Northern Maine Adventures Photo Album

Katahdin Lodge and Camps of Patten, Maine In 1969

2008-04-03T02:07:00.000-07:00

Look at all that front lawn I had to mow down there at Katahdin Lodge and Camps, in the summer of 1969.

(You can right click your mouse on the photographs on this web site, to enlarge them, and see much more detail in them.)

Anytime Finley Clarke's Nephew, that'd be me, David Robert Crews, was living and working at Finley's Katahdin Lodge and Camps, David was the Lodge's sole grass cutter and weed whacker.

I wouldn't have it any other way.

And my Uncle Finley and his wife, my Aunt Martha, both completely agreed with me.

In November of 1968, I moved, from where I grew up in Dundalk, Maryland, a Baltimore County suburb of Baltimore City, to Katahdin Lodge of Patten, Maine, to begin living and working at the Lodge. In effect exchanging the crowded, industrialized sights, sounds and smells of suburban sprawl for the quiet, sometimes gentle/sometimes harsh, natural beauty and fresh air of the heavily forested, sparsely populated Katahdin Valley.

The very first time I had entered that wide, rolling, deep green, mountain and valley landscape, was during summer vacation of 1966. I was a 16 year old passenger in my father's car. Dad, my mother, younger sister, cousin Nelson and I were on our way, up from Maryland, to spend a week at the hunting lodge my Uncle Finley, my mother's younger brother and my father's best friend, had bought the year before. We were driving about 6 miles south of the Lodge, when I was blessed with my first full, sweeping look from the northern Appalachian Mountains to our left, then back across Rural Route 11 and out across the wide, rolling Katahdin Valley to our right.

I felt the very soul of me expand -- powerfully -- outwards in all directions around our moving car -- with such secure, natural warmth that I can not fully express. Something previously unknown to me, from deep inside of my living spirit, reached out and embraced the countryside. It instantly mingled all in amongst the multitudes of tall, healthy green trees. Then slid back inside of me.

For the first time in my life, it felt like I had finally arrived at home.

I had found my most comfortable place on earth. I was destined to love that sweet, rough section of God's Country more than anyplace else I have ever been.

Which is why, at the end of Thanksgiving Day Week of November 1968, after my father and I had spent that week at the Lodge, I accepted my Uncle Fin and Aunt Marty's request that I stay there at Katahdin Lodge to live with and work for them, instead of going back home to Baltimore to join the US Merchant Marines, as I had told everyone in my family that I was planning on doing.

I graduated from Dundalk High School on June 5, 1968, and had planned on joining the Merchant Marines before my official Army draft notice came. That way, I could not be drafted into the US Army, trained as an infantryman and sent to die in Vietnam. At that time in our nation's history, most young Americans thought that all military draftees were sent to Vietnam as infantrymen. And that few ever returned home fully alive.

In November of '68, I figured that I had about another year before my draft notice arrived in the mail. So I stayed at Katahdin Lodge, and my father drove back home to the Baltimore suburbs alone.

And I experienced my first wintertime in northern Maine.

Eventually, after a great winter spent at Katahdin Lodge, with my Uncle Fin and Aunt Marty, a few paying lodge guests, along with plenty enough of the finest kind of Mainers, especially the country girls, and after doing a whole lotta' snowmobile riding, but mostly doing a whole lotta' hard, often dangerous physical labor, I became a Registered Maine Guide--who specialized in guiding bear hunters.

I was the right man for the job.

Especially when it came time for keeping the Lodge's roofs, walkways, parking areas and large horseshoe shaped driveway shoveled or plowed free from the record snowfall of the winter of 1968-69 and for keeping the Lodge's substantial, rocky lawns mowed and looking good.

All through my teenage years, while still living in Dundalk, I had shoveled neighborhood sidewalks and driveways, and had mowed and trimmed neighborhood lawns for money.

My way of viewing doing that work was similar to how some other young men view being on an organized football team.

Participating whole heartedly in football practice and playing football games is a very physically, mentally and emotionally demanding challenge. And in order to be, and feel, successful, and to win any games, football players must love 'tackling' those multiple layers of challenges. They must also learn to understand and respect their opponents.

You already know that mowing lawns or shoveling snow can also be a very physically, mentally and emotionally demanding challenge. Many teens, especially today's computer dependent teens, do not want to mow any lawns or shovel anything at all around their house, or anybody else's. Other teens love working out in gyms and being on sports teams. The average kid thinks of lawn mowing and snow shoveling as being a serious, frustrating hassle. But I approached it from a different angle.

I thought of it all as, "How can I understand the varying challenges of each individual mowing or shoveling job, in order to do each job the easiest and most efficient way, while setting and maintaining a steady pace at working that neither drains my energy and strength too quickly, nor takes me too long? And I want to evenly exercise and strengthen my body as much as possible. But, I must respect my own abilities and limitations, and weigh them against the various degrees of difficulty that each job possesses."

When lawn mowing, I started each lawn by first looking the yard all over, and figuring out how to make the most of the terrain along with the layout of typical yard objects like a swimming pool and a birdbath. It was the challenge of creating a geometric mowing pattern that allowed me to git-'er-done right. A pattern to be used every time I mowed that lawn. I always wanted to make as many passes as possible with the mower facing in the same direction, with the cut grass blowing out from under the mower only one time--to avoid building up too much cut grass under the mower. That meant pulling the mower backwards almost as many times as pushing it forwards. Which also exercised my body more evenly. I have never seen any other old or young mowing pro doing this. I guarantee you that most power lawn mowers cut the same going in either direction. You can use that technique on the fussiest of folk's lawns, and it will look just fine.

But it also means having the common sense to realize that bagging cut grass and putting it out for the trash man to collect is asinine. Because you are taking natural fertilizer away and wasting it. I ask you, so what if a little bit of cut grass gets dragged into your house? It won't kill you or cause cancer in your offspring, but the chemical fertilizers you may use on your lawns can kill by causing cancerous type medical conditions.

For shoveling snow, first I see if the walk or driveway is lower at one end. I always start at the lower end, no matter how slight the angle of the grade is, because it allows for you to not have to reach as far as in reaching downhill with the shovel, and each shovelful will be lifted up a slightly shorter distance. Each snowfall is either dry and light, or wet and heavy, to varying degrees, so I find out how heavy each shovelful of snow feels. I scoop up the same basic amount of snow in each shovelful and set a pace and rhythm that is akin to the rhythm of old time field hand laborers' work songs.

Everything I did to mow or shovel like I have told you counts towards a better outcome, like shaving fractions of ounces off of football players', heavy, protective gear by using lighter, space age materials when making the helmets and padding. The lighter the gear, the faster and further the players can run. And by coming up with separate strategies, 'running different patterns', for each mowing or shoveling situation, it was even more like playing a football game against each and every shaggy lawn or snow covered sidewalk and driveway job that I 'tackled'.

Ya' see what I mean by comparing playing football to mowing and shoveling? It is similar. Unfortunately, mowing and shoveling don't earn ya' any cheers from a crowd of spectators, no scholarships are awarded, and there's no ego boosting or busting attention from the media. But mowing or shovelling still isn't the terrible and unpleasant chore that most kids think it is. It is all about how you view the challenges and overcome them.

After a good snow in Dundalk, when you walked down the street I grew up on, Dunmanway, you could usually tell which sidewalks I had shoveled. My shoveling jobs were almost always wider and straighter than any other sidewalks on the block. When I finished up mowing and trimming a lawn, it looked neat and tidy. I couldn't stand the sight of any blades of grass sticking up above the rest. It all had to be cut and trimmed to a reasonably even level.

It simply makes good sense to me to do the job right. And that personal maxim made me a good employee of my Uncle Finley's, because Fin fully personified that work ethic--every working day of his life.

While I was growing up, my parents had provided me with plenty enough clothing, other necessities of life, toys, model car kits, and then, as I passed age 14, Rock and Roll record albums became my preferred Christmas and birthday presents. My father worked in steel mills most of his life, and my mother usually had a good part time job. My entire extended family lived quite well enough, just about right in the middle of the American middle class.

But I wanted to purchase certain items that my parents could not afford. So I started my own little lawn care and snow shoveling business.

The Baltimore area does not receive a lot of snowfall each winter, but it was enough for me to earn maybe a hundred to a hundred and twenty bucks a winter. That snow shoveling business of mine allowed me to afford plenty of model car building kits (AMT Three In One Kits), record albums and some clothes.

Then all through the spring, summer and into the fall, the money from my lawn care work flowed into my bank account mighty darned good and steadily. Sometimes it garnered me better average hourly wages than those of the Bethlehem Steel Mill and Chevrolet Plant employees whose lawns I mowed.

Using a power mower is one of my all time favorite forms of exercise and outdoors activities. I kid you not.

After my body had matured enough to be nearly through the personal trials and tribulations of passing through puberty, and my brain had begun to achieve some solid degree of common sense and job site safety sensibilities, and I had grown strong enough to mow my family's large 100 x 60 foot yard, with a gas powered lawn mower, my father never had to tell me when to mow the yard. I did it because I was naturally compelled to pitch in and help take care of our home, it's good exercise and it paid well.

From the time that I was 12 or 13, until I moved away from my childhood home, our lawn there on Dunmanway never went for more than a week and a half without me cutting and trimming it to near perfection. It felt so good. And dad paid fair wages too.

After our lawn was done, I went on and mowed and trimmed other neighborhood family's yards for more money.

I can't stand self-propelled mowers. They don't actually make the work any easier. And my well honed, sculptor-style technique of mowing requires unapposing, fully dexterous control of the mowing machine at all times.

My all-time favorite lawn mower was a gas powered Lawn Boy, with a 15-inch blade. That little buddy and I could git'er done. We worked well together, through most of my teen years.

Now, when using a 15 incher, the smallest sized power mower blade I have ever known of, you have to make more passes on a lawn. But anything with a blade over 18 inches wide is too big and bulky for my personal, particular mowing technique. I'd rather zip right along with a lighter 15 or 18 inch mower, but do more zigs and zags, then to push a heavier, lunky darn 20 to 24 incher along for fewer, but slower and much sweatier zigs and zags. It seems that everybody else in America believes that the wider the mower blade, the quicker and easier they can mow a lawn, but that just ain't so. I know, because I'm an old pro.

Never had a power lawn trimmer either, and I've rarely ever used one. I do most of the trimming with the mower. That's why I prefer smaller bladed, lighter mowers that are not self propelled. They're easier to maneuver up against fences, above ground swimming pools and buildings. For me, them old timey scissor lookin' hand clippers were the right tool for doing any small amounts of trimming that I couldn't get done with a mower.

But I was younger and much more supple at the time.

Today, ten minutes work with a pair of those hand clippers, and I'd end up hobbling towards my medicine cabinet, with a screamin' sacroiliac steadily reminding me that those manual tool lawn care days of mine ended when my lower back was operated on.

Yeah, I know, I'm older, overweight and I get in the way sometimes, of those Spanish dudes who do the lawn care work for this rental townhouse and apartment complex I live in.

But I'm still gonna' tell you that my personal motto, concerning lawn mowing, has always been that the job isn't done until the sidewalks and driveways are swept clean.

I hate everything about them thar' new fangled, ear splitting, lung burning, back breaking, heavy darned gas powered leaf blowing machines. It is much easier and more peaceful to use a simple ol' broom to sweep the grass clippings off sidewalks and driveways--if you'll accept my opinion of it.

In my younger days, I mowed a lot of grass in Maryland and in Maine. I actually enjoyed it. But there was one humongous difference between mowing lawns in Maryland and mowing lawns in Maine:

THAT FRIGGIN FOUR FOOT THICK CLOUD OF MAINE BLACKFLIES, MOSQUITOES AND NO-SEE-UMS STEADILY SWARMING ALL AROUND MY BUG BATTERED HEAD!!!!

All I can say here is, "Praise the Lord and pass the Old Woodsman Bug Dope".

What Not To Do When Dating A Bush Pilot's Daughter

2008-04-03T01:54:00.000-07:00

I shot this photograph in July 1969, when I was a passenger in the rear seat of my buddy Bobby's little two seater, bush pilot's plane. That groovy little ol' hedge hopper didn't have lights or a radio.

The shot is looking westward over Rural Route 11, about seven miles north of Patten, Maine, in Penobscot County. It is about three miles south of Katahdin Lodge. We are flying due north into Moro Plantation, Aroostook County.

We are looking out into 90 miles of the Great North Woods. It's all thick forest land with a few woods roads here and there, until you reach Canada.

Today, there are well maintained snowmobile and ATV trails traveling all through that deep, delightful forest. I'd sure like to get back up there and ride those trails. You can easily reach them from Katahdin Lodge's front yard. I mean doorya'd.

One Saturday evening in August 1969, around sundown, I was with Bobby's daughter Barbara, my steady girlfriend, parkin' and sparkin' out in back of a potato field, when Bobby flew over us at treetop level.

Now that'll grab y'ur attention!

Bobby often went up for short flights of that nature just before dusk got dark. He also usually took a passenger along for the ride. His most frequent flying companions were his good wife Jean, my Uncle Finley, or the Maine Guide whom I guided bear hunters with at Katahdin Lodge, Gary Glidden.

Luckily for Barb and I, we were merely just sparkin' and not burnin' up the bench seat in the cab of that pick up truck.

My sweet little munchkins and I were out on our usual Saturday night date. And that generally kicked off with a movie in Patten at the old converted opera house. Sheesh it was hard to find a seat there without busted springs biting your butt. I can't recall one darned detail about that building, but it was definitely just about ready for the wrecking ball. They showed a movie there once every Friday night, and then repeated it once on Saturday night. It was all geared for young teenagers. Weren't no adults willing to put up with that wild crew in there. The show was more about congenial, boisterous, adolescent horseplay than it was about the movie.

Barbara and I maintained a well planned and proven m.o., our modus operandi, for our Saturday dates.

Her younger siblings went to the show every Saturday. They were too young to be riding around in cars and acting wild with other kids yet, and the movie house was the only other entertainment around on most weekend nights.

Our m.o. was go to the movie for at least a half hour, make sure her brother and sister spotted us there, then we high tailed it for the door. We exited the former opera house and entered the world of teenage drivers in Patten, Maine. That consisted off a whole lot of riding around the wide open countryside for miles and miles then going parkin' in the moonlight.

The Saturday we got caught parkin' by her papa-in-a-plane, I had gotten off work earlier than usual, so I picked up Barbara earlier than usual. That meant we had some time to kill, until the movie house opened. So we rode around out in the country for a little while. But I was in need of some rest from driving, because guiding bear hunters entails driving an average of 80 to 90 miles a day. That's the only reason we stopped and parked in the potato field at that particular time.

But I do declare to you that we did not really get to parkin' heavy. That was for after the show and way after it got dark.

Wow! I'm hearing things!

While I'm writing this, I am experiencing audio flashbacks of the distinct bwurrrhherrrring sound of Bobby's single engine plane straining to hop back up over the treeline of the potato field; after he had swooped down below treetop level in the adjacent field looking to spot any deer, moose, bear or other critters who were just strolling out from their daytime sleeping quarters for a night of harvesting their groceries.

Most mammals in Maine eat breakfast at dusk, work the night shift, eat dinner at dawn, and then peacefully snooze all day.

So anyways, here comes Bobby's plane!

And here's how it went down there in the pick up truck:

Barb and I, more or less in unison, "What's that sound I hear? Turn down the radio. Look over there! It's your/my father! Oh crap! Oh no! Who's that in the back seat?"

Barb, "It must be my mother! It has to be! I know it's her! Can you see 'er?"

A mighty shook up me, "I bet it's my uncle in the back seat! Oh man!!"

Barb, "He's comin around behind us. What'll we do? What'll we do? That's my mom in there, I know it, I know it, that's my mom in there. She's gonna kill me!"

Me, "Maybe it's Gary. Oh man I hope it's Gary!"

Barb, "I'll be grounded for a month. She's gonna kill me!"

Me again, "If it's Finley, I'll never hear the end of it."

Barb, "If it's my mother, NEITHER ONE OF US ARE EVER GOING TO HEAR THE END OF IT!"

My maturing, young 19 year old vocal chords were yankin' tight and twangy like four pound test fishing filament being used to pull a truck out of a ditch. My voice was taking on a strangely higher pitch, when I said, "He's waving at us! Oh my gahhhd. He could see right in here on us. Good thing we wasn't doin nuthin."

It sure was a "good thing we wasn't doing nuthin," because from where I was sitting in the cab of the truck Bobby and I could see each other's faces so well I clearly saw that he was laughing at as.

But neither Barb nor I had one iota of a clear clue as to who was in the plane's back seat. The rear side window was too small and the rear seat set too far back for us to see who was in there. But Bobby didn't come back for a second helping of teenage angst. He certainly was eating it up on that first fly-by though.

I cranked up that Chevy truck and headed straight to the old opera house. We stayed for the entire movie that night. After the movie, we made sure to speak to her brother and sister. Well, she yelled at one of 'um for throwing the rest of their popcorn at the other one. Barb was, after all, their older teenage sister, and it's rare to get anything but a bunch of yellin' out of your slightly older teen sister.

Then we two scared love birds drove to the Clam Shop up the street, and got something to drink and eat. We rode around some after eating, but we never drove out past the town limits. All the parkin' spots were outside of town. No matter. The mood had passed.

That was some scary night, especially when I took her home after our date. We were at her family's mudroom door 15 minutes early; it was 10:45 PM, instead of the usual 20-30 minutes late, for Barbara's 11 PM curfew. But not a soul was stirring inside the house. They were all in bed already. We were quietly perplexed and thoroughly subdued.

A little goodnight kiss and off I went--to slowly drive up the North Road to the Lodge, to face my Uncle Finley and Aunt Martha.

Had Bobby been there waiting for me at his house, and had he punched me in my face and knocked me down in the dirt, as I had expected him to do, there would have been nothing I could have done. But apologize for what had happened.

Then drive up to the Lodge to pack my bags and leave.

Not only was Bobby a tough little, top-notch Maine woodsman, who could have easily whupped my young, suburban bred keyster, Bobby was one of Finley's best friends. If Bobby had gotten angry at me, he would have gotten angry at Finley too. Then Fin and Marty would have been angry at me. Plus the whole Town of Patten would have turned against me.

So it's a darned good thing for me that my buddy Bobby had a great sense of humor.

On most Saturday nights, I hung out in Patten or rode around the countryside with friends and buddies, until 2 AM or so. I hung out with other young men who were old enough to stay out that late, but who were still unmarried. We could even drink beer there without fear of any hassles. But vehicular accidents and a better understanding of alcoholism and how it progresses ended that open tolerance of underage and public drinking in Patten a long time ago.

I usually drove Rt. 11 from Patten to the Lodge at 10-15 MPH over the 50 MPH speed limit; but that night I just puttered along doing 45 MPH or so. But when I pulled into the Lodge's driveway, nobody was awake there either.

Now I had to try to get some sleep. It wasn't easy. And the morning wake up was even rougher. But I had to mosey on in and eat breakfast with everyone there.

I ate a quiet, uneventful breakfast with Fin, Marty and some of the Lodge's paying bear hunters.

Still nothing said. Man o' day! What to do?

When Finley Kenneth Clarke got pissed at somebody, he rarely held his anger in or allowed the offending pissee, whomever they may be, to get away scott free. So I knew that he hadn't been in his good friend Bobby's plane the previous evening.

I picked up the Sunday newspaper and headed for the mass of comic strips in the funny section. I needed some cheering up.

I couldn't really read or concentrate on anything well enough to even understand what was going on in the drawings of the comic strips. My psyche was effectively dissolving into the mystery of the plane's back seat passenger, and what was going to happen when Fin got wind of the 'wildlife' scene that Bobby and his passenger had spotted, when they were up there spotting wild game from the air.

Then Gary Glidden stops by at the Lodge.

Gary was rarely ever there on a Sunday, except when harvested bears from the Saturday hunt had to be skinned.

Fin was a bona fide workaholic. He suffered from PTSD that came from him fighting on the front lines of the Korean War. He earned a Silver Star and more. One symptom of PTSD is furious, marathon, perfectionist style workaholism. He often did some kind of work around the Lodge for at least a half day on Sundays.

Gary had gotten himself drafted into one of those Sunday projects once, so he rarely showed himself at the Lodge on Sundays. Can't blame 'im, he only got Sundays off.

As was expected by all who knew that, Gary said that he wasn't staying long enough to sit down. And he didn't accept the offered cup of coffee. You could see that he was in a jolly good frame of mind. He was steadily smiling harder, wider and taller than was his norm. He was talking more energetically than normal too. His arms and hands moving quickly to the beat of his conversation.

All the while, I was stealthily peeking past the newspaper, whilst tuned into all that Gary was saying and doing. Fear, of the words "plane" or "Bobby" or "Barbara" or "David" coming out of Gary's mouth, had my mouth dry, and my teeth worried.

I was worried all over.

As I sat there doing my best version of a b-movie hotel detective sitting in the hotel lobby watching everybody and everything from behind a wide spread newspaper, my very good friend Gary simply eagle-eye peered over the crowd of people sitting or standing around the Lodge's long, wooden dining room table, and he had simply grinned at me. The hugest, most soul shaking grin I ever had aimed in my direction. A very expansive grin, which was very unnerving to me.

It was obvious that Gary had been in the back seat of Bobby's plane on the prior evening. And that the guldang-sun-'uv-an-oar had stopped by just to let me know it.

What a rub that was.

Who coulda' passed up the chance to do something like that?

Gary had done it in the spirit of close, pure friendship, though.

You see something so rib-splitting hilarious as what Bobby and Gary had swooped down upon, during the previous evening, and you simply have to make the most of it.

I never thought of this before: Those two guys must have practically been bouncing around the insides of the plane, due to them laughing so hard their ribs nearly busted open.

Gary, Bobby and I had had some good laughs together.

Gary and I had worked together for a lot of hours. Numerous times, we had tracked wounded bears together, often at night. And we never carried any firearms, because 100% wild Maine Black Bears always avoid humans.

I have tracked wounded bears at night by myself; more than ten times; less than twenty times.

Bobby was the Lodge's plumber, and I was his assigned helper, when he needed one up there. One time Bobby and I worked together all day long, while crawled up under a back bedroom that was not built over the cellar of the Lodge's main building and only had about a three foot high crawl space under it. And crawl a lot that day we did. Bobby let me know that he appreciated me sticking with him all through that dirty job.

Bobby said, "I figured that a city kid like you would be off somewhere goofing off every chance you got."

The reason he said that was, because he had stayed under there in the dirt, every time I was sent to fetch tools or plumbing supplies from his work truck, as he required them. He was surprised that I always came right back, crawled right on back in under the building, with a healthy smile on my face, and got right back into the job and funny conversation that we kept going the whole time.

Bobby's family had spent many a Sunday afternoon visiting at the Lodge. We all knew each other and our families.

I can take a joke, and if those two champeen' friends of mine, Bobby and Gary, had one on me, so be it.

I'm chuckling mildly about it right now myself.

Gary was my friend--genuine and trustworthy. He never told Finley what he had seen from the plane. On that worried Sunday of mine in Maine, after Gary had hit me hard with that grin, he left without mentioning a word about the plane ride to anyone.

But it wasn't time for me to relax a little yet, sitting there in the Lodge's dining room on my Sunday off.

I had no idea of who else knew about the prior evening's bush pilot and potato field incident, besides my champeen' friends Bobby and Gary.

The phone could ring any second with Barbara's mother, Jean, at the other end. She and my Aunt Martha, were best friends, until Marty died. Jean and Marty woulda' been far too much for me to deal with, if they came after me in anger. I'd have been done for at Katahdin Lodge, for sure.

After an uninterrupted, peaceful lunch, the only thing to do was to keep my usual Sunday date with Barbara for a drive somewhere in the beautiful Katahdin Valley.

I drove down to the Barb's house, with tremendous trepidation tickling my innards.

I walked into the house, from through the mudroom door.

In the kitchen, Barb's mother said a normal, pleasant hello to me, as she continued preparing their usual big Sunday supper.

Then, bravely, but a might bit meekishly, I eased on in towards their living room, where Bobby was sitting and reading the Sunday paper.

Ol' Bobby dropped his newspaper down a few inches, looked up at me with a great, wide, glowing grin on his face and said, "Well hellooo theah Dave, ya been in any potato fields lately?"

And that was it!

I never heard a word about it from Barbara's mother.

But miracle of miracles, in the normally faster-than-a-radio-signal small town gossip circuit, it took two weeks before Finley finally heard about it. That was because Gary, Bobby and Jean were protecting me from Finley's war time PTSD instilled brand of anger.

But Bobby and Gary each had to eventually tell someone else the story. So they told a sister or brother, a cousin or friend in town, and that is how it finally made its way to Finley. It was just too freakin' hilarious for them to keep to themselves. Can't blame 'um for that.

When Fin found out, he really rubbed it into me. And for a several weeks running, every new group of bear hunters heard about it sometime during the week.

It sure was embarrassing for me at the time, but it's one of the best memories of Maine that I have today.

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

ursusdave
photography
patten maine
katahdin lodge
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David Robert Crews

Patten, Maine and Dundalk, Maryland-- Two Small, Somewhat Similar American Towns

2008-04-03T01:40:00.000-07:00

In order for you to understand what my Northern Maine Adventures truly meant to an eighteen-year-old, Baltimore area, suburban kid you must know a little about where I lived, and what my life was like, just before I moved to Maine.

Throughout this new web site of mine, "The World's First Digital Coffee Table Book," I am telling both northern Maine and Baltimore, Maryland area based, 1968-69 era, fact filled, fun filled historical stories.

For those good reasons, I am going to show you a photo of "downtown" Patten, Maine and a photo of "downtown" Dundalk, Maryland. The photos were taken 40 years apart, but neither downtown area has changed very much during those 40 years.

Nah' folks, there really wasn't a dirt road going through Patten, Maine, circa 1967, when the photo was taken. Main Street was being dug up, repaired and repaved.

They had to dig so deep down under where the surface of the tar topped street had been because there used to be whole logs embedded under it all across the entire center of town there. Whole logs had been installed back in the olden days, to provide road support. I believe I heard it was an aggravating engineering mistake of bone shaking proportions from the 1800s. In wintertime, frost "heaves" up anything solid that is under any tar topped road surface up there in northern Maine. Consequently, every winter, it became unbearably bumpy when driving through town, until the street work shown in those two photos was completed.

Compare the above digital, JPEG file copy of my photo of downtown Patten, Maine circa 1967, with the different JPEG file copy of the same photo that is below this text. The above copy is as good as I can do with digital photograph enhancements.

I am sufficiently experienced and fully capable at custom hand printing photographs in a photographic "wet" lab, but I have no digital photography experience. I need to learn digital photography.

The JPEG copy above shows the lower half of the Patten photo best, with fairly discernible detail in the street and sidewalk areas of the photo. The copy below displays the potential for great looking clouds in a digital, full customization of the photo. I am not speaking about over enhancing, adding anything to or faking anything for a final, really nice digital file version of the photo. I simply desire to bring the late 1960s, historic, subject matter, along with its interesting details seen in the photograph, out past the limitations of those two current JPEG files of it. So that we can all enjoy seeing the history much better.

These two JPEG files were created from a print that was copied from an older print, which was developed by my neighborhood, now long gone, Stansbury Pharmacy photo service; and that older print was printed from a negative that had been exposed using a cheap, little Kodak Instamatic Camera.

This is a recent photo of Dundalk Village Shopping Center, in Maryland. This street is Shipping Place. It is the "Main Street" in the neighborhood where I grew up, and where I live today.

You can see that Dundalk's main street has similarities to Main Street in Patten. Both commercial districts have about the same amount of retail space, with apartments above some of the stores. It's just that Dundalk has all of its retail/residential buildings on one side of its main street.

On the other side of Shipping Place there is the small Veteran's Park, in two separate sections; also, over there is the Dundalk-Patapsco Neck Historical Society Museum; and the Dundalk Post Office is on that side of the street too.

When I was taking that photo of downtown Patten, the Patten Post Office was to the right and somewhere behind me. But Patten doesn't need any parks, because it is surrounded by miles and miles of farms and woodlands.

In 1969, when most of the photos on this web site were taken, and when most of my written stories about my adventures in Maine took place, the "downtown" areas of both Dundalk and Patten were very lively places of retail commerce. They were very sociable, small American towns. Friendly places where local teenagers had good times hanging out a lot, but did not cause too much trouble. So when I moved from Maryland to Maine, Dundalk's small town type of lifestyle helped me to fit right in up there in Patten.

If you would like to see more photos of Dundalk, Md., click on the link in the upper right side column for Photo Albums of David Robert Crews on Photocamel.com. There is a Dundalk, and a Maine, photo album on there. The full extent of my photography talents are well represented, in eight photo albums, at the other end of that link.

During 1970-71, I was a US Army photographer. Photos and stories from that part of my life are linked to this page over in the right side column. The links are An American GI On Okinawa In 1970-71 and also Lieutenant T. Gordan Barber and The Stolen Marine Corps Property. But, after my honorable discharge from the Army, I was not an active photographer again until 1999.

From around 1999 to 2003, I was a part time photography student at Dundalk Community College. I had full use of the black and white and color photo "wet" labs at DCC. The labs were top-of-the-line; the instructors and lab aids were fully competent at their professions.

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, the digital photography revolution is winning a modernization war against film photography; and the terms of surrender for old-time film photographers, like me, is that most wet labs must be shut down. The DCC wet labs I worked in are two of those defeated former bastions of film based photography.

The guy who ran the DCC photo labs, Mark Trojan, is my age, and we have much in common. For one, he and I each attended a 1972 Pink Floyd concert at the acoustically perfect Lyric Opera House in Baltimore, separately, we did not meet until 1999 at DCC, but our memories of that stupendous Pink Floyd concert are nearly-exactly the same. Mark kept a rockin' little ol' stereo system in the photo lab's central, lighted work space. He and I both own large libraries of recorded music, which are quite similar. That all boils down to I did a lot of hard, successful work in those wet labs and had a truly great time at it.

There are photographs of Maine and Mainers and me on here that were scanned from 8x10 photographs, which I custom hand printed in the DCC wet labs, from 1968-69 era negatives.

If anyone is interested in paying to use any of my photographs for commercial purposes, know that some of my photos are capable of looking a whole lot crispier through the magic of multiple ones and zeros. some need digital help, but most are excellent as they are.

You can contact me at: ursusdave at yahoo dot com

I am chomping at the bit to go full digital with my photography and to learn how to do custom digital work on the old photographs on this blog.

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

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Two Legged Dear Hunting In Patten Maine

2008-04-03T01:26:00.000-07:00

This shot was taken at the end of a fantastic week-long stay at my uncle's hunting lodge in Maine. It was Thanksgiving Day Week of 1968. That good-lookin-like-me fellow there is my father. Dad is getting ready to go back to our home town of Dundalk, Maryland, a Baltimore County suburb of Baltimore City.

I had planned on going back home with him, and then joining the U.S. Merchant Marines. That way the U.S. military couldn't draft me and send me to Vietnam.

But I am staying there in Maine to work for and live with my Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley K. Clarke, at their Katahdin Lodge and Camps in Aroostook County. They desperately needed manpower to help operate their business, and I was it.

At first, I had my bags all packed up and in the station wagon there. We were all exchanging heart felt so-longs and see-ya-laters, when Fin and Marty launched into psy-ops type maneuvers and manipulations that were designed to keep me there. They promised me use of their vehicles for my spending lots of time in town enjoying the finest kind of country-kid style fun and games; the food was always good and plentiful on Marty's dining room table; and then they said, "You like riding the snowmobiles, think of all the fun you'll have doing that."

That were all she wrote, so to speak. I yanked my suitcases back out from the Ford wagon there, and the rest is history, as they say.

For Dad and I, that Thanksgiving Week was a greatest time of our lives. It was the last week of deer hunting season. But I hadn't become interested in big game hunting yet. I was there for the country girls and good times with all them wonderful teenage Mainer kids up in that part of God's Country.

Around Katahdin Lodge, during that week in late November of '68, it was said that my father, Bob, went out to hunt four legged deer during the day, and his son, David, went out to hunt two legged dear at night.

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

Author's note: This blog is actually part of my poorman's web site.

Links at the top right of this web page lead to the other parts of this 'homemade' web site.

This web site consists of all the linked publishing's under My Work That Is Published In Maine and Some Of My Other World Wide Web Published Works.

This blog site is set up as a digital coffee table book styled web site, with the most newly dated blog post being the first page of the book.

It is read down the web page from the latest dated blog entry through the next three older blog posts/pages of the book.

Once you have viewed one set of four blog entries, hit that OLDER POSTS button, at the bottom of each web page to view the next four blog posts/book pages.

That is how to navigate through and enjoy viewing the "The World's First Digital Coffee Table Book".

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The Mailman's Beautiful Daughter

2008-04-03T01:08:00.000-07:00

L to R: The mailman's daughter; lucky me; Jughead McCarty's girlfriend; Arnie Ballard; and Deanna Caldwell--who was my first steady girlfriend up there.

I'm second from the left and right where I wanted to be.

That cozy little scene took place about eleven months after Deanna and I had gone out together a few times. The photo was taken during Deanna's birthday party. She and I had only gone out on three or four dates together. But in the great little Town of Patten, Maine - way up there in Penobscot County - during 1968-69, when you hit that third anniversary mark in your dating relationship, no one else would date you until you and your partner broke up.

On our third or fourth date, I became casually aware that Deana and I were not meant to be together any longer. So during my next Saturday night in town, when I met a different pretty Patten girl, I asked my new female acquaintance to accompany me to the movie show playing in the old, worn out Patten Opera House that night.

Jeeze oh wiz! The way she reacted! Well, shoot man, you'd have thought I had asked her to have my baby! Or to just go get in some real quick practice at it.

That attractive young lady had twisted her upper body up and back away from me, with a dark, harsh frown deeply chiseled into her lovely kisser, and she very tersely said, "NO! You're going steady with Deanna Cauldwell! Aren't you?"

My shocked reply was, "No! We only went out a couple of times! I haven't asked her to go steady yet."

Then the lovely young lady explained Patten's three date rule to me. I told her I had no idea I was supposed to inform Deana that I wasn't planning to ask her out anymore. Let's just say, on that Saturday night, I was glad the new girl understood.

That three date rule actually worked most of the time. The resulting monogamy cut down on wicked-bad arguments, fist fights between jealous boys and such.

Up in that photograph, the long-haired-long-legged-good-lookin' girl all the way to the left was the mailman's daughter. Her family lived on Rural Route 11, near Bumpas Hill, between Katahdin Lodge and Patten. The family had a nice sized, healthy vegetable garden out in their dooryard. The mailman, his sweet and gregarious wife and their attractive teen daughter worked that garden to near-perfection together; all through the short North Woods growing season that serious gardeners are saddled with up there.

On most days, at least once a day, my daily bear hunting guide responsibilities required me to travel by their inviting, well maintained, mid-sized country home. If any of the mailman's family members were out in their garden, when I was briskly motoring past, we exchanged friendly, sincere waves of our hands.

