Paul Wentworth, seen here during a recent Brown Bag Lunch event entitled "Growing Up in Maine," still looks forward to each day as an opportunity for a new adventure.
Photo by Virginia Woodwell
YORK VILLAGE - The latest York Public Library Brown Bag Lunch, held Feb. 26, featured six Maine natives each describing their childhoods.
Called "Growing Up in Maine" and billed as an oral history presentation jointly sponsored by the Museums of Old York and Sentry Hill, the event drew an appreciative crowd of 30 and ended up extending well beyond the noon hour, as members of the audience mingled, afterward, with the speakers to share photos and memories.
"I'm still sort of in love with my own childhood. I really enjoyed it," said Richard Bowen, one of the speakers, as he concluded his talk.
And that seemed a widely-shared view, despite the fact that the six speakers represented an age-span difference of approximately 30 years, and childhoods spent in more than a few Maine locations.
Bowen, who finished high school in 1967, grew up in Springvale; Ruth Drake-Benedict, the first speaker, grew up in Eliot; Margaret Dixon, the third speaker, was born in 1925 in Augusta but would also live, as a child, in Industry and in West Forks; Cynthia Dutton grew up in York Beach in the house in which she now lives; Irene (Pat) Welch began life in 1927 in Westbrook, but the family moved, eight years later, to Gorham; Paul Wentworth, at 90, senior among the speakers, was born in 1917 in Newfield, but soon lived, successively, on Long Island in Casco Bay and in Bowdoin and Phillips, as his father, a minister, moved from parish to parish.
Although each speaker took pains not to compare past to present, some of that was inevitable, and their stories revealed how childhoods - and times in general - have changed.
Most of these children played together outside and in unstructured groups, for example, in settings more rural and in neighborhoods smaller and more stable than now, and with fewer warnings about things to fear. There were fewer gadgets and less wealth and less travel, and there were some outhouses and some one-room schoolhouses - and there was tragedy.
Every childhood described here was different in its way, however, and no speaker emphasized the negative.
Drake-Benedict spoke of her mother losing vision in one eye between the births of her two children but still sewing all of her daughter's clothes and saying, "I can do more with my one eye than other people can with two."
The children in her Eliot childhood, Drake-Benedict reported, played together outside "constantly," in a baseball field in summer; in winter, skating on a pond across from her house, or sledding on an un-sanded hill where a Newfoundland dog named Caesar caught every sled on every trip down. They also organized their own plays in a barn, or staged band concerts where they'd "pass the hat for pennies, nickels and dimes."
July 4 was a major event in summer, Drake-Benedict said, and included fireworks ordered by catalog and delivered by train to Portsmouth; her father carefully supervised their lighting. Halloween, she said, might include sticking pins in doorbells but not "treats;" those came only on Beggar's Night, just before Thanksgiving.
In Springvale, in Bowen's youth, there was a house key but it was "seldom used," he said; milk was delivered to the door every morning from a local farm, and the family had one car, a Packard, in which they went on Sunday-afternoon drives. Bowen had a grandmother with whom he was close, and when he picked up the telephone to call her, he reported, the very local telephone operator, after greeting him with a "Hello, Richard," might add, "Richard, I don't think your Nanna's at home now."
That grandmother remembered the death of Queen Victoria.
Bowen's childhood passion was playing alone in the family's woods behind their home.
"I don't recall being warned about any dangers there, or to have any fear of people," he said. In the summer between seventh and eighth grades, he "spent hours and hours there, watching a fox family grow."
Bowen told two stories from a time after high school - described as "wonderful" - when he worked in summer at a hotel in Ogunquit.
A friend working at the Dunelawn told him that he had to deliver breakfast to Joan Fontaine, so Bowen tagged along one day, to get a glimpse of the famous actress himself. Afterwards, he was told, Fontaine complained, saying, imperiously, "I don't think it requires two teenagers to deliver my breakfast."
