6 miles long by 3 miles wide, so you could get anywhere on a bike. I clearly remember the ferry ride over from Point Judith. It was windy, with choppy seas. John and I sat outside right up in the bow of the ferry, sang sea shanties and purposely got soaked by the spray. It was great fun.

As usual, we had a full house. In addition to my parents, grandmother, Olwyn and John, my Uncle Frannie and Aunt Lalee stayed for 2 weeks, and my two married brothers and their families each stayed a week. Rob, still single, visited as well.

The best beach was Scotch Beach; it had good waves for body surfing and decent surf fishing too. We always took our fishing poles to the beach and caught plenty of pollock and scup. If you wanted to catch flounder, you had to either rent a rowboat and bottom fish in the new harbor area of Great Salt Pond or drive around to the other side of the harbor and fish the channel entrance from shore. We would catch lots of flounder from a rowboat but they were on the small side. I much preferred catching fewer but larger fish in the channel.

There were 2 lighthouses on Block Island, we lived not far from North Light. It was a good beach-combing area. The more famous light was Southeast Light, standing above the Mohegan Bluffs. This lighthouse has since been moved inland a bit due to cliff erosion.

There was one town on the island, New Shoreham. It wasn't much of a town, just a few shops and some run down hotels. There were some formerly grand hotels dating back to Block Island's better days, now sagging in the middle and boarded up, located on the east side of the island north of town. My opinion, as a twelve-year-old, of Block Island was that it was a pretty boring place. I'm glad we spent only one summer there. Thank God for the body surfing and fishing.