Everyone living on that road waved to any passing vehicles they saw going by, and local drivers all waved back. That was just one such wonderful way that people everywhere up there, in amongst that heavily forested section of God's Country, got along real well.

During 1968-69, for the entire God-given time that I was a resident of Maine, I longed to get to know the mailman's daughter.

Before that evening at the birthday party, she and I had never met each other. And she had one, steady boyfriend, the entire time I was up there, back then. Consequently, whenever I was motoring by her house, when she was out in the garden, I could never slow down and pull into her dooryard, to stop and strike up a flirtatious conversation with her.

When her long time, steady boyfriend was off beginning his first semester at college, on my last friggin night in Maine, before I reported for U.S. Army basic training at Ft. Dix, New Jersey, the next morning, she and I finally met.

Man o' day, was I ever happy to be sitting with her and enjoying our first conversation, which I had so desired for almost a year. Except I had to hold back on the flirtatious part, because it would have been very rude in the company of our mutual friends and acquaintances.

I had to leave the party while it was still going good, because I had an early flight to catch the next day. But while I was saying my so-longs to all of my treasured and lovingly remembered friends there, I couldn't believe it when the mailman's daughter asked me for a ride home.

But alas, even though common sense softly whispered into my ear that her boyfriend was going to hookup with some fine, young college coed and breakup with her real soon, I was a complete gentleman to her that night.

I knew that most boy-girl relationships don't last too long when one of the two goes off to college by themselves. That information could have easily allowed me to circumvent feeling guilty, if I had gotten the mailman's daughter to 'go parkin' with me on the way up Rt. 11 to our separate homes, to stop and get the windows of the pickup truck all steamed up.

Problem was: there were too many small town type nosy witnesses there at Deanna's house. They were sure as I knew 'um gonna snoop around the next day to find out exactly what time that she gotten home that night.

And they probably did it too.

I had to take her straight home, past all of the good, safe 'parkin spots' over in the dark fields and woods roads up there. I made it a short, but oh so intensely sweet, goodnight conversation with her in her family's driveway.

Any other way of conducting myself would have caused her a lot more small town trouble than it would have for me.

The next morning, I was beginning another great traveling adventure, one that could have gotten me killed in Vietnam. Had I chosen the way of the cad that night, she was going to be left there all alone to face the gossip and scorn of a typical small town in America, while I went on my merry way into the U.S. Army.

I cannot honestly say that I have never chosen to be a cad.

I can honestly state that nothing untoward happened on that beautiful night in Maine, when I finally met the mailman's daughter.

If you look at how she is reclined there close to me, you will notice that she had obviously sat down next to me, because her shapely left side is resting slightly, softly over onto my right side. That's all I needed, on that final evening of my youthful, civilian life, that and her request for the ride home, is all that I needed to be quite contented in knowing that she was also attracted to me. That the beautiful young lady and I could have been close friends and lovers, had circumstances permitted us to.

Who was it said, "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, if you try sometimes, you'll get what you need?"

Oh yeah, it was that scrawny little limey Michael Phillip Jagger and his Rolling Stones who said that.

That Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stone's song sings about a fact of life that was paramount for blessed little me. Because, even though the mailman's beautiful daughter was never the grateful recipient of the natural pleasures of the complete Dave Crews experience, you can bet your bippy that a goodly little number of other country girls around town sure 'nuff were.

And it was my pleasure to have been of some useful service to the several deserving lovely young ladies of Maine, whom I was blessed to have known well.

Thanks ladies, it was real.

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

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Ballard's Citco Station On A Saturday Night

2008-04-03T00:47:00.002-07:00

That's Arnold Ballard at the left, but I don't remember the other two guys. This was in Ballard's Full Service Citco Gas Station in Patten, Maine. Arnie's father owned it. I took this series of photos to show my family and friends back in Dundalk, Maryland--a suburb of Baltimore--what it was like hanging out in town on a Saturday night.

Now that I see this old photo in this format, it comes to front that the most important historical angle to it is the hair cuts of those two guys. They look like the carefully crafted styles that many of my contemporaries wore through the '60s.

Hey! Don't the guy all the way to the right in the back look like he's figuring on going bald, before he's out of his twenties? He's already training his forward comb over!

If that fellow is still alive and sees this: "Sorry old pal, I couldn't resist".

I just fit right in up there in Patten, Maine. It may look like those fellows in that photo are shutting me out of their inner circle, but I had a comfortable leaning spot in amongst that circle of friends and buddies just off to the left. I had shifted position to take the photograph.

Oh yeah. I definitely fit right in.

Even though I fit right in up there, I was always aware that if at least the past two, no, three generations of a person's family hadn't been born and raised within oh, say sixty miles of the town of Patten, then that person would always be "from the outside."

I respected that.

They had a tough life up there livin' in the woods.

When there were local jobs available, the work was usually fairly hard and often dangerous. If they became injured or ill, it was their family, friend or neighbor who drove them the hour or more it might take to get to the nearest hospital. Those folks up there relied on one another for their survival. Everybody looked out for each other.

The kids from Patten and the other small towns in the area would often go to each other's dances and parties. And I went to most of them too, often with my best friend, Gary McCarthy. He and I picked up some sweet babes together, at those countryfied teenage social affairs.

Early one relaxed, mid-summer's Saturday evening, just before the night's teen fun and country kid style action was about to commence ta' happening in northern Maine, Gary McCarthy and I were sitting next to each other, while sipping sodas, on swivel stools at the lunch counter in the Patten Drug Store.

Gary turned to me and said, "Dave, if you get into a fight with a guy from another town, then by jeeze, it'll be me and you against him back to back; I'll fight any of his friends who try to hit you from behind. But! If you get into a fight with a guy from the Town of Patten? It'll be him, me and the rest of the town against you."

I had no problem with that. I admired them for the way that they stuck together.

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

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When I Moved From Maryland To Maine, I Went From One Nearly Crime Free Area To Another

2008-04-03T00:47:00.001-07:00

If you'll notice, this business card says that the post office for Katahdin Lodge is located in Smyrna Mills, Maine. Not Patten, as is said throughout all of my Northern Maine Adventure writings and is on the painted signs in the dead bear photos on the last page of this digital coffee table book.

Patten, Maine was the original postal address for the Lodge. And in 1969, we had to pick up our mail in town. I enjoyed doing so.

Sometime between 1970, when I was home on leave from the Army, and 1977, when I returned to the Lodge to live and work, mail delivery service to Katahdin Lodge had begun.

My Uncle Finley had changed post offices for his Katahdin Lodge in the early '70s. He claimed that too many people in Patten knew too much of his business from knowing what kind of mail the Lodge was receiving. And then gossiping about it.

I don't know about that. I think that maybe it was just a little bit of paranoia brought on by Finley's Korean War induced Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

In all small town/little village types of populations around the whole wide world, gossip happens.

Small town gossip was one of the aspects of my northern Maine adventures that was quite interesting and entertaining to me. And that aspect of my adventures is all laid out in amongst my published short stories, which are instantly accessible through the links at the top right of this page, under: My Work That Is Published In Maine.

Patten is where we, at the Lodge, went to town for some of our supplies and most of our socialization wants and needs. That little town is 10 or 11 miles south of the Lodge. The town's commercial section is about equal to two city blocks long.

Smyrna Mills is about the same distance from the Lodge as Patten is. Both in mileage and travel time. With a trip to Smyrna taking a few minutes longer. But Smyrna only had one small, country store for a 'commercial district'.

Patten had far more personality than Smyrna. It may still today. I don't know though. I just found a new web site for the Town of Smyrna, and the area looks like it is doing better today than it was when I used to pass through there on a regular basis.

Patten has more than twice the population of Smyrna, and as far as I know, that census number for Patten has never topped 2,000 souls.

I can only speak for the limited time that I lived and worked up in Maine, but, back then, for my own personal tastes, Patten had more good living per cubic inch than anyplace else on earth.

As far as I know, of coarse.

No matter what, for me, in Northern Maine, Patten was where the action was.

In all of those little towns, during the 1968-69 era, the crime rate was nearly zilch, nada', not a problem. And whether I was either in a place of business in one of those towns, or out riding around with some Mainer kids in their vehicle, on a Saturday night, I left the key in the ignition of the vehicle that I had driven to town in. There were no vehicle thieves to be seen anywhere, in or around most of Northern Maine.

In early 1968, when I was still living in Dundalk, Md., crimes did happen, but it was not bad here: people left car windows open all night; this was before everyone had air conditioners, so homes had wooden screen doors that would never thwart just a mildly determined criminal's evil intentions; our homes had screened windows that stayed open all night long, in hot weather; some burglaries did happen and were often somewhat of a fear; but armed robberies, muggings and other violent crimes rarely ever happened in my Dundalk neighborhood.

1968 Dundalk was not a violent or dangerous area, like Baltimore's dank, rotting harbor area neighborhoods were in those days. That is where the world famous tourist destinations of the Inner Harbor and Fells Point are today.

My Uncle Finley K. Clarke, his sister--my mother Doris, my Aunt Martha (nee Thomas), my father--Bob Crews and all of their brothers and sisters grew up together in the Bethlehem Steel owned company mill town of Sparrows Point, Maryland. "The Point" was an easy eight minute drive from my parent's, two sister's and my Dundalk home. During the entire history of that small Town of Sparrows Point, there were virtually never any crimes committed at all.

I spent a lot of time "down The Point" at my grandparents' homes. The Clarke and Crews families were members of the St. Matthews Episcopal Church down there. The Thomas's may have been too. I don't remember whether they were or not, but they went to church on The Point. I was down The Point for most Sundays, on every holiday--except for on the 4th of July, Memorial Day and Labor Day when large family picnics were held in my backyard in Dundalk--and I visited my grandparent's homes on many days in between holidays.

The small Town of Sparrows Point was an American community where you could comfortably walk around feeling 99.9999% positively certain that you would never be anywhere near an occurring crime.

Thankfully, the relaxing, nearly crime free life of Patten, Maine was nothing new to Fin, Marty, me or anyone else in our my families.

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

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My Uncle Finley Surrounded By Family and Friends

2008-04-03T00:46:00.000-07:00

I took this photo in the spring of 1969 to show my family and friends down here in Dundalk, Maryland what it was like up there at Katahdin Lodge of Patten, Maine on a typical Sunday afternoon.

Whewee! I luv the sculpted lines of that "Trumpet"—that'd be Triumph 650 Motorcycle to you non-motorcyclists.

That gray clad country gentleman leaning in the doorway is Morris, and the smiling woman on the back of the Triumph 650 Motorcycle is his good wife Marge. Morris and Marge were very close friends to my Uncle Finley and Aunt Martha, and the two couples often spent time together.

Morris and Marge, Fin and Marty, and I were all in the Lodge's dining room playing Cribbage and sharing great conversation, when Gary and Cathy Glidden pulled into the dooryard on their motorcycle. They were just stopping by for a quick visit. Gary and Cathy worked at the Lodge during hunting season—Gary as a hunting and fishing guide and Cathy on the housekeeping staff. They wanted to know when they should start working at the Lodge for that upcoming bear hunting season.

That is Cathy back there in the helmet, of coarse, and you can just see Marty's right shoulder there on the other side of Gary.

One of my nephews saw this photo and thought that Fin looked like he was angry at Gary, but it is just a tad bit of a serious talk going on between them there for a minute or two. They were fairly well matched as working partners and had tracked many a wounded bear or deer through the woods together, often at night, and had shown plenty of paying sportsmen good, safe, successful, memorable times in the vast Maine woods.

The TV reception at the Lodge was limited to about two and a half stations. One was always from over in Woodstock, Canada. And the weather had first say on which ones we could tune in to at any time.

No matter. Listening to Fin, Marty and our Mainer friends, like Morris and Marge, tell stories, some true some not so at all, was far better entertainment than TV any day of the week.

I was setting at the Lodge's Cribbage Board and Yahtzee Game adorned dining room table, one friend filled Sunday, when I was hit with an epiphany of life affirming solidation. This was after having to hold onto to the table and my chair at least once or twice to keep from sliding off onto the floor into a puddle of pained, side-splitting, laughter. I had managed to keep it under control though, because it was 35 to 40 miles to the nearest hospital. And not one doctor in between. Can't be bustin' a gut due to overwhelming hilarity way up there in the woods like that.

The epiphany was: Listening to tall tales told well is no more like being an audience member at the Liars Club Yearly Awards Banquet than watching comedy shows on television is.

You are not supposed to "believe anything you hear and only half of what you see" (Joe Stanboni my Dundalk neighbor taught me that back in '66), which truly applies to TV, and telling tall tales, if anything.

I realized on that Cribbage and Yahtzee game playing, tall tale telling Sunday evening in Maine, that tall tales are a direct ancestor of most movies and television shows.

I thoroughly enjoyed my Sundays spent amongst those finest kind of country folk.

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Splittin' Wood and Workin' Hard

2008-04-03T00:40:00.000-07:00

That's me, when I was finishing up with splitting 19 cords of hardwood, for firewood. I worked on that wood pile for 9 or 10 hours a day, for 10 weekdays, during 2 weeks in the late summer of 1969. My Uncle Finley bought the wood and had it delivered to Katahdin Lodge in full length tree sized sections. The Lodge only had wood stoves for heat, and 19 cords was enough to last through the entire upcoming winter. Gary Glidden (Finley's other bear hunting guide) did the chainsawing work to cut the tree length sections up into those short lengths. Then I split 'um up and stacked 'um up good and proper.

According to the way some photographers see it, this is a self portrait. I conceived the shot, directed a helper to stand on the exact spot I had chosen, told them to make sure they could see a certain background object at the left edge of my camera's view finder and also the top of my head in the viewfinder. Then I told them to squeeze the shutter when they heard my splittin' axe kachunck! into the wood -- and it turned out good.

Cleaning up after those two weeks of splitting wood. That's me with my back to you, Finley lookin' at you and two of our paying bear hunters who enjoyed pitching in to help out a little.

Heh, heh, yeah; those other three men were helping me clean up the little wood chips and scraps that were scattered on the ground at the end of my 90-some man hours of wood splitting and stacking; but nobody at all ever got between me and the splittin' axes, mauls and wedges when I was steadily swingin' heavy steel and making small chunks of firewood from great big tree trunks.

Do you see that 1967 or maybe '68 Chevy pickup truck back there, in the photo?

That was my favorite vehicle of all times to drive.

It had: four wheel drive; large sized, heavy duty, all seasons-mud-snow super gripping tires; a flat head type of 290 cubic inch straight six-cylinder engine; a four-speed standard transmission with a "granny gear"; and a stick shifter on the floor.

The granny gear was first gear. It was there to drive real slow with through mud and snow, or to get the truck slowly moving when it had an extra heavy load to haul. We Katahdin Lodge drivers normally used that four speed as a three speed, never employing first gear till the going got really rough--like in a wheel swallowing, mucky, oozing ol' quagmire.

Driving with a standard transmission gives a driver much more control of the vehicle's precise speed. It runs tighter on both the acceleration and deceleration. The deceleration effect also helps slow the vehicle down for curves or going down hills. I knew and had always made good use of the basics of those facts but was actually given a very worthwhile tip for developing better, standard transmission, driving skills by one of the Lodge's paying bear hunters from Massachusetts. The tip was to shift gears less frequently and at slightly higher RPMs than when most people shift. That allows a driver much better control of the vehicle, it is easier to change gears and with much smoother riding--if you do it right. I always had an open mind for learning such things.

The truck had neither power brakes nor power steering. That lack of power assist was best for the way that we had to drive up there in northern Maine in order to get our daily business taken care of. Or when I was just driving around enjoying the wild and wonderful Maine countryside with a girlfriend or other friends.

Having no power assist on the steering makes it much harder to turn the steering wheel, because it gives a lot of resistance to a driver's manipulations of the front wheels. That forces wheel handling efforts to steer the vehicle much more precisely, which was better for driving at higher than posted speeds on Maine's wild and woolly, twisty-turny, hump and downy, two lane tar-topped, gravel or dirt country roads. We always averaged 5 to 15 MPH over the speed limit.

No power brakes made it much less likely that we Katahdin Lodge drivers would brake too hard and fast and bash some passenger's face or head against the dashboard or something. Like when we were carefully traversing the rough old, washed out, rocky, mud puddley logging roads, old overgrown farm fields and such in the back-in-the-woods places where we used to drive when bear baiting. We were constantly, gently applying the brakes in those rough situations. And we definitely did not want to brake too hard and fast and go out of control if a wild animal, domestic pet, pedestrian, stalled vehicle, slow moving piece of humongous farm machinery or maybe a whole herd of milk cows 'suddenly appeared' in the road in front of one of us.

On one late winter, Saturday evening in Maine, just after a cold, quiet darkness had eased on down over Rural Route 11, between the Lodge and the Town of Patten, I was on my way into town for a Saturday night date with my girlfriend, when a whole herd of cows did 'suddenly appear' in front me all across the freezing, friggin road.

To my discredit, this happened at a clearly marked cattle crossing. Cows have the absolute right away at cattle crossings. Cows who have full, uncomfortably expanding udders, and whom are heading for the milking barn, make way for neither man, beast nor fast moving motor vehicle.

Oh jeeze! The plump and pretty little dairy farmer's wife was standing there in the middle of Rt. 11 next to her herd of crossing cows and she was all-a-jumping up and down, frantically waving her arms up in the air and forcefully holding out a tightly gripped, lit kerosene lantern at me.

Fortunately, I knew how to tap brakes like them ABS brake systems do for most of you.

Consequently, instead of plowing into the farmer's wife and a half a dozen or so udder swollen milk cows, I slid sideways and over into the snowbank a bit--whilst skillfully tapping down on the brakes till the truck came to a safe stop.

That was my fought. I was thinking about where my girlfriend and I could go 'parking', after going to see a movie, instead of paying my usual full attention to the road.

If we don't respect the farmer's rights, how in the hell are we gonna' eat?

Man o' day! I was embarrassed and ashamed at making that nearly tragic mistake!

One mistake like that, and I'd have been sent packing back down to my parents' house in Dundalk, Maryland. I'd probably have never seen Patten, Maine again.

But nothing like that ever happened.

Anyways, the point is that I prefer the precise handing capabilities of a standard-shift-it-yourself transmission and no power steering or brakes for when I really wanna' Rock n' Roll out on some good old country roads.

But, then, come to think of it now, for most of you's ("you's" is my Baltimore accent showing through), you's had best stick to power everything and ABS brakes for your vehicles. You may own a big-ass SUV with four-wheel drive and all that lot, but ya' gotta' be able to drive Northern Mainer style to do it how we Katahdin Lodge drivers done it.

That's a well earned bit of braggadocio for sure.

Those barely visible, nice and neatly stacked, piles of firewood over in the woodshed there to the right are just the 'tip of the iceberg' from all that firewood that I split and stacked in the late summertime of 1969. I loved doing it.

And you see those piles of wood there that are not covered? Well they got covered with tarps later that day. I can't stand seeing firewood being stored uncovered. Leaving a firewood supply go uncovered wastes the wood by allowing it to get wet from rain and snow and to rot. That makes it very difficult to get a home heating fire burning good with the moist, partially rotted wood.

There were two things at Finley's lodge that were never left out in the yard uncovered.

One was firewood, the other was tools.

Fin stored his rakes, shovels, mauls, picks, mattocks and other garden type tools in a building or tucked up under a building's eave and hanging from some nails--in order to keep rain and snow off the wooden handles and metal heads. Finley K. Clarke never in his life owned a wooden handled garden tool that had any rust or rot on it.

I appreciate that. Makes sense to me to take care of the equipment right. You never know when you're really gonna' need it.

I believe that splitting wood is better exercise than pumping iron--lifting free weights. Like when using the weight lifting equipment that was set up in the weight room down in the basement of the old YMCA, in my home town of Dundalk, Maryland. During my early teenage years, I lifted weights "at the Y" several times a week.

Neither of those two physical endeavours, though, weight lifting or wood splitting, are as good exercise as swimming.

During four summers of my youth, from 1961 to '64, I attended Red Cross swimming courses, including a life saving course, and swam many laps every summer at Baltimore County's Merritt Beach, in Dundalk. The beach was right down the street from the home that I grew up in. I was still swimming there regularly in 1965, when Baltimore County closed the beach to swimmers; it was closed due to water pollution from Bethlehem Steel Mill in Sparrows Point, Maryland.

Those Red Cross water safety and swimming qualifications made me somewhat more valuable as a professional outdoorsman, a Maine Guide; because I had the ability to save drowning fishermen or fisherwomen, canoeists, boaters, swimmers or somebody who accidentally fell into some deep water.

As a teenager, I also used to get plenty of exercise while being paid to mow and trim lawns in the summer, and to shovel snow from sidewalks and driveways during the winter.

So ya' see, that 1969 wood spitting and stacking experience was my type of preferred exercise. And that "wood chopping" (a quote from my city kid days) work, like the swimming, mowing and snow shoveling, was all done outside, where I enjoy spending my time the most.

Before I started that wood splitting and stacking job each day: I had to water seven hound dogs, two Bobcats and one ornery horse; and I had to help Fin and Gary load some 250 to 450 pound 55 gallon drums full of rotting, stenching, maggot covered bear bait onto Katahdin Lodge trucks.

Then Fin and Gary went out riding 'round the beautiful Maine countryside bear baiting. While I worked steady at the hard labor task of splitting and stacking firewood.

Later, during each evening: I had to feed and water the animals; and like every other evening during bear season, I had to go out and gather up a few of our paying bear hunters from the woods; I had to track any bears that our hunters had shot at--sometimes with Finley and/or Gary and sometimes by myself; even through the deep, dark woods at nighttime, but always unarmed; if any of our hunters killed a bear, we had to carry it out of the woods to the truck; then we guides had some bear skinning to do, when we finally made it back to the Lodge.

Fortunately, during those two weeks, when I was working on that 19 cords of firewood, Monday thru Friday, Fin and Marty only made me mow the lawn and trim the weeds, on their large piece of cleared ground around the Lodge, on Saturday or Sunday.

And I was responsible for cleaning up the dog crap. About twice a week, I had to shovel up what the five hound dogs who were chained to five individual dog houses dropped on the ground. About twice a month or so, I had to scrub out the wooden floored dog pen where two Beagles lived.

The Bobcat pen got cleaned out about twice a month too. It's a dirty job, but someone had to do it. Animals who rely on human care deserve that kind of good treatment.

Except for during those 10 days of building up those humongous stacks of firewood, I performed all of the afore mentioned morning, evening and weekend tasks plus went out bear baiting and guiding bear hunters 6 days a week. Just like Gary and Finley did. I had a lot of fun while doing it all, too.

During the entire time that I worked for my Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley, at their Katahdin Lodge and Camps of Patten, Maine, I never worked less than 9 hours a day, 6 days a week.

In fact, at the beginning of bear season, in June of 1969, I worked no less than 14-15 hours a day, for 2 and 1/2 weeks straight. Without a break at all.

And that 14-15 hours a day is what it figures up to after deducting meal times.

Working at the Lodge was quite a broad based challenge to take on and do well at. I was, and still am, proud to have accomplished what I had at Katahdin Lodge.

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

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David Robert Crews

The Center of the Katahdin Lodge Universe

2008-04-03T00:31:00.000-07:00

Down there at the far end of Katahdin Lodge's long, wooden dining room table are: L to R--My Aunt Martha; next to Marty is one of her housekeeping staff, I hope to learn her name again; the goofin' gal down there at the end of the table and pinching her nose up at the camera is Cathy Glidden; the next woman may be Chuck's wife, because that is Chuck Chanadet next to her there.

This beautiful, but serviceable, dining room table was the center of the Katahdin Lodge Universe.

Look at how inviting that area is to human socialization.

Let me rephrase this: Ain't that a peachy-keen spot for hanging out with family, friends, and new acquaintances?

The most obvious thing to all who view this photo is the size and shape of the beautifully grained table. Look at all the room there is for big, full bowls and wide, full plates of food. And look at all the room there is for losta' friendly folk to sit all around that table, and to enjoy each other's company.

Anyone for Cribbage?

How about a game of Yatzee ?

Man o' day! We at the Lodge proved how easy it was to get both those games rollin' on that table, with room to spare for numerous kibitzers too.

Less than half the table is visible here. It was a great place to be when it was surrounded by small groups of gregarious people having the finest kind of times in Maine.

Down past the end of the table to the left is the living room.

Consequently, people in both the dining room and living room could all join in on any hilarious bantering that was bouncing about in either good-sized room. And the undoored entrance to the kitchen was directly behind me, when I took the photo. Anyone working in the kitchen, or just hanging out in there conversing, could easily join in on some conversation flowing smoothly out in the dining room, or vice-versa.

That joint got real noisy at times. But it was usually good and friendly noise.

A lot of that noise was the hearty laughter that always followed some well told joke. At times, that means dirty jokes. Martha Clarke had the ability to remember and effectively deliver lotsa' dirty jokes.

When I was growing up, and Fin and Marty came to visit my parents at our house, Marty couldn't hardly wait till my two sisters and I went to bed, so that she could start telling dirty jokes. She most definitely could probably have been a popular stand up comedian. She could be one in the oft comically rude and crude 21st Century, but not back in the 1950s, '60s, and on into the '70s. Because the potency, and her effective delivery, of her hellacious, ever-ready repertoire of filthy jokes was enough to make Lenny Bruce blush.

Take a gander, up into that photo of the dining room, and check out that long row of uncurtained windows, which are traveling the full length of the dining room and wrapped on around the front of the Lodge's main building there.

I LOVE HAVING SUNLIGHT COMING IN THROUGH WINDOWS!

Everyone in the dining room had a full, clear view of a large section of the property out there, including the entire horseshoe shaped driveway.

The few times that a large wild animal was seen from inside the dining room, everyone there got a good, memorable view of it at the same time.

If any vehicles entered the driveway, you could see who it was from all over the inside of the dining room area. Nobody had to get up from a scrumptious meal, a good game of cards, or an interesting and entertaining conversation to, "See who that is coming in".

Scrumptious meals? DID I SAY SCRUMPTIOUS MEALS?

Darn right I did!

Meals at Katahdin Lodge were home cooked and served family style in much heftier proportions than was necessary. Men often gained weight the right way at Katahdin Lodge. Some hunters were returning guests who had come back to the Lodge on another hunting trip just for that healthy food factor. For the hunters it was: no stress from who knows what kind of a job, profession, or business; lots of fresh air; natural, quiet, peaceful time out in the woods alone; and plenty of homemade food. At home, many of them ate carry out and fast food quite a lot. There definitely were guys who were there more for their health than to bag a bear.

We, who either worked at the Lodge or were one of the multitudes of returning guests, always got a kick out of first time guests who didn't know the ropes of the table yet. The rest of us would be happily sailing along and passing around bowls of good food while scooping out healthy, steaming piles of it onto our plates when newbies would be thinking, or grumbling, that there wasn't enough victuals being served to go around.

But they'd get caught at their mistakes quick and informed, in-no-uncertain terms, "To take it easy man; that one bowl of fresh mashed potatoes ya got yur mitts on there isn't for the whole table; take what ya want; look, here she comes with two more bowls of it. They put several bowls of everything out."

Or some friendly newbie would go for the last of some victuals laying in the bottom of a food bowl at the same time someone else did; and it was the newbies first meal at the Lodge; and it was the first time during that meal that a bowl was going to be empty; and the newbie would politely say to the other hungry guy, something like, "Here buddy, there's only enough string beans left for one person to have a second helping of; here, you can have what's left of it."

Which would immediately elicit, from somewhere in amongst the other eaters, "Hold on there my friend! They always keep bringing it out until we can't eat no-mo. Look! There she comes with another full bowl of it. See? Ya don't even have to ask; they just pile it on us automatically."

Most people at the Lodge could only woof down one of the wide, chunky beef steaks served there for supper every Thursday night. One week, five college friends came up to the Lodge together for a week long bear hunt. Great kids they were. Lotta' laughs. Well now. On their Thursday, steak night at the Lodge, one of them college boys asked my Aunt Martha for a second steak. I'd never seen that happen before.

Marty replied, "Why, sure you can have another one. We always cook a few extra steaks. But this is the first time anyone has ever asked for one. We usually end up chopping them up for David to mix in with the dogs' food."

At which one of the other college boys added, "Oh yeah, he can eat! You should see how he piles up his plate in the cafeteria. It looks like feeding time for zoo elephants. But look, (the speaker taps on the beefsteak eater's flat, six packed tummy) ya see that? He's captain of the junior varsity wrestling team, he's plays on the lacrosse team, and he's a pretty good gymnast too."

Marty gave Captain Beefeater one of the steaks she already had cooked for such an unlikely event as this.

The cap'n ate it; then she gave him another one.

Woof-woof-woof down the hatch the third steak went.

Meanwhile, Marty was frying up her last two thawed out steaks.

Mighty young Captain Beefeater ate 'um all.

As he was eating, he looked like a graceful gymnast executing a smooth, well-practiced set of moves on the parallel bars.

Meanwhile, Marty was working in the kitchen, cleaning up after supper. And from where she was washing the dishes, she could turn to look backwards and see the beef eater out there in action.

As the mighty young lad was finishing his last few bites of steak, Marty stepped to the doorway between the kitchen and dining room and leaned against the inside door frame.

As soon as the last little chunk of meat came off of Captain Beefeater's fork, into his mouth, Marty picked up his empty plate. And she cheerfully declared, to the comfortably seated group of Cap'n Beefeater's onlookers and well wishers, "Ya know? I only did that to see a good lookin young man eat five steaks at once."

The dining room crowd erupted into hearty laughter.

That healthy food attitude was the main reason why certain ones of the Lodge's guests were return clients.

It's called fishing, not catching. You don't always catch fish when you try to. It's called hunting, not wholesale meat delivery service. There was no guaranteed fishing or hunting at Katahdin Lodge. If you can't be satisfied with only having great times out in the natural environment of the deep woods, don't go hunting or fishing there.

At Katahdin Lodge and Camps, in Moro Plantation--Moro, Maine, at the bottom western edge of Aroostook County, post office address Patten, Maine, there were no guaranteed results for hunting or fishing.

What was guaranteed was, "The best of hunting, fishing, and backwoods hospitality."

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

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David Robert Crews

Cathy and Gary Glidden and Sons

2008-04-03T00:00:00.000-07:00

Left to right: My younger sister Jeanmarie; the little guy is my older sister Diana's son, Will; that's Gary Glidden holding Will, and Gary's very attractive wife Cathy is next to him; then the guy at the far right is Tony(?), a frequent paying guest at Katahdin Lodge. Tony was about as much friend of the family as he was a paying guest. There were a goodly number of paying guests who stayed at the Lodge once or twice a year for "The best in hunting, fishing and backwoods hospitality".

Gary and Cathy Glidden. These two finest kind of natural born Northern Mainers were mighty good to me.

pssst: hey! is she goosin' him?

Gary Glidden became my mentor, when he came back to work at Katahdin Lodge, for my Uncle Finley, a few weeks before the 1969 summer bear season opened. He is a top notch woodsman. Outdoorsmen like him don't get lost in the woods, and they're never at a loss for telling a good story.

Gary and I spent many hours driving around together putting the bear bait out in the woods, showing the hunters where to sit and watch their bait, coaching them on how to hunt for bear, and making sure that the hunters were safely out of the woods each night, after legal hunting hours were over.

Whilst driving along our bear bait routes: we were always admiring the scenery; talkin' about everything and everybody; and stopping now and then to enjoy doing business with the local merchants.

Gary introduced me to some of the Patten area's most interesting and unique local characters. He taught me a lot about how to live the good life up in Maine.

His wife, Cathy, worked in the Lodge for my Aunt Martha. And Cathy became a treasured friend of mine too.

In the small town, close knit community that I was living in up there, one word from Gary or Cathy that I was any kind of a risk factor to the local folk's safety, or well being, and my Uncle Fin would have had to send me away from there.

During the summer of 1968, when I was visiting the Lodge, while on vacation, Gary had given me my very first introduction into the social life of typical Patten teenagers. He had two of his sisters have one of their boyfriends drive them up to the Lodge to take me out for an evening on the town. The full story of that very memorable summer evening of my life is written out in full, in my short story titled: The Day I Fell In Love With Patten Maine.

Gary 'has a heart' for horses. His father's old, retired, lumberjack's work horse was kept in a cozy, comfortable horse hovel that sat along side of one the Lodge's bear baiting routes. Several times, when I was with Gary, he stopped to visit his father's old, dying friend the horse. Gary would soothingly speak to the animal for a few minutes, then we were on our way back to work.

During our first visit with his dad's horse, Gary explained to me how close a lumberjack and his workhorses grow. He said that his father only had to gently utter certain mild words to his horse for the horse to move long, heavy, freshly cut and limbed logs to where Mr. Glidden wanted them to go.

"David," Gary added, "you sure don't want some untrained or stubborn horse kicking you or bustin you all up with a heavy load of logs way out there in the woods, now do you."

It was so beautiful, peaceful, and relaxing to wait off to the side of that horse's hovel, while allowing Gary time from our busy workday schedule to say a few kind words to his father's old, most trusted friend; while I'd quietly stand looking out over the old, unused summertime farm field there, that was overgrown with beautiful, blossoming wild flowers.

Gary had "love" tattooed on one set of knuckles and "hate" tattooed on the other. The tattoos were inked during Gary's obligated two-year stint in the U.S. Army. Drafted American lads were only required to complete a two-year hitch in the military. Gary had those two tattoos because he had been in what was supposed to have been a motorcycle gang, while stationed at an Army base down in Texas. My guess is that it was just a bunch of goofy-kid military draftee types acting wild and crazy during their first big adventure away from the old hometown.

After Gary received his Army discharge, he returned to live in Patten, and bought himself a hot dang Corvette. For a brief period, after his Army days ended, Gary was the devilish personification of wild and crazy. He drank a whole lot of cases of beer and drove his Corvette like a madman. But very skillfully, I must add.

His teenage brother was warned by their parents to never ride in Gary's Vette, but you know how younger brothers can be. Gary's brother told me that he took one hellacious ride around town with Gary in the Vette, and that was all it took to convince that teenager that parents are usually right. When the brother told me this story, with a very dark, solemn look about him, he ended it with, "By jeez I never got in that car again."

Then Gary met Cathy.

Cathy was the gentlest kind of female human being. She was the kind of person who never makes personal enemies. The only people who could possibly have had anything against her were other women who wanted Gary. Cathy was as wonderful as a woman can be. I'll fist fight any man or talk down any woman who ever says different. And, basically, you can bet your bottom dollar that the entire Town of Patten feels the same way about Cathy.

After dating Cathy for a short while, Gary realized the full extent of the opportunity the two of them had for a long, happily married life together, as fully empowered partners and lifelong soul mates.

Gary instinctively knew he would never find a better woman, or one who was a better match for him.

Gary quit drinking booze, issued a firmly stated cease and desist order to his wild side, and he married Cathy. They lived about as happy and wholesome a life together as any man and woman ever have.

