York Corner
This past Saturday was warm enough for T-shirts and shorts, but there was a nip in the air on Sunday when we arrived at York Beach at about noon, so we were surprised to find crowds on the streets and sidewalks there, and some folks even sunning on the sand.
Two strangers we ended up talking to then, one in the big parking lot and one at the upper edge of the beach, suggested that family may have the name of the game that day.
Robert Hickory, for example, from Vermont, was there with his wife, Linda, daughters Joy, Jennifer, and Jessica, and grandchildren Alexis, 6, Abigail 9 months, and Saige 10; plus some others whose names we never caught up with. They'd been shopping a bit and, when we caught up with them, were piling back into their cars to introduce one daughter's boyfriend to Nubble Light, so we appreciated Robert's lingering to tell us a bit about himself.
Both he and his wife were born and brought up near Rutland, he said, he in Bridgewater, and she in Mt. Holly, and he chuckled when he reported that, because, as he put it, "We're both from ski country and neither one of us skis."
Robert works as a tool designer at General Electric's Aircraft Division, we learned, and Linda works at a company called Hubbardton Forge, which makes hand-crafted lighting: chandelier, wall sconces, floor lamps, table lamps and the like.
Of his own job, Robert said only, laughing, "I sit at a computer, think up things and draw pictures of them," but he called his wife's place of business "pretty interesting."
Hubbardton does hand-forging, he explained, and regularly holds open-houses to demonstrate it. Linda's job there, he said, is to assemble all the parts for a given product and present them to somebody else to build. The company, Robert added, wholesales a lot of its products to L.L. Bean.
He and Linda met, he told us when we asked, because Robert worked with her father at G.E. But both had been married before, he said, and their current family represents a pooling of their children, six in all, from those first marriages: his two sons and her three daughters and one son.
Robert confessed, a little abashedly, that the family likes to stay in Wells because of "all the places to eat, and its quiet beach." But he was quick to add, "We can't come to Wells without coming to York at least once to see the shops."
Robert and Linda, he also reported, usually come to the shore alone for 10 or 11 days in July (and did so this year), traveling in their 37-foot fifth-wheeler and parking it at the Wells Beach Resort. (They also camp often at Lake George. One reason for the camper: "You meet a lot of friendly people in campgrounds.") But this weekend, because there were too many of them to fit in the camper, and because fall weather can be iffy, they'd checked into a motel, Lafayette's Oceanfront Resort.
They'd arrived on Friday and would be leaving on Monday.
Robert held up a bag containing three small boxes of Goldenrod Kisses. They were going back to Vermont, he said: one to his mother, one to his wife's mother and one to himself.
The other family we approached, the one on the beach, began laughing before we'd even spoken a word. Tipped off about our mission by our reporter's notebook, they explained that the person we were about to speak to, the apparently senior member of the group about to respond as the one in authority, was a reporter himself - and a seasoned one at that.
He turned out to be a photographer, too, and for The New York Times, no less.
He was Bill Wingell, from the Binghamton, N.Y., area, there with his wife Vinni, his son Joshua, Joshua's wife Deirdre, and Joshua's and Deirdre's son Micah. The junior Wingells live in Worcester, Mass., where they'd all rendezvoused before coming on to York; there (in Hudson, Mass., actually) Joshua designs microprocessors for Intel, and Deirdre runs a portrait- and commercial-photography business (Deirdre Stearns Wingell Portraits) out of their home. The occasion, that day, was Micah's fourth birthday, and the family - with more present and more about to come - had agreed to have a beach party at Micah's request.
We, however, ended up spending most of our time then talking to Bill - and so long that the rest of the family began taunting us. "How long," they asked with more laughter, "is this article?"
In the end, Bill retrieved his camera from his car and began taking our picture, which got us laughing.
We'll report here next week on all Bill told us about his interesting life, but will leave you, first, with a Web site he referred us to that displays his photos. It's www.photo.net/photos/wingell.
We couldn't find there a picture of the Nubble he'd taken on a trip here a couple of years ago, but we did find scores of candid and captivating pics of people, accompanied by witty labels and followed by the comments of appreciative fans.
We liked best the comment that concluded, "A great eye and soul, my friend," because it reflected our own response so accurately and concisely.
To be continued…