"I must go down to the seas again" - Blue Hill - 1957 & 1958

"I must go down to the seas again, To the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship And a star to steer her by." from SEA FEVER by John Masefield Those lines by England's Poet Laureate remind me of Wiscasset. During every summer trip to Blue Hill, we stopped at Wiscasset on the way there and back. In an earlier blog, I mentioned the old wooden schooners lying derelict there. One could almost hear them rotting away. It seemed that each time we passed, there would be one less mast standing. Although I grew up around sailboats, these schooners were the first boats that really caught my interest. They were truly "tall ships." Soon, iron ships were to catch my interest. The summers of 1957 and 1958 proved to be significant stepping stones toward my eventual career at sea because it was when I was first introduced to merchant ships. My father was the marine transportation manager for a large oil company. While in Blue Hill, he took the opportunity to visit company ships that regularly called in Maine ports and I went with him. We often went to Searsport and occasionally to Portland. I clearly remember walking down long, wooden docks to board T2 oil tankers (the nomenclature "T2" refers to the type and size of a vessel). These ships were built in the 1940's for the war effort and were later utilized for private trade. I met old salts like O.T. Tonnessen and Charlie Hayes and was always given the grand tour. This was fun. As happenstance would have it, during my professional career at sea, I often called at the same Portland dock first visited years ago. The drive up in 1958 lasted longer than normal. My parents had a brand new car, a Jeep Wagoneer. In those days, a new car was not supposed to be driven over a certain speed until the engine was broken in. We did not exceed 40 mph the whole way. Also, back then, radios were not standard equipment in cars. They were usually bought as an after-market item. Our radio was installed just before the trip. A couple of hours after leaving home it started to rain. My father turned on the windshield wipers and a rhythmic clicking noise began. It turned out that the casing of the new radio was too deep and was being clipped by the wiper mechanism on every stroke. The noise became really annoying so we found a gas station and had the radio removed. The corner of the radio case was hacksawed off and the radio reinstalled. It wound up taking us the better part of two days to reach Blue Hill. We rented Guy Hayes's house those two summers. Pooh Hayes stayed in a cottage on the property. Bart Hayes's younger daughters, Hillary and Beena stayed with Pooh. There was a party-line telephone system in the area. When the phone rang, it was answered by people from several different houses. It always confused me. One night the sky turned multi-colored. I remember being outside with John, Hillary and Beena, lying on the ground looking up at the dancing lights above. None of us knew what this phenomenon was. As a group, we decided it had something to do with the Star of Bethlehem. It turned out to be the Northern Lights. During my seagoing career, I saw the Northern Lights multiple times but they never seemed as vivid as the first time. I wonder now if this has anything to do with the build-up of carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere. Down the hill from the house was Blue Hill Sound. There wasn't much of a beach but the clamming was great. Uncle Frannie taught me how to find clams by looking for bubbles in the sand at low tide. The clams we dug were pretty good size, probably six to eight inches long. Aunt Lalee, a talented artist, would paint seascapes on the insides of the dried shells. There was a rowboat moored a hundred feet offshore which we mainly used as a diving platform. We'd dive down to the bottom and find sand dollars, not the nice bleached ones you'd find on the shore, but live ones covered in fine, brown hair. Even though I was a good swimmer, my parents wouldn't let me swim out to the boat unless they were there. Occasionally, a bunch of jellyfish would wash up on the beach. They were clear with small, white circles in the middle and were just the right size to throw at somebody. Blue Hill had a yacht club, the Kollegewidgwok Yacht Club. We weren't members but our cousins were so we went there occasionally. There were some really snooty members with even snootier kids but the important thing was that we got to sail. Some friends had an Atlantic-class sloop that my father would take out from time to time. We'd troll off the stern as we sailed and often catch mackerel. Doug Byers, whose house we had rented the previous year, had a 42 foot yawl named Abanaki. One day we cruised with him from Blue Hill to Bar Harbor and back. It was an all-day affair and was fun because I had never been on such a large sailboat before. The Byers's always had a big picnic on the 4th of July. Maybe picnic is the wrong word because the food served was salmon and green peas. Yuck. Midway between the town and our house were the Blue Hill Falls. We called them the Reversible Falls because there was turbulent water present on both the rising and falling tides. We would fish for tautog (blackfish) in the calmer sections of the falls. The Blue Hill Fair was always a big event. It was kind of a mix between a 4-H show and an old-time carnival. I remember the Gypsy-like hucksters trying to entice the young men into a tent to see the tattooed lady. Much to my dismay, my parents wouldn't let me see her. Once a summer, we would drive to Bangor. There was a Sears store there, called Sears & Roebuck in those days, which was a big deal back then. I'd buy new fishing lures. We also visited Acadia National Park several times each summer. I remember sites such as Cadillac Mountain, the Thunder Hole and Jordan Pond. From the top of Cadillac Mountain, you could often see the ferry, Bluenose, heading out of Bar Harbor bound for Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. I can still taste the pop-overs and strawberry jam from the Jordan Pond House restaurant. It was always crowded there, even in the 1950's. That should give you some idea how good their pop-overs were. We ended our summer vacation earlier than normal in 1957 because my parents were going to Europe to see my brother Rob, who was studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. I lucked out, though. I was only home a few days before I flew back to Maine to stay with my cousins. This was my first plane ride. I flew from LaGuardia to Bangor on a noisy, twin-engine aircraft, changed planes, then flew on to Bar Harbor where Pooh Hayes met me. We stayed until the end of August then drove down to Andover, MA where they lived. Davie, my oldest brother, had gotten married earlier in the year and his in-laws, the Bruce's, lived not far from Andover, in West Newton. They invited me to a Red Sox game. Dr. Bruce and I went to a double-header against the Tigers at Fenway Park,  The Tigers won both games.  Marty Keogh made his rookie debut for the Sox and I'm pretty sure Ted Williams played in one of the games; he was at the end of his career then. Dr. Bruce later sent me a signed Ted Williams photograph which, years later,  my mother discarded along with all my other baseball cards when she was cleaning out the house in Bedford. After my parents returned home, my new sister-in-law, Joanna, drove me back to Bedford, NY. She was a neat gal and told me she could make it all the way home without stopping for a red light. Granted, half of the trip was on turnpikes and parkways but she did indeed make it all the way without stopping. Whenever she saw a red light in the distance, she would slow way down until the light changed then speed through. In 1958, we bought another chinook, Nootka, from the Perry Greene kennels in Waldoboro. Like his forebear, Barra, Nootka was hit by a car at a young age and had to be put down. My parents had bad luck with chinooks, although my grandmother's chinook, Rowan, lived a long, happy life. Rowan was too lazy to chase cars. 1958 marked the end of our summer rentals in Maine. What followed were one summer on Block Island, one summer back on Martha's Vineyard, and four summers on Nantucket. However, the blogs about Maine don't end here since my parents were to eventually retire there.