The last time I saw Cathy and Gary, was in 1979. I stepped into their cozy, clean, comfortable home, and there was Cathy tenderly holding their one-week-old son, Enoch, in her loving arms.

Enoch was born with more birth defects than I could ever remember the long list of.

The doctors at the hospital where Enoch was delivered said that Enoch was born with so many medical problems that he didn't stand a chance of making it through the rest of his very first day as a newborn baby. They instructed Cathy and Gary to prepare themselves for upcoming, horrible grief, and to make funeral arrangements for their son.

When feisty little Enoch lived to the following morning, the doctors gave him no more than three more days to live.

When tiny Enoch refused to cooperate with the docs on that deadline, the doctors declared that the baby had absolutely no chance of living out a full week.

It was on the eighth day of Enoch's young life that I met him. I have never witnessed a more loving scene. As Cathy gracefully cradled her sweet baby child in her arms, Gary stood beside them. He stood there, gently, with supreme compassion for the child. He showed a strong, determined will to make his son's life as good and healthy as could be.

"I tell ya now David," Gary said, "after the little guy made it to day eight this morning, we decided that the doctors don't know what they're talking about. And if the little guy could hold on this long, with all he's got going against him, he just might make it. So we brought him home to take care of him ourselves."

I'm trying to think now, but Cathy and Gary were each approximately thirty-six years old when Enoch was born. And I believe that was the first time that they had conceived a child. This was due to the natural fact that Cathy was slowly going blind from tunnel vision. Which is why she drove into a giant moose one time, while she was driving during daylight--she never saw it at the side of the road. Her brother had gone blind at an early age, from the same medical condition. Cathy and her brother's tunnel vision is a hereditary thing. It was either believed, known, or feared that Cathy carried the hereditary genes for that blindness condition. But hereditary genes rarely affect all of a carrier's offspring. So Cathy and Gary were in their late thirties and had been happily married for over ten years, before they finally conceived a child together.

The very first time that I went onto the Internet, my very first search term was "Patten Maine".

During my first time on the World Wide Web, I hadn't surfed the web for very long before this thought popped into my head, "I wonder if Enoch made it."

Then I'll be, pleasantly, damned if I didn't find a list of wheelchair race winners, from up around Portland, Maine, with Enoch's name on it.

Eventually, I made email contact with Enoch. He has graduated from college, drives a wheel chair van, and is doing all right.

And ya' know how I said that Gary was acting around Enoch on that eighth day of the tiny baby's life? And how Cathy held her only child so lovingly in her arms?

Gary and Cathy maintained that loving, dedicated parental vigil all the way up through Enoch's college days; including all during Enoch's fifty-plus, painful, scary operations, and full recoveries. Gary and Cathy telephoned their beloved son at college everyday.

Enoch told me, via email, that Gary and Cathy had adopted a fine young son. Most certainly, the Good Lord was smiling down upon that boy-child, the day that the boy went to permanently live with his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Gary Glidden, and his brother Enoch.

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

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David Robert Crews

Chet and Suzann Chase Went Snowshoeing with Marty

2008-04-02T23:46:00.000-07:00

Chester "Chet" Chase, his wife Suzann Chase, and Martha Clarke, after snowshoeing back to Hale Pond.

pssst: is that dog up 'ees butt?

Yes, Chet does look rather young for his age. He was a high school teacher though.

Several times at the Lodge, when Chet and Susann were visiting us, one of our paying bear hunters innocently asked Susann what grade in school that Chet was in. The just couldn't figure him out at first.

I can't say that that kind of thing made me feel bad for Chet and Susann, or that it was of any humorous value to me. I was rather neutral about it. As I was about Chet and Susann. I did not particularly care for their company, but I did enjoy it a bit--now and then. I can't remember any outstandingly great or hilarious times we had together, but then they never actually rubbed me the wrong way at any time either.

But I do have to admit that I got a bit of a kick out of hearing how the boys at Chet's school, Katahdin High School, had once 'borrowed' somebody's goat one night and tied it to Chet and Susann's front porch. Any guy who looked like Chet, well, he was a nice guy at heart, but that don't matter to some of the kinds of rugged outdoorsman type of kids who were in an abundance at Katahdin High. Chet was just a natural target for their favorite brand of high jinx.

My Uncle Finley, Aunt Martha, and I all enjoyed going out snowshoeing. It is great exercise.

When walking on snowshoes, you always wear at least one less outer layer of warm clothing than you usually wear; or else you will become overheated and begin to perspire profusely. You usually take off the heavy coat you normally have to wear outside during cold weather. If you do wear too much warm clothing, when snowshoeing, you will not walk very far before you will become very uncomfortable, and you're inner most layers of clothing will become soaked with sweat. Then if you take your outer coat off, you will be chilled to the bone, in-no-time-flat, by your freezing sweat.

Snowshoes can break. Accidents can happen. And a personal health problem or emergency may arise at the worst time, like at the beginning of a snowstorm in the farthest place you have ever snowshoed to. So be as prepared as you reasonably can, for such problems.

Whenever you are out in the woods, no matter what you are doing, always carry two different, reliable fire sources. Like waterproof matches and a fully filled windproof lighter. And stow them in two different places, in two different layers of clothing, or one fire source in a clothing pocket, and one in a backpack pocket.

When you are either working or having fun, or in many cases having fun at working, in the Great Outdoors, you either follow the rules that experienced outdoors enthusiasts tell you about, or you will eventually suffer the harsh consequences.

So listen to and heed any safety info or instructions that your experienced, professionally qualified ski instructor, scout leader, salesperson in an outdoors outfitter store, Maine Guide, author, etc. offers or gives to you.

For many of us, nothing is much better than a good day in the Great Outdoors.

For all of us, nothing is much worse than being the victim of a preventable, tragic situation in the Great Outdoors.

When you are out in the Great Outdoors, please heed the advice and unbendable rules of outdoors experts--the more local to where you are going into the outdoors that the experts are from, the more reliable their information and advice should be.

For example: there are no ticks, chiggers, or poisonous snakes in the area of Northern Maine where I was granted a Maine Guide's License. But there are black flies, mosquitoes, and midges--no see 'ums, and some, potentially, mighty mean momma moosies.

For our personal protection during summer insect seasons, we Katahdin Lodge hunting guides usually: wore long sleeve shirts--yes, it was in the early summertime; with insect repellent smeared onto our hands and on up our wrists to our lower forearms; we put insect repellent all over our faces, ears, and necks; we even doused some onto the lower part of the sweat bands in our hats; we bloused our work boots, military style, with big rubber bands holding the bottoms of our pants tightly against our boot tops, so that no insects could crawl up our legs.

The most dangerous animal in the woods around Patten Maine is a cow moose with a calf at her side. If you get too close to a cow with a calf, momma moose will defend her calf with some extremely deft and powerful forward kicks of her very hard front hoofs against your much softer body.

I know a little something about protecting one's self from ticks, but not enough to give advice on it. I know nothing about chiggers. I know very little about avoiding poisonous snakes, when hiking, hunting, fishing, camping, etc. in areas with substantial populations of poisonous snakes.

I have hiked and fished in areas with very low numbered poisonous snake populations. I keep my eyes open and constantly look for them. I usually take along a hiking stick to thump on the ground at every step, in hopes that the vibrations from that will travel along the ground and warn any snakes that I'm coming. That trick may not work, but I'll do it till I'm told by an expert on snakes that it doesn't.

I will do some serious research before I ever travel to any geographical areas where there are a lot of poisonous snakes. And when I get there, I will ask questions of knowledgeable authorities and request the right reading material.

In the early 1950s, my Uncle Finley, and my father used to be in the Army Reserves together. They went together to Army Reserve summer training at Ft. Knox Ky. a few times. They later told the family about using clear fingernail polish on their legs to keep the chiggers from digging in under their skin. That's all I know about chiggers, so if I ever go to where the chiggers are a serious problem, I'll find out what to do to prevent them from bothering me. That nail polish trick may be or may not be a good idea, but I know to find out from modern experts before I try it.

I do know a good bit about how to avoid bears in the wild though. But I'd still ask about any new info, tricks, or techniques in any new bear area I might travel to for outdoors activities.

I'd have died forty years ago, out in the wide woods of northern Maine, if I hadn't listened to and heeded what I was taught, by Maine outdoorspersons who know their stuff.

Please be safe on all of your outdoors excursions.

And say hello to a tree for me.

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Was She His Wife or Not?

2008-04-02T13:22:00.000-07:00

The couple in this photo spent a week at Katahdin Lodge, during the winter of 1968-69. The week they were at the Lodge, this "married" couple were the only paying guests there. He was an Italian man who owned a nice Italian restaurant in New York City, and he said that the young woman was his young wife and that she helped him to run his restaurant. But she was definitely not Italian.

All that week they were at the Lodge, as usual, everyone at the Lodge were all steadily interacting socially as we ate three big family style meals each day together, played card games and Yahtzee (no real gambling ever), or watched something good on the TV. It was during those hours of fun that the “married” couple slipped up a few times in conversation and revealed that they most likely were not actually married at all. The kicker was when the young woman and a local Mainer man who was up to visit for the evening were discussing where and how to store, handle and enjoy the best of wines, whiskeys, homemade beer (the Mainer's forte') and other spirits. The "wife" didn't know where the restaurant stored and babied it's private, most desirable reserve stock of extremely expensive booze.

My Aunt Marty was partly in on that conversation, as she stood and partly leaned against the table next to where the Maine man and New York woman were talking. Marty could hold her own in any conversation what would arise at the Lodge. She heard her Mainer friend begin to discuss what kind of an area in his home was best for storing the little bit of semi-expensive private stock that he kept on the nice, cool, bottom shelf of his wife's pantry, and had stopped on her way into the kitchen to see if she could learn something about storing top shelf booze. The Mainer man had cocked his head towards the Italian man's young female companion and politely asked her whether the best booze in their New York City restaurant received its required long periods of rest and recreation in a cool wine cellar or in a refrigerator or where. That flustered the young woman, because she didn't know! She obviously didn't really work in the restaurant. Just then, the Italian man, who was sitting next to his young woman but was talking to someone else about something else, just then he slides into the conversation between his woman and the Mainer man, and the New York Italian man begins telling the local Maine man about how and where a good Italian restaurant stores its best booze.

You know darn well yourself that the wife of a top notch restaurant owner usually has something to do with the care and treatment of their top shelf ignorant oil--even the best of boozes can trick you into acting ignorant, if you drink too much of it. As that young "wife" was sitting there all flustered and at a loss for words about where to store top shelf booze, my Aunt Martha was standing next to her and looking quite surprised by how the young New York woman didn't know where the restaurant she worked for, and her "husband" owned, stored its best booze. I can still see Martha Clarke standing up straight from her leaning against the table, and walking into the kitchen, while shaking her head and I can still hear Marty muttering, "sheeeshes", in disgust at realizing how dumb the two New Yorkers were for trying to pass themselves off as a married couple.

In 1968-69, unmarried couples were NOT permitted to do the double-backed beast, or to even be alone in a bedroom together, at all, at Fin and Marty’s Katahdin Lodge.

When that Italian guy had to stealthily slide on into the restaurant wine cellar vs. pantry shelf conversation to save his mistress and himself from being exposed as unlawful fornicators, it was the 3rd such mistake in 5 days that they had made. Marty had heard enough. She then knew for sure that she and Finley K. had been duped into allowing those two New Yorkers to come up for a week and take immoral advantage of Katahdin Lodge and Camp's "Best of hunting, fishing and backwoods hospitality."

But the week was almost over, the Italian man's money was good, and the New York man and woman were two fully-grown adults. They weren’t welcome back there though. Marty later said that if they ever called for a reservation again she’d turn them down.

That Italian guy’s major pet peeve in life was how Jewish grandmothers conduct themselves in the best restaurants. "They always send something back to the chef. They make a big deal of their entrance into the crowded dining room, fuss over and try to refuse the first table offered to them, and they always eat about a third of the entree' then complain about it, until the waiter tromps on back into the kitchen with it and informs the p.o.'d chef that the old lady was gonna' raise holy hell about the service there with whomever in city government she actually did know and occasionally bribe. The chef and maitre d' always agreed to allow the bamboozling silver/blue/aqua-marine haired matron to have a new, larger chunk of entree'." Then he said something about the inevitable dismallity of the tips garnered from such a trying, but regular customer.

The clandestine couple from New York and I did some good rabbit hunting over in the woods across Rural Route 11 there in front of the Lodge. There were two beagles living at the Lodge, but only one was ever taken out of their slat wood and chain link fence dog pen to go hunting with, or for any other reason. They were permanently sequestered up there at the wood line behind the Lodge but with a full view of the front driveway and Lodge. There number one doggy duty was to bark a lot at anything coming out of the woods behind the Lodge and at everyone driving into the dooryard. I had never rabbit hunted before I moved to Maine in the fall of '68, but it wasn't no problem getting to learn how to do so with a dog. First rule I's taught is don't shoot the dog or allow anyone else to.

Good Snowshoe Rabbit Beagles sniff and sniff and dig into snow and go and go all round till a rabbit jumps up and runs. Then the dog instinctively runs that rabbit in circles in tighter and tighter circumferences in towards their shotgun toting human partner's field of fire. The dog keeps it up till the bunny's shot, killed or crippled and flopping around kickin up snow clouds whilst skaaahrreeemmming at the top of its tiny, pink lined, internally bleeding lungs.

Or the rabbit gets away scott-free.

'They' say that the absolute optimum most clever thing that a rabbit hunter can do is to always allow the dog to come in and make the kill on any wounded and sqwaukin Bugs-Bunnies. The dog always zeros in on the squeals, zips right in and snaps the hare's neck bone with a canine's natural precision and skillful mercy. This, 'they' say, will make the dog a better hunter. I believe them.

The illicit lovers from New York and I went ice fishing one day out on Grand Lake Matagamon. It was all three of our's first time ice fishing. I put the Lodge's three snowmobiles onto our blue Chevy stake-body farm truck, which was equipped with tandem rear wheels, an 18 foot flat wooden bed, a four-speed transmission with a two-speed rear axle. For snowmobiles, we had a Ski Doo double track, a Ski Doo single track and a Moto Ski single track. We were using old time pop up flag ice fishing traps. I can't even find any on the ice fishing web sites, so they must be illegal now. Those ice fishing rigs had X style cross sticks to set across the hole in the ice, you reeled out some line, baited the hook, dropped it in, set a springy little flag pole back onto a catch, and when a fish hit the hook the flag popped up. I suppose that was too easy of a way fishin, so I can't buy one off the outfitters on the web right now.

When we three first time ice fishers zoomed out onto Matagamon on the snowmobiles we stumbled right onto several already augured holes in the three foot thick ice. The surface water in the holes was only froze an inch or so thick. I looked all around that wide expanse of flat, inviting lake surface and saw not a soul. I hollered over top the reeng-reeng-reenging sounds of three snowsled's hard throttled engines for them two to stay there and set up the fishing gear we had. I throttled up the sled and flew on across the snow blanketed ice to an island there with a small campfire spot that had a tin can hanging by some baling wire where anybody could melt snow in it to make boiling hot coffee or tea. And I had plenty of tea bags and sugar with me.

By jeeze now I tell ya, I t'weren't a'workin on starting a fire for more than second or two when I heard the sounds of two snowmobiles heading hell-bent-for leather in our direction. Those two screemin machines were being jockeyed at full horse power towards us for some reason. All of a sudden one splits off and makes a b-line straight at me and the other rider went straight to the "married" couple. The rider coming at me was 'all up in his stirrups' and taking quick stock of what I had in my hands and what I was fooling with in the snow. It was then that I realized that a game warden had me in his legal-eye sights. He was looking to fine me for anything I was doing outside of the law.

I chuckled softly at their impressive abilities to skillfully peruse that lake surface from way over there while staying completely unnoticed at the shoreline. Their dogged determination to check us all three out in a flash, so we could not stash any illegally caught fish in the snow was rather unnerving, but welcomed, and that was how they wanted it. Many a fisherperson has built a fire to cook and eat fish caught out of season, over or under sized fish, fish caught by someone without a valid fishing license or perfectly legal specimens that a fisherman could eat a few of while catching more fish so they can take home the daily catch limit but still over catch for the day. As I realized all this, I involuntarily let out a laugh, slapped the palms of my thickly mitted hands onto the three layers of warm pants upon my thighs, and I happily rolled back into the snow covered island and pulled out my valid fishing license for the warden. Them two finest kind of Maine woodsmen and Maine Game Wardens had scoped us out and swooped down upon us good and proper.

The wardens left us and disappeared just as quick, after they checked our fishing licenses and all.

It was a fine afternoon just outside the north eastern edge of Baxter State Park. I got a little camp fire going up on the island, and we three ice fishers each drank several cups of hot tea from melted snow water. In about four or five hours of fishing, we three each caught one or two apiece, kept a couple of real whoppers on our stringer for dinner later, and rode on back to the truck. It was parked in by the dam keeper's home.

Then I couldn't figure out an easy way to ride the sleds back up onto the long, wooden truck bed. The Lodge hardly ever trucked any sleds anywhere. If we had, then Finley would have made some solid and safe custom ramps for it. I had used high snowdrifts back at the Lodge to ride up onto the truck, and it was easy to jump the sleds a foot or two down onto the highest bank in the gatekeeper's driveway. Then I saw just where I could motor up enough speed to climb a snow bank and pop onto the truck. But I had to drive out the driveway and go turn the truck around to be able to back it up to the makeshift snow ramp where the sleds could be ridden onto the truck.

I got into the truck and they followed me out the driveway on their sleds. I turned right at the road, stopped and signaled them to wait there by the snow ramp, and I moseyed on in towards the northern entrance to Baxter. There was about a foot of hard packed snow on the road with maybe eight inches of new, soft stuff. A pickup truck had cut tire tracks into the loose powder.

It looked OK to me!

I got stuck down at the bottom of a slight hill that levels out in front of the park gate. The gate was closed for the winter. It had to have been a four wheel drive pickup that made the tire tracks. The four tandem rear wheels of the farm truck were just wider enough more then the pickup truck tracks to get me into trouble. Consequently, what happened was my truck's front tires rolled along nicely while the wider tracked rear ones experienced just a little too much resistance from the snow.

I had never put snow chains on a vehicle in my life. I struggled and struggled down in under the sides of the truck bed while trying to put the set of chains on. There was always a good set of chains behind the seat of every Lodge owned truck. I'd cram the end of chains in under a tire, try to force it as far as I could with my freezin fingers then climb up into the cab and try to ease backwards onto the chain—inch by inch. Maybe woulda got it if that Italian city slicker had had enough sense to ride in on the snowmobile to see where the hell I had gotten to?

I just gave up and walked back to the dam keeper’s house. My two fishin partners were in there warming up with cups of hot coffee. When the gatekeeper heard of my predicament, he apologized for not coming to look for me. The New Yorkers had figured that I had gone for a joy ride in the park, so they told the dam keeper I was just young and goofing off.

When the middle-aged dam keeper there saw my truck, he knew that his pickup could not pull it out of there. So he drove us fisherpersons the 20 some miles back into Patten and then the 10 or 11 miles up Rt. 11 to the Lodge. The Italian sat in the middle of the bench seat with his woman setting on his lap. I was scrunched in against the inside of the passenger side door, and the dam keeper was practically pushing the driver’s side door off the side of the truck. It was cramped in there. We had quite an overload of human mass in the cab of that truck. It was rough country roads all the way, and that little lady there kept worrying about cracking her man’s nuts. She kept adjusting her doubled up body this way and that between her man, the dashboard, windshield and roof of the cab. She kept saying, “Ooh, sorry. Did that hurt? You all right? Here honey put your knee here……….” and on and on for 30 freakin miles.

I thought the not only was the dam keeper very kind and generous to us, I was under the false impression that he was enjoying all of our company. He kept smiling nicely. When we arrived in the Lodge’s driveway, the driver refused a 20-dollar bill from the Italian.

As the man and women walked across the dooryard toward the Lodge, Marty stood there in the open doorway looking for answers to several important questions. The first being: where is her farm truck? I was taking a moment to really look that driver in the eye and make sure that he realized that though I was not a native Mainer and country gentleman, I was no city-brained ignoramus who wasn’t willing to return the favor any time. As soon as Marty got a sketch of the facts from the NYC love bunnies, she walked on over and offered the driver a cup of hot coffee. He said yeah, but he had to have it to go.

While Marty fetched him a cup the guy says, “Jayzzus! Those two are somethin else, ain’t they? Did you hear her? That crap really got on my nerves. Didn’t it bother you?”

“Shoot man! I thought you was drivin along havin a good old time over there. You was smiling all the way.”

He shook his head and said, “Keeeyryst almighty! I wanted to climb out the guhdamned window before we was even so far as Fifefield's (Wildland Store). I kept lookin over at you to see if you was just as miserable as I was. That is one aggravating beech with a lame ass excuse for a man, that’s for sure.”

He eased up on that when Marty was close enough to hand him the cup of coffee through his opened window. Marty chatted with him some and they exchanged tid bits of small town gossip real quick. Marty wasn’t dressed for the cold night, and as she said bye to him and scooted on back into the Lodge, he wheels the truck around, looks at me one more time, rolls his eyes up at the stars, and quips, “And you gotta live with them two for week! I hope you can take it. See ya later.”

Fin was out of state on National Guard duty at the time. So the next morning Wayne Birmingham came up just about daybreak to get me. He drove a mid sized six-cylinder car, but was taking me out to where his Skidder was parked back in the woods, and he had a logging job going. I was darn lucky that he was cutting pulpwood that close to where I got stuck. That was the first time I rode with him, and he was one of the most highly skilled drivers up there. Didn’t know it at first though. I was fearfully fidgeting around all over my side of the front seat as he drove on snowy road faster than I ever knew was possible. It turned into white-knuckle time for me. I can still see a faint image of his huge, chuckling grin as he pointed at the knuckles on my right hand as it gripped the dashboard as tight as I could.

I’m looking over at this guy who I barely knew yet, cept for a few gatherings of 10 or 15 friends and family at the Lodge, and he’s looking at me the same way I watched comedy movies.

“Slow down Dave. We’re not in any danger. Look. You see that softer snow there on each side of the main tire tracks? Watch. I’m keeping the sides of my tires dug into it. Now just sit back and watch on this curve. The car is not sliding at all. OK. Now I’ll drive on the hardest packed part where the previous drivers kept their tires. Here it goes. Feel it start to slide? Don’t worry. Those snow banks will stop us nice and softly if anything happens. Now pay attention as I go a little faster with the tires just into the soft line of snow. See. No slipping at all. That’s all ya gotta do. Try it on the way out. You’ll see.”

That was one of the most valuable lessons anyone ever gave me. It wasn’t long till I was a pro at that driving technique. Gives me a lot of confidence, security and safety when driving in the snow.

The very best example that I can give you of that is the time that I went in to pick up my Baltimore County Taxicab to begin a twelve hour shift at a little past 5 PM, and there was a little less than a half inch covering of snow on everything. And the storm was starting off just right. The flakes were coming down small, steady and softly. No wind was howling and driving snow into everything to make it rough. It was dry stuff. Very artistically fluffy. It slowly sculpted, smoothed and distorted everything on every lawn. Inch by inch, hour by hour. All night long.

About two hours into it the snow flakes began to gradually take on some heft and heavy attitude. Now it was coming down in the very way that I enjoy the most. The flakes stay crispy dry the whole friggin time.

Three hours into my shift and there ain't much happening on the road. Cept me. That taxicab dispatch radio was Rock n' Rolling all night long through the early morning all the way till four hours after I was supposed to turn the cab back in. The cash was just a pouring into my eager paws. I was near as contented, relaxed and happy as I could ever be, during that rather rough stretch of my life.

I was in complete control of the vehicle the entire time. To top it off all nice and glorious like, I only had time to stop for one fifteen minute meal break during the entire sixteen hours. Nobody was out anywhere so it was easy to stop and take little leaks in the snow now and then.

When the level of the snow was rising past six inches, the world around me became so quiet and serene that my face developed a near permanent pleasant little smile. It was like all of roads, streets, alleys and highways throughout Eastern Baltimore City and County were reserved for my use only.

The cab customers were thrilled and thoroughly appreciative of the way I was moving through the storm so gracefully and without ever sliding or spinning the wheels more than a few sprits here and there.

The tires were bald. Not bald snow tires either. Swear to it. It was a North Point Cab. A junker. But it ran good that night.

Wayne and I drove on into the woods. It got much more interesting here because the average four wheel drive vehicle owner today would never have tried that trail. Wayne was having a bang-up-time treating me to a good dose of how the average man in Northern Maine drives to survive.

Wayne fired up his skidder and showed me a few deft moves with it. It was all center jointed with very tall tires. It went in around and through the trees with great ease. The snow in the woods was over three feet deep. But that skidder walked all through the woods looking sorta like a dog wagglin through sniffin out rabbits. Wayne ended the show with a brief little front end plow blade dexterity demonstration. He stopped to let me climb up onto the side of the "skidahh" and away we went

It was a one-seater piece of heavy machinery, so I had to hang onto the outside next to the driver’s door. That was one funny and memorable ride. I was hangin off and onto that big, fat, yellow, outer-space-insect lookin woods machine to varying degrees of all there and almost not there. Finally, I couldn’t take it any longer. I had to find out what would happen if I let go and flew on off into a snow bank.

Yeehaaa!

And Wayne loved it. I did that one more time, when I saw this hill top and hill drop coming with the perfect snow drift piled against the snow bank and I let go and launched off right when the skidder hit that weightless kinda feel you get at the top of hills as you crest them and that’s where Wayne and I sealed our new friendship solid.

Then the crazy sum-b was pushing the farm truck back up the hill, from the entrance to Baxter, and damned if he didn’t snug the skidder’s little front plow blade under the tail end of my 18 foot flat truck bed and lift the rear wheels 3 feet off the road. He took complete control of how my truck steered. I kept turning around sticking my head out the window, looking back at him, laughing hilariously and yelling to him while trying to steer the truck straight. Wayne was in his glory. And it was then that top-notch Maine woodsman knew I was game for all that kindsa' horseplay. Wild and crazy horseplay, but done with well honed skill and actually very safely.

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

ursusdave
snowmobile
photography
patten maine
katahdin lodge
creative writing
David Robert Crews

My First Beard or Do I Just Need To Wash My Face?

2008-04-01T23:31:00.000-07:00

I had this photo taken 'cause I was about to go shave off my very first attempt at growing a beard. I was 18 years old, and nowhere near as hairy as I wanted to be.

I remember telling all my family and friends there in the Lodge's dining room that the snowshoes needed to be in the photo, so that my family and friends down in Maryland could see them. At Katahdin Lodge, Fin, Marty, me, some of our family and friends, and a few paying guests used those snowshoes now and then. But only for recreational snowshoeing. It was mostly two mile round trips into the woods behind the Lodge to Hale Pond and back.

Professionally speaking, this photo needs to have the left side cropped in some so that a viewer's eyes don't try to focus in on what's on the other side of that room divider. And the left side curve of the snowshoes to the far left tends to draw a person's eye that way. The right side needs to come in a fraction, so we don't see that little strip of darkness from that inner section of the dining room. This picture cropping knowledge is basic Photo 101.

The photograph is cropped that way because it allows other snowshoers an opportunity to get a kick out of checkin' out what may very well be some handmade, moose hide, 1960's era Aroostook County snowshoes.

Our closest neighbor, and my tea drinking buddy, who lived about a mile away, had made a pair of handmade moose hide snowshoes for my Uncle Finley. I believe the neighbor's name was Tillie. Or was his wife named Tillie? I don't know anymore.

That were nigh onto forty year' ago.

You gotta' treat and store snowshoes right. Or they'll have y'ur lazy arse stranded and freezin' way out in the woods.

Various sections of the world have their own particular way of building their own snowshoes and maintaining them.

Maybe some snowshoe loving Scandinavians or one of them crazy Russians doing time up in Siberia might see this photo one day and enjoy seeing the details of how the snowshoes are constructed.

In the photo, it looks like a pair of inexpensive neoprenes on the right, and the real thing, the moose hide shoes, are on the left.

Both pairs of snowshoes were serviceable aids to snow top transportation, in the woods, and they never let me down.

My face in this photo not only looks like it needs me to stand a little closer to the razor next time I shave, it looks like I haven't been anywhere near a bar of soap for quite awhile.

But that ain't dirt darkening my formerly comely mug.

When I uploaded that photograph for this article, I noticed that from my hairline down about two inches on my forehead, I look rather pale. Then from there, about two inches above my eyebrow, on down to my neck the surface of my skin looks kinda' smudgey-brown.

Then I remembered that this was my Northern Maine wintertime tan line. All professional outdoorsmen up there get wintertime tans every year.

I had been living and working at the Lodge for five months, when this shot was taken, and all the while had worked outside during many an hour of daylight. There was snow all over the ground the entire time. The sun was often shining healthy, wholesome, vitamin D deliverin' sunrays down hard on me from up in the wide skies over the Katahdin Valley, while some of it was also simultaneously being reflected back up at me off the shiny surface of the pure white, often hard crusted and gleaming, snow. That set of wintertime conditions creates a natural version of a tanning salon.

I always wore a hat when working outside, and that's a wintertime tan line running across my forehead.

I was complimented on it and kidded about it by several of the folks there who saw it as a clear indication that their young relative or friend from the suburbs of Baltimore was becoming a tried and true outdoorsman.

That winter it snowed about the most that it ever has up there. There was plenty of snow on the ground from before Thanksgiving week of 1968, when I arrived at the Lodge, till way into April.

The very first snowfall had covered the ground completely, and that blanket of snow endured the entire winter long. The first snow didn't come any earlier than was normal. It's just that the first few snowfalls usually melt away, then finally the substantial snows hit numerous times, and that succession of heavy snows often keeps the ground well covered for several months.

In the early fall of '68, the ground didn't have time to freeze, before the insulating properties of snow took full effect. Consequently, there was none of the normal layer of frost deep into the surface of the earth there that winter. Which made it a wicked bad mud season the following springtime. And I had the memorable pleasure of working out in it. While it worked against my Uncle Finley and I, at Katahdin Lodge, the entire time the mud was drying out. It was a formidable foe for Fin and me and our shovels to contend with. We scooped out and maintained little canals all through the yards and driveways everyday.

Ask any Mainer about the yearly mud season up there. It's mud, mud everywhere, and no dry land in sight.

The Lodge's post office was in Patten, but the Lodge actually sat about ten or eleven miles up Rural Route 11 from P-town, in the Township of Moro Plantation--Moro, Maine.

In Maine, plantations are simply chunks of local geography that are mapped out in square sections, with six miles to each four sides.

Moro, Maine was, and maybe still is, in a regional snowbelt.

This snowbelt began somewhere just over to the west of the Lodge, where the very most northern one hundred mile section of the Appalachian Mountains lay there all sprawled out nice and comfy like; while generously blessing that part of God's Country with majestic beauty, and the finest kind of nature's wealth. The snowbelt ended somewhere to the east of the Lodge, about two-thirds of the way over to Houlton, Maine and Woodstock, Canada. How far north or south the limits of that snowbelt reached, I never knew.

I do know that right there about in the middle of it was right where I wanted to be at the time.

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

ursusdave
snowshoes
photography
patten maine
katahdin lodge
creative writing
David Robert Crews

The Rarest Bird 'Round Katahdin Lodge Was A Formally Dressed Finley K.

2008-04-01T23:08:00.000-07:00

Finley Kenneth Clarke in Katahdin Lodge's kitchen, 1969.

The rarest bird 'round Katahdin Lodge was a formally dressed Finley K.

I can't remember where my Uncle Finley was going at the time this photo was taken. I just remember that I took the shot because it was the only time I ever saw Finley wearing a formal suit and tie.

See those stacks of canned goods and other goods on the pantry shelves back there?

At Katahdin Lodge, we stayed well stocked with food and other supplies all the time.

In November 1968, the Lodge's freezer had four deer worth of butchered meat in it. No beef was eaten at the Lodge until late the following spring. It was venison for red meat, chicken and local slaughtered pork for plenty of variety. And some canned Tuna Fish a few times.

Then when the venison ran out, it was back to ordering wholesale amounts of freshly butchered beef from Cry Brothers up ta' Caribou.

At any time, anywhere from one to thirty or forty people might be enjoying a good, all you can eat home cooked meal in the Lodge's dining room.

But it was illegal to serve wild game to paying guests, so my aunt and uncle and I ate most of the venison. Only our visiting family members or Mainer friends were allowed to eat Deer meat there. I ate delicious venison almost everyday that winter. And I've bragged about that many times since.

It is illegal to feed paying guests wild meat, because that practice puts too much hunting pressure on the deer and moose populations. It also makes it much more profitable to hunt out of season. It encourages Lodge owners to become, or hire, big time poachers.

One of the countrywomen, who worked on the housekeeping and kitchen staff at the Lodge, a wonderful woman named Winnie, baked fresh breads, rolls, muffins, pies, and cakes.

Winnie's daughter, who is my exact age, made most of the birthday cakes though. She was married to the Katahdin High School principal, in 1977, when she was asked to create my, 27th Birthday, birthday cake. That cake she made for me was the most delicious one I will ever eat.

I can bake some basic handmade cakes from scratch, and using whole wheat flour, honey, and other all natural ingredients. My grandmothers, some of my aunts, my cousin Bonnie, and my mother were, or are, all proficient bakers. Plus, where I grew up, in Dundalk, Md., we had some very good bakeries in our neighborhood.

Until I moved to Maine, I had attended numerous birthday parties for all of my extended family, on both sides of my family. My Granddad Crews had retired as foreman of numbers 9 + 10 Blast Furnaces at Bethlehem Steel in Sparrows Point Maryland, and my Grandfather Clarke had retired as a carpenter over on "the ship side", the Sparrows Point Shipyard. My parents had grown up in the company mill town owned by Beth Steel-- Sparrows Point Maryland. It was a wonderful place to live. Just like Patten Maine. All of my aunts and uncles had attended the same schools. And, up until 1965 when Fin and Marty moved to Maine, none of them had moved very far from home when they got married. Many worked "down the point" too. Fin and Marty were next door neighbors while growing up on Sparrows Point. That made it easy for any of us to get together for holidays and birthdays. I ate a lot of birthday cakes at a lot of family parties.

Consequently, I know a little something about good birthday cakes.

But I have no idea how that 1977 birthday cake, which was homemade for me by Winnie's daughter in Maine, could have been 100% perfectly tuned to my sweet tooth. It was the best I have ever had, and I am 100% positive that it was the best I ever will have.

Birthday cake is the one thing in life that I know I have had the very best of.

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

ursusdave
photography
patten maine
katahdin lodge
creative writing
David Robert Crews

The 1968-69 Katahdin Lodge and Camps Music Soundtrack

2008-04-01T22:46:00.000-07:00

My Aunt Martha Clarke At Katahdin Lodge In 1969.

pssst: is she a tree?

One good thing about the times when my Uncle Finley, Aunt Martha and I were the only ones at Katahdin Lodge, and we all had work to do inside of the main building, was that they had a record player in the dining room that was often spinning out some good tunes.

