Our First family vacation
During World War II it was considered unpatriotic to take a vacation, not to mention that gasoline rationing made it almost impossible to travel more than a few miles from home.
During the summer of 1947 we experienced our first family vacation - a trip to Maine. Because it was to be a two-day road trip, we piled into Bernie’s 1941 Plymouth sedan early in the morning and headed north. Interstate highways did not exist then so we followed the main roads, which went through the center of every town and city along the route. Crossing the Delaware River meant loading the car on the New Castle/ Pennsville ferry . Going from New Jersey into New York City involved one of the tunnels under the Hudson River. All of this was part of the great adventure for Peter & me. We were camped out in the back seat and spent our time looking at all the new parts of the world that passed by. Howard Johnson’s Restaurants were Bernie & Edee’s first choice as eating stops, so that’s what we looked for as meal time approached. We spent our first night in a hotel and then early the next morning were on our way again. It was probably afternoon of the second day before we crossed the bridge onto Orr’s Island in Maine. Our destination was Royal Rest. This was not a hotel or resort, it was a house where the Houghton family prepared meals for their guests. Royal Rest was basically a house with most of the first floor devoted to the dining room, with a couple of guest bedrooms upstairs. We stayed in two rooms in the nearby home of Miss Wakeman. It was rather primitive, to put it politely, water pumped from a rainwater cistern in the basement, and heated on the wood stove for a bath. A two-hole outhouse of the back porch for other necessary functions. For each meal we would walk up to Royal Rest to our assigned table. Meals were served by Pauline, the Houghton’s daughter, who had graduated from the Fanny Farmer Cooking School in Boston. There was no menu and no choice of entrees. The meals just appeared in the serving window from the kitchen and word spread around the room about what was being served. To Peter & me it was all wonderful.
Our days were spent exploring this wonderful island with it’s rocky coastline. We spent a lot of hours just climbing on the rocks and hunting for sand dollars and starfish. Actually going into the water was a cool experience, no it was a very cold experience. Water in Maine is never less than cold.
Orr’s Island is connected to Bailey’s Island by a most unusual bridge made of cross-stacked stone blocks, with no mortar. The very far end of Bailey’s is known as, what else but, Land’s End. The only thing at Land’s End was a pier with a gift shop, which we liked to explore. It was from this pier that we could watch the private boats heading in every evening, because we were there during the annual Tuna Tournament. Our next stop would be the Bailey Island Mackerel Cove pier where the tuna were hauled off the boats, weighed; then the heads cut off and the tuna placed in a waiting truck to be rushed to markets. I thought tuna were small because in the store they came in small cans, but they weighed over a hundred pounds with the winner being the one that weighed in at several hundred.
Thanks to Bernie talking Mr. Stevens a local lobsterman into it, we got to go out in his lobster boat one afternoon as he made his rounds checking his lobster traps. We learned that each lobsterman had a personal color combination that they painted on the wooden marker connected to the end of a line of traps. He used this rope to pull up each trap, checking to see if any lobsters were caught inside. While he was making his rounds we came across a group of fishermen who were using their large net to bring in a huge catch of small fish, which they dumped into their small boats.
Trips into Brunswick were lots of fun with stores lining both sides of the town’s grassy mall. A book store with a large selection of magazines was a particular draw. Edee found some plastic cups in the 5 & 10 ¢ store which were marked ‘Tupperware’. ( that was before they started selling exclusively by home parties). The Brunswick department store had a system of containers where the salesclerk place paper money from a sale. The container traveled, by a system of ropes and pulleys, up to the ceiling, across the store, and into a cashier’s office. A couple minutes later it returned with your change. The world was full of wonderful things that two kids from Linthicum had never seen before.
A real treat was our trip to Portland on the steamboat, Aucosisco. We boarded from the Pier on Bailey’s Island for a voyage that took about an hour. When we arrived at Portland, there was a large restaurant on the pier where we had lunch, lobster rolls if I remember correctly. Soon it was time to retrace out route back to Bailey’s, with stops at several islands along the way. Bernie told us that this was the only way to get from Portland to Bailey’s when he made the trip each summer during his childhood. By the time that Edee & Bernie taught puppetry at T-Ledge Camp, on Orr’s Island, in the early 1930’s, the connecting bridges made auto travel to the islands possibly.
As our two-week vacation wound down, we loaded up the car and began the two-day road trip back to Linthicum.
In 1948 we made the vacation journey to Orr’s Island once again. That would be the last time that Peter took part in the trip, because the following summer he had a job at the shipyard on Key Highway in Baltimore.