Summer of '56 - Chappaquiddick and Blue Hill

The following summer was split between the Vineyard and Blue Hill. We spent the first two weeks at the Dike House on Chappaquiddick. The house was quite isolated, located at the end of a long road consisting of two dirt tracks with a grass hump in between. The road ended with a small parking area just past the Dike House, right before a small humpback bridge built from railroad tie-like material. The road did not continue on the other side of the bridge; the bridge led only to sand dunes. The only people who drove over the bridge were surf fishermen with four-wheel-drive cars that could be driven on sand.

It was an eventful two weeks, fun but unlucky. The crabbing was excellent although my uncle Frannie did get a nasty bite from a blue claw as he was trying to take it out of the crab net. His hand bled considerably. One day I left my favorite baseball glove on the roof of our Plymouth station wagon. Naturally, the next time my parents drove into town the glove fell off and was lost. I dropped and broke a new fishing reel the same day I bought it, and our outboard motor vibrated its way loose and dropped off our dinghy into the creek as we were motoring back from a fishing trip. Fortunately we were almost home and were able to locate and retrieve the motor the next day, although we couldn't use it the rest of the time there and had to resort to rowing. I wonder how much of this bad luck was foreshadowing as the locale was to become infamous when Teddy Kennedy drove off the Dike Bridge in 1969. That bridge was our playground; it was a hundred yards from the house. We fished and swam off it daily. I have a very strong opinion about the Kennedy incident.

After Chappaquiddick, we headed back to our old stomping grounds, Blue Hill. I always loved the drive up to Maine. My mother and I played animal whist incessantly. This was a game where you counted animals seen along the way, different animals being worth different amounts of points, first person to 100 points wins. Cows were worth 1 point, horses 3 points, dogs 5 points, cats 10 points, dogs in automobiles 25 points and cats in windows 100 points. There was no problem seeing lots of animals in those days since a good part of the drive was on rural roads.

Our animals were good travelers. Few cars were air conditioned in the mid-50's which was fine with our dogs. They loved to stick their heads out the car windows as we drove. Even Puddy liked to travel. She would meow for maybe the first five minutes then settle down in her bed and enjoy the rest of the trip quietly. Her cat carrier was a bushel basket.

We rented the Byers's house, friends from Andover, MA. The house was not your usual summer rental house; it was a large, formal home. A typical downeaster named Knute lived nearby. He was a local handyman/fisherman and a real character. My friend John and I spent lots of time with him.

I believe this was the summer I learned mumbletypeg, a game in which you made a knife stick in the ground by flipping it off your fingers, throwing it over your back and making it "jump the fence," your hand being the fence. In those days, every boy carried a knife. Not so today, although a good sailor still carries one.

This is the first summer I don't remember any of my brothers being there. It had been a while since Davie had spent the summer with us. He left Harvard to join the Marines when the Korean War started and had lived away ever since. Far and Rob had summer jobs out west digging pipeline trenches for oil companies.

We had several sets of cousins in Blue Hill, my mother's first cousins Guy Hayes, Bart Hayes and Ruthie (Pooh) Hayes and their families. Guy Hayes owned a large, red farm house just south of Blue Hill. He had 6 kids, 3 girls and 3 boys. Lucy, the oldest, was my age. I could whistle but couldn't tie my shoes. Lucy could tie her shoes but couldn't whistle. We competed to see who would master the other's skill first. She won.

We spent the next two summers in Blue Hill as well. That's for the next blog.