When we were working, the music sure helped us maintain a good pace at what we were doing.

Fin and Marty had some of the usual record albums middle class Americans bought back then. Mitch Miller, Sinatra, Dean Martin, New Christy Minstrels, Smothers Brothers (I went Marching To Pretoria many a time when that song came on), Patsy Kline, Readers Digest Collectors Edition Original Recordings of Glenn Miller and other Big Bands and Swing Bands, I think there was a Wayne Newton record or two, no Elvis?, and the best of theirs for me was Johnny Cash.

Sometimes, I was hustling between what I was working on inside the Lodge and out to the tool shed, for more nails or something, I'd pass that spinning Johnny Cash album, and I'd go boppin' along like a contented rooster "going, down, down, down into a burning ring of fire" for a few yards to the beat of the music.

What a way to get along. We were working to the rhythm of the singer and the band.

That record collection was often fully enjoyed when family and friends were there at the Lodge to visit. Fin and Marty and other couples did do a little bit of dancing, now and then, but mostly we'd be diggin' the music while playing some Yatzee, Cribbage or another non-betting card game. I don't remember any gambling at all, but they may have played some penny anny poker a few times. Whatever the game was, I sure liked tappin' my feet to the beat of the music while formulating my game playing strategies.

I had brought some of my record albums and a cheap stereo up to Maine from my home in Dundalk, Maryland. I was a dedicated record collector and music listener. Dedicated to Rock and Roll, Blues, and Rhythm and Blues music.

I had that cheap stereo out in my tiny sleeping cabin. Out there, the toads living under the floor heard a lot of Eric Burdon and the Animals, the Yardbirds, Rolling Stones, Them (featuring Van Morrison) and the Best of Muddy Waters.

I'm in a real good mood, so I'll tell you something no one else remembers.

Keep this to yourself, OK.

This here Rolling Stones Fan and Born Again Beatle Maniac from Kladnud (Dundalk spelled backwards) Junction actually requested his favorite Dean Martin album to be played on the Lodge record player a few times. Admittedly, I did dig on Deano's swinging tunes more than I ever thought possible.

Fin and Marty graciously allowed me play some of my albums sometimes on the Lodge's little fold down record player with the fold out speakers attached.

But, naturally, hardly any of my listening library was their cup of tea. So it was usually only barely heard when the vacuum cleaner was roaring.

I had a good sense of proportion though. The only time I played them anything so radical as Frank Zappa and the Mother's of Invention's Help I'm A Rock was when they asked me what Freak Out meant. The Mother's first album is titled Freak Out. And no one up there had heard that now world wide famous piece of slang yet.

Marty had pulled Freak Out out of my record case, because she saw the avant-garde graphics on the album cover, and asked, "What's this Beatnik bullshit? David! What does freak out mean? C'mon, show us what a freak out is."

My parents and sister happened to be there visiting, so I put on an impromptu demonstration of freaking out for them.

On went the album cut Help I'm A Rock. I plopped down cross legged on the dining room rug, started waving my hands and arms into the air way above me, dropped my chin onto my chest and did a Laugh In TV Show comedian style rendition of some basket case burnout trying to bust out from the inside of an invisible boulder.

Marty slid off into the back office and comes out with a double barrel shot gun. She broke it wide open, so everyone could see that it wasn't loaded. We had no tolerance for people screwing around with firearm safety rules, so Marty had made dead certain that the gun was obviously incapable of firing. Then she just pointed it down at the floor right next to me and went "Bang!".

That worked well, the whole joint erupted into roaring laughter.

When I was in high school, there had been a stereo in the school cafeteria, and I was the record committee most of the time. I also brought in most of the records that I played during lunch periods.

Some of the albums that I had with me in Maine were ones that I had played for my schoolmates.

Every lunch period, at Dundalk High School, I parked myself on the end of the table right underneath the locked stereo cabinet that was up about five feet off the floor and bolted to the wall. The turntable and amp were kept in there. I waited by the stereo cabinet till the cafeteria monitor, the male driver's ed teacher who wore hip white shoes, unlocked the cabinet for me. Then I put on a couple of my record albums.

Across the lunch room table from me everyday sat my friend, Edna Galiano. She was a short, well built girl, with very long, pretty hair and a hip sense of style. Edna played bass guitar in an all girls Rock band. She and I never dated, but we were a steady presence around the record machine. We guarded it from Top 40 Billboard Chart 45 RPM records only fans and other lesser minded music owners. We listened to entire album sides at a time, and that was it. So she got her lunch tray first, then I went through the line and got mine.

As the record committee, I turned Dundalk High School onto the first albums of Hendrix, The Doors, Cream, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Country Joe and the Fish, and the ever-obscure West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band.

Most of the other kids at my high school were not only often hearing the albums for the first time, they were learning of the musicians for the first time. In those cases, I had often just learned about the band and the album myself, a day or two before, when I had discovered the album sitting in some retail record rack; like amongst the young, fertile isles of the humongous record department at Two Guys Department Store.

The Doors were well received by the kids in the DHS cafeteria, and Cream's first album was an instant success. All kinds of people were coming up to take the Fresh Cream album cover back to their lunch room table full of best friends, so they could all check out who the new, exciting Rock group was.

I don't recall the particulars of any other times I played a new record at school, except for when I played The Jimi Hendrix Experience for the first time. That, now famous, first album caused a near riot of angry protesting.

When I had captained the superb Rock music of The Jimi Hendrix Experience's first album on its maiden voyage into the ears and minds of the DHS school cafeteria music listening audience, it was BOOOED off the turntable. Because all except for about twenty of my good friends, guys and girls who would sometimes turn me onto new music, the kids in the cafeteria all banged trays, plates, forks, knives and spoons, while yelling, hollering and booing at a steadily increasing, very loud decibel level.

Like Jack Crabb - aka Little Big Man - used to say, "That is a true historical fact."

There was a solid percentage of hard core Soul/Rhythm and Blues music fans amongst the white students in many Baltimore area high schools at the time, in 1967.

It was some of the white guys amongst Dundalk High School's Soul/R + B fans who had started the ruckus. It wasn't black kids from Dundalk's all black (in '67) neighborhood Turners Station who started it and made the most commotion. Sure, they were mostly Soul/R + B hearted teens, and they eventually did add a little something to the loud, thick cloud of rude noises too. But they had not yet experienced their God given, previously denied by man, unbridled freedoms of school desegregation long enough to feel strong enough to protest against a white student's choice in what got spun on the lunch room record player. It was the white guys who went wild and rude at Jimi first. Then their good lookin' white girlfriends started jumpin' up and down and adding fuel to the conflagration.

I was so deeply angered by the rude, closed minded antics of the crowd, that I refused to take the record back off the turntable myself.

A buddy of mine sitting next to me, on the lunch room table bench seat, had leaned in close and quietly said, "Dave? What are you gonna do?"

My terse lipped reply was, "Let 'um listen to it. They don't know what the #@*& they're missin."

The record continued playing, while the riotous objections to it roared louder and louder.

It wasn't but a minute more, when the cafeteria monitor, the driver's ed teacher who wore hip white shoes, had to come take the Hendix album off of the turntable and hand it to me.

I looked around the cafeteria, and those twenty or so music sharing friends of mine all had their heads bowed low, with their young faces hanging down near the partially eaten food on their lunch trays. Those faces showed sheer, sad, disgust and disappointment at their couple of hundred classmate's combined first opinion of the, soon to be considered, by many, the best Rock guitarist who ever lived, James Marshal Hendrix.

Six or eight months later though, Jimi Hendrix was roundly appreciated by many at the old green and gold--DHS school colors.

You could tell the percentage of white kids in my school who were hard core Soul and R + B music fans by the way they dressed. The boys wore Wing Tip Shoes, Glenn Plaid Pants and some famous name brand casual/dress shirts that I don't remember the brand names of. But I know it was a style that could be fashionably worn with or without a tie. The girls all wore Saddle Shoes. And they all wore the same kind of skirts and blouses as each other, but I don't know the names of those styles or the brand names. The school dress code dictated that skirt hems be no higher then two inches above the knee, but the Soul music girls wore their skirts with the hems just at the bottom of their knees. I saw that as a straight up self righteous fashion statement against the new coming of the Mod mini-skirt. I didn't want to date any of the Soul fan chicks, but I did want them to show us guys all the leg allowed.

In 1966, '67, '68, the Baltimore/Washington corridor was the Soul Music capital of the world. More of it was listened to and bought there than anyplace else. Hendrix ticked off a lot of Soul/Rhythm and Blues fans at first. DHS's Soul fan base peaked in the fall of '67. Right when Hendrix's first album was made available in our record stores.

My friends and I wore Mod type British Rock and Roll Invasion style clothes. Most of you have only seen that style in an exaggerated form in Austin Powers movies. But we did not look that far-out and colorful. We had much better sense of style and taste in clothing than that.

At our high school dances, the school had to hire a Soul/R + B band and a band that played Rolling Stones, Yardbirds, Beatles, etc music. The dance chaperone's soon learned that the Soul/R + B band had to play first, because the fans of those bands hated our music and made a lot of rude noises and fights started. Most of us American Mods liked soul music a lot. But we liked Rock and Roll and Blues Rock better. The side I was on never started any crap, when the Soul band was playing, but we never ran away from any either.

I was fortunate enough not to ever get into any fights at or after a dance myself. But I was always in the half circle of guys who were there to prevent anyone from the opposing half circle of the other guy's friends from jumping into the fight. Those fights caused us to loose out on a lot of future school and teen center dances, because the trouble it caused cancelled upcoming dances.

But I must say, in defence of my generation, it was almost always one on one fights that I was any part of. There wasn't gonna' be any kicking a guy when he was down, either; not by their guy our ours; we'd stop our own from doing it. And there was never a weapon involved, and no retaliation later.

But it still wasn't a nice activity to be involved in. I'd rather be friendly with everyone.

1968-69 Katahdin Valley area social scenes were quite peaceful and non-violent, in amongst the sparsely populated American communities located there.

The fact is, I only witnessed one fist fight/wrastlin' match the entire time I lived in Maine. And that wasn't much 'uv a fight at all.

The big fight occurred on one Saturday evening in Patten, when there was a live Rock n' Roll band playing at a dance, in the Patten Town Hall.

My best friend at the time, Gary McCarthy and I, were standing just outside the front door of the town hall, while finishing off a cold beer apiece, before going into the dance. When all of a sudden, three young teenage boys come poppin' out the door, and two of them 'locked horns', and started to furiously goin' at each other. They fell, with their arms, hands and legs all wrapped around and grappled to each other, just like two young buck deer with their impressive racks of late fall antlers all locked together in territorial combat.

Let em tell ya' now, them two boys were kickin' up some dust from the dry, bare earth they were rolling around on there. But they weren't actually hurting each other very much.

Gary and I thought that it was hilarious, because no one was actually getting hurt, and it was a fair match-up. Gary and I never would have stood there and allowed some bigger kid to beat up a smaller, less evenly matched guy.

Due to the fact that I was not a natural born native of Patten, if I got into a fight there in town with a guy who was also a native of Patten, then Patten native Gary would have had to back up his life-long fellow P-townsman. But I could have helped Gary hold two fighting Patten boys apart, to peace'ify them.

Welp', the larger of them two battling lads says, "Stop! Hold on now!"

The combatants both relaxed their 'death grips' that they had held onto each other with, and the bigger guy lets go of the other boy.

They both stand back up, and the bigger kid asks, "What are we fightin for anyway? You just walked up to me and said let's go, we gotta go outside and fight, but you never said why. I don't wanna fight you. Why are we fighting?"

The smaller, former combatant says, "Because I shot your brother in the ass with a BB gun. And he said that he was going to get his bigger brother to beat me up. So I figured that we might as well get it over with right now."

"What!" Replies the larger, former combatant, "We're fightin' because you shot my dumb-ass little brother in the butt? I don't give a crap if you shot him in the butt or not. Next time, you can shoot him once for me too. C'mon, let's go back inside to the dance and have some fun. I ain't gonna fight you because of that little twerp. I'd rather go kick my dumb little brother's ass, than fight you. I do it all the time."

At that, they each slapped one of their arms around the other's shoulders and proudly walked back inside; to where some girls were most certainly waiting to be asked by one of them to get up and dance. They were proud to have proven that they each could fight fairly hard and take, and that they had shown common sense in choosing not to continue the brief battle.

In the later 1960s, in and around Baltimore, my closest friends and I were painfully aware that Baltimore was averaging one year behind New York City, and two years behind California, when it came to clothing trends, music and 1960s life style changes. One of Jimi Hendix's 45 RPM single releases, either Hey Joe or Purple Haze, was a number one hit in NYC nearly a full year before it was ever even played on a Baltimore radio station. I can't remember which song it was, I just remember some other original Hendrix fan telling me about it, right after I told him about The Great DHS Cafeteria Jimi Hendrix Fiasco.

The well known song Sunshine Of Your Love by Cream was the first Cream song played on Baltimore's only Rock station at the time, WCAO AM. And that song is off Cream's second album. I had that second Cream album, Disraeli Gears, for 3 or 4 months before any of it was allowed on the airwaves in Baltimore.

Several months after that, when I moved to northern Maine, most of the teens up there had never heard of Cream or Hendrix yet. Those cutting edge musician's albums were already for sale in Houlton, the largest town around, a small college town, but it was 35 miles away from Katahdin Lodge. And in the summer of 1969, there was even a few of my kind of albums for sale in a little country store in tiny Sherman, Maine. I was happily surprised to see that. The records weren't selling yet, but they sure did in due time.

Many of northern Maine's young people eventually got into my kind of music. And the very first time I heard one of my favorite Cream songs, Badge, was when it was played by a live band, made up of Maine kids from further south in Maine who played at a dance in the Patten Town Hall. (bawuwm-bawumm-bawumm-ba-wumm-bwumm-bwumm-bwumm-bwumm-bawuumm-bawumm Thinkin' 'bout the times that you drove in my car)

Patten Maine teens were some Rockin' and Rollin' kids, Top 40 records only, but them kids had a natural 4/4 beat poundin' in their hearts. They were some dancin' Top 40 fans too. 1968 Baltimore teenage dancers didn't have a thing on them Mainer kids.

Maine kids were cool in their own ways, that's why I dug 'um so.

It was all Top 40 at the town hall record hops, cabin parties and on the Patten Drug Store jukebox, of coarse.

At the cabin parties and town hall dances rarely were any of the all-white folk there afraid to get up and boogie. Northern Maine was the only place I'd ever been where most young Euro American men at social affairs got up and danced more than they sat around and hoped they didn't do anything to embarrass themselves.

Anytime that I was sitting at the lunch counter in the Patten Drug Store, and a good 1967-68-69 Rock n' Roll song was playing, I could watch out the huge windows there and spot at least one passing pedestrian who was walking to the beat of the music--that could not be heard out there at all.

I conducted controlled social experiments on this phenomena.

I would spend the longest periods of time sippin' sodas and eating tuna sandwiches at the lunch counter, while pretending to have the hots for the sweet, curvy, young thang' working behind the counter; but I was actually confirming my hopeful expectations that Patten did indeed have a Rock n' Roll Soul.

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John Birmingham and Katahdin Lodge's Trusty Old Land Rover

2008-04-01T22:34:00.000-07:00

John Birmingham and the Lodge's Land Rover.

Look over at the right side of this photograph, past the top of The Rover's hood, and check out the high, sloping snow bank on the side of the woodshed. That pile is there from when my Uncle Finley and I had had to go up on the roof and shovel off four foot deep snow, or the building would have collapsed. It was an all day task.

On that day, after we ate lunch, I waddled on in to the living room and plopped my carcass down onto the sofa. I wanted to rest there while we waited the 20 or 30 minutes it takes stomach action to digest food enough that you won't get cramps from hard physical activity. This is in full accordance with what was taught me at Red Cross swimming safety classes. You know the oft stated maxim: never swim with y'ur tummy full.

Friggin Finley looks in there at me trying to get comfy on the sofa, leans a little forward, and in towards me, grins mischievously, and says, "What the hell'r you doin?"

My honest answer was, "I'm digesting."

Fin bolts upright, like he just got hit in the butt cheeks by static electricity, "You're digesting?"

Now I swear to you that I was as serious as a heart attack, when I answered, "Yeah. Well it's like from what I learned during swimming lessons, you know, you'll get cramps if you swim after eating, and that's hard exercise, like swimming is, up on that roof. We don't wanna get cramps do we?"

Dear o' dear me.

Finley then made a soon-to-be famous statement that I was forced to hear him and/or Marty repeat many a time to many a person--when they jovially teased me about that day of hard shoveling. Fin had told me, "You can git back up there on that roof and digest with a shovel in y'ur hand!"

John Birmingham is one of the most capable woodsmen who ever lived. He is also reputed to the best shot with a rifle who ever set foot upon Katahdin Lodge's dooryard.

John is the son Finley always wanted.

But life is not fair, so Finley and Martha never had any children. I never knew the unfortunate, natural reason why Fin and Marty never had children. They were securely in love with one another, and I believed that they made mad, passionate love, or sweet, tender love, often. They went to doctors, when they lived in Maryland, to see if anything could be done so that they could conceive children. But there were no good results.

In 1979, Finley, his top-notch guide Richard Libby, and I were out in the dooryard there talking about John. Richard told us about a time when he and John were standing there talking, when John suddenly shouldered a loaded rifle he was holding, aimed it at a little bird that had just lit upon the telephone wire, up there running alongside Rt. 11, and John fired off a quick shot. And poof, went the birdie.

Then Richard said, "It was amazing, I never saw anything like it before. That bird just disappeared into a tiny pink cloud of floating feathers. POOF! Just like that! By jeeze if that son-uv-an-oar had cut that wire we'd a been in deep shit. Can you imagine? As tiny as that bird was John never even made the line sway or move. He hit that bird dead center. If he hadn't it would have just been knocked off the wire."

Richard looks up at Finley, gives him a big wide grin, and adds, "I know the guhdamned bullet never touched the wire. When he pulled the trigger, time froze for a split second, and my mind zoomed right in on that wire. You know how clearly you can see things at a time like that? Well, all I could think off was what you were gonna say to John if he had cut your telephone or electric line."

We had a good laugh on that thoroughly thought out sentiment. Fin would have been ferociously furious if John had screwed up on that deal.

Were I given the chance to 'turn back the hands of time', and was given the choice of traveling the world with The Rolling Stones, as their personal photographer, or the choice of living and working as a woodsman in Maine, I would choose Maine.

Yep! I would chose time spent in the woods of Maine, with the finest kind of Maine country folk, over equal time spent with the world's greatest Rock n' Roll band, my all time favorites, The Rolling Stones. Because the Maine Guides I worked with were/are as good as a modern woodsman can be. They were/are super-stars in the Great Outdoors. And the women in northern Maine were/are my kind of gals. I prefer wholesome, healthy lookin', great cookin', good lovin' ladies like the Town of Patten produces over the gold digging, hot and nasty, groupie chicks whom I would be around with the Stones.

The heaviest factor weighed into that Stones vs. Maine decision is: I flat-out prefer spending most of my time out in the natural splendor of the woods.

When that photo of John Birmingham and the Land Rover was taken, John was home on leave from the U.S. Army. There he was an expert shot, a physically fit woodsman, a man who had tracked many a wounded bear or deer at night. And what does Uncle Sam do? He makes John an Army clerk. John was sent to Vietnam for a year, but he never saw combat. He spent the entire time in Saigon. He later said that when he was drinking in a crowded Saigon bar, all he had to was start telling bear stories, then he never had to pay for a drink for the rest of the night.

John returned from Vietnam unscathed, and eventually made a career as an Army Recruiter.

When the photo of John and The Rover was taken, Fin and Marty were down to Maryland visiting family and friends. My Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley had lived in Sparrows Point, Md., and then over in Dundalk, till 1965, when they purchased the Lodge.

Fin had been a bricklayer "down the Point"--the Bethlehem Steel Mill at Sparrows Point--and Martha worked in the main office there. Fin and Marty grew up next door to each other. My father's family also lived "on the Point"--in the company owned mill town--so all of our families knew each other well. We were together for every American holiday, and we all visited each others' homes on a regular basis.

My parents, two sisters and I spent wonderful hours each holiday at both of my grandparent's homes, along with most of our aunts, uncles and cousins. Fourth of July was at my parents' house. Dundalk's world famous 4th of July Parade ended three blocks up the street from my house. Our yard was 100 x 60 ft. Plenty of room for picnics, badminton, croquet and all that was fun and games for a large family.

There was a really cool freight train track at the end of our yard. The railroad tracks were up on an embankment, and dad had planted tons of sticker bushes at the bottom of the hill there so that when us kids were little we would stay back off the tracks. The hill was hard to climb too. Trains went by real slow, and that was super for when the whole family was out there during a picnic. We would be smiling and waving to the passing train's engineers, while we were yanking on invisible air horns, until the smiling, waving engineers blew the train whistle for us. And we sent back cheers of joy to them.

I learned how to drive standard transmission, manual clutch and stick shift equipped vehicles by giving that Land Rover something to worry about.

The Rover was old and well used, but my personal nickname for it was, "the Cadillac of the woods." It was that darn comfortable on the worst of all woods roads, with the heaviest of loads.

With The Rover, I hauled a lot of hunters, great guys, good buddies out into the woods to take them bear hunting, while having interesting and enriching conversations, in that British made four wheel drive buggy. It eventually came to mean so much to me as one of the best aspects of my time as a Registered Maine Bear Hunting Guide, that I have taken the liberty in this narrative to write "The Rover", instead of the Rover. I heartily adored and deeply respected that machine.

When I first 'met' The Rover, I was up at the Lodge for my 1968 summer vacation, with my parents, both sisters, one brother in law and two little nephews. My family always pitched in to help around the Lodge, and I wanted to help out with some bear baiting for my uncle. Gary Glidden was Fin's only hired hunting guide that summer, and he was in the front passenger seat of The Rover the day that Uncle Finley decided it was time for me to learn how to drive a stick shift. Damn near gave Gary whiplash, till I got the giant, jumpin', jack rabbit out from under The Rover, and gained control of that clutch pedal and stick shift assembly.

I "rabbited" The Rover out the Lodge's driveway and slowly jerked my way out onto slender Rt. 11 there. The Rover was moaning n' groaning rather dismally, while a whole crew of family members, a female lodge employee or two, paying hunters and hound dogs out there in the dooryard howled with laughter.

I stalled out, turned red, tried to swallow a mouth full of dried spittle, and looked back to see if Fin was gonna' call it off. But he just cupped his hands around his mouth, and hollered, "Hold on Gary, everybody jack rabbits the first time."

Then Fin waved us on down the road. My fear struck eyes were bulging out a bit, as I scanned the road for moving vehicles, cranked The Rover back up, and bopped on down the line.

Gary, like Finley, was one of the most highly skilled motor vehicle operators who ever 'turned a wheel'. He coached my driving so well that day that I was shifting smooth and in the groove by the time we returned to the Lodge, several hours later.

That was during the infamous summer of '68, when America was metamorphosing from being 100%, tried and true, red-white-and-blue, to being the land of Hippie protesters, clouds of Pot smoke, and radical new found ways of conducting one's relationships with the opposite sex.

But none of that had hit Patten, Maine yet.

During the year when I first worked at the Lodge, in 1968 and '69, there was never ever one single longhaired man who worked or hunted there.

After my high school graduation from Dundalk High School in June'68, I had been letting my hair grow out for the first time. Because, believe it or not, when I was going to school in Maryland, any guy with long hair got expelled from school. EX-FREAKIN-EXPELLED!

Like many of my schoolmates, I had wanted long hair for a couple of years before I ever got to grow it out. And, like myself, most of us did grow it out, after we either quit school or graduated.

Then, in November of '68, I moved to far-north Maine, where no longhaired males were welcomed. So I cut mine shorter and had many great times as a plain-clothed-cop sorta' quasi-Hippie-type kid turning into a professional Maine outdoorsman.

Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley were painfully aware of that little bit o' Hippie in me.

One day during August of '69, five, young, American, college kids on a camping trip stopped in at the Lodge, after one of their cars had broken down just up the North Road (Rt.11) a short ways. They were in a Corvette that was towing an old, worn out, raggedy looking, junker SAAB.

As the two car college caravan eased on into driveway, Fin, Gary and I just happened to all three be there in the driveway. We were looking at our clipboards, which held lists of bear baits that we had discovered fresh bear sign on that morning, and we were discussing which hunter was going on what bait stand. We all three greeted the young college crew, but I instantly began to see the approaching storm.

The junker-SAAB had dropped its motor fan onto its radiator, and had ripped some healthy leaks into it. All that the young college friends cheerfully asked of us at the Lodge was to borrow some tools to use right there.

In that part of the world, in those long gone days, there was no refusing such a request. Way up in the woods like that, people rely on each other for their shared survival.

The group of friends consisted of: (just like in the college road trip movies) One quintessentially real good looking blond haired boy; one blond haired girl who was knockin' my socks off, as she pranced around the scene; one OK looking brunette chick; one average looking guy; and one rather goofy looking fellow who owned the SAAB.

They were all obviously of above average intelligence--book wise, not woods wise--and also from wealthy homes. Rich college kids often receive their family's older 'second' car, when they go off to school. Back then, the USA's rich folks, nor any of us, weren't so financially well off as Americans are today. Today, the cars are much nicer in the student parking lot. I was from a blue collar neighborhood, so in the '60s, the only old foreign cars like a SAAB that I ever saw were being driven by university students to Rock concerts. So as soon as them kids turned into our driveway at the Lodge, I had 'um pretty well pegged for what they were, and what was happening. So I was the first of we three Katahdin Lodge hunting guides to greet and meet them.

My mistake.

OH! The college kids were sure enough in great spirits, unfazed by the mechanical situation, loving life in Maine, and happy to see me; it was every other single individual at the Lodge that day who were the problem. They took an instant dislike to the strangers, because the young men had long hair. And when it was learned that none were married, and all five were sharing two tents together, it was immediately assumed that these five were all about "free love", and Pot smoking-tent shaking orgies in the woods. That was all a no-go in that part of Maine, at that juncture of time.

After no more than a minute in the company of those welcomed-only-by-me strangers, I sensed the discomfort broiling in Fin and Gary. I had to walk away from that scene in the driveway. I let Fin and Gary lend them the required hand tools and make small talk while a quick-fix repair was done well enough for them to drive both cars the 10 miles into town where the closest garage was.

The sweet middle aged country woman who baked all the fresh breads and deserts for the Lodge was stomping through the dining room and kitchen, while tersely declaring, "SHACK RATS!! SHACK RATS!! All they are is shack rats!"

And the whole crowd in the Lodge in there were taking turns glaring out the long row of dining room windows and voicing their full agreement with the baker lady. So I moved on out towards the woodshed, to look for something that needed done.

Jeeze o' wizz! I popped out the kitchen door as Marty was coming in with a basket of freshly air dried bed clothes. She was muttering something unintelligible into the clean sheets and pillowcases, which she had just pulled off the clothesline, when she spotted me.

Aunt Marty grits her teeth tight, leers out angrily at me, through squinched down eyelids, into my pale, young eyes, and gripes, "THOSE ARE YOUR KINDA PEOPLE DAVID! THOSE ARE YOUR KINDA PEOPLE."

I stayed out behind the woodshed, until it was over.

Then, some weeks later, our new Life or Look Magazine comes in the mail with a special edition, full insert, extra magazine issue on the Woodstock Music Festival. Three days of music, mud, drugs, some sex, and a whole lotta' mild mayhem that defined the end of the '60s.

The magazine with the Woodstock insert in it was opened in the Lodge's dining room, when we had all just finished eating our afternoon meal. There were all the Lodge staff there, plus a hand full of bear hunters passing the magazine around amongst themselves. They were simply livid.

That magazine was my first look at what Woodstock meant.

Unfortunately, I couldn't even take a peak at it till the rest of everyone who was in the Lodge at the time left the dining room. I had learned my lesson on the day the longhaired males, unmarried males and females, but still camping together anyways, young Americans came. I was not going to allow myself to be caught looking at photographs of a half a million of 'um. Fin and Marty would have 'laid right into me'.

So when the dining room emptied, I slid on over and flipped the pages of the magazine, while it was still laying down on the table there, because I did not want to get caught with it up in my hands.

I had record albums, out in my little sleeping cabin there at the Lodge, from about half the bands at Woodstock. Several of my lifelong friends from back in Dundalk, Md. went to Woodstock. I'd have probably been there at the festival too, if I had still been living and working in the Baltimore area. But way up there just above Patten, Maine, the young people did not know about it.

I recognized musician after musician, and said to myself, "What'd I miss?"

That missed out feeling didn't last long.

I loved it up in the woods.

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

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David Robert Crews

A Very Close Family and An Idiot Stick

2008-04-01T10:45:00.000-07:00

L to R: My mother-Doris Mae Crews (maiden name Clarke); myself-David Robert Crews; my father-Robert Edward Crews Jr.; my younger sister-Jeanmarie Crews (married name Little); my aunt-Martha Louise Clarke (maiden name Thomas.

The two photos on this page were taken in early spring, 1969. My family had come up to visit us at Katahdin Lodge during my sister's Easter break from high school. My mother had hoped that I was going to go back home to Dundalk, Maryland with them when they left. But the woods, the young women and the good times up in and around Patten, Maine had quite a solid grip on me.

I never thought of this before, but maybe my mother was trying to take me home because she was worried about me being drafted into the Army and sent to fight and die in Vietnam. My entry into the military was inevitable. It is very possible that she had wanted to spend as much time with me as she could; until my U.S. Army draft notice or my voluntary enlistment took me to where she could not come to stay and visit with me for a week.

She had lived through World War Two, while living in Sparrows Point, Maryland, as a young adult. Then her brother Finley and other young men from her neighborhood had served in the Korean War. She knew plenty enough mothers who had lost sons in those two wars. Maybe she feared not ever being able to spend time with me again, after I either received that inevitable military draft notice or I enlisted into the armed services from up in Maine. And I eventually did enlist into the Army from Bangor Maine. Fortunately though, I got to spend a couple of weeks at my parents' home before I reported to serve my country.

When I did not go back to Dundalk with them, my mother was visibly disappointed.

L to R: Doris; Bob; Jeanmarie; Marty; and in the back that is my uncle--Finley Kenneth Clarke.

You see that wide, old style, heavy metal snow shovel hanging on the outside wall over there at the right?

That idiot stick and I were very close companions.

Finley once said that shovels--and industrial strength push brooms--are often referred to as idiot sticks, because any idiot can operate one.

Most men who ever worked for Katahdin Lodge were highly skilled idiot stick operators.

First off, there was a lot of snow to be shoveled in the wintertime.

Second, during 1969, then all through the early 1970s, Finley often had dirt digging projects going: like expanding the small cellar under the main building of the Lodge; putting in a well and water pump; and installing an underground bulk gasoline tank.

The hunting business is a very serious and dangerous profession to be involved in. Very few, if any, of the Lodge's hunting guides were ever even close to being considered being an idiot. That includes the large number of deer hunting guides who worked for Finley over the years. If any of Fin's male employees had ever done anything idiotic, it would have been their last day at Katahdin Lodge. And their sorry keysters would have been dressed down, chewed out and tore up by Mighty, Mighty Finley The K.

That idiot stick hanging on the outside wall of the Lodge and I were sometimes like brothers-in-arms, battling snow beasts of magnificent proportions.

Other times, that snow shovel and I moved a lot innocent minded snowflakes out of harm's way. It is downright dangerous for unsuspecting, gentle snowflakes to be allowed to lay around on driveway and walkway surfaces. Those individually, uniquely designed works of natural art could have gotten themselves squished, if Brother Shovel and I hadn't been there to lift them over to safety.

I shoveled off the roofs of every single building there at least one time. And as you peruse the pictures on this web sight you'll see a fair number of old buildings.

The roof over top of the Lodge's dining room leaked in several places; every time it rained, and when any snow on it was melting. So I shoveled off that section of roof after every snowfall, before any of it could melt and leak in on us.

My aunt and uncle made it my full responsibility to try to plug those leaking holes in our roof. I was issued a grease gun full of "Monkey Dung".

After receiving that gift of an unexpected, but welcomed, addition to my professional powers, every time we could figure out exactly where a leak might be coming from, I climbed up on the roof and Dunged it.

Trouble was, though, that we could usually only vector in on the source of any of those awfully aggravating water trickles while it was raining, but the Dung don't stick when the roof is wet.

Every time after it snowed: Fin, Marty and I were loathe to allow that innocent, docile, beautiful white snow on the dining room roof to eventually morph into tiny droplets of falling water that could possibly be forced to endure some extremely foul language being bombasted at them, as they fearfully fell from the dining room ceiling.

Pure and driven snow on the roof; all that its H2O molecules wanted in life was to seek out a safe and smooth, gravity guided path of least resistance.

Instead, for any snowflakes melting on the dining room's roof, it oft was an eventual, frightful fall into any of the three to five buckets, pots or pans being used to catch leaks.

To save the snow from such a falling fate, and to protect its delicate little ears from some awful cursing, I went up there on the dining room roof and shoveled it off after every single time it snowed, no matter how light the coverage may have been.

Actually, we wanted the snow shoveled off right away because those leaks were causing more structural damage to the building's framework than we were willing to allow by our own laziness or lack of respect for the natural resources that made up the timber and nails of the Lodge's buildings.

Through the years, before, during and after my times at Katahdin Lodge, I have made darn good use of my idiot stick operating abilities.

Especially during a year working on the labor gang in Bethlehem Steel's blast furnaces.

Sadly, those hard shoveling days of mine are over.

It has taken quite a few re-injuries of an original back injury that prevents me from using any shovels for more than a minute or two anymore. My back was first injured in 1973, when a man in a speeding 1966 Pontiac Bonneville ran a red light, broadsided me and knocked me off my new Yamaha 650 motorcycle. For two decades after that, it took quite a few re-injuries, which lead to one lower back operation along with 5 1/2 total months in veterans hospitals, to destroy my beloved abilities with an idiot stick.

But I'd be glad to stop on by over to your place to coach you on how to properly and safely use an idiot stick anytime ya' wanna' give me a call. The number is: 555-1-800-877-have-a-cold-glass-of-homemade-iced-tea-ready-for-me. Have that glass of iced tea, served with a tad bit of real sugar already in it, sitting next to a comfortable lawn chair and have an attractive, single, young forty-something-year-old woman there to rub my neck, shoulders and back, while I watch you work. And I'll be happy to come over anytime.

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

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Snowmobiling The Day After A Blizzard Hit

2008-03-31T20:55:00.000-07:00

That was the best snow of my life.

Three days before that photo was taken, there was two and a half feet of hard packed snow out there in the front yard, whoops, I mean doorya'd of Katahdin Lodge and Camps in Moro, Maine. Then about three feet of super soft and fluffy white powder fell all over the snow belt up there that includes the Township of Moro Plantation. It was a two day blizzard all over those Great North Woods.

