Irwin Wass is seen here celebrating his 95th birthday at Fox's Lobster House on the Nubble.
Courtesy photo
When Cynthia Katsapetses, of Middleton, Mass., was casting about for a suitable setting in which to celebrate her father's 95th birthday, she couldn't have been more pleased when she discovered Fox's Lobster House, out on the Nubble.
For not only had that father, Irwin Wass, served for 16 years locally in the U.S. Coast Guard - including three years and seven months out on the Isles of Shoals (visible from the Nubble), plus another three years close by at Portsmouth Harbor - but he'd grown up, the son of a lighthouse keeper, on islands off the coast of Maine.
AND Irwin Wass had one particularly special memory related to the Fox locale: 82 years ago, on the weekend of his 13th birthday, his family had traveled to visit the family of another lightkeeper, and that family's home was the Cape Neddick Light Station, more familiarly known as Nubble Light.
So a grand birthday party was held at Fox's this year on the Sunday after Labor Day, and when we got wind of it all recently, we caught up with Cindy and Irwin to flesh out some of Irwin's unusual story.
He was born, we learned, at Sprucehead, Maine, on August 29, 1912, and his father, Hervey Wass, served the light on Whitehead Island, on the peninsula south of Rockland and Thomaston, before accepting an assignment to Libby Island, off Machias. Hervey Wass would remain there for 20 years, and it's Libby Island that Irwin speaks of as the home of his youth.
Was that isolated life, two miles out into the formidable Atlantic, at all lonely or boring? we asked.
"Oh, no, no!" Irwin responded, his voice, ordinarily soft and measured and temperate, rising a bit. "There never was a dull moment."
The middle child among five and the oldest of three boys, he felt it a privilege to be able to spend all day with his father, and to learn from both parents as they practiced a necessary self-sufficiency. They had cows and chickens, and they'd harvest nine tons of hay each year, mowing it by hand with scythes, on the island's 40 acres, he reported. His mother "sewed, knit, canned," and each year his father would build, for sale, a little boat of the type known as a pea-pod; those sold for $30.
They also hunted, Irwin said ("There were a lot of ducks"), they set lobster traps, "and any time you wanted, you could go out and catch a haddock or cod."
Until high school, schooling for Irwin Wass was at home. A teacher would come periodically, but only to deliver teaching materials to Irwin's mother. When Irwin was fifth-grade age, the family, minus the father who had to remain on the island, tried spending a winter on the mainland in the village of Starboard, but the summer cottage they were occupying proved too cold, so they returned to the island. The following year, when it was time for Irwin's older sister Winona to attend high school, they began wintering in Machias, rejoining their father on the island in summers and on vacations, and there in Machias Irwin finished high school.
After high school, Irwin didn't quite know what to do for a career until, in a Machias bank one day, he saw a man working behind a counter who was, he said, "all dressed up and looking pretty good." So, thinking he'd like to end up resembling that fellow, he enrolled for two years at the Maine School of Commerce in Bangor. But it wasn't too long before he discovered that that banker's pay was only $12 a week at a time when even mill-workers, he said, earned $2.25 a day. So the Coast Guard, he decided, given his island background, looked like a good bet.
And there, indeed, he shone, right from the beginning. With a quiet pride he described revealing, on just his second day, that he already knew how to row well, and, a little later, when a station skipper mildly reproved him for a botched paint job simply because he was the new guy, he was able to point out, respectfully, that the botched job was not his, and that his was actually the work that had been done well. "My father taught me how to paint and to do most anything," he told us.
Yet another skill learned from his father would prove of major importance. When the Coast Guard learned that he was an excellent marksman, they put him on the Coast Guard Rifle Team, and, in 1940, when that team competed in Ohio with 2,500 shooters in 104 other 10-man teams, his walked away with the fourth-place prize. Then, when the U.S. entered the Second World War, the Guard made him a trainer of riflemen.
Irwin's first Coast Guard assignment in 1934 had been the one on the Isles of Shoals, and his next, at Portsmouth Harbor. But the training of riflemen, that included customs officers and Secret Service men as well as soldiers, would last throughout the war and take him to places in New England from Boston to the Canadian border.
After the war, Irwin would be put in charge of the Coast Guard station on Burnt Island, off Port Clyde, but that assignment would be cut short by illness. Prolonged hospitalizations in Portland and Boston revealed that he had Meniere's Disease, and he would be discharged in 1950 with full disability benefits and pension.
By that time, he'd married and had children, and the tale of his courtship is of storybook proportions. When he was rifle-training in Wakefield, Mass., in about 1937, a trash-collector at the range there told him, memorably, about a cousin named Alice Levere. It would be two years before Irwin met Alice, but then only two weeks before they'd be engaged and only three months before they'd be married.
At the time of the engagement, Irwin had been sent to Bangor, so he bought the ring there and put it in the mail. Alice, who knew the ring was coming, later told him how her postmaster also knew, by the expression on her face, what was in the package he was delivering. Her hands shook in the unwrapping as he said, sympathetically, "I want to see that, too."
The marriage would last for 59 years, from 1940 until Alice's death in December, 1999, and there would be three children.
"We had a wonderful life together," Irwin said to us.
He added: "And it was love at first sight. There was no question in either of our minds."
As for that visit to Nubble Light on his 13th birthday in 1925, Irwin told us that it really ended up being, for him, a trip elsewhere. The Nubble Light's keeper had two daughters and a son, and the oldest daughter had a car and took Irwin off on a jaunt to Old Orchard Beach, where he was stunned at seeing people in numbers he'd never seen before, and amazed at the amusement rides. And he can still remember, he said, the swaying of the pilings under the big dance hall at the end of the pier there.
Irwin's younger brother Philmore, five years Irwin's junior, had to remain back with the two families at the Nubble on that day, and he afterward called that "the worst day of my life."
He may have had the last word, though.
The bookish member of Irwin's family, he would earn a doctorate at Columbia
University and become an economics professor. He would also genially chronicle the island life that he and Irwin had known as boys on Libby Island in a 1987 Down East Book called "Lighthouse in My Life." Read it in a copy available at the York Public Library.
And, as you do, send year-long happy-birthday thoughts on our behalf to our new friend, Irwin Wass.