On another occasion, as he was standing in line to place his order for an ice cream at the Viking, the woman behind him said to him, "Young man, you have very good taste in ice cream. And I thank you for not asking for my autograph as that man over there did."
She was Katharine Hepburn.
Cynthia Dutton described her childhood in York Beach - at a time when it had its own governance and its winter population, she said, was 600 - as "happy and carefree."
"We played all over the neighborhood," she said - at kick-the-can, snowball fights between girls and boys, winter sliding on Ocean House hill, swimming, messing about in tide pools and rowing on the Cape Neddick River.
Her family was only the second to live in the house, at first only a "summer shack," right on the water that her father bought in 1936. Dutton remembered the cast-iron cook stove with which they began there, and the three-burner kerosene stove that succeeded it, and crouching over a second-floor vent above a first-floor pot-bellied stove to eavesdrop on "hot discussions" among adults below.
Dutton's elementary school was the building that now houses the York Police Department. There were four rooms there, she reported, with two grades in each, and the children's teachers sometimes joined them in play in the playground out back.
Margaret Dixon appeared to have experienced the most challenging childhood. Her mother died when she was three, and she grew up with her father and grandparents until her father married a woman 10 years older with nine children. When she was four, the family's house burned to the ground on the night before Christmas. On the farm they lived on in Industry, her father made cider and maple syrup, shoed horses and grew beans for a canning factory - and Dixon remembered getting a "switching" at age five for forgetting to bring the cows in for their evening milking.
Matter-of-factly but with a sense of humor, Dixon described other elements of what was commonplace for her then: outside water pumps and sleeping attics that had "no heat but lots of blankets;" no electricity and no telephones, with the nearest towns 21 and 29 miles away; eating, with her brother, oranges cadged from the town's dump next door - and surviving; running around barefoot and stepping on a nail, and getting run over by a car at an early age but not getting hurt "because cars were higher then."
Dixon recounted one memory distinctly "Maine": the sight of logs pouring down the Kennebec River.
Dixon would graduate from West Forks High School at age 17 and two days later be in Portland looking for work. She found it in a World War II job at the shipyard, where she was paid 55 cents per hour to be a "Rosie the Riveter," one of 3,000 women out of a total workforce of 30,000 who were then working at the war effort around the clock.
World War II figured in almost all the other speakers' stories, too, though less significantly. Dutton remembered her father being an air-raid warden; Drake-Benedict spoke of ration stamps and adding coloring to "Oleo" for butter, and Pat Walsh, the fifth speaker, told of not being allowed on a particular ocean beach "because a German had washed up there."
Walsh had special reason to be sensitive to matters of national identity, because he father had emigrated from Norway and her mother's family had come to Canada from Denmark. In first grade, she said, she was sent home with a note from the teacher saying, "Please speak English," and when she was in third grade, she came home to ask her father, "What's an immigrant?"
His answer: "You were born in this country and you can be whatever you want to be."
Walsh's childhood memories included her father shooting a bear on a hunting trip to Jackman and turning the skin into a rug; raising pigs and steers and keeping half and selling half, and storing the meat, hanging frozen in winter, out in the barn; running a family vegetable stand and hearing her father say to her, just as they'd sit down to dinner, "Irene Patricia, I hear a customer..."
Paul Wentworth, the final speaker, reported that he'd been the youngest of 10 children and the seventh son. The fact that his father was a minister meant inadequate income for the big family, "so we were dependent on the generosity of parishioners, neighbors, and friends."
"We lived frugally, but I can never remember being hungry," he added.
Among his memories: a first schooling in one room with one teacher and six grades; watching coal-fired steamships struggling to tie up at Long Island's pier in wind and waves after a heavy snowstorm; losing a favorite ball down the hole in an outhouse.
"I didn't want it back," he said of that ball.
Wentworth sent listeners away with a philosophy he said that he has always followed.
He still, at 90, he said, "anticipates with enthusiasm the adventures I will encounter tomorrow."