Two days before that photo up there was taken, when the snow began to come down, we knew that a huge storm was just beginning. And with about two feet of snow already on those roofs of our small cabins back there we knew that the upcoming snow would add more than enough weight to cave the roofs in. If you look at the piles of snow around the cabins you will see how the snow that I had shoveled off those roofs is piled up around there with fresh powder on top of it. But there isn't a full three feet of fresh snow on the roofs because I had shoveled some off and then the harsh, blizzard winds had blown a lot of snow from that open area into huge drifts against the snowbanks that were alongside the road out front. The snowbanks and snowdrifts were all ten to fifteen feet deep all along both sides of the road out in front of the Lodge. It was a couple of weeks before we could look out the Lodge's first floor windows and see any cars driving by.

Before the new snow coverered it, I already had a well worn snowmobile track worked into the snow there in the front yard of the Lodge. The track went in a large, tromped on looking oval shape all around the outsides of the cleared property there. It had one trail going off into the ninety-mile deep forest behind the Lodge's yard, but that trail only went about a mile back in to Hale Pond. That section of snowmobile trail went over an old, minimally cleared and cared for woods road, which was on Lodge property. There was another snowmobile trail that lead from the Lodge across Rural Route 11 out front and on into the woods across the road. Then it traveled through a tightly cut and cleared section of woods trail until it lead out into some old farm fields.

My Uncle Finley Kenneth Clarke owned Katahdin lodge and about six hundred and fifty acres of woodland back there behind the Lodge. That woodland stretched all the way into Canada before it reached a tar road; and there's only a few woods roads in between. Some are well maintained and others are in various stages of overgrowth.

Somehow, supposedly, one corner of Finley's property angled out into the backwoods waters of Hale Pond. The pond was a mile and a quarter long, maybe a half mile or so across. A mile and a quarter long stretch of fresh, cold water seems too large to be called a pond, but in Maine, a pond is spring fed and has an outlet, a lake has an inlet and an outlet.

Due to the natural fact that Hale Pond was spring fed, no one was ever allowed to walk out on the ice there. I can't remember exactly, but I think that the spring water is a small number of degrees warmer than the pond water and the spring water flows up to the surface where it can seriously weaken a small area of solid ice that is surrounded by long distances of ice that is thick enough to walk or snowmobile on. No matter what the exact science behind it is, it isn't safe to walk or snowmobile on ice that is on a spring fed pond.

One impetuous time, my Aunt Marty--Finley's wife--and either her sister or a female friend snowshoed back to Hale Pond. They thought that it looked pretty safe to walk out onto the pond a short ways. After all, there was about two feet of snow all across the pond and up into the deep woods all around. And there were small, wind swept bare spots along the shoreline where they could see that the ice underneath the snow there was also about two feet thick. They then took photos of each other standing out about forty yards or so from the edge of the land.

When Finley saw those photos, he flipped his lid at Marty and the other woman.

Any sensible man would have.

Up there in that photograph, with the red snowmobile in it, while that beautiful, nicely settled in, powdery snow in the photo was falling, I was using a farm tractor with a wide, hydraulic bucket on the front of it to plow the Lodge's horseshoe shaped front driveway. The snow was coming down so quick, steadily and heavily that we knew that if I didn't do that plowing all night long then the driveway would become too snowed in for the farm tractor to handle. That meant paying for a bulldozer driver to come up and dig us out.

During that blizzard, Marty only allowed me to come into the Lodge to warm up for ten or fifteen minutes after every two or three hours of plowing fast falling snow. Fin had been out of state on National Guard duty when Northern Maine was struck by one of the biggest blizzards ever known of up there. So I had the whole blizzard to myself. Or more realistically, and without any "tongue in cheek" humor, I had to do all of the plowing and shoveling work myself. I enjoy being outdoors in snowstorms, immensely so, but one man on his own in that situation doing that snow clearing job really could have used a little friggin help.

Again, that was three feet of powdery snow that fell on top of two and a half feet of hard packed snow in two days. After I had shoveled and plowed snow all day, most of the night, and through the next day during that blizzard, my aunt had pointed out the healthy red complexion on my cheeks that the wind driven snow had given me. Then she said to me, with a squint on her face, "Now doesn't that feel good? Do you know how much it would have cost me to hire a bulldozer and its operator to come up here and clear all of that snow off of the driveway after the blizzard ended if you hadn't kept it plowed? A hundred dollars."

Conquering that sizable storm felt great to me.

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

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Snowmobile Riding At Katahdin Lodge

2008-03-31T16:44:00.000-07:00

Believe it or not, these are mild jumps, compared to what we Patten, Maine snowmobilers were into. We had jumps that gave us a lot more 'air'.

This third photo was taken so that I could show my family and friends in Dundalk, Maryland just how you have to throw your body around on a snowmobile in order to counter balance the G-Forces during a hard curve, or the sled will flip over. What's happening here in the photo is that my left foot is planted firmly down onto the left side running board of the sled to hold it down, my right leg is holding tightly onto the sled's seat, my right heel is dug into the seat and I'm holding on tight to the handle bars.

My favorite and most versatile riding position was with my left foot planted down nice and comfortable on the left side running board, my right knee on the seat along with the lower part of my leg down to the top of my boot. That way, the rider is half kneeling and half setting down. Then I could easily dig my right foot and leg into the right side of the soft, padded, smooth vinyl seat, hang my warm mitted hands over the handle bars, loosen up my thumb for the throttle, hit the gas, haul-ass and hold on like a baby Opossum hangin onto its moma's back when the hounds are barking bad breath at 'um.

Then it doesn't take but second or two or dexterous throttle action till you're outrunning the hounds and being blasted in your face with cold, delicious Northern Maine air.

Some sled riders rode kneeling down with their knees on top of the seat most of the time. That is the absolute most advantages way to ride, and that is how we had to go through certain sections of our favorite trails. Riders can shift their weight around faster and tighter in tune with all that is happening when in that position. Sometimes when the riding got to where everyone had to ride on their knees, we had to yell over the sounds of the running engines at first time snowmobilers who thought that riders sit down flat all the time. 99.99% of all first time riders take a little convincing to get 'um up off their haunches when the trail gets its roughest. Then after a short ride for them in the company of skilled riders they usually find the groove and fit right into it easy enough.

There are times when it is best to stand up nearly straight, but with your knees flexing to the pounding of the snowmobile against the snow. If the surface of the snow on a wide open field is hard packed or crust covered enough for the sled to travel across it without sinking down into the snow at all, then it is often best to stand up when flying along at whatever the highest safe speed was. Sometimes a rider stands up just to hoot and holler from the intense excitement and shear joy of riding.

Every time that a sled goes galloping down an ungroomed trail it cuts any low spots even lower. And ya' carve up the trail into the best line of travel, so as the days pass after a good snowfall hits then those kinds of trails get more challenging and that provides you a nice dose of miniature roller coaster style fun. It was always top speed for us Patten area riders throughout the tightest of barely cleared woods trails.

When I set up this series of photos, I knew that people who have never ridden a snowmobile like this might think that I'm showing off by hanging off the other side of the sled like that, but G-Forces, gravity and natural balance dictates how you have to lean into the curves. If you do not do what the natural balance demands of you then the sled flips and you flies. You have to have your body in what ever position that is necessary; or it's down to the snowmobile repair shop to replace broken sled parts and maybe to the hospital to repair or medicate some busted or badly bruised human body parts.

John Birmingham flyin' a Ski Doo.

Now here is John Birmingham showing what a hard left turn looks like from the left side of a sled when you stay setting down. If he was riding in a straight line and had hung his body off the side of the sled like that, then the sled would have tilted over onto its left side. If he had not hung off the side like than when making a hard left turn than he would have flipped and flown off to his right.

Again. It may look like we were showing off for the camera, but there is always only exactly one position that your body can be in during this kind of riding. You either get into it and get a good feel for the balance and the G-Forces or you will wreck.

The powerful, Adrenalin feel of those forces is what I loved most about riding snowmobiles. I rarely ever sat down flat on one. This was because we did most of our riding back then on our own woods trails or out on old unused farm fields.

Today, there are well groomed, fairly flat and smooth snowmobile trails running all over the State of Maine. When riding on those modern trails, you do spend most of your time sitting down, but ya' still gotta' lean into them curves.

And, oho, it feels so good when you get right into that groove and ride well.

Know what 'ah mean?

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A Great Day of Snowmobiling in Moro, Maine

2008-03-31T14:19:00.000-07:00

This was out on Rockabema Lake in Moro Plantation, Maine, around February of 1969. We were taking turns climbing up that island and hopping onto the top of it. It was about twenty some feet or so straight up the side of the island to the top.

It was a mighty sharp climb, I'll tell ya' that.

I made sure that I had that tree more visible in the next shot, so that maybe people could see how steep and high that the climb actually was.

I was new to sledding and had no idea that a snowmobile could do that. I made it to the top one time, loved it to death, but was just about scared to death to do it again. It could have seriously injured and maybe even killed anyone who fell backwards with their sled falling down on top of them. So I stayed up there on top of the island in the cool, comfy, soft snow and took this series of photographs.

That fellow, I believe, is either Carol Gerow or his younger brother Pete Gerow. I'm prett-near positive that he is a Gerow brother. Carol was married, owned Bear Mountain Lodge and was settled down. So he and I never ran around together all over the Maine countryside going to parties, dances, hanging out in town, drinkin' beer and chasing girls, but me and ol' Pete sure enough did. Pete and I got into a few hellacious and hilarious conversations during Cribbage games at Katahdin Lodge too.

Pete had a tad bit of a kind of a pudgy, Pillsbury Dough Boy look about his face. I had known him all winter long while we all were wearing long sleeved shirts. I'll never forget the first time the next summer when I saw him in a short sleeved shirt. He had arms on him that looked like something from those Charles Atlas bodybuilding adds we used to always see in comic books. But Pete didn't get his impressive muscle structure from using Charles Atlas' Dynamic-Tension miraculous method for total muscular development, Pete got that way from growing up splitting wood for the family's wood stoves, by using a chain saw from the time he was about 14 years old, by shoveling a lot of snow, and doing other hard physical labor to help his family survive and thrive in the, sometimes harsh, northern Maine environment.

My friend Pete didn't look one bit homosexual. And, as far as I know, he wasn't. But I just looked at some old Charles Atlas adds that are on the Internet, and they look real gay to me today. I'm not saying ol' Charlie A. was gay, he may have been one hell of a ladies' man, or a dedicated, monogamous husband, but his adds sure look gay to me today. Maybe that's just my 21st century awareness of the openness of homosexuals in our society. I'm not against the rights and freedoms of gays or lesbians in any way, though I do say that the protections and rights associated with legal marriage should only be for the protection and rights of heterosexual couples and their children.

I want this new series of articles to be like it was you and I comfortably sitting in my home, while looking at these old photographs together. And as when anyone is sharing photos from their past, they would be conversing about things that the photos would bring to mind.

This photo of a Gerow brother brings up my memories of their dad. Their father, Putt Gerow, owned a tiny country store at Knowles Corner, Rt. 11 and Rt. 212. That is a few miles north of Bear Mountain Lodge, and six miles north of where I lived and worked at Katahdin Lodge. Putt and Pete lived in a nice sized house that the store was attached to the front of.

Putt taught me a very valuable lesson one time on how to start a motor vehicle rolling that had been stopped still on a snowy, icy, slippery road surface. He had shown me some very deft and gentle clutch and gas pedal technique. Unless ya' know that technique yourself, you can't imagine how well that driving tip has served me well throughout my life.

I have had a lot of fun with that driving technique while riding friends around in the snowy wintertime or on muddy back roads. I've also made some good money from it, when I was driving professionally.

Especially when I drove a taxicab.

I possessed a Baltimore County Taxi Driver Permit for three years. During that time, when it snowed or there was an ice storm, there I was in an old worn out car, which had been converted into a taxicab, with bald tires on it, and I was just-a-walkin' that cab all over Baltimore City and it's suburbs. Hardly another vehicle was out on the road, because there was four or more inches of snow piling up all over the place, or several inches of solid ice everywhere on everything. The cab was not mine, and if you ask me, it was a crime to have that junker on the road, but it passed the required inspections. I drove a cab during and right after every snowstorm and ice storm that occurred within those three years when I drove a cab.

While those snow and/or ice weather events were happening, many of my northern Maine learned driving technique's were sincerely appreciated by my cab riding customers. I got a lot of people to work when they could not handle the slippery driving conditions themselves. It was always very safe, comfortable and relaxing driving when I was "at the wheel". The entire time, I was very aware of, and thankful for, what Putt Gerow had taught me about easing a motor vehicle across slippery road surfaces.

I'd have never driven a cab if it weren't for my degenerative back disease and severe depression keeping me from working full time as a photographer. Now I survive on a small, monthly, non-service connected disability check from the Veterans Administration. Just thought that I'd throw that in to let you know how important Magic City News is to the work that I do get to do these days.

The last time that I saw Putt Gerow was in 1977 or '79. We sat in his living room talking about all of the old, fallen down hunting camps that he knew of way back in the woods. Some of those camps were from the days when only wealthy men could afford to go on hunting trips to Maine, and they had traveled by train to get to and from northern Maine. Those men were doctors, lawyers and very successful businessmen who brought the best of whiskeys and other liquors along with them to the hunting camps. And then empty, expensive, booze bottles were thrown onto each camp's own dump back in the woods.

Those bottles were valuable antiques, when Putt and I were discussing them. Putt knew where several of those old dumps were located. He had found some of those valuable old booze bottles there and had stashed some of the empty bottles under rotted old stumps or in other places where he could easily locate them again. He had been deer hunting, or something, at the time and did not want to carry the bottles around the woods with him. Putt wanted to hike back in to go get those antique bottles some day. But, in the late 1970s, Putt's health was failing fast; he was just too darned old to go that far back in the woods anymore, where the old hunting camp dumps were.

I had brought up the subject of antique bottles and old dumps. I have wanted to go find some of those buried treasures ever since I had learned about the old camps and their dumps, back in 1968, and also how the rich hunters had brought their highest priced booze along to showoff, enjoy and share. I tried as hard as I could, but I could not convince Putt to tell me where some of those dumps were. I wanted go antique hunting out in the woods. I assured him, and by jeeze I meant it, that he and I would each receive fair splits of the profits of what we sold and also each of us would acquire our own personal antique bottle collections.

Putt was your typical Native Northern Mainer. Putt was an Old Maine Woodsman of the highest caliber. I was no more than an old acquaintance of his, mostly just a regular customer in his country store, who had come "from the outside". Twasn't any damned way that Putt Gerow was going to share any of his knowledge of where those long gone hunting camps had been with anybody but a close relative or friend of his, who was also a Native Northern Mainer--and you can bet that he probly never let anyone at all know there where abouts of those old bottles.

I certainly did enjoy seeing Putt 'stick to his guns' and not ever give up hope of going that far out in the woods again, to where the dumps were. I love them woods and being out in them too much myself for me not to understand how he saw the situation. He never gave up hope to take one last, long walk in the woods.

Putt Gerow was a good man.

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

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David Robert Crews

Snowmobiling On Tillie's Back Field

2008-03-31T13:35:00.000-07:00

From left to right: That's my Aunt Martha Clarke setting on a double track, single ski Ski Doo; then there is my old Moto Ski; and then it's me on a single track, double ski Ski Doo.

The three photos on this page were taken in 1969 on a Katahdin Lodge neighbor's farm field in the Township of Moro Plantation, Maine. The neighbors were an older, married couple, and I'm sure that one was named Tillie; I think it was the husband, but I can't remember the other one's name.

That neighbor owned those fields in the three photos, and Tillie and I had cut a rough trail from the very back of his fields through the woods there to an old overgrown woods road that then led you past the old Katahdin Lodge dump, through the shooter's end of the Lodge's rifle range, and then across RT. 11 onto the Lodge's front yard.

I often went snowmobile riding through there to the fields by myself.

When anyone from Katahdin Lodge went snowmobile riding alone, they were required to carry certain emergency items with them. In case of mechanical breakdown or the rider got stuck in deep snow.

A lone snowmobile rider always had to strap a pair of snowshoes onto their back. That way, if the sled broke down they could walk out. No one can walk very far in deep snow, without snowshoes, before they become exhausted.

In case of an accident and injury, or for some other reason the rider could not make it out on snowshoes, they needed to be able to start a camp/signal fire. So a lone rider also had to carry three packs of matches stashed into the pockets of three separate layers of clothing. That way, if melting snow or rain rendered the outer most stashed pack of matches unusable, then one of the two inner layer stashed match packs could get their emergency fire started.

If the stranded rider's perspiration got the inner most layer stashed matches wet, then there were the other two packs. Perspiration damage to the matches can easily happen if the rider becomes stuck in deep snow, but had not had a mechanical breakdown. Getting stuck meant working up a wicked bad sweat, while trying to work the sled out of the bad spot it's in. If you look closely at the skis on the sleds, you can see handles for pulling the sled out of a bad spot.

And snowshoeing makes a person sweat a lot; a stranded rider has to take off and carry at least one top layer of outer clothing when snowshoeing. But if the snowshoes break, or the rider becomes exhausted from snowshoeing, then they must stop and try to start a camp/signal fire.

The match pack stashed in the rider's middle layer of clothing was there for the rider to be even safer in case they became stranded out in the woods alone.

Whenever I rode a snowmobile to go visit Tillie and his wife, their television would begin to pick up static interference from my snowmobile's firing spark plugs. There was a lot of acreage to ride on back on their fields, and the TV interference only occurred when I got real close to their house, where we never did any regular riding. When they saw the static, and knew I was coming, they put a pot of water on the hot wood stove for me. Because I'm a tea drinker who can't stand the taste of coffee.

They were wonderful people to spend time and drink tea with.

I added this photo of the three sleds together for any vintage snowmobile enthusiasts who may want to see these older sleds from a slightly different angle of view.

And there I go just a zipping on by on the old Moto Ski.

Can you see how the seat on that old Moto Ski is built up higher than it was when the sled was stock?

I didn't do that to the sled. I didn't like it either, because that made it harder to ride through the woods trails or to do fast, sweeping turns out on farm fields. It set me up too high and screwed up the center of balance. Worse, I couldn't ride real well up on my knees like a good sledder does, when they need to change their balance quick and easy to keep the sled from flipping over.

That sled had been owned by a beaver trapper who had built what was basically a long, shallow wooden compartment under the seat, where he could store traps and other equipment.

The sled came cheap to my Uncle Finley, because it had spent a few days under the ice of a lake, when the trapper had fallen through one time.

The sled was given to me as partial payment for my work at Katahdin Lodge.

One of the coolest and most unique things that I ever experienced happened while riding a snowmobile on those old farm fields, which are seen in the three photographs.

No, I'm not talking about the times I sat there in the dark field at night, with the snowmobile engine shut off, and a pretty girl sitting next to me; while we snuggled up close together and gazed up through the barely polluted skies above, at the brightly twinkling, planet and star filled heavens, as she and I quietly chatted--while admiring it all.

As good as that was, no twinkling planet or star was the coolest, most unique object that I ever saw up in the sky there.

It happened during mid-day, on a beautiful, sunny, winter day. Three of us were riding single on our own sleds. I was with Al Levesque's grandson (the kid was from outa' state too) and Old John Tucker's native Mainer son. We were heading towards the John Tucker residence, up on the Town Line Road. We were happily traveling along at top speed, across the wide, flat farm field, running nearly parallel to a tree lined wind break. We had to ride to the end of the wind break and turn left along side of the Town Line Rd.. I was riding to the right of the other two sledders. It was already turning out to be a glorious day for us.

When, all of a sudden, and I mean ALL OF A SUDDEN, Tucker sweeps in close beside me at top speed; he reaches over and taps on my left coat sleeve, while yelling for me to look up and to our left; he points to a spot just above the wind break tree line to our left, and there was a mighty freakin' huge, flat black, a non-reflective black, United States Air Force B52 Bomber.

That mighty behemoth was traveling about a slow as it could go, right there, nearly down at tree top level, right beside us, and it was moving in the same direction as we were.

We automatically popped up from our sitting positions on our sled seats and rode standing up and jumping up and down. We were waving wildly to the bomber crew member who was sitting in the cockpit seat closest to us. And we three young sledders were hollering our mighty happy heads off.

That bomber crewmember pointed his finger down at us. He must have been pointing us out to the rest of the flight crew.

We three young men down there were lovin' life as we knew it.

Then the guy in the B52 waved back to us.

I found out later that the plane was from Loring Air Base, which was 60 or 70 miles north of the Lodge. They performed those low flying maneuvers to try to fly under the air base's radar, like an enemy aircraft would. And the flat black paint was designed to make the aircraft less visible to radar and to the human eye.

But we three snow sledders sure enough saw it!

And what a thrill it was!

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

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David Robert Crews

Innards Of A 1968 Era Ski Doo Snowmobile

2008-03-31T13:06:00.001-07:00

I took this shot in a Patten, Maine snowmobile repair shop, to show my buddies down around Dundalk, Maryland what the engine and clutch of a snowmobile looked like. But I wasn't so good of a photographer yet. So the detail seen in the sled is not as good as I could have gotten it by using better camera gear and with my U.S. Army Photo Lab Tech School training behind me.

While I was in that snowmobile repair shop, there was an old Maine lumberjack there sharpening his chainsaw blade--by hand. My Uncle Finley was there too, and we marveled at the dexterity and skill with which the lumberjack was handling his sharpening file. It was a considerable piece of work.

The entire time though: the lumberjack's squatted most of the way down onto the floor, with his backside halfway perched upon a small, old wooden box; the chainsaw was on the floor; he's gotta' half lit pipe hanging down from his between his teeth; he's casually conversing with the half a dozen or so of us younger Maine woodsmen in there; he's spinning off good jokes, quips and brief little, interesting and funny stories--like an old Maine lumberjack might.

It impressed me how he could work at such an unrelenting and steadily effective pace and be so relaxed about it. Hand sharpening a chain saw blade is not easy, because you have to make your file strokes just right--every hundreds of times.

I mentioned a little about how amazed I was about this, and the gregarious guys in the shop all agreed with me. They said it takes a real old timer to use a file on a chainsaw blade chain that way.

I loved hanging out with the people in those places.

Below is one final vintage snowmobile photo, for this series of articles. It shows some of the awesome scenery enjoyed by backwoods travelers in that part of Northern Maine.

I sure wish I could get someone to teach me how to bring out the best in my older photos by using photo restoration and enhancement software like Photoshop. These vintage snowmobile photos of mine have the potential to look much better than how I know how to scan them in and present them on the Internet.

I have no idea who that guy on the snowmobile was. For some reason the name Cecil Gallagher or the last name of Cyr comes to mind.

But this photo shows the front end of that model and year Moto Ski snowmobile about as good as my inexpensive camera, which I owned at the time, could do it.

This shot was taken somewhere up in the Township of Moro Plantation, Aroostook County, Maine.

That sloping field he's on was a super-duper fun place to ride our sleds on. And I believe that is Mt. Chase in the background.

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

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snowmobile
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David Robert Crews

A Good Day's Fishin at Katahdin Lodge

2008-03-30T23:11:00.000-07:00

That is one very happy David R. Crews there holding up a stringer of sixteen Brook Trout caught in Hale Pond, on a good day in Moro Plantation, Maine, by Martha and Finley Clarke, Wayne and Barbara Birmingham and David (myself).

Hale Pond is a mile back into the woods behind Katahdin Lodge. There was a barely drivable dirt road going back to it, from the Lodge. The pond is a mile and a quarter long, maybe a half mile or so across. A mile and a quarter long stretch of fresh, cold water seems too large to be called a pond, but in Maine, a pond is spring fed and has an outlet, a lake has an inlet and an outlet.

Wayne, Barbara, Finley, Marty and I had spent the better part of a very nice spring day puttering around Hale Pond in Katahdin Lodge's 16 foot, aluminum fishing boat.

There was a Loon fishing for its dinner on Hale Pond the same time we were fishing for ours. We would be anchored tight and fishing, but not catching, when we'd spot the Loon making a dive. I suppose you could say what we did next was rude. We'd crank up the outboard motor and go cast our lines where the Loon had just dived down and come back up from with something fishy looking to eat in its mouth. As we headed our motorboat in the direction of the Loon, as soon as we got anywhere near where it was, the big fishin' birdie flew off to another fishing spot on the pond. Humm. Looking back on that, I also suppose you could say that the Loon knew all the good spots, so why not share that info with us humans. The Loon trick worked every time. We humans caught a few trout where the had just dived for some itself.

Wait a minute!

I can't remember who had said to go fish in the Loon's spots. We hit on about a half dozen of them. Maybe it was my Uncle Finley. If that's true, then it was his bad karma from that what caused my fish hook to catch the skin of his right temple. And not my youthful clumsiness.

Uh huh. It wasn't my fought at all!

Five good sized adults in a 16 foot fishing boat is stretching your water safety luck, anyways. We were just about at maximum capacity for the boat. It was crowded.

I was casting my rod. I had it held straight back behind me, horizontal with the surface of the pond. I thought that if the hook and sinker were near anyone, they'd say so quick. I thought I had a clear casting space, but Fin was slightly into that space. I made a mighty hard cast, and the rod jerked tight and froze in mid air, about a foot into the sweeping arch of the cast. It felt like the hook had caught on the outside edge of the little boat's gunwale--directly behind me. The boat was so crowded, that I did not bother trying to maneuver around to see where the hook was attached. So I lowered the rod backwards back down some, figuring that this would unhook it from the gunwale, then I moved the tip of the rod backwards a half a foot or so, to make sure that I was clear of the entire boat this time. And I gave it a mighty heave ho and away you go. But it jerked tight, hard and fast and froze in mid air again.

Somebody said something. I turned around and what do I see, the curved shank of the barbed hook grabbing a tight hold onto the soft, 'tented out' flesh of Finley's temple, and the barbed point sticking back out of his temple.

He was hooked good and proper like.

Surprisingly! Ol' Finley K. made nary a sound.

I started to try to take the hook out, but they all said let Wayne do it. That made sense to me. Wayne was a top-notch Registered Maine Guide. He got it out easy enough, no serious damage was done to the side of my uncle's head, and we kept on fishing.

I guess you could say I hooked the big one that day. And it was the one that didn't get away.

We had ridden back there to Hale Pond in the Lodge's Land Rover, so we could tow the boat with us. Hale Pond was our favorite hiking destination, so vehicle traffic was discouraged by never making one little improvement to the rough road to it. The road was on Lodge property.

Fin decided to leave the boat there till bear hunting season kicked off on June 1, 1969. He didn't mind if any of the locals used his boat without asking, but he did not want anybody to screw up or swipe his little outboard motor. He told me to hide the motor. So I stashed it over behind some trees and in some underbrush, stepped back towards the beached boat, and saw that it was not easy to spot the hidden outboard from there.

As we loaded our happy selves into the Land Rover, we were all practically singing songs of joy.

It was a stupendous way to spend a day.

We got about 30 yards up the road, and there was that darned outboard motor showing plain as could be over in the woods. I had stashed it well enough from anyone who was commandeering the boat for awhile, but not from anyone traveling down the road there. My Aunt Marty thought that was hilarious, and Fin and the Birminghams did too.

It was embarrassing.

I had only been living in Maine for five months, and I was raised in suburbia. I had a lot to learn yet.

I heard about that one (that outboard motor stashing screw up of mine) now and then for the rest of my time at the Lodge. Hooking my uncle wasn't what they told everyone about as much as where I hid that motor. But that's how it is when you are the youngest employee in any business.

It was a fun, bouncy ride all the way back to the Lodge.

We were all in top spirits.

Right as we started into cleaning and cooking the fish, in the Lodge's kitchen, Ol' Grayden, or was it Irving, Bates came driving into the dooryard for an evening's visit. He stopped by at the Lodge now and then to play Cribbage and tell us all some mighty tall and entertaining tales. That seventy-or-eighty-some-year-old Bates feller could keep me enthralled for hours with his stories about hunting, fishing, woodsman's adventures, family life and small town gossip as lived and loved up in that part of God's Country. And the addition of one more person made it a perfect match for the number and size of hungry human bellies to the number and size of dee' delicious, fresh fish.

YEAH!!

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I Bought A New 1969 Triumph 250 Motorcycle In Maine

2008-03-30T23:04:00.000-07:00

My 1969 Triumph 250 Motorcycle

I had to drive 66 miles from Katahdin Lodge to the nearest Triumph dealer to buy that bike. There was a Honda dealer over in Houlton, 35 miles away, but the next nearest motorcycle dealer at all was up around Caribou and Presque Isle. And I checked the odometer once, it was 66 road miles from the Lodge to the Triumph dealer.

My Uncle Finley was going to buy himself one just like it, but the Triumph dealer would not give Fin a discount for buying two at a time. The dealer charged $735.25 for one, and he wanted $735.25 for the second one. But he was a native Mainer, who had never seen us before that day, and we were "from the outside", not from Maine. My Uncle Finley and Aunt Martha had moved to Maine, from Maryland, in 1965. The dealer may have given some native Mainer a break on the price, at least the 25 cents, but not to anyone from the outside.

I had some great times riding that motorcycle in Maine. It wasn't powerful enough to take the hills up there very fast, but that was O.K. with me, because I hadn't become too highly skilled of a rider yet.

In 1973, while living in Dundalk, Md., I bought a Yamaha 650 motorcycle. I became quite the highly skilled rider on that one, for sure; and there are still a few witnesses around who can testify to that fact.

Whenever I went riding out in the countryside, of Baltimore and Harford Counties in Maryland, with some other motorcycle riders from the Dundalk area, I always ended up leading the way. What I had learned up in Maine about country driving served me well when riding motorcycles through the Maryland countryside.

In Dundalk, I was nicknamed "Trick Rider", by a guy who I grew up with. He gave me that nickname because I would stand up on the seat, while riding, or hang off the side of my 650 Yamaha like a Plains Indian Warrior hanging off the side of a well trained horse while shooting from underneath the horse at battling Calvary soldiers or circled, covered wagons, and I'd do some other crazy looking things on the 650.

But my motorcycle trick-riding wasn't much of anything compared to what we see in motocross riding today. They really pull off some wild tricks in motocross, and usually way, way up in the air too.

In my defense though, we 1970s riders didn't have the super suspensions on our bikes like today's bikes have. And, like guitar playing, nobody had invented the wild, well tuned, modern licks or motorcycle tricks yet--that we enjoy today.

One time, up in Maine, I was on that 250 Triumph and goin' down the road feelin' fine, when I hit a huge mass of flying insects, just past Peavey's Corner on the way to Shin Pond from Patten. The massive cloud of bugs was so thick that they were peppering my face like bird shot from a shotgun blast and were flying up under my sunglasses and blinding me. So I had to turn around and head back to town.

I can't remember if they were mosquitoes or blackflies. Each of those insect species thrives in Maine every summer.

Maine's seasonal insect infestation gets so bad that you cannot walk very far outside before you are in bug bitten misery. You have to wear insect repellent when outside for more than a minute, if you want to be comfortable out there.

During summer bug season, we Katahdin Lodge bear hunting guides wore long sleeve shirts with the sleeves buttoned down at the wrists, and insect repellent applied to our wrists and lower forearms. We "bloused" our work boots military style. That means we tucked the bottoms of our pants legs up under big rubber bands, which held the doubled over pants cuffs tightly against our boot tops, to keep biting insects from crawling up our lower legs and chewing on them for a good, bloody meal. And we doused the sweatbands of our hats with bug dope too.

We guides all often got bit a few times each day. After all, somebody's gotta' feed them aggravating little dive bombers. The well fed insects then go on to be food for fish, birds and some larger insects, and those critters are all important parts of the local ecosystem. The bugs bite us humans, trout eat bugs and humans eat trout, at least I do.

Seems fair to me.

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

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David Robert Crews

That Ornery Horse

2008-03-30T22:21:00.000-07:00

That is my mother, Finley's older sister Doris, on That Ornery Horse; Finley's chit chatting with the beast, they were best of friends; the woman standing back there on the Lodge's boardwalk is Doris and Finley's mother, my Grandmom Clarke.

Very few people ever got anywhere on That Ornery Horse. I can't remember the old guy's real name, so he shall be referred to here as That Ornery Horse. He sure was ornery to me. When I rode him, he wouldn't go hardly one darn direction that I wanted him to.

That is a 16-year-old me sitting all wrong on That Ornery Horse. I don't know a thing about horsemanship, but if you do I'm certain that you can take one quick look at this photo and tell that I have no idea how to handle a horse. The way I'm sitting in the saddle and handling the reins told That Ornery Horse that I knew not a thing about how to control him. Then I'm allowing him to graze on grass, when I was wanting him to walk around and take me for a horsey-back ride. I can't tell you exactly what I was definitely doing wrong, but I can tell you that I was doing it all wrong.

That horse was real sneaky rascal.

One time, in 1969, an experienced horseman, who was a paying guest at the Lodge, was showing me how to saddle that horse. And the darned horse snuck a peek backwards to see where my feet were placed. Then he casually placed his hard hoof down onto the top of my relatively softer foot. Now that's a sneaky rascal.

And the whole dang time I lived and worked at Katahdin Lodge, it was me who watered the horse in the morning, fed and watered him in the evening, and mucked out his stinking muckin' little barn.

He was a pest too.

Anytime I was mucking out his two stalls, in the little horse barn my Uncle Finley had built for him, I had to shut the door to keep him out there, or he'd come in to just stand there and harass me. I would be steadily shoveling his horse manure out of his living space, and he would ease on in next to me, then lean over against me and pin me up against the wall.

What an ingrate!

I am no horseman at all.

I only tried to get him go for a nice long ride back to Hale Pond once, but he wouldn't go more than a hundred yards down the mile long woods road to Hale. I knew my limitations with him, so I never tried to ride him again.

No big deal. When that horse was under my care, he got treated like he should. I always gave him his necessities, along with a few gentle words and a light, friendly scratch to his face, no matter what the weather or anything or anybody else was doing. I worked on his schedule. That's only fair.

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

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David Robert Crews

Living In The 7600 Block Of Dunmanway

2008-03-30T21:35:00.000-07:00

This was my longtime next door neighbor, Carolyn "Sissy" O'Baker.

Sissy is sitting cross legged in the back of her brother's Blues Rock band's hearse. The band's name was The Psychedelic Propeller.

Our families had each bought brand new homes next to each other, in the 7600 block of Dunmanway, five days apart, in 1955. I have a younger sister, Jeanmarie, who is Sissy's age. Sissy has a brother my age, Austin. "Aussie" and I were best of friends, and Jeanmarie and Sissy were good friends. There were a dozen or so other kids on our block, who's families had also moved there in the mid-to-late-1950s.

The 1950s and '60s 7600 block of Dunmanway was a good place to grow up.

Left to right, kneeling down in the front are: Davy Phillips, Debbie Atkins, and Kevin Humphreys. In the back, left to right are: Austin "Aussie" O'Baker, Bobby Humphreys, Dougie Atkins, and Billy Phillips.

Dave Phillips lives in the house he grew up in, and I think that he has been in a home waterproofing business most of his adult life. Debbie Adkins was married to a buddy of mine, but they divorced, and I have lost track of her. Kevin Humphreys is still around Maryland somewhere, but I have no idea what he's up to these days. Austin O'Baker and his family moved to Chicago in 1967 or '68. One time, just after I got out of the Army in 1971, Aussie visited me when was again living at my parents home on Dunmanway, and that's the last I knew of him. Bobby Humphreys joined the Baltimore County Police force, and served as a narcotics detective for most of his career. Doug Atkins is a successful business man who used to own the Dundalk bar named The Zoo. Bill Philips has passed on to a kinder, gentler world 'on the other side'; where his loving father had been patiently waiting for him, for several decades, and his loving mother has recently joined them.

That's me, when I was about 14-years-old, standing in front of the O'Bakers' house. This is looking up the 7600 block of Dunmanway past my family's house, which is next door to the O'Bakers' former house. My younger sister now owns our old house.

And that's me, at about 14-or-15-years-old over in the Baltimore County Recreation and Park's ball fields across from my former home on Dunmanway.

There were four Baltimore County Recreation Department baseball fields right across the street from our entire block. Plus two soccer fields; one of which was also used as a football field. The competitive sounds along with the spectators' cheers of little league baseball, football or soccer games being played there was a lively and welcomed addition to the soundtrack of my life. I never got too into playing organized team sports, but I sure had fun over there watching games and hanging out with all the other spectators.

I did play in a lot neighborhood pick-up baseball and football games over there though. I preferred the casual atmosphere of pick-up games to the oft uncalled for dirty tactics of trophy-minded parent-coaches, plus the aggravating rule book pounding antics of player's parents. And, as you probably also know from national new reports, it gets a lot worse with some parents and parent-coaches at 21st Century children's competitive games.

Dunmaway was a good place to live.

This was my Grandmom Crews at the left, Grandmom Clarke on the right, and Granddad Crews at the other end of the kitchen table. I took this shot during one of our many family get togethers at my parents', two sisters, and my home on Dunmanway.

Every year, we had large birthday parties there for my two sisters, and me. And we went to my many cousins' birthday parties at their homes, or sometimes at one of our Grandparents' homes. Both pairs of my Grandparents had large enough homes for everyone on their side of the family to be comfortable in; but amongst their children--my parents, aunts, and uncles--our home on Dunmanway was the largest of all the other family homes. So any of my cousins' special, big birthday parties were held at our mutual Grandparents' home. I can't remember how often we had big birthday parties for the adults, it wasn't every year, but we did have them.

That photograph marks my entrance into the world of serious photography. Absolutely so. Before that, I, like most people, mostly took what could only be considered as snapshots.

I saw that typical Grandmothers visiting at our house scene at the kitchen table. But I did not want to do the usual stand there, point my camera, and say, "Hey Grandmom, I wanna take your picture, smile!"

I wanted to capture the scene on film just as it was in normal, unposed life.

So I went into my bedroom and came back out into the dining room with my cheap little Kodak Instamatic Camera hidden up under my shirttail. Then I got down onto the floor where a few of my younger cousins were playing with some toys. I made it look like I was goofing around with the younger kids, while watching my Grandmothers for when they looked just right. I wanted to capture, for ever, the personal, intimate interaction between the two older ladies, whom I loved so dearly; and who had known each other from way back around the time when they each first got married. When they had lived in the small town of Sparrows Point, Maryland.

As soon as the scene looked perfect to me, I whipped out my camera from underneath my shirttail, quickly stood up, off went the flash, and I had successfully banged off the shot that I wanted. I had made one wonderful, informal portrait of both my Grandmothers together in my home.

Of course, then came warm, sincere smiles from my Grandmothers.

They each said, with deep, Grandmotherly love, and also with pleasantly feigned mild aggravation, "Ohh! David!" Then they said something like: darned you "Davy Boy" for surprising us with that camera's flash. Naturally, my Grandmothers were quite delighted, and felt sincerely complimented, to have me surprise them by taking a photograph of them that way.

Behind the entire block, of the 7600 block of Dunmanway, is pair of train tracks; for freight trains only. Slow moving freight trains, which virtually eliminated any danger to us kids who grew up while often playing "up on the Tracks". Because from anywhere back there on the Tracks you will hear then see the train when it is plenty far enough away to allow you to get off the tracks before it comes any kind of close to you.

And, yup, the first letter in "Tracks" should be capitalized, because to us kids in the neighborhood, it was a specific geographical location.

We always referred to the location as, "up on the Tracks," because the Tracks are on a steep, raised embankment. The railroad tracks were there long before the houses we lived in were built. The raised embankment was built to keep the Tracks evenly level with higher ground just further up the Tracks. But it worked perfectly as a physical deterrent to smaller children who have to practically crawl up the steep, slippery embankment. It also worked as a psychological boundary between the Tracks and the backyards there, for everyone. It did not seem that that tracks were in our backyards, but more down there just past the ends of our backyards.

Those raised train tracks have always served as a nice way to present, for your viewing pleasure, the powerful, modern steel, American industrial beauty and awesomeness of huge freight trains. I have always enjoyed watching trains going up or down the Tracks. My sister lives in the house we grew up in, and if I am there visiting and hear a train a comin', I will go out back to watch it go by.

In the 1950s and '60s, when we often had plenty of extended family over for birthday parties and picnics, the other kids in our family were fascinated by the trains going by behind our home. Naturally, after hearing trains going by several times a day for years, my parents, two sisters and I would detect the faint sound of an approaching train long before our visitors could. We always called out to all the visiting children in the house that, "A train's comin! C'mon kids, go to the dining room window."

It would take a few minutes for the train to get there, because it had to go slow for the unguarded road crossing a half block up the street. That made it even better for the mysteriousness of how my parents, sisters and I knew the train was coming. The kids would always be pressing their faces up against any of the six, large, glass windowpanes of the dining room windows, while jumping up and down and saying, "Where? Where? Where is it? I don't see it. We don't see it!" Then they'd be tickled pink when it came rolling on by back there.

That was for inside parties, which usually occurred in the evenings.

All family picnics were held in our backyard, because it was the biggest and best backyard of anybodies. We had a picnic on every Memorial Day, 4th of July and Labor Day. On the Fourth of July, Maryland's biggest and best Fourth of July Parade ended three blocks away up on Dunmanway. Later, at nightfall, Dundalk's fireworks were viewable from the slightly higher ground of the Baltimore County recreation property across the street.

When trains went by up on the Tracks, we picnickers would all be out there luvin' it, the children gleefully so. We would all wave to the train's engineers, and they'd smile and wave back. Meanwhile, a few of whomever were down at the bottom of the yard, playing Horseshoes, Badminton, or Croquette, would always give the passing engineers the old yankin' an invisible-cord-to-a-whistle arm and hand signal. The engineers 'id give 'er a few friendly toots, and the family would send back cheers of joy to the engineers.

Back during those years, three or four trains a day made round trips on the train tracks behind my former home. They came from the rail yards of Baltimore City down to the Bethlehem Steel Mill in Sparrows Point. There, they exchanged strings of rail cars full of steel making supplies for either emptied supply cars or cars loaded down with massively heavy, freshly made steel products. Then the same train came back up the Tracks again. Every time I saw one go by, I enjoyed it.

But the trains don't go by up on the Tracks very often anymore. Bethlehem Steel once employed over 30,000 men and women, including many members of my family. But there are now fewer than 3,000 total employees working there, and not a one is related to me.

Here is the only good shot of the Tracks that I can find. It must be from 1963 or '64. That is Johnny Ripple at the left, and me on the right. I didn't want to use all these old photos of myself on here, but they are the only ones I have that show what I'm writing about on this page.

The spot of light colored sand at the end of the yard is one of a pair of sand pits down there for playing Horseshoes.

If you look very closely, in any of the three, over forty-years-old black and white photos on this page with me in them, you can see that I'm wearing a pair of Jack Purcell Sneakers on my feet. They cost three times what regular sneakers did; they cost over nine bucks. And, I believe that they were the most expensive sneakers money could buy at the time--in and around Baltimore.

A half-a-block down the street from my childhood home on Dunmanway was Baltimore County's Merritt Beach.

If you scroll back up and take a quick look at that photo of me standing on the Baltimore County Recreation and Park's ball fields across from my former home on Dunmanway, and look at the baseball backstop fencing at the top, right side of the photo, you can almost see through the fencing and into the entrance for Merritt Beach.

When I turned 11-years-old, I began taking Red Cross swimming courses "down the Beach". We neighborhood folks rarely ever said, "Merritt Beach," it was "down the Beach" to us. I took Red Cross swimming lessons down the Beach every summer, from when I was 11 until I was 14--when I passed the Red Cross Junior Life Saving test. The only difference between Senior Lifesaving and Junior was that you had to be 16 to take Senior, they swam more laps than us and had to swim out three times as far to save a 'drowning life guard', to pass their test.

In 1965, Merritt Beach was closed to swimming. It was the summer before I turned 16 and was old enough to take my Senior Life Saving there. It was closed due to the terrible water pollution caused by the Bethlehem Steel Mill, in Sparrows Point, over across the back waters of the Chesapeake Bay that we swam in down the Beach.

Entrance fees for the Beach were a quarter for anyone 15 or under, and fifty cents for anyone over 15.

But then, I was a neighborhood boy, weren't I. And there was a locally well known way to sneak into the Beach without paying. It was a path through shoreline trees and bushes, way across the other side of a school field from the ticket booth. It was on the other side of Merritt Elementary School--my Alma Mater. And young Dave, that'd be me back then, was probly the best there was at utilizing that free path to fun in the sun.

If you got caught sneaking in, the lifeguards told you that you had to help them clean up the day's litter from the beach, along side them at the end of the day. I never got caught more than twice. But it was a lot of fun when two or three of us younger teen sneakins on litter patrol got to making horse playin' challenges with any of the 16 to 20 some-year-old lifeguards, who would gladly wrestle any two or three of us aggravaters into the sand. I never knew any guy who got caught sneaking in to not show up at the end of the afternoon to pick up beach litter, like the lifeguard had ordered them to. It was all part of the fun. The Beach was one of the best local teenage hangouts there ever was, anywhere, in any century. There was no way we locals would ever get ourselves barred from there for not showing up at the end of a great day at the Beach to work for the entrance fee we had tried to sneak past.

Anytime I snuck into the beach, that two-bit ticket price I saved by sneaking in bought me one ten-cent twelve-ounce soda, full sized candy bars were a nickel, so were small bags of pretzels or chips and also any one great Rock n' Roll song on the jukebox played for a nickel. But there were times I snuck in 'cause I didn't have a quarter. Even though my father had a good full time job in a steel mill, and my mother had a good part time job at Hutzler's Department Store in Eastpoint Mall. That's the way it was with all middle class Americans back then. We always had a nice, comfortable home, enough groceries and good clean clothes to wear though. And I never heard of any family around us ever loosing their home due to foreclosure or eviction.

The Beach was often packed with picnicking families, especially on weekends. Down there at the former Merritt Beach, there is still a very cool, breezy, large, nicely spread out picnic area under great shade trees at what now is called Merritt Point Park.

This photo of Merritt Point Park, formerly the Merritt Beach picnic area, was taken on a foggy, drizzling day in around the year 2002. It is the only one I could find right now to show how nice the shaded picnic groves are in that park.

Here is a 1977 photo of the section of the former Merritt Beach where we used to swim. The grassy part right in front was where the soft, clean sand for laying upon out in the sun used to be.

There were times on the sandy part of the Beach where you could not find a place to lay a beach towel. A beach house at the top of the gently sloping beach sand had a little snack bar, a wall of vending machines and one kick-ass jukebox. I can hear the long ago sounds of bare, happy, sandy feet shuffling under the young dancers there right now. It was a great place to meet chicks.

That platform out in the water once had two ladders for swimmers to climb up onto it and two diving boards for swimmers to dive off of it.

The two sets of poles out in the water used to have ropes with flotation devices on them. The two ropes ran parallel to the water line on the beach. "First Rope" was the safety line that non-swimmers should stay behind. The water at First Rope was about five-foot deep at high tide. The beach sand went out under the water to about 1/3rd of the way past First Rope out towards "Second Rope". At high tide, Second Rope was in eight-feet of water. It was illegal to go past Second Rope. One fair warning was all the lifeguards ever gave to anyone who swam out past Second Rope. Two times out past it and the swimmer was ordered out of the water.

As swimmers walked out past First Rope towards Second Rope, the sand dropped off at that 1/3 of the way out mark, and it dropped off at a very steep angle. It dropped into very soft, mucky muddy bottom.

During a very low tide, I once jumped off one of the diving boards feet first and held my body stiff like an arrow to see how far down into the muddy bottom I could sink. I went into it all the way up to my knees. But because this was after I had taken four years of Red Cross swimming lessons, taught at Merritt Beach, including Junior Life Saving, I knew that as soon as I began to try and kick myself free from that muck that I'd be sucked in tighter. I was ready for it, I was just doing an experiment as I did try to kick myself free. And by-golly it sure enough did just what we swimming students had been taught--the muck sucked onto my legs, and the harder I kicked, the tighter the mud's grip on my legs became. So I relaxed my legs and used my fairly well developed upper body to "power" myself back up to the surface. I was ready for it: I had sucked in and held my breath in preparation for it; the were not very many people at the beach that day; I had buddies on the diving platform and lifeguards on the beach who would have known right away if I was under water too long and stuck in the mud. The danger was minimal to me at that particular point in time. But I had proven to myself that any untrained swimmer who did not know what the bottom was like there would have definitely drowned if they ever became stuck in that soft, mucky stuff. There probably had been drownings there when someone got stuck in that muck, but I do not know of any of those actual incidents.

And that trailer park across Bullneck Creek there is a five star rated trailer park. I don't know who rates them, but I do know that five stars is the highest rating. I mowed lawns and delivered newspapers in that trailer park, plus I visited friends there. It is very neat and clean, and during most years the police never have to go down there for anything. It is still that way today--a nice, clean, safe place to live.

Before it was closed due to pollution, I had planned on becoming a lifeguard down the Beach.

Then I had planned on getting my driver's license at 16. So that I could meet girls at the Beach, or coming out of the Beach, and then give them a ride home.

An any hot summer Saturday or Sunday, when the Beach was still open for swimming, but was getting ready to close for the day, a steady stream of families in slow moving cars came up past my house on Dunmanway. Along side of the cars, in the street between the moving cars and the neighborhood cars parked along the curb, was a steady stream of tired, walking teenagers, along with any of their younger brothers and sisters who had gone to the Beach with them. They were all worn out from a day of fun in the sun. The girls would often ask me and/or Aussie O'Baker and/or any other possibly-16-years-old looking neighborhood guys who were relaxing out in front of our houses, while enjoying the parade, if we could give them a ride home. We young teenage guys in front of our homes on Dunmanway and the thin, steadily moving crowd passing by were joking and laughing with each other the whole time, till the last weary straggler struggled on by.

The loss of swimming down the Beach was very bad for me.

But the neighborhood was still a good place to live.

This is the former Merritt Beach in 1991. You can see a flat piece of the old beach house jutting out into the right side of the photo. That tree filled area across Bullneck Creek is Chesterwood Park. It was, and still is, a very nice place, indeed. Back around the late 1800s and into the early 1900s, during hot summer days, when there wasn't much of anyone who owned any motor vehicles yet, steam boats from the harbor in inner city Baltimore brought picnickers out of the awful, stifling, coal-burning-cookstove-smoke-saturated-air polluted, city heat to Chesterwood Park for a day's relief from that crappy, city life.

In those olden days, back around 1900, when Chesterwood Park was one of the best places where any inner city Baltimoreans ever got to go, Merritt Beach was part of a large farm.

The Beach was formerly known as Dundalk Bathing Beach, and was once affectionately known as "The Old Snake Hole." But, unfortunately for a young outdoorsy kinda' kid like I was, most of the snakes that were once seen down there, in abundance, had been long gone before I was ever old enough to go down there to see or catch any of them. Ah well, I've never really been much of a snake handler anyways.

When I was growing up on Dunmanway, there were, and there still are, a few turtles living down there in the shallow, mucky bottomed back waters of the former Merritt Beach. Catching and releasing Snapping Turtles was my specialty, amongst us neighborhood kids. But! Guldangit! I'm prett-near ashamed to have to say that I never ever got my paws on one single wild Painter Turtle in my whole life. And I have yet to photograph any Snappers. I intend to do some great portraits of Snapping Turtles some day. But here's a photo of me with a whopper of a Snapper that I caught down the there, about a dozen years ago. That's me old best buddy, Bug Doggy, at my side.

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

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David Robert Crews

Mod Clothing, My 1966-68 Bedroom, and Some Of My Good Friends In High School

2008-03-30T21:04:00.000-07:00

In order for you to understand what the people and places in and around Patten, Maine mean to me, you need to know what kind of a young man I was, and where I came from, just before I moved to the Katahdin Valley area of Maine. It would be one thing if I had been a country boy from Northern Baltimore County, Western Maryland, or Maryland's Eastern Shore who had grown up working outdoors on his family's farm and had hunted and fished his entire young life. But it was another thing for me, because I was a Mod clothes wearing Rock n' Roll minded kid from the Baltimore suburb of Dundalk, Maryland. I had quite quickly become a country kid up in Maine. And I loved it.

There I am in 1966 or '67, at 16 or 17 years old. I'm sporting an elongated "Joe College" hair style, and wearing a Mod flowered shirt. That's a wide Mod belt holding up some tight fitting, Mod hip-hugger pants. I'm standing in my suede Mod boots, while standing on a rottin' Mod log. I'm holding up an old Mod door, in front of the fallin' down Mod shack that it fell off of. When I went Mod, I went all out for it.

But I could not grow my hair into a long Mod style, because I was still in school. When I graduated from Dundalk High School, in 1968, most Maryland schools did not allow a male student to wear his hair one fraction of an inch down over his ears. Long haired boys were expelled.

And Hippie hadn't hit Baltimore yet. Except inside of publications like Life or Look Magazine.

That amateur fashion shoot, up there, was shot right over in a thin strip of woods that runs along side of the railroad tracks behind my family's Dundalk home, on Dunmanway.

That busted up shack was an abandoned "colored people's house", on railroad property. The railroad never allowed anyone to move in after the previous family had left. Which had made sense in the modern 1950s, when that last family had left, because there was no running water in the place. The railroad had not allowed any such improvements, just a little electric service.

Inside of that moldy old shack was where I fell for the greatest practical joke of the 1960s, when I tried smoking dried banana peels.

They tasted lousy.

And didn't do a thing for me.

A San Fransisco Haight-Ashbury Rock n' Roll star, Gary "Chicken" Hirsh, of Country Joe and the Fish, was credited with starting that ridiculous, substitute for reefer, rumor. Way back then, in much of America, a lot of us kids had only heard of pot smoking, but never had seen any weed. It was already being smoked heavily in Frisco though.

I had heard of several ways that you had to prepare the banana peels to smoke them. There were recipes for boiling it in water, or rubbing alcohol; and then drying it in various combinations and ways of drying it slow or fast or in complete darkness, or up under your left arm pit while you flapped your arm or something. Or whatever some birdbrain could come up with to try and prove they were hipper than thou.

It was written later that the Rock star rumor starter had read that there actually is a psychoactive substance in the white lining of banana peels. But a lot of, freely circulating, opposing falsehoods were written and/or spoken about the origins of that zany idea.

About a year and a half after I had tasted the bitter smoke of that great, practical joke, I am in Patten Maine on a Saturday night. I walk upstairs above the stores in town, to a small apartment or rented room up there, where some buddies of mine were hanging out. I walk in, and there are three or four of them up there just a grinning and a giggling like fools. I look over to the far side of the room, and there's one of 'um flippin' banana peels on the hot radiator by the window, to dry them out.

I laughed and said, "I know what y'ur doin! You're dryin' out banana peels to smoke 'um. I tried that once, but it didn't work."

One of 'um replied, "Yeah, well we're still gonna try it. We can't get any pot to smoke up here in Patten, and we want to try something. You're not going to tell anybody, are you?"

I was grinnin' and gigglin' almost as bad as they were by then, when I replied, "Shoot no man, I ain't gonna tell nobody! I just told ya that I smoked it once myself."

Smoking dried banana peels didn't do anything for them either.

I was not drunk, or any other kind of stoned, when that photo of me laying there in amongst a pile of old junk was taken. The empty beer bottles are simply part of a conceptual piece of instant on the spot junk art--something to express the rebellious and avant-garde artistic flavor of the Mod experience.

Although I did way too much underage beer drinking over around that old shack--it was a very popular neighborhood place for that illegal act--I can 100% absolutely guarantee you that I did not drink the beer that was in those empty National Beer, Nat'y Boh, Nasty Boh bottles. I never drank a quart of National or a long neck, deposit bottle of that watery crap in my life.

After I got out of the Army, in '71, and I was drinking a little too much beer almost everyday, my father usually had part of a case of National cans in our refrigerator. I never took but one, one time. It gave me a headache. And, during my entire thirty-one-year alcohol consumption career, I never again drank any of that most famous Baltimore beer, with Mob Town's (Mob Town is Baltimore's Civil War legacy nickname) beloved, famous, winking Mr. Boh on the label.

Thirty-one-years full of heavy drinking times, not drinking times, heavy drinking times, than not drinking at all again was enough.

I'm retired now.

This is my 1966-68 bedroom at home on Dunmanway. I had curtains that matched the bed spread.

And I had bought a record album carrying case with the same design on it. In 1968, I packed that case full of records and took it to Maine with me.

The photos on the walls all came out of magazines that I sure wish I had copies of now. I read the best Rock mags on the market, and they are worth some money now. The only magazine name I can remember right now is Crawdaddy. And there must be some photos up there on the wall that came out of Life or Look Magazine. All from what are some of the more valuable collector's issues now.

The photo on the wall that is at the bottom left is of Frank Zappa and The Mothers. That photo up above the Mothers and to the right could be Jim Morrison sitting behind the TV in a closet. The red one at the top with its head missing is The Crazy World of Author Brown, with his flaming hat on. I liked his one song, Fire, and the wild photo, but never had any of his albums. That is Cream--Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker on the railroad tracks, in the photo at the top, middle. On the far wall, at the top, is my favorite drummer of all time, Ginger Baker. I'm lost on the rest of it.

This is my bulletin board, with a well thought out collage on it. What I was thinking at the time, though, I couldn't tell ya'. And the eyes were on a mobile.

In the lower left corner of the bulletin board, it seems like that could only be Janis Joplin belting out a blues wailer. I got real artsy-comical with the feet under the tomato, and it is probly Jack Bruce as the tomato's harmonica playing head. I believe I spot a black and white shot of Ginger Baker playing his drums near Jack's head. To the top left, in red and playing left handed guitar is Jimi Hendrix. I see another shot of Hendrix in red all the way over to the right, middle. At the top left, that double image is of Owsley Stanley, the Grateful Dead's longtime soundman, Bear. The regal black woman in the magnificently colorful dress was simply a great centerpiece for the collage. The WJZ TV bumper sticker was there at the bottom of the bulletin board's frame because of the goofy elephant graphic and whatever goofy graphic was at the other end of it.

That round disc of cardboard tacked into the top right corner of the wooden frame is a Sgt. Pepper Album cut-out insert.

I have an uncut Sgt. Pepper cut-out insert sheet in my living room. It is made of light cardboard and it's almost the same size as an album cover--the cut out is 12 x 11 13/16. I paid twenty bucks for it at an antique show, a few years ago. The disc on my bulletin board looks like I cut it out from one of those famous cut-out sheets, but I didn't. Nobody did. A machine did it. Because I bought the Pepper album a few days after it was released, and I will never forget how overjoyed I was when I opened up the album, carefully slid out the paper sleeved vinyl disc and along with it comes a whole lap full of separate cut out inserts.

"What's this?" I joyously shouted to my parents and sister, who were in the living room with me. The whole cardboard sheet cut out version came in later runs of the album. So there's a bit of Beatles collectibles trivia for ya'. If you ever see a used Sgt. Pepper Album at a yard sale, flea market, etc., or in a dumpster, check that baby for the machine cut cutouts in it. That would be a very valuable find.

That hip looking, long haired young lady is one of my best friends from high school, Patricia MacNeil.

Pat designed, created and sewed most of her own clothes. She was fashionably far ahead of the other girl's at school, with her own natural sense of style. But she never acted like she was or would ever say so. Her clothing creations were visually pleasing and very attractive; but not attractive in a "look at me" kind of way. Her handmade dresses, blouses and skirts seemed to gently flow from within her, and she looked just exactly like she should have. She probably made the pants she is wearing in the photo. And she may have created her coat too, or at least redesigned it to some degree. Her best work, though, was in creating her beautiful blouses, skirts and dresses.

This photo of Pat had to have been taken on a Saturday or other day when there was no school in session, because girls had to wear skirts to school. It was probably taken after an afternoon spent together in downtown Baltimore, while shopping and hanging out with our usual group of friends who also dug the hip places in and around the once bustling Howard Street corridor.

Pat and I and about a half dozen of our other friends all walked part-ways home together from Dundalk High School, everyday during our senior year.

About the only major difference of taste, or opinion, in our shared teenage lifestyles was: Pat and Nancy Becker could not talk me into listening to any of their acoustic Bob Dylan albums.

I had Dylan's electric Highway 61 Revisited and was a serious listener of it. When I told my group of friends that I had begun to really get into all of the music on Highway 61 Revisited--to me, it was all as good as the '60s anthem from that album, Like A Rolling Stone, that we have all heard many times--Nancy and Pat got all too gushy like and said, "Ohhh Dahhve. If you like that, you have to come listen to his first few albums. The lyrics are so good."

But I had heard bits of his acoustic music before that, and it wasn't for hard rockin' me. Till about fifteen years ago, when I began to collect, and listen to, all of Dylan's early stuff.

Each day after school, Pat and I were the last two walking together--after all of the others in our after school quorum of hip, high school kids had broken off to go their shortest routes to their homes. Then Pat had to take a left at Robinwood Rd, and I went on the farthest of all, to Dunmanway. But many a day I walked with Pat up to her house. Then we hung around the bird feeder, out in the front yard, for a while, sharing warm and humorous conversation.

I took that photo during the final half of our senior year.

This is Carmello Krocheski. She was also one of my best friends from high school, and a member, in fully fledged good standing, of the after school walking home together crew with Pat, Nancy Becker, and I. Carmello died young, from Lupas. I think she was about 28-years-old.

I took this photo just after we had graduated from high school. As I look at this photo, I can see where you may be thinking that she is not a very cool and hip looking 18-year-old girl at all. Today, she doesn't look too hip to me either. But Carmello most definitely was a very hip young woman.

Carmello had the same type of music in her record album collection as I did. And, when I was the lunchtime record committee for the Dundalk High School cafeteria's stereo system, I was the person who turned DHS onto The Cream, Frank Zappa, and Jimi Hendrix Experience. I think that it was Carmello who had turned me onto Tim Buckley. She was seriously aware of, and deeply concerned about, the horrible effects that the Vietnam War was having on our generation. We also read some of the same books, and saw the world around us from many similar points of view.

She was a whole lot of fun to spend time with. A very upbeat kind of a gal.

After my 1968-69 year in Maine, I entered the Army in November 1969. And when I was home on Christmas leave, on Christmas Day 1969, I visited Carmello and her family. There was a nice, heavy snow falling, and my Northern Maine acquired driving skills served me well that day. I had a great and safe time driving my father's big, white Ford station wagon all over the southeastern Baltimore County area, while wearing my Army, full dress, uniform to visit relatives and friends.

That day was the only time I ever wore my Army uniform at home in Maryland, and I only did so for my family and close friends. During those Vietnam War years, American military personnel in uniform were often treated very rudely and crudely by American civilians--whose freedoms we G.I.s were protecting.

The last time that I saw Carmello, just after my discharge from the Army in the early 1970s, she told me that I had done something kinda' odd at her house, on Christmas Day 1969.

Carmello lived with her older sister, and their mother--two other lovely ladies whom I was well acquainted with. I'm fairly sure that I had been drinking some beer that day, as I could have purchased it at Ft. Holabird, though I was only 19-years-old at the time. But I can't quite seem to fully recall doing what Carmello told me I had done. I do have a slight, hazy memory of maybe doing it though.

Carmello's family had set out a very nice Christmas buffet. Evidently, I had made a potato salad sandwich from their buffet table. Carmello said that she, her sister, and mother just couldn't get over me making that potato salad sandwich; they got some great laughs from me doing that, and had reminisced and laughed about it for years after.

I love homemade potato salad, and am a self declared connoisseur of the dish. And now I do hazily, definitely recall doing that. I had picked up the idea from some Maine or Army buddy of mine, somewhere along the line, and I remember him saying that his family had always made potato salad sandwiches. I thought that it was pretty funny, so I made one too. So I do believe that I had also made one that Christmas Day at Carmello's--just for effect. Ya' know what I mean?

I had some beers in me, I was extremely happy to be home, and I had probably done it to give the Krocheski gals, all three of whom I liked a lot, and whom I was liked by a lot, I'm pretty darn sure that I had done it just so they would get some good laughs out of seeing me eat a potato salad sandwich.

In fact, now that I have written it out, and see it more clearly now, I know I had done it for comic effect. Because I have never had a potato salad sandwich since then.

This is Nancy Becker, who was also one of my best friends from high school, and a member, in fully fledged good standing, of the after school walking home together crew with Pat, Carmello, and I.

How fully fledged was I at the time? Well let's just say that I was very fortunate to have such intelligent, world wise, sensibly humorous, and down-to-earth female friends as the three young women on this page. Or I'd have gone too wild, too soon. And I seriously doubt that I'd still be alive today.

In the photo of Nancy, she is standing in her sister and brother in law's--Linda and Tommy Beaver's front yard, on the Fourth of July, in the early 1980s, I think. I hadn't seen her in over ten years, when I walked up to her on that bright, summer day. That's why I took the photo as she extended her hand to greet me. I wanted to capture that moment forever.

Nancy was always quite the delightful young woman to be around. Like I said before, on this page, the only serious disagreement Nancy and I ever had was when I refused to go with her and Pat MacNeil to listen to Bob Dylan's first three albums, because I was not into the acoustic Dylan yet.

After my 1968-69 year in Maine, on a November day, about a week before I entered the U.S. Army, I was home in Maryland to spend time with family and friends. Nancy, Pat, and I decided to go hitchhike down to Georgetown in Washington D.C.. I think one of them had an apartment in downtown Baltimore. Because for some reason, we had rendezvoused, to begin our hitchhiking adventure, in downtown Baltimore, at an old time lunch counter, in a drugstore up in the Howard Street corridor. It was already dark out at the time. We each drank a cup of hot coffee or hot tea, at the lunch counter, to get us warmed and revved up for the adventure.

As we sat there calmly, happily talking amongst ourselves, and sipping our hot drinks, we each were taking slight, furtive glances at this very weird, and outa' whack, fellow on the other side of the lunch counter, because he kept pouring and pouring spoonful after spoonful of sugar into his cup of hot coffee, from an old time glass sugar container. The glass sugar container ran empty, and he begins to call for the waitress.

The waitress was one of those older, worn down kind of women, who had never had a fair break in life; she had already lived a long lifetime of rarely ever really looking good; and she possessed a charmless personality, that matched her dismal, low budget lifestyle. The poor old gal was sort of hiding behind a lit cigarette back there just inside of the stainless steel, swinging kitchen door. She was very slow in responding to the weird guy's steadily repeated requests for her to attend to his present needs and desires.

Now, Nancy, Pat, and I are not saying anything at all about what the weird guy and waitress are doing, nor are we acting like we were paying any attention to them. But we three were each thinking to ourselves, "He's dumped about eight teaspoons of sugar into his cup of coffee, so he can't be gonna ask the waitress for more sugar. But I just know he's gonna do it."

Finally, the waitress comes out. And, in a drably tired, and defeated-by-life tone of voice, the old gal asked the weird guy what he wanted.

Very droll like, just like the two of them were doing a well rehearsed and perfectly timed comedy skit for a TV show, he said he wanted more sugar.

That was it for us! We had to drop some money onto the lunch counter and get going really fast. We were cracking up and didn't want to offend those two unfortunate souls at the drugstore lunch counter, by laughing right at them. We stumbled over each other's feet as we practically rolled up into a giant ball of hilarious laughter and on out the door and onto the sidewalk--while whispering to each other in unison, "Did you see that? Did you see that?"

The rest of the night was just like that, all the way to D.C. and back again. It was great.

I had my Maine Guide's Buck Knife on my belt, and I was in about the best physical condition I ever have been in. So though there is always a dangerous side to hitchhiking, we were three sharp minded 18-19-year-olds, and I was as ready to rumble with any potential trouble as I ever was.

We got a few good rides out of Baltimore, then a guy who was already in the Army, who was driving an old Corvair, picked us up. He was heading to Georgetown himself. He was a good driver, and a pleasant conversationalist.

As we drove through D.C. and got closer in towards Georgetown, the G.I. driving us hinted around that he'd like to walk around with us for a while. I may have gotten a little too protective of my female friends, when I smoothly nixed that idea. He probly was an OK guy, but I wasn't too certain, and I think maybe I should have asked him along with us. I told the girls about it as soon he dropped us off, and they said that, yeah, I should have asked him along. I still feel a little bad about that.

Nancy, Pat, and I all three knew our way around Georgetown, and we had a fantastic time there. We knocked off the fun an hour before the bars were going to close. That was our well thought out, strategic plan for having our thumbs in the air while the traffic leaving the internationally known and populated party district of Georgetown would be the heaviest.

We hadn't had our thumbs up for more than a full minute, when the third car passing by pulled over, and stopped. It was a little yellow VW Bug. The driver's door popped wide open, then the passenger door popped wide open; and one really drunk and tired looking, good looking, young woman jumps up out of the driver's door, then one really drunk and tired looking, good looking, young woman jumps up out of the passenger's door.

The driver hollers and slurs out, "Who's gotta driver's license? We can't drive no more! One of you has ta drive."

With that, I got into the driver's seat; Nancy, Pat, and the female passenger got into the back seat; the drunk girl driver got into the passenger seat, and I drove us all the way to where Pat, Nancy, and I had previously met up in Baltimore. It was a great trip back home.

The VW belonged to the driver's brother. The two girls were from Delaware, and they had picked up two, very lucky, hitchhiking sailors. GO SWABBIES! Then they all four had had some good times in Georgetown.

But they had one big problem, besides sobering and resting up while I drove them safely as far as Baltimore--I wasn't too much under the influence of alcohol at all. Their problem was that the brother had told his sister not to drive his VW Bug out beyond the town limits of where they lived. So the girls had disconnected the car's speedometer, in order to hide the high mileage put on his car that night.

The Delaware girls were very grateful to us for safely, and with lots of good conversation and joking around all the way, for safely helping them get as far as Baltimore. And we three hitchhikers were extremely grateful for our super-superb luck in catching a ride all the way to Baltimore in less than a full minute's thumbing time.

It sure is a shame we can't very well safely hitchhike anymore. Oh well. I Still have some great memories of those bygone days to enjoy though.

After my 1968-69 year as a Maine bear Hunting Guide, I came home to Maryland to visit family and friends, just before I entered U.S. Army basic training. During that short time to still be a civilian, I went to a party at Carmello's new, single working gal's apartment; well it was new to her, but in a very old and architecturally interesting and sound building. I can't recall whether Pat or Nancy were there, but at least one of them probably had been. Carmello's apartment was her hip pad, ya' might say, but she'd have just called it an apartment. It was a cool and hip little home for a young woman, that's for sure. It was in Baltimore City--not quite downtown, not quite uptown--on East Biddle Street, near Charles Street. A decidedly, fairly hip young neighborhood in that day and age. The area was populated by art students from the Maryland Institute, plus struggling, young and older professional artists, musicians, poets, writers, some brand new and some older Hippies, some cranky and crusty really old folks-long time residents, etceteras.

It was a nice, small, pleasant, hip, gregarious group of conversing young people there at Carmello's party. They were a very mellow lot--but no pot or hash was smoked, though I never knew of Carmallo ever smoking any, there were definitely some part time pot/hash smokers there. Not me at the time, but I had puffed it some in high school and really got into it a year later, while overseas on Okinawa.

There were no alcoholic beverages there either. Me being the several times a month social beer drinker that I had been for that previous year in Maine, I asked if anyone wanted to pitch in on a case of beer.

Well shoot man, the way they reacted, you'd a thought I'd suggested we all go out to mug a bunch of the old folks in the neighborhood. Everybody there dropped their chins to their chests, or looked away from each other, and especially away from me, with very soured, disapproving looks all over their faces, as the whole place became nearly numbed by surprise looking. The molecules of the quietly, forever slowly moving air in the apartment just sort of stopped bouncing around against each other, stopped dead still and hung there, in the middle of the room. I was feeling completely off balance and out of place, while the stale air waited for the sounds of someone's vocal chord vibrations to stir its stunned, little molecules up a little, when one long-stringy-haired and fuzzily bearded guy, who was sitting cross legged on the floor, said, "A case of beer? A bottle of wine maybe. But a case of beer? (he snorts a short, sneering snicker) No way."

You may have already read some of my writings on this site about me wanting to grow my hair long, but having to cut it to be able to live up in Maine. Well the one thing was at Carmello's party was that I was the only shorthaired guy there. Believe me, those guys there were not the first in the Greater Baltimore Metropolitan Area to want to grow their hair long, but once it had become the popular style of more and more Baltimore area young people, the young men in the social circles of Carmello and her party attendees all had longer hair. BUT! The attendees were as prejudiced against my short hair as my Aunt Martha, Uncle Finley, and the Native Mainers up there around Katahdin Lodge had been against my long hair--a year earlier.

I stayed a little longer, while Carmello and I enjoyed each other's company a little more, but then excused myself, and headed on back into my old home neighborhood. There, I found some drinkin' buddies to pal around with for the rest of the evening. That stuffy group of Carmello's newer friends there were not quite up to my somewhat wilder and more fun ways of socializing. And those wine-ee party goers weren't so damned, avant-garde-er, and hipper than me as they thought they were.

After I was discharged from the Army in November 1971, I was invited to a dinner party with Pat, Carmello, Nancy, and some other people whom I had known in high school, and new acquaintance or two. It was a nice time. There was some wine and little bit of cold beer there. A little bit of pot was piped. We all shared some considerably lively and stimulating conversation. Though I left that party feeling nice and contented to have been there, I knew it was the last time I'd be with any of them like that. They invited me around again, several more times, but then gave up on that idea.

I had become way too wild and crazy while serving in the U.S Army on Okinawa, to be around my down to earth old friends. I had developed an unsettling, nearly unquenchable thirst for cold beer and other forms of booze, and a nearly unsatisfiable desire to smoke another bowl or joint of weed. That was not compatible with some of old my high school friends' lifestyles. Not with Pat, Carmello, and Nancy's. But there were plenty of other lifelong friends around my old home neighborhood who drank and smoked just like I was doing.

That heavy drinking and smoking and other drugging lifestyle maimed a few of my old friends--physically and/or mentally maimed them, killed a few, and the peripheral damages of our self destructive lifestyles destroyed, or made miserable, too many of our families', friends', and/or lovers' lives, our professional working abilities and relationships, and the well being and futures of too many of our younger relatives.

Take it from a survivor, drink alcohol and/or use other drugs as little as possible. If you haven't tried any certain such mind altering, oft terribly personality and life altering, pyschoactive substance yet, don't move onto it. You may be moving to someplace where there is only destruction, pain, and misery. Keep your consumption of what you do use to as minimal of an amount as you possibly can. You'll live a healthier, happier, and a much more positive, successful life if you do.

Though it has been close to 15 years since I drank any booze, but not as long since I last misused any drugs. Every single day of my life, I pay a little bit of a life and soul draining price for my mistakes in the former use and abuse of alcohol and other mind altering drugs.

There are no free rides in this world. Ya' gotta' pay to play.

This is Ray-Ray Griggs. He and I were good friends from the seventh grade, about when this photo was taken, on up through high school. He had been going to Catholic school somewhere, until he got himself kicked out of there. Then he came to my public school, when we had been good pals for over a year already. He was in a lot of my classes, and we created some funny times in those classes.

Ray Griggs and I each pulled off a good number of lighthearted classroom antics on our own, and also sometimes together. We could team up very effectively with one of us acting the straight man, and the other being the funny one. We'd switch it up from one time to the next, so as to keep everyone else off balance on what to expect when one of us two would set one of our little comedians' plans into action. It was often done with a few words whispered, along with some hand signals sent, across the classroom to the other guy, when the teacher had their back turned and was writing on the chalkboard. Or one of us two would give a serious answer to a teacher's classwork question, and the other'd add a funny quip to the end of it. The whole class would roar with laughter, and the teacher also often got a kick out of what we had done in jest. We made a few of our teachers smile quite a lot.

We never put anyone down or poked fun at some other kid who couldn't get us back with their own wit and childhood wisdom. Getting hit back with some good comedy was half the fun. Ray's and my jokes, pranks, comical stunts, and funny punch lines thrown into the day's class lessons were all done for everyone's enjoyment. Naturaly, the teachers didn't always appreciate the adolescent comedy we had used our thick, steaming, young skulls to create. But we never-ever really ticked a teacher off, or ruined their day. Because we never did anything out of malice towards authority or towards our fellow students.

If I were to really get into to telling you all about Ray-Ray Griggs, I'd have to start another web site just for him. Only then could I tell you all I remember, and cherish, about him. Plus, to be fair to all of the many, many people with their own personal, cherished memories of wild and funny times with Ray-Ray, I'd have to solicit and publish Ray-Ray stories for several years. I was intimately familiar with Ray-Ray's well known, and well loved, wild and crazy, rib splitting hilarious at times, one of a kind personality. He was that kind of widely popular and much beloved person.

I'm going to tell you two more things about Ray-Ray.

The first is something that I was sworn to secrecy about, during the first week that I knew him. Ray-Ray took tap dancing lessons in an after school tap dance class held in Dundalk Elementary School. But he didn't take them for too long.

The second thing is something that everyone who knew Ray-Ray knows full well. Ray-Ray was one of the very most highly skilled--over the public road--motorcycle riders who has ever twisted a big bike's throttle grip. Ever. Anywhere. Anytime. Anyplace.

Please don't mind me for qualifying myself here by saying that, in my younger years, I could really ride hard and right in the groove myself. I was much more highly skilled at it than the average motorcycle-two wheeled motor vehicle operator. But I could have never kept up with Ray-Ray, if we had ever gotten to ride together, and he had decided to leave me way back there behind him in his jet stream.

Unfortunately, he and I never managed to be going in the same direction on our bikes at the same time. Ray-Ray owned and rode a big bike, a Harley 1200, for most of his young adult life. I only owned and rode a big bike, a Yamaha 650, for two years. And I got hit on it twice, by cars whose driver's were at fought for the accidents. So that cost me too much riding time, while the bike was in the repair shop.

I knew Ray-Ray's well earned reputation for the way he rode. I had seen him ride a few times. I knew the way that some of the guys who had been blessed to ride with Ray-Ray could ride hard, but safe, themselves. Guys who greatly admired Ray-Ray's superb motorcycle handling skills, and who all agree with me in all I say here about our long departed friend, Ray-Ray Griggs.

Ray-Ray may no longer be gravity bound to ride the tar topped streets, highways, and backroads of this earth any longer, but he certainly must be riding hard, fast, and in the groove somewhere. That's the way his soul was on this side, and it may very well be the way that his soul is spending eternity on the other side. He and I did get into some minor hooliganisms together, and also on our own, or with others. But I reasonably believe that he never did anything so wrong that he was not accepted and fully welcomed into a good place on the other side.

This is Joe Stamboni, a somewhat pudgy looking fellow, and truly one of a kind.

You see that curly, down over the forehead, waterfall styled, Rockabilly lookin' hairstyle of his? He was about the last guy in our school who had held onto that 1950s/early 1960s look. By 1965, most of us East Coast USA teen males were into the "Joe College" look. Our hair and clothing styles reflected what the college kids looked like at the time. Like what you'd see on Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys on the cover of an early Beach Boys surf music record album. But Joe looked positively normal and in style with his hair like that.

Somewhere around midsummer of 1965, Joe and his parents had moved in two houses up the street from mine, on Dunmanway. That was during the summer before my first year of high school, which was tenth grade at the time. Joe was going into twelfth grade. That school year, my next door neighbor and ten-year-long friend, Austin "Aussie" O'Baker was going into the tenth grade too.

By the time that the beginning of the school year rolled around, Joe was on good, friendly terms with all of his neighbors. So everyday of the 1965-66 school year, Aussie's mother drove her son Aussie, Joe, and I to school. It was great fun having Joe ride with us, because he could really brighten up the start of your day. He possessed a keen, sharp, and ever ready wit, all about him, all of the time. He was just about the most popular guy in school. And between classes, when you walked down through the crowded school hallways with Joe, it was non-stop, "Hey Joe, how ya doin," "Hey Joe what's up," all the way. And Joe was steadily joking and laughing with people all up and down the hallway, at a steady pace of up to about 10 or 20 kids away in either direction. Ain’t no doubt about it, Joe was surely the most popular guy in Dundalk High. He got along great with kids in every clothing/hair style type of click and group and with all of the teachers too. Most everybody knew and liked him.

Joe was probly the last male to wear black leather, pointy-toed, Hollywood movie hoodlum style shoes, which had big Cuban Heels on them, on the boardwalk “down the ocean” (Ocean City, Maryland). All of us other teens were wearing penny loafers, tennis shoes/sneakers--particularly Jack Purcells, or sandals. But Joe believed that there wasn’t anything better than the solid, thunk-thunk-thunking sound of his hard, Cuban Heels hitting them boards while he strolled on down the boardwalk, checking out the girls, and the girls were all looking around to see where the solid sounds were coming from, and then they watched him stroll on by.

Joe Stamboni was the first guy in Dundalk to dare wearing a polka dot Mod shirt. I do believe I remember it having large red polka dots on a yellow background. About that time, he also decided that the only pants he would wear were white jeans. He bought three pair of them, and he put on a clean pair everyday. He said it trully simplified things for him by only having three pair and always knowing he had to wash two pairs of them every other day.

I don’t know how the heck Joe ever passed any courses in high school. He never took a book home. He never studied or did any homework at home. Somehow, he got it done during the school day.

Joe often talked about a Corvette he was going to buy, as soon after he graduated from high school, and he got himself a full time job, as he could. Consequently, Joe had a Corvette spinner hubcap screwed onto the front cover of his blue, school notebook, which he proudly carried as he walked down the halls. He eventually owned several different Corvettes.

Joe was a very good drummer, and was heavy into 'slinging fatback' on the drums. Fatback is a nickname for the heavy backbeat of Rhythm n' Blues/Soul music.

Joe kept his drum kit set up in the family room at the side of his house. When Joe was practicing on his drums, anybody walking down the sidewalk out front or driving down the street out there could hear it. Us neighborhood kids would sometimes sit out in front of Joe's house while listening to him pounding out a heavy, rockin', beat to some Rhythm n' Blues songs, with a whole lotta' soul.

When he was practicing, Joe liked listening to Baltimore's WSID AM radio station, while playing along to the songs spun by the greatest of all Soul/R n' B disc jockeys, Fat Daddy.

When Fat Daddy was introducing songs and doing other on-the-air radio disc jockey announcements and all, he jive-talked in a very fast Baltimore City style African American accent. Fat Daddy often made it very difficult to understand exactly what he was saying, but in a most entertaining way. The majority of his listeners were inner city African Americans in Baltimore, and even they could not understand much of what he said on-the-air. Joe loved telling how Fat Daddy had gotten into trouble for saying, "Every time I hear the Supremes, I cream in my jeans!" Which Fat Daddy had said numerous times before some prudish woman in his listening audience finally figured out what he was saying every time he played a record by Diana Ross and the Supremes; and then that woman filed a formal complaint about it.

A teenage Joe once gave me some of the best advice I ever heard: “Don’t believe anything you hear, and only half of what you see.”

I found that statement to be quite profound.

It was absolutely amazing to see a somewhat pudgy Joe wearing an out of style hair cut, out of style shoes, the latest style pants, and also shirts that were soon going to be in style, and he was the most popular guy around.

Last week, I was quite fortunate to have enjoyed a nice conversation with an old friend of mine--Dave Collins. I had seen Dave and talked to him last fall, after his Rock n’ Roll band had played a concert in Dundalk Maryland’s Veterans Park. Which was the first time we'd seen each other since shortly after we had graduated from high school together. Previous to that conversation in Veterans Park, the last contact we had was by letter, when Dave was in Vietnam, and I was a student in the U.S. Army's Photographic Laboratory Technician School at Fort Monmouth New Jersey. In fact, I still have the last letter that I was going to send to Dave. It is in a Photo Lab Tech School notebook that I have kept through all these past decades.

Dave moved into my neighborhood in 1963 or '64, when we were both 13-or-14-years- old. He ended up being in a lot of my classes at school, till we graduated together.

We were very good friends when Dave and our mutual, close friend Larry "Sid" Cramer formed a Rock N' Roll band with some other guys. Dave was the lead singer, Sid played bass guitar, and, another old friend of mine, Frank Catanzariti played lead guitar. I knew the organ player, and the three guys who had served in succession as their drummer, but I can only remember Larry Lundy as one of the guys who had played drums. The band's name was The Rysing Suns.

The Suns were a great Rolling Stones type of Rock n' Roll, Rhythm and Blues, and Blues music based band. Dave's Rocked-out-Bluesy singing actually sounded a little like Mick Jagger's--till Dave's voice fully matured, after high school. And that opinion of Dave’s singing abilities is coming from a lifelong collector of recorded music who is, first and foremost, a Rolling Stones fan. The Beatles were better, but the Stone's earliest music sounded just like I felt inside. I went to many of the Rysing Suns' live performances. The Suns were the best 1967 era high school aged Rock n' Roll band who were all Dundalk kids.

I traveled around Dundalk and the Baltimore area having all kinds of teenage fun with Dave and Sid.

At Dundalk High School, in our senior year, we cut out for lunch period one afternoon together. This was a time when all school kids were expected by all adults to be in school during school days. Sid drove us in his car to the Wise Avenue Gino's Hamburgers joint for lunch.

As we approached the very busy intersection where Holabird Avenue turns into Wise Avenue at Merritt Boulevard, we all three look to our left, because the driver of a furniture delivery van had lost control of his too-fast traveling truck, and was heading in our direction. The truck was about to wreck either into us or something or someone right in front of or beside us.

The truck had been barreling down Merritt Boulevard and had tried to make a right in the curved, right turn lane, onto Holabird. But instead, it went flying straight across the cement lane divider, and was bouncing all up and down. The driver and two furniture delivery helpers inside the truck's cab were bouncing all up and down like basketballs being dribbled by Meadowlark Lemmon at a Harlem Globetrotter's game--and the inside of the roof of the truck's cab was like his huge hand dribbling all three balls at once. Those three men were looking very frightened.

We had a red light up ahead and were slowing down at the time for that stoplight.

The truck stays on a straight course all the way across the two lanes of Holabird Ave. that go in the opposite direction we were going, but, very fortunately, no vehicles were moving in those two lanes.

Then the truck comes a bouncing up over the Holabird Ave. center cement divider, and the darned lucky truck driver accidentally squeezes through in between two cars that were stopping for the red light just up ahead and to the left of us, over across one lane in the left turn lane. We were in the curbside lane heading straight.

The driver frantically whips his steering wheel to his left, which just barely keeps them from plowing into our left, front side. There was one car up ahead of us in our lane, and it was already stopped at the red light. The truck driver whipped it to the left, just missed smashing into the left side tail end of the car in front of us, as the truck pulls up to a complete stop, in the center lane, right at the red light, right as we pulled up beside it.

It was eggzactely like a scene in a comedy movie--like in Cannonball Run.

It was an absolutely amazing, and rather hilarious, set of fortunate circumstances for all. Everybody who was traveling through that intersection at that moment was lucky. Because if the truck had hit any vehicles, there's no telling what the chain reaction would have been. The vehicles who had the green light were all flying real fast as usual up and down Merritt Boulevard.

But we three high school guys were doubly lucky, because if we'd have been any part of an accident, we would have been suspended or possibly expelled from school.

I never cut out for lunch period again. I felt that my luck at not getting caught cutting lunch was all used up on that one.

Sid's car was his mother's older, used Chevy Nova station wagon. Not a cool car, but it carried plenty of band equipment, or Sid's friends. I was in that car when I learned of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination. I was in the back seat, and I think it was Stevie Eitel in the front passenger seat--I know it wasn’t Dave.

It happened on a Friday night. Sid, Stevie, and I were going out somewhere, I can’t remember where, but we had just begun our evening of teenage socializing. Dundalk Shopping center was a very busy, lively small town Maine Street kind of a place back then. Local teenagers were hanging out there a lot on Friday and Saturday evenings. I have forgotten whom we had stopped to talk to, but we had been driving up Dunmanway into the shopping center, when Sid had spotted someone we knew and had pulled into the alley across from St. Rita’s Church, to talk to them.

It was two of our friends, I think that one was Jerry Swan, and they said, “Hey man! We all have to be off the streets and in our houses by eleven o'clock tonight.”

Naturally, Sid, Stevie, and I thought that those other two guys were trying to play a practical joke on us. Then when we told them we didn’t believe what they were telling us and asked why we had to be off the streets, they told us about Dr. King’s death and riots happening in Baltimore City. But of course, we didn’t understand why we had to be off the streets because of that, even though Dundalk borders Baltimore City.

Just then, two uniformed Auxiliary Cops came walking up to our car. Auxiliary Cops don’t carry guns, but do help out the regular police in various ways. We teenage guys there all knew what the two cops were. They didn’t carry guns, but they had big wooden nightsticks, flashlights, handcuffs, and some powers of detention or arrest. The two guys standing outside Sid’s car asked the two cops to verify their claim that we all had to be off the streets by eleven, and the cops verified it. The two cops continued to steadily walk towards us until they came right up close to the car, brushed our two buddies away from the side of the car with their nightsticks and shined their flashlights inside and checked out everything inside the car’s interior. There was something in a large, brown paper bag sitting under Sid’s jacket and right next to me in the backseat.

One cop points his nightstick at the jacket and bag and brusquely says, “Hey, what’s under there?”

We teens all knew right away that the cop thought it was a bag full of cold beers under the jacket. Because we had drank some cold beers together before and knew that it definitely did look like it was two six-packs in a bag hidden under the jacket. Sid reached around, lifted up his jacket, and opened the bag for the cops to see what was inside of it. I forget what was in the bag, but having the two Auxiliary Cops come down so quick and heavy on us like that let us know it was no night to be screwing around with the 11PM curfew.

The next day, Saturday, there was a 6PM curfew. I was up in Dundalk Shopping Center all that afternoon, and it was very weird.

Usually, cars that were parked in the shopping center stayed parked for at least a half-hour, and usually for longer. There were a lot of good retail stores and eateries there in 1968, and people could shop for a lot of different things there. But on that Saturday, people were coming in, getting only what they needed that day and were getting out and going back home as quickly as they could. The adults all looked very solemn and worried. We teens were thinking that it was all very entertaining, but after a couple of hours of watching all this strange movement of shoppers and their cars, it seemed like it was the end of the world coming and everybody was preparing for the worst.

The liquor stores and bars were all closed all that weekend. I saw an old wino go into DTs and fall down shaking like crazy on the sidewalk in front of the old Arundel Ice Cream restaurant, because he could not buy any booze anywhere. The ambulance had to come and take him away.

I can remember that by the time my friends who were also up there that day, and I started to head to our homes for the 6PM curfew, we were had become pretty well spooked by it all.

My father had a 22 Cal. rifle, a single barrel 12 gage shotgun, and a 7 MM hunting rifle. He told me that he had the shotgun and 22 already loaded, just in case a roving carload of rioters might come through our neighborhood. He had a shy, sorta' silly grin on his face, and said he knew it was probably not going to happen, but if I had to I had to defend the family and house.

Sunday it was a 3PM curfew. That was as close to a science fiction end of the world movie or an episode of The Twilight Zone that I ever wanna' get anywhere near. About an hour after the curfew set in, I simply had to go spend a few minutes standing out in our front yard. It was something I never want to see again, with no life anywhere to be seen or heard till a lone car would go flying by up on Merritt Boulevard and fun right through the red light.

As the lead singer in a 1968 era Rock n' Roll band, Dave Collins was bound and determined to grow his hair long, and to graduate from high school. But, as I say in other pages on this web site, in those days, longhaired boys were expelled from school, or had already quit school. Dave did manage to get away with having his hair grown just a little ways down over his ears.

I had to be satisfied with having the longest sideburns in our high school. I cut them shorter for my yearbook picture, but mine are the longest sideburns in the DHS Class of '68 Yearbook.

One afternoon between classes in school, I moseys on into to the school's smallest boy's lavatory and am unpleasantly surprised see two guys I didn't know beating up on Dave Collins. It was one taller, bigger guy and Dave duke-ing it out hot and heavy, with the big guy's medium sized buddy trying to throw some cheap shots in over and around his big buddy's large chest and shoulders, at Dave's face and head.

Dave had been trapped by them two chumps towards the back of the lavatory, between the sinks and the toilet stalls, so he had those solid fixtures on both sides of him to his advantage, because it kept the medium sized chump from getting around his big buddy, and then really doubling up on my best of friends, Dave.

As soon as I saw it all, I jumped onto the medium guy's back, did a little Judo move (taught to me by Dave Rix) on him, took his legs out from under him, and crammed his lousy little backside right into a urinal, stuck my index finger damn near up his snotty little nose, and said, in no uncertain terms, "One on one #*&*&%#@##! One on one."

That sumbee in the urinal had the nerve to look up at me like I was the one not fighting fair. But he sat there in the urinal until I allowed him to get up.

I quickly turns around to see how ol' Dave is doing; and I swear to you that he is fighting in such perfect boxing form, with his head tucked down, real nice and defensively, and his mighty young fists upper cutting furiously fast and pppooouuunnndddiiinnnggg that big dude so fast and hard into his large section that Dave's punches were lifting the big chump's heels right up in the air--about three inches off the friggin floor. That big sumbee's face was looking totally pained and frustrated, because he could not land anymore of his punches anywhere onto Dave where it counted.

So the big chump throws up his hands in defeat, steps back, looking all miffed and uppity like he was being cheated out of his clean cut American male's right to beat up all longhaired males. Then he has the nerve to say, "Alright. Alright. But I'm gonna see you later sometime."

Dave was a peace loving fellow, so he didn't say anything at all in reply to that great big, sore looser.

I had never even seen those guys anywhere in school before or never saw them after that, at all. I had no idea who they were. But the fight did happen right at the end of our senior year, so them two chumps only had a few weeks in which to see either of us two Daves later.

Man! That ticked me off to see a big guy who looked like he should have been able to take Dave on his own but had his smaller buddy helping him out. If Dave would have started a one on one fight and it was me jumping in and throwing in cheap shots at his opponent, Dave would neither have liked nor allowed that at all. He was a fair fighting kinda' guy, and so was I.

I am no longer a proponent of stand up and duke it out fair rules anymore. It's do what you have to win these days, so I have adjusted my personal defense standards to fit the modern lack of gentlemanly fisticuffs rules for a fair fight.

The way that the fight had begun was: Dave was in there alone. The two chumps had walked in and saw Dave's "long hair", which was only a half inch or so down over top of Dave's ears, at the most. Dave was combing his hair back behind his ears at the time, but them two clean cut American boys took offence to it. So the big one--he was a full head taller than Dave and a bit wider at the shoulders--calls Dave, "Hey Sally."

Because Dave was cornered back there in that small space between the toilet stalls and the sinks, he had no choice but to fight his way out of there. I don't recall what Dave said back to the big chump, or whom Dave had said had swung first. But Dave, as anyone would have, knew that he was trapped and about to be swung upon, so he may have indeed gotten the first punches in. Dave did have a false tooth cap knocked out, so he may have been sucker punched by the big chump.

Dave sure enough did get the last, mighty effective, punches in there, though. I will never forget turning my attention from the medium sized chump, whom I had handily stuffed into the urinal, to look back at Dave and the big chump battling it out and seeing my old peace loving friend Dave Collins fist fighting hard in a fine example of a boxer's defensive tuck and lifting that big chump's heels right dee-frigg up off the floor--by the solid delivery of perfectly placed, thumpitythumpitythumpity, punches to the big boy's, large, chicken hearted, mid section.

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Hip Shops In 1965-68 Baltimore, Beatniks, Mods, and The Psychedelic Propeller

2008-03-30T20:25:00.000-07:00

After you finish reading this blog entry and the one below it, you will definitely wonder how I ever fit right in up in 1968 era Patten, Maine. This entire body of work, this web site, has to do with what I knew, when growing up into my teen years, then what I had discovered about myself and the people and places of Northern Maine, when I first visited that part of God's Country.

The Psychedelic Propeller

Those longhaired lads in this 1967 era photo are The Psychedelic Propeller Rock n' Roll band. They are sitting on the railroad tracks behind the house where I grew up-in Dundalk, Maryland. In the photo are: at the far left, wearing maroon Mod pants and fringed moccasins, is Dale Patten, lead singer; there in the middle of the tracks is my next door neighbor Austin "Aussie" O'Baker, drummer; faux-fearfully pointing at an invisible, speeding freight train coming our way, is Denny Romans, lead guitar; the bespectacled lad in the sandals and yellow checkered Mod slacks, is Chris Cywinski, bass player.

I do believe that this shot hints at some early, natural photographic talent of mine. No wonder I chose Ft. Monmouth's Photo Lab Tech School, when I joined the U.S. Army in 1969.

The Psychedelic Propeller band members and I were some of the small number of Baltimore area teens who wore Mod clothing. We identified ourselves as Mods. In 1966,'67,'68 Baltimore, no one in or around Baltimore was calling themselves, or being called, Hippies. Back then, those four guys were some of the very few longhaired males around Baltimore. And just wearing those maroon pants and fringed moccasins, that Dale had on, was enough to make some other guy want to start a fight with him, at any Maryland high school dance, and a lot of other places, in those days. It was one thing for those guys to be having long hair and dressed in full Mod clothing while up front and playing in the band at some of those dances, but if Dale had dressed like that to go see some other band play at a school dance, he would have been hassled by other teens at that dance--for certain.

Aussie isn't wearing any Mod clothing at all in this photo. He couldn't safely wear it everyday. He was the first male to wear bell-bottom pants in Dundalk. The first day he wore bell bottoms to school, he caused one hell of a stir. We were walking down the school hallway and kids were running thirty feet ahead of us telling other kids what was coming. They were all pointing and laughing at Aussie. He just ignored them. And that happened between every class that day. It would have been the same in any Maryland high school, so don't think it was only Dundalk who was behind in those new fashions.

Denny and his mother lived in a high rent apartment building in a wealthy section of Cold Spring Lane, over across town--Baltimore City. Chris and Dale were from up in the Harford County country type Town of Bel Air, Maryland. Austin O'Baker lived next door to me, in the 7600 block of Dunmanway, from 1955 to 1967 or '68. And they had all four quit school already; you can tell by their long hair. Up until 1969 or '70, local public schools did not allow longhaired boys to attend classes. I wanted to grow my hair longer too, but I wanted a high school diploma more. The band members would all have been in the same grade as I was in, if they hadn't quit. Denny was the only one of the four band members who truly was a rich kid, and was being fully supported in all he did by his wealthy, five times divorced and alimonied, mother; but the other guy's parents had bought them some of their band equipment and also supported them in most other ways.

Aussie, Dale, Denny, Chris and I all had the same basic records in our album collections, wore the same style clothes, and possessed the same brands of humor. We had some great times together.

The band practiced next door to my house in the O'Baker's clubroom. I hung out with them at practice a lot and traveled around with them in their old Cadillac hearse, especially when they played shows. I was their "equipment manager". Which basically meant that I helped them to carry their musical gear in and out of shows. But what it also meant was that high school dance committees, bar and club owners or managers where the band played had to allow me in for free. When the band played where alcohol was sold, I had to either stay right near the band while they played, or, in the case of the old, infamous Baltimore bar named Judge's, which was on Greenmount Ave. just up above 33rd Street, I had to hang out up in the back balcony with the light show guy.

Riding to and from those shows in the back of that old hearse was a right comfortable ride. I thoroughly enjoyed the rides, along with the company of the band members. My favorite way to ride back there was laying stretched out and relaxed on the hard, black side of a big Vox Super Beatle Amp, with a guitar case for a head rest. When on those rides, and during Psychedelic Propeller shows in bars, clubs, or high school auditoriums, my four good friends and I were absolutely lovin' life as we knew it.

The Propeller was a pretty good teenage band. Rock n' Roll with Blues roots and straight up, Rocked out Blues numbers. Denny could do a fairly accurate Jeff Beck or Eric Clapton run on his guitar. In '67, they were the youngest musicians playing in any club in Washington DC's internationally famous Georgetown. I experienced some superfluous times on the streets of Georgetown when I was down there with the band. The people there were mostly pretty hip and mellow. There was one place, some late night eatery, and the sidewalk out in front of it, where we knew some psychedelic drugs were often available, but none of us cared about that. And when the band was Rockin', I was often right there out in front of them on the dance floor with some Rockin' little honey.

Denny Romans {now known as a Demian Bell, and very actively playin' the Blues over in Europe} put the group together, and the band was managed by an older guy named Stu -- Stuart Windsor -- who had set up the very first head shop in Baltimore. The head shop's name was The Psychedelic Propeller. The band was partially conceived as advertisement for the shop. Stu's shop was a neat little place to hang out, for short spurts of time. It was on the north side of W. Read Street, and a little ways east of Tyson Street. Read and Tyson were neat little side streets, in a very hip neighborhood, with Read Street having various little commercial establishments, and Tyson Street being somewhat famous for it's colorful, pastel fronted, tiny row homes.

Above is the first flier, the very first advertisement for the first "head shop" in Baltimore -- The Psychedelic Propeller. Now the question is: did the shop's owner -- Stew -- misspell propeller, with an o instead of e at the end, did Stew misspell it on purpose? I can't remember any talk of it being done on purpose, and guess I'll never know.

The Bluesette Teen Nightclub

The absolute very coolest under-18 teenage place that the Psychedelic Propeller Band ever played was in our absolute most favorite place to be in Baltimore on a Friday or Saturday night--The Bluesette teen nightclub at 2439 N. Charles Street.

It was owned and operated by husband and wife Art and Sharon Peyton. Sharon handled the behind the scenes work and administration to run the club and a booking agency for local bands, and Art was always in the club or working with his bands. Not only was Sharon's way of doing business modeled after her hero, the greatest Rock n' Roll impresario of all time, Bill Graham, I thought that Art actually looked a little like Bill. I have no knowledge of Art's life before the Bluesette, or what he got into after the Bluesette closed. I don't even remember when or why it closed. And nothing pops up on the Internet about either the man or his club.

The club was in a section of row houses that were being used as places of business. You entered the Bluesette through a basement door that was at the front of the converted row house, near the sidewalk. Just inside the door, you showed your Bluesette club card to a smiling and sincerely friendly young person and paid them a small entry fee.

Then, as you walked towards the staircase to the first floor, there was a tiny room off to the right. Band equipment was often waiting there to be carried upstairs to the stage. In the back wall of that very tiny room was the door to the club's only restroom.

When you were walking upstairs, all of the walls from there on up and around were all painted flat black.

At the top of the stairs, on the first floor of the building, was a very small bar, with five or six stools in front of it. They may have served near-beer there, I know I had heard that they did, when I was first told about the place. I am sure I asked for some, as soon as I got up to the bar my first time in the club. But I only remember buying sodas. And nobody was into sneaking any booze in.

The bar was where the kitchen had been. Then the inner walls that had separated the kitchen from the tiny dining room from the little living room from the small front first floor entrance hallway were all stripped down to the 2 x 4 studs. That way it was nice and open and you could watch the band playing from anywhere inside that first floor. The studs were also great for leaning against while talking to other kids who were sitting in typical old wooden nightclub style chairs, at typical small round nightclub tables.

There was a stage at the front of the living room. It was built up about a foot and a half. The drummer set up his drum kit so that his drum throne was sat at the edge of the windowsill for a large, bowed out bay window. That way, the drummer's back was nearly up against the plywood sheeting covered, large square windowpanes. He could sit on his throne and play with plenty of elbowroom, while swinging his body sideways back and forth, while kickin' and poundin' out some driving rhythms.

The main band that played on the Bluesette's stage was The Urch Perch. Art Peyton was their financial backer; he bought them some of their band equipment and also paid for an Urch Perch trip to New York City, where the band cut a demo, 45 RPM record. But I was not very impressed by them. I didn't care much for their playing or their personalities. I felt, and still feel, that The Psychedelic Propeller were a better band, with at least a little more musical talent then the guys in Urch Perch possessed. I based that on watching the bands play and very carefully watching for musical mistakes--lost or loused up lyrics, lead guitar riffs, bass runs, drum rhythms etc.. I, intimately, knew a lot of the music that they all played; from often listening to the original songs, which were in my ever expanding record album collection.

There was a small dance floor in front of the Bluesette's stage. From an audience member's point of view, who was sitting at a table in the rear of the club--where the back wall of former dining room was: the dance floor was delineated on the front side by the stage; the left side by the wall between the club and whatever business was in the former row house next door; the rear of the dance floor ended in front of the tables and chairs that sat in the former dining room and up into the back edge of the former living room; the right side of the dance floor was determined by the flat black painted 2x4 studs where the front entrance hall wall had stood and also by a few tables and chairs that were sort of stuffed into where the living room entrance from the front hallway had been.

The Bluesette had the very first strobe light I ever knew about. And it worked real well with those flat black walls and ceilings. You could get to dancin' or jumpin' and runnin' around when that flashing strobe light was on and you truly appeared, and darn near felt like, you were moving in slow motion.

Art also had the first psychedelic light show most of us kids there had ever seen. It was just an old 35MM movie projector. But he had somehow gotten some psychedelic colors-in-crazy-motion kinda' films from out in Frisco; he projected them onto the front of the band and the top torsos and heads of the dancers. He also used old black and white movies to some very good effect in his light shows.

There was never one bit of trouble at the Bluesette. No fights, no kids coming in too drunk; they may have come in a little drunk, but it never showed much. There wasn't much pot or hash in Baltimore yet, so there was never more than a few nickels of weed or hash in the place at anytime. As far as I know, very few pills to get high on and no hard drugs were ever around in the Bluesette. You never saw anyone whacked out, just a talkative kid now and then who was speeding off one of their mama's diet pills. A joint or small bowl of weed was known to have been shared down in the bathroom a couple of times. You could tell by their sly little grins when they came strolling back upstairs.

Hanging Out With The Mods In Downtown Baltimore

On some afternoons, a core group of us teens who went to the Bluesette were Mod kids who hung out together in downtown Baltimore. Some of those Mods had quit school, so they hung out in downtown Baltimore during the weekdays. But for me, during high school times, hanging out downtown only happened on Saturday afternoons and school vacation days. Nothing much happened down there on Sundays back then. But on Saturdays and some summer weekdays downtown Baltimore was a neat place to be.

The main place where we walked around and sometimes shopped was on Howard Street and in the several city blocks in any direction from Howard St. that was known as the Howard St. corridor. On Howard St., there were several of those old style, five or six story tall, name brand department stores, like the Hecht Company, but I can't remember any other names right now. They all had those elevator operators who announced every sales department on every floor.

It was the crowded sidewalks of Howard Street that made it such an attractive, lively, and safe place for us Mods to be.

Like I said earlier on this page, in 1966-68 Baltimore, Hippie hadn't arrived yet. No one I knew in those days ever called themselves Hippies. Anyone, which was almost everyone, in the Greater Baltimore Metropolitan Area who didn't like long hairs or our clothing styles didn't ever call any of us any kind of a dirty Hippie bum. Baltimore was two years behind the West Coast in all that stuff back then. In and around Baltimore, any males wearing bell bottoms, hiphuggers, flowered shirts, love beads, etc., or long hair, were subject to threatening hassles at any time. Longhaired, or just Mod clothes wearing, males were called weirdos, odd balls, and "What're you's queers?".

Any longhaired and/or Mod clothes wearing man who was old enough to drink in a bar, tavern, or club would have never lasted long in almost any 1968 era Baltimore booze joint, before he was punched out. The Psychedelic Propeller Band played in Judge's Bar, but none of the band members would have ever been so naive as to go there when they were not being paid to and were being protected by the bar owner and employees.

In those long gone days, job opportunities for fully capable longhaired males were nearly zilch. No department store or any other shop in the Howard St. corridor would hire a longhaired male back then. Nor would most other local places of business or industry.

The thick, busily flowing crowds on the sidewalks of the very popular Howard St. corridor offered us Mods natural protection from being singled out and hassled. Just like a small group of one kind of fish moving around in the ocean while snugly mixed in with a school of a different kind of fish. So that predator fish, like sharks or shitheads, can't easily dart in through all those other fish to attack the small, different looking group in amongst the steadily moving crowd.

General Music Store

Down around the corner from Howard St., on Baltimore St., across from the Civic Center, the 1st Mariner Arena now, was the most fantastic recorded music store I have ever known of--General Music. Though the name sounds generic, that store was anything but, generic. The name General was equal to the store's rank amongst all recorded music stores there ever was. That place was so jam packed full of entire walls of record albums, floor to ceiling, and crowded racks of records covering most of the floor space, all of it neatly cataloged and displayed, that it's a wonder the place didn't sink into the ground from all that weight.

I believe that the salesmen in there were mostly Jazz, Folk or Classical Music aficionados. Those ready, willing and able salesmen there could find any rare record they had in stock in a jiffy.

Not only did they stock Baltimore's best selection of Jazz, Classical and American Folk Music, the store must have had about the most diverse world music, folk and popular albums from around the world, that there ever was. I heard customers make some very weird requests in there. And by-yimminy a salesmen would roll a shelf stocker's ladder over to a wall rack, climb up and retrieve that "Popular Folk Songs Of Lower Slobavovia Played By Left Handed Angry Gypsies" album, or whatever the request was for.

General Music did get in some new Rock n' Roll albums before any other music store around did, and their Rock n' Roll shelves were very nicely stocked. But it was rare old Blues albums that my musician friends were mostly looking for in there. I had close friends in two of the best teen Rock bands in the Baltimore music scene. They wanted old Blues songs to listen to, learn from and maybe turn into newer sounding Rock songs.

I have been a Blues fan since I was about 14. It started out with the "British Invasion" white guy's versions of the Blues. Then I bought the Best of Muddy Waters album, when I was 16, at the advice of a published interview with Mick Jagger. A lot of the early Rolling Stones' recordings are Rocked out Blues tunes. I've always liked some original Blues music. I first began to seriously buy and listen to a few original Blues albums when I was in the Army. But it wasn't till about 20 years ago that I began to seriously collect and listen to a whole lotta' old and new Blues albums. Nowadays I listen to newer, digitally recorded, and older, digitally remastered, Blues by the bushel full.

Ted's Music Shop

During the '60s, Baltimore had one of the most fantastic musical instrument shops there ever was, Ted's Music Shop. It is still in business, but I just found this:

Blogger1947 posted this on Sunday, 19 March 2006:

"I had occasion to stroll the blocks south of Mount Vernon place recently, and it's not Don Swann's old neighborhood any more. Ted's Music Shop is but a shell of its former glory. You can actually see through the show window to the back of the shop."

Blogger1947 obviously also remembers Ted's from a few decades ago. Because back then, Ted's was absolutely packed with musical instruments and many were from all around the world.

The shop is in the same neighborhood as the world famous Peabody Institute. If you do not know about the Peabody, here is a quote from their web site:

"The Peabody Institute has a preeminent faculty, a nurturing, collaborative learning environment, and the academic resources of one of the nation's leading universities, Johns Hopkins."

Only the most talented and well financed students of classical and Jazz music attend the Peabody. Ted's was well stocked to serve that prestigious community of students, instructors, and visiting professional musicians. Not only was Ted's well stocked with the finest of instruments that are normally played by classical or Jazz musicians, but the shop was very well stocked with quite rare and beautiful musical instruments that most of the average students, instructors, or visiting pros at Peabody had never even seen any photographs, drawings or paintings of before they walked into Ted's and saw the real thing for the very first time.

But my friends and I went to Ted's for the Rock n' Roll gear that he also stocked to similar grand proportions. The only thing I ever bought at Ted's was a harmonica. My visits there were with band members from the Psychedelic Propeller and also 1966-68 Dundalk's best Rock n' Roll Rolling Stones music based band, the Rysing Suns. I knew all the guys in that band from long before they formed the band. The lead singer, Dave Collins, had lived down the street from me since he was 13, and was one of my best friends. So between the two bands, I got to go into Ted's and watch his wonderful salesmanship in action a bunch of times.

My take on Ted was that when one of my buddies asked Ted for the price of an instrument or amp, Ted would always give the lowest price he could afford to. You know how it is when you are comfortably standing off to the side of two people doing business, and you can easily hear all they say, while watching the facial expressions and body language of both parties in the deal? It always appeared to me that Ted would stop speaking to my friend for a moment, while Ted gently rubbed or halfway squeezed the skin of his own chin. Ted always appeared to take a quick glance down at the floor in front of him while doing a clandestine scan of how my friend's pants and shoes looked. Then based on the fact that we teens were all dressed casual, not tatty or dirty, but not expensively, Ted would offer the guy a truly fair price for what they both might be able to afford to handle dealing with. I may have been, and may still be, wrong about this, but I have always believed that Ted gave certain, special discounts to young, struggling musicians. It always appeared to me that Ted was going to do what he could to help a struggling young musician do well in their, hopeful, music career.

All any of the musicians in Ted's had to do was to mention something they were interested in, and Ted went looking for it. I can remember a young musician or two simply admiring and then complimenting Ted on some very strange, beautifully constructed wooden stringed instrument. A rare collector's piece that had originally come from somewhere like a mountain village in the Himalayas. The next thing you know, Ted is reaching for it to allow the guy handle it and strum its extremely difficult to replace strings. The young musician would simply be flabbergasted by Ted's kindness and respect for the kid.

We all respected and admired that man.

Ted had instruments displayed and stored all throughout his building and hung all over the insides of it. You didn't have to be a musician to be attracted to the internationally known appeal of that shop. It was so visually exciting to see so many old and new instruments in very good to mint condition. Ted surrounded himself with rooms packed full of some of the finest quality musical instruments, parts, accessories, and necessary gear on earth. It was simply a stunning place to be. And Ted never seemed to loose track of where anything was displayed or stored.

Ted was an all-round fine and humble human being. I never witnessed or heard of anyone not being satisfied with a purchase at Ted's.

One thing I never thought of back then was: what world famous musicians had shopped in Ted's, or had just hung out there, while enjoying Ted's company and maybe trying out some of his rare, imported instruments? I know he had some autographed photos of famous musicians around. He must have had a solid world wide reputation amongst all card carrying Musician's Union members as the man to visit in Baltimore, when you're in town to play a concert, visiting, vacationing, or just passing through.

From Ted's front door you can see all of Baltimore's Washington Monument and some of the four, small beautiful parks surrounding it. I am a man who has always been into photography, to some degree, and I now realize that Ted's was the perfect bait for drawing famous musicians into where I could casually, quite possibly convince them to stroll on over into the parks for some informal portraiture. Between the parks, the monument and the magnificent architecture of the old buildings in that whole neighborhood, there is a fantastic choice of backgrounds for informal portraits.

And I have known all the little side streets and alleys and how to get from Ted's to, let's say, some very nice little eatery, ever since I was a Mod kid spending numerous afternoons walking around up there for hours and exploring it all. I'd not only be the musician's, and any of their traveling companions', portrait photographer for a little while, I'd be their city guide.

It's that old saying in its most appropriate usage, "If only I had known then, what I know now."

Sherman's Book Store

At the corner of Park Avenue and Mulberry Street, about a ten minute, easy, stroll from Ted's, was Sherman's Book Store. That was a true Baltimorean's place to shop.

Abe Sherman owned and ran that bookstore, and, when I first went into his store, Mr. Sherman was well over 60 years old. In fact, he was the oldest man in Baltimore to be accepted into the U.S. Army during World War Two. I think Abe was in his early 40s in 1942. He may be Abe to me now, but I wouldn't have dared address him as anything but Mr. Sherman back then.

Abe was the first in Baltimore to sell posters of Rock n' Roll bands. I bought Rock n' Roll record albums once or twice a month, during every month that I was in high school. I knew when all of the latest stuff came out in local record stores and in the record departments of large department stores. That includes General Music on Baltimore St., Modern Music in Eastpoint Mall, and a very nice and slightly 'ahead of the pack' record store in one of the wealthiest sections of Baltimore, on Cold Spring Lane. Sherman's had the very first Rock n' Roll posters sold in Baltimore. I bought my first poster there. It was a black and white photo of the Rolling Stones, which sold for a-buck-fifty. And that was the first time I was ever in Sherman's. For years after that, I shopped there just about anytime I was in that part of town.

As I was paying for that first poster, I looked over Abe's shoulder, and there behind him were the very first buttons I had ever seen that had Hippie style sayings on them: "Make Love Not War"; "Draft Beer Not Students"; and the famous peace sign. I was standing there in Sherman's with two friends. We gleefully read the sayings on all those buttons, then I purchased several buttons along with that huge photo of the Rolling Stones. It all, absolutely, blew our young minds. We were awe-struck and mighty thrilled by that experience. Baltimore was becoming a brave new world to us.

I searched on the web for Abe Sherman, and I found this, from a guy who had moved to Baltimore and begun working for Abe Sherman in 1979. Tom Chalkley wrote:

"The strangest thing about Sherman's was its collection of faded black-light posters and other leftovers from the psychedelic era. It seems the neighborhood was full of head shops once, but Abe had no use for hippies until his son pointed out that the freaks were pumping millions of dollars into the economy. So Abe--a crusty, cynical septuagenarian--began to stock incense, New Age literature, and huge images of Jimi Hendrix and the Who."

But that's just his guess on how it began. The text says, "It seems the neighborhood was full of head shops once, but Abe had no use for hippies until his son..." But Abe actually started it all in his neighborhood. Before any other head shops or any Hippies were around there. He was into it before the Psychedelic Propeller Head Shop opened. I was in the Propeller the first week it opened. That fresh, new kind of a shop was big news to my friends and I. Also, when Abe started selling posters, the Jimi Hendrix Experience did not even exist yet. I was there and heavily into it when it all began in and around Baltimore. And "you can take that to the bank", as they say.

But it was really neat for me to read Tom's article and finally find out how Abe got the idea to sell that stuff. Because ever since that first purchase in Sherman's Book Store, I have often wondered about that and have commented to other people about it. That part of the Tom's story would be true. It's just that Ted's son had to have been talking about what was happening, mostly, out on the West Coast and in New York City, but Ted's son had to have known that trends like that spread across America. I'm going to try and contact Tom. He seems like a nice person, he just didn't actually live the history he was surmising about.

Abe Sherman was a tough and scary man, until he got to know ya'. But he always watched every move every customer made, in his store. He would stand right behind you, while you looked at magazines or books, with his arms folded over his chest and a thoroughly unfriendly look on his face. He admonished any customer who did not put a book or magazine back exactly where they had picked it up from. And you had to perfectly and evenly straighten up any pile of magazines or books that you took one from.

But when he got to know that you were serious about buying any of his avant-garde, or other, types of publications, posters, or Hippie pins, he was one neat old dude. He found out what you liked and showed you where there was more of the same kind, or something similar. Sometimes, he would guide me over across the store to show me a section of publications I had never read anything like before. I believe he honestly thought I might like them. I rarely purchased any of his suggested books or magazines, but he never became gruff or cross about it. And he turned me onto one or two items that I was very excited to learn about.

Still though, like I said, Abe was a tough and scary old guy; a Jewish man who had joined the U.S. Army at about age 40, to go try to kill that screamin' German demon, Adol'f Gitler (SHikl'gruber).

Here's something from D. Borsella on Baltimore Timeline:

"Abe Sherman was a known Baltimore character who ran the bookstore at the SW corner of Mulberry and Park Avenue. You went to Sherman's if you fancied being insulted. After 3 seconds: “Are you buying or reading! If you wanna read, go over to the library."

Susan Fradkin of City Paper Online wrote:

Abe Sherman terrified generations of book buyers at his newsstand (he yelled at me once for standing too close to the magazines).

Long time Baltimore newspaper columnist Michael Olesker wrote:

You know you’re a Baltimorean if you ever lasted 15 minutes without Abe Sherman throwing you out of his bookstore.

One time, my two friends and I, who had gone into Sherman's together for the first time, were in the store looking at new posters, when Mr. Sherman said, "You like that poster? You guys wanna see some better ones? C'mere."

So Mr. Sherman leads us over to an open basement doorway, and he walks down the basement steps. We had walked, about eight feet behind him, over towards the basement doorway, but had stopped and were patiently waiting a little ways back from the open doorway; we were expecting Mr. Sherman to bring the posters up to us. Now, we had never worked in any stores; we had never been down in any retail storage areas like a basement--where customers are traditionaly forbiden to enter. Had it been any other store, we may have reacted the same way and would have stood there not daring to enter the basement. We were always fairly reserved, when shopping in Sherman's, and completely respectful to Mr. Sherman, so we did not dare at all to enter his basement storage area. But Mr. Sherman takes a few steps back up towards us, smiles warmly, motions with his hand for us to walk towards him, and says," C'mon down here."

We replied, more or less stammering in unison, "Wawawhat? UhUs? You mumumean we can go down there? You'll let us go down there!"

We then proudly crossed a boundary line that we never thought anyone but Mr. Sherman could cross and live to tell about. It really made us feel good about ourselves. Mr. Sherman had recognized us as being true citizens of the brave new young world we liked living in.

Abe Sherman sold the latest, hippest, premium Rock n' Roll magazines and other solid quality items that go with a Rock n' Roll album music collector's lifestyle. And a goodly number of my friends and I purchased as much of it as we could possibly afford.

Beatnik Encounters

Here's something else from D. Borsella on Baltimore Timeline. He or she talks about Sherman's Book Store, but first he or she says something about the block where the Psychedelic Propeller Head Shop had been located:

"Remember beatniks? In the 1960's they had not quite made the transition to hippies. Baltimore's beat street was Tyson Street, Read and Tyson..."

He goes onto tell other info about Baltimore Beatniks I never knew. But it was the Beatniks and Mod types who became Baltimore's first Hippies. I saw Beatniks a couple of times.

The first time it was when I spotted a guy and gal Beatnik sitting in a booth in a downtown Baltimore sandwich shop. They were having a wicked bad argument. My two Sherman's Book Store shopping friends and I were on a bus heading towards Howard St.. As the bus waited at a red light, I saw the two Beats in the sandwich shop, and I excitedly pointed them out to my two buddies. But then, I was totally shocked to see two Beatniks screaming at each other like a pair of Tasmanian Devils. I thought they were all into peace and staying cool, man, cool.

The second time, the last time I ever spotted any Beatniks, was one Saturday night after the Psychedelic Propeller Band had played a show at the Bluesette teen nightclub. The club closed by 12 PM, and it took us an hour or so to load the band's equipment into their old hearse.

From 2-5 AM, the Bluesette turned into the Blues Back Alley after hours Jazz club. We teen clubbers were well aware that Beatnik types frequented that after hours club. We were also well aware that the older, Jazz style hipsters did not want to mix in with us younger, Rock n' Roll style hipsters. Because to the older crew, we weren't so very damned hip at all. So, if we had still been in the club when they came in, we would have been a little shy about talking to them. We knew they didn't want to talk to us. They were like the big league pros, and we were young beginners at being hip and cool. Due to the probable possibilities of what would happen if any Beatniks met any Mod kids face to face, wherein the Beats get mighty well miffed at being spoken to by mere, non-Beatnik, teenagers, the club's owner, Art Peyton, always wanted us kids out before the Beats began arriving at around midnight.

That night when I saw Beatniks for the second and final time, Aussie the drummer had driven his mother's Cordova Brown, '64, Chevy Impala up to the Bluesette. And I was riding "shotgun", in the Chevy. We met Dale, Denny, and Chris at the club, then helped them to unloaded the band's equipment from the hearse and take it into the club, through the backdoor.

On that Beatnik spotting Saturday night, after the Psychedelic Propeller finished playing for the teen crowd at the Bluesette, we packed the band's equipment back into the hearse. Dale and Denny drove home in the hearse, to their new bachelor apartment--I mean bachelor pad, they drove the hearse to their cool pad.

By that time, it was just about midnight. The time when the teen nightclub turned into a very hip Jazz club.

That was right when Aussie, Chris the bass player, and I had gotten into the Chevy Impala. It was parked with its front end up close to the rear wall of a building that was just a few doors down and across the alley from the backdoor of the Bluesette. Aussie eased his mother's Chevy backwards out of the parking place. It took some tight, tense, very careful maneuvering, between other parked cars and some old, rusted, metal backyard fences on both sides of the skinny little alley back there behind the club. Aussie got 'er out of there without scratching any of the pretty, Cordova Brown paint on the Impala. Then he put the car into drive, and we went forwards, motoring, very slowly, up that skinny little alley.

All of a sudden, we spotted two, outright, hardcore, mustached and goateed male Beatniks walking up the club's back steps. Steps that, ten minutes earlier, we had been using ourselves while hauling out heavy amps and all.

Aussie, Chris, and I had been paying very close attention to the young, barely experienced, teenage driver's difficult task of getting the Chevy out of that tight parking spot. Aussie had needed Chris' and my extra two pairs of eyes to see how close his mother's car was to everything that was all tightly in around the car back there. Consequently, none of us had noticed the two Beatnik Jazz musicians who had walked up the alley and were now walking up the back steps of the Bluesette/Blues After Hours Jazz Club, and onto the back porch.

One Beatnik was carrying a big fat, stand-up bass in its case, and the other Beat carried a guitar in its case. Chris spotted them first, from the back seat, and he thought that Beatniks were really cool; we all three did. So Chris rolls down his window real quick, dives about halfway out the rear side window, he's got his left arm extended all they way out and his finger pointing at the Beats. He practically screams, "LOOK AT THAT!"

I'm up front in the passenger seat, the club is on Aussie's side, and I tell Aussie, in a loud voice," "Whoa man! Stop! Look at that!"

When I was in elementary school, kids dressed up as Beatniks for Halloween, and one time I had too, daddy-o. I used my mother's eyebrow pencil to make a mustache and goatee on my face.

Beatniks were unseen legends to us. Nobody saw Beatniks in any Baltimore suburbs.

Aussie stopped the car and rolled his window down. We were going to say something benignly friendly to them, like, "Hey, what's up? We just left the club. Our band played there tonight. You guys are Jazz musicians, right? That's cool. All right man. Far out. Catch ya later."

Unfortunately, for all of us, we never got past loudly saying, "Look at that!" Because we Mod kids were happily flippin' out and almost yelling, in a friendly, laughing way, at those two Beats, and that friggin-aye-freaked them two Beatniks right out.

The Beatnik holding that big heavy bass hears us and turns around real fast and fearfully glares at us--with a look of sheer terror on his face and all in his body language. Then he grabs the other Beatnik by his shoulder and yanks him part way around backwards, whilst fearfully and frantically pointing at us. The guitar carrying Beat in front quickly moved up to the backdoor and began trying to stick a key to the backdoor into the backdoor's lock. He's bent slightly forward under the rear porch light trying to keep his shadow off the keyhole, so he can see where the key goes in. At that point in time, the bottom of his guitar case was resting on the floor of the porch.

Those old Baltimore City row homes have very tiny backyards, so we were very close to them and could see them very clearly from the alley at the end of that tiny, short backyard behind the club.

They must have thought we were some inner city toughs who were gonna' get out and go beat their asses good. They were terrified, and I mean truly terrified. Those cats obviously rarely ever went out into the sunshine very often. Their pale faces showed shear, white faced fear, under the bright, bare light bulb that hung down from a battered, sloppily hanging back porch light socket.

The Beat in front starts frantically yanking and shoving on that back door, while furiously fumbling with the key in the keyhole. Finally, the door pops wide open, and the Beat in the back, with the bass, starts shoving his guitar carrying buddy through the door, really hard; while the Beat in front's trying to grab a good hold onto his guitar case, but was tripping over it; then the Beat in the rear scrambles--his feet were quickly moving up and down like has was running through the alley, to get away from us kids in the Chevy, instead of standing there on the porch feeling trapped by us--he scrambles forward, while jamming that big, heavy, awkward, stand-up bass case right in up against his buddy's back; he pushed the bass case hard up against his buddy's back and was pushing his buddy in to 'safety'. They practically fell forward into the club, then slammed the backdoor closed tight and locked it loudly, behind them.

The scene looked like when a war weary soldier was protecting his longtime, combat buddy from a hand grenade that had just been tossed over onto the porch behind them.

We felt kind of bad and a little bit embarrassed by what we had accidentally done. We did not intend to shake them up like that.

Beatniks lived in a culture we had some things in common with. Beat literature and poetry was read by many teens in the 1950s and '60s. Not by me, but some of the Psychedelic Propeller members had probably gotten into reading some Beat writings. Beatniks' music was considered to be very advanced and exploratory Jazz. It is very difficult to play. We were no Jazz fans, but we knew how hard it was to play well and how important Jazz was as an intelligent influence on Rock n' Roll. Beatniks were against the War in Vietnam. And we three young men in that Chevy knew that any one of us might some day be drafted into the Army and sent to Nam.

Here is Dan Akroyd on how he came up with the Blues Brother's world famous stage and movie wardrobe:

"I showed him (John Belushi) this album cover, John Lee Hooker, and there was John Lee Hooker and he had the hat and the shades on. And I said this is the look. I said if we ever put this together (the Blues Brothers), this 'id be the look. The suits and the ties came from the Beatnik era. In the '50s and '60s Beatniks, and Beat poets, and musicians, Bop, Be Bop and Jazz musicians would wear straight apparel so that they could go out into straight society and not be hassled..."

Those two Beatniks, that Chris, Aussie and I scared the be-bop-be-jeezums out of, were wearing a style of cheap, dark overcoats and hats that a 1960s low wage earner would wear to church on a rainy Sunday--very nondescript and fashionably forgettable. But the way they had shaped their hats, we all shape our hats to fit our own individual personalities, the musical instruments they were carrying, but mostly the fact that they were wearing '60s hipster style goatees just screamed, "WE'RE BEATNIKS!"

Even if we hadn't known to expect seeing Beatniks going into the Blues Back Alley Jazz Club, we three teenagers still would have known they were Beatniks.

Hardly any other men in or around Baltimore but a Beatnik would have had their facial hair grown out and artistically trimmed like the two Beatniks that we saw had theirs grown and trimmed. Not at the end of the age of the clean cut American Male. Unless you were Amish, you'd almost never see a man with any shape of a beard in the congregation of any American church, when I saw two of the last of Baltimore's Beatniks.

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

ursusdave
dundalk
beatniks
bluesette
baltimore
rock and roll
photography
patten maine
teds music shop
creative writing
dundalk maryland
shermans book store
David Robert Crews

Beautify America—Get A Haircut

2008-03-30T13:43:00.000-07:00

This photo was taken just before I went and got a haircut. I had to get a haircut in order to be able to live and work at my Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley K. Clarke's Katahdin Lodge, of Patten, Maine. The photo was taken in the backyard of the home where I grew up, on Dunmanway, in Dundalk, Maryland, during the first few days of January 1969. I had been in Maine from mid November 1968, until a few days before Christmas. Then I came home to my parents' house for the Christmas and New Years holiday.

When I was in Maine, during November and December of '68, I kept my, slightly, long hair combed back behind my ears, or tucked up under my hat, so that it was not too obviously so long. It had to be hidden, as best I could, until I made the decision on whether to live and work at the Lodge, or go back to living near Baltimore, where I was free to grow my hair longer. I hadn't quite yet been fully committed to going back up to the Lodge, until the January day I got that haircut. There was no way I could live up there with such awfully long hair--as you see it is in the photo.

Yeah? Well it was too awfully long for Northern Maine at the time.

Not only would my Uncle Finley and Aunt Martha never allow it, there was no chance for me to date any girls up there, while I was wearing my hair long. And, sooner or later, some clean cut country boy was gonna' start a fight with me.

Up there, back then, if one person from in or around the Town of Patten started a fight with someone who was "from the outside", then the whole town backed up their local troublemaker. Right or wrong, they stuck together.

I never had any problem understanding and accepting that. It was a difficult natural environment to live in, work in, and raise a family in. The families up there relied on each other for their mutual survival and well being. In that type of a social situation, absolute interfamily and interpersonal cohesion, surrounded by a thick wall of potential, instant exclusion of any outsiders, is a must for the best interests of the sparsely populated community.

Until about six months after my US Army discharge, in November 1971, that was the longest my hair had ever been. In 1972, I eventually grew my hair down to my shoulders. I would have grown it down to my shoulders before I went into the Army, but I had chosen to live and work hard at Katahdin Lodge, where longhaired males were not allowed. In 1968-69, I had grown to love being up in the woods, and spending time with the finest kind of northern Maine folks, a whole lot better than having long hair.

In 1969, in the southern Aroostook County/northern Penobscot County area of the Great North Woods of Maine, longhaired men were not very much welcomed at all. I only saw three longhaired men at Katahdin Lodge one time. They were there for less than an hour, while doing emergency repairs on their car, with the Lodge's tools. My Aunt Martha, Uncle Finley, and the native Mainers who worked for them at the Lodge did not like those longhairs being there at all. One time, while driving a Katahdin Lodge truck, I picked up a friendly, happy longhaired guy who was hitchhiking from Nova Scotia down past Houlton, Maine. During most of 1969, I traveled all over that Aroostook-Penobscot area of Northern Maine. Those four were the only longhaired men I saw during that entire year I lived up in Maine.

I picked that longhaired hitchhiker up on the northerly most stretch of Interstate 95; then dropped him off, when I turned off, at the I-95 Smyrna exit. There was no way I would ever mention anything to anyone at Katahdin Lodge about helping that fellow hitchhiker, unless I left out the fact that he had long hair. Picking up safe looking hitchhikers, while driving a Katahdin lodge vehicle, was A.O.K., but not longhaired male ones. Uncle Fin and Aunt Marty preferred that I left any hitchhiking longhairs to rot on the side of the road. In the summer of '68, after a plane ride from Baltimore to Bangor, I had hitchhiked from Bangor up to Katahdin Lodge. My hitchhiking, was also A.O.K.with Fin and Marty. But my aunt and uncle'd be p.o.'d if they ever knew that I had gotten into a vehicle with any longhairs.

My best hitchhiked ride, from the Bangor Airport to the Lodge, had been with a slightly longhaired, traveling male computer technician. He was driving a brand new, baby blue, Pontiac GTO convertible. He advised me to get into computer training. He said that he was one of the few computer techs in the nation, and he was well paid to travel around the United States fixing computers. Not only that, he added with a great big grin on his face, when he arrived at a town where his next job was, the first thing he did was to go to the office where the broken computer was located, and introduce himself there. And in there was always a whole office full of women, a few of whom were always single and ready to mingle. He never had any problems finding a girl to go out on a date with him in any new town his job took him to. I liked the sound of that fringe benefit. And the good money and plenty of paid traveling expenses aspects too, of course. But, like I told him, computer work is an indoor job, and I have never been interested in only working indoors.

I did a lot of hitchhiking in my younger days. And Maine was the best place to hitchhike that I ever knew of. Jeeze I'd love to be able stick my thumb out for one more, safe, wonderful, travelin' time. Unfortunately, it ain't safe no mo'.

In 1969, longhaired men were freely roaming all over various places in America.

But not: in a lot of small towns; or most of the southern states; the wide open country of large western states; midwest farm communities; many mid-Atlantic communities; or in many parts of northeastern states either.

That didn't leave much but a lot of California and some of New York City. Look at the average length of men's hair in the August 1969 Woodstock Music Festival movie. Not many of those Hippie type music fans had really long hair. In 1969, there were longhaired guys living in many American communities. But roaming freely in their hometowns was not something they could always do without risk of some kind of a potentially serious problem from somebody who didn't like longhaired men.

During the late 1960s, there were infamous billboards put up with "Beautify America, get a haircut" plastered all over them.

21st Century Sensibilities

Now, in the 21st Century, whenever I am in a public place, and there are some nice, healthy, happy, friendly groups of various peoples enjoying each other's company, I often receive a fleeting flashback to the 1960s times; when people put far too much emphasis on how your hair, clothing, and jewelry may have differed from theirs.

Today, I absolutely love seeing all of our 21st Century social mixes of longhaired, no haired, purple haired, spike haired, green and orange polka dotted haired, and every kind of different cut haired friends and acquaintances getting along so well together.

I sure am glad that people today can pretty well do what they want with their hair and be accepted by, and/or hired to work for, other individuals or groups of individuals who choose totally different hair styles.

I feel mighty fine about seeing any tattooed or no tattooed, body piercing-ed or not piercing-ed folks comfortably walking or sitting down relaxing together in a public place, like Baltimore's Inner Harbor or Fells Point.

I truly appreciate seeing any employees of the businesses in those public places freely expressing themselves, and/or just being their natural selves, by the way they wear their hair, dress their own personal bodies, pierce their own personal bodies, etc., because enjoying your own God given personal freedoms ROCKS!!

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

A Guide To My Short Stories About Living In Northern Maine

2008-03-30T13:36:00.000-07:00

Here is a guide to my short stories about being a Maine bear hunting guide and country girl's delight, up in Patten, Maine at Katahdin Lodge and Camps. I will provide links to each of these stories, where they are published on a Maine web site. Some stories are on several web sites.

Just keep in mind that I need a little bit of professional editing help. I also need to do some other 'sprucing up' of the stories, in order for me to be completely satisfied with these written works.

But the stories sure are interesting, entertaining, a tad bit educational, they contain some cool history and are (according to thousands of readers so far) easy and enjoyable to read.

I hope that you enjoy reading one or all of them.

The House Fire is a nice, but scary one (it scared me when it happened, that's for certain). This story is good reading for gentle and not so gentle folks of all ages.

The Day I Fell In Love With Patten Maine ain't nuthin' like you will expect, and it could be a mind blower. It's a real, small town, soap opera scene and a teenagers' thrill a second experience.

An Italian Nice Guy is a good bear hunting story that is really a chipmunk story. It is actually good for kids to read. No bears are even shot at in it. It is fictionalized a bit, but mostly true. I expanded on what I knew about Tony and his family, but they had to be real nice people.

Here also are copies of emails exchanged between myself and the Italian Nice Guy's family, confirming that I wrote his story well.

The Rocket Scientist is a crazy trip about a genuine Washington, DC Rocket Scientist. It is about one of a hunting guide's worst fears and dangers.

Jungle Dirt is something which stands on its own. It was my first attempt at fictionalizing a true story. It is about a Vietnam Veteran's experience, when he went bear hunting in Maine just three days after coming home from fighting hard for a full year 'Nam. It is a good story for all of us Vietnam Era Veterans and others who care about us, and how we were treated in America during and after the Vietnam War. Just about the only fictional parts have to do with the me making some descriptive guesses about the Nam Vet's mother and a small amount was expanded on to the guy's stepfather's description. Boss Hog on the Dukes of Hazard did look exactly like that friggin' jackass of a stepfather though.

Easiest Way To Carry A Dead Bear or My Uncle Finley Couldn't Handle It is a nutty piece, but it does give a darn good hunting tip. It gets right loony, ain't no doubt about it.

Bananastien is about young adults testing the limits in 1969 Patten, ME. Part of it gets real wild on those wild and woolly Maine country roads, when there is a true life high speed police chase.

Driving Northern Mainer Style is a basic "how to guide" on driving on those wild and woolly, climbin' and droppin', twisty and hard turning country and backwoods roads up there in Maine. And also how not to drive them roads. Within that written piece, there is also a story about how I nearly 'bought the farm' early one morning up on the Washburn Road, where it goes into the small city of Caribou, Maine. Ya' better tighten up y'ur seat belts for this one.

My VW Bug Trip To Maine has a hilarious bear hunting scene in it,. It's a hoot! And the rest of it is a wild, funny and very, very happy story. It was about a trip of mine back up to Maine, while I was on leave from the Army, just after I had graduated from US Army Photographic Laboratory Technician School, and before I was assigned to overseas duty on Okinawa. This story goes from Patten, ME down to Dundalk, MD and through a bunch of quite memorable experiences.

Then They Own You takes place in 1979, when I tried to work for my Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley Clarke in Maine one more time. This one comes down heavy (in a bad way), as the Hippies used to say.

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

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David Robert Crews