Have you spied a big old touring car tooling about on roads to the Nubble lately?
A vintage antique, that is, with tall, narrow tires, a convertible roof, and two seats, front and back, accommodating eight and offering commanding views (when the roof is down) of the surrounding countryside?
If you have, chances are you've seen the 1911 White (that's its make) owned by the Hayford family of Cape Neddick.
"He's a big collector - like a 12-year-old boy," Donna Hayford told us last week, speaking appreciatively through laughter of her husband Rick's predilections. "We have old cars, coins, baseball cards, postcards, seashells, quarters - we have four complete sets of the new quarters saved for our grandchildren, and we don't have grandchildren yet!"
On the sunny Sunday morning of July 6, acting on a tip that the Hayfords had a major collection of antique postcards depicting York, we'd come to the Hayford home, tucked away in the woods not far from Lake Caroline, to learn more. There, over tea and muffins on a comfortably breezy porch, Donna gave us the full story.
At our prodding, that began way back.
Donna is now 48 and Rick (Richard), 50, and they have two children, Allie (for Alexandra), 17, a senior at York High School, and Andrew, 13, a freshman. The couple met in 1980, when both were students at the University of Connecticut, she having grown up in Ridgefield, Conn., and he, in upstate New York near Rochester. At UConn, she was an undergraduate and he, a graduate student in engineering. She would go on to earn an MBA at the University of New Haven, and an MS in managerial computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and by 1997, when both were still in Connecticut, he would be working as an engineer for Pratt & Whitney, while she worked fulltime as a systems manager for United Technologies, Pratt & Whitney's parent company.
By that time, however, the Hayfords had begun to think of a move to Maine. In late spring of that year, after a canvassing trip through Kennebunk, Wells and York, Rick asked his company if there might be any chance of his being transferred to Pratt & Whitney's facility in North Berwick. Amazingly, the answer was an immediate yes, and, even more amazingly, the Hayfords also immediately found their York home. (Though it had been on the market a year, it was brand new, and a refreshing contrast to their previous home, an 1820 brick colonial that they'd carefully restored.) In less than three months, they would be moved.
Equally amazingly, Donna would continue in her Connecticut job for seven years, pioneering in telecommuting and managing a staff of seven from a distance of 160 miles away. By 2004, however, that challenge, made almost superhuman by the simultaneous challenge of raising two children then 9 and 13, was taking its toll. Donna sketched an image that made that challenge come alive: her son, trained not to interrupt her, holding up a bag of Fritos in one hand and a Coke in the other while standing in the doorway to her home office as she took an important phone call.
"They were learning to manipulate me," she laughed.
Now, she absolutely couldn't be happier about the decision she made in 2004 to quit and devote herself to fulltime motherhood - nor could she be more enthusiastic about the family's move to York. Her reasons have to do with combined matters of woods, ocean, and scenery, schools, town size, residents' friendliness, safety and more.
"This is the good life. We couldn't ask for anything more," she says. "We will never leave here."
And therein lies a connection to the postcards.
Rick (and Donna, too) began that collection very soon after they moved to York and have thus far amassed something like 320, with more in the pipeline. About 80 percent, Donna reports, are scenes of old York: York Village, Long Sands and Short Sands, the Goldenrod and York Beach, Nubble Light, trolleys, and more, all dating from, roughly, the late 1890s to the 1920s. Many are of the giant Passaconaway Inn, now long gone but a favorite of the Haywards because it was not far from their home - and all show, not only, as Donna puts it, "what York used to look like but, often, what it still looks like," which is, in her judgment, another of the town's chief attractions.
The Hayfords get these postcards from any number of sources: antiques stores, trade shows, flea markets and online. Prices, Donna says, range from 50 cents to $100 but average $5, with most costing $2 or $3.
Hunting them out to get the best deals Donna calls "a nice winter pastime" - and when we asked if her kids shared their parents' interest in that then, she answered quickly, and again laughing, "Oh, no! That's just one of those strange things that parents do!"
In a world before everybody had cameras, one side of all these postcards gives us a history, all unplanned but recorded in pictures, revealing fashions in clothing, transportation and architecture, and including transformations carved by nature in the landscape.
Where they've been written upon, the other sides of these postcards are no less interesting and revealing. Many boast no writing, but those that do reveal the origins of York's visitors 100 years or so ago: New York, New Hampshire, New England, Donna reports, with none from much farther away.
And, while many of their messages are the commonplace "Having-a-good-time-wish-you-were-here" variety, some, we discovered, open windows for the imagination, and for insights into other aspects of history. "Just this moment Mother is sound asleep in the lounge," wrote one correspondent, while another reported, in 1910, "Little Geo is all burnt up." "I want to tell you that I have got the hooping [sic] cough and I am hooping good," wrote somebody in 1908, while somebody else wrote home in 1917, perhaps in a message related to the great flu epidemic of that time, "I hope that you are improving rapidly."
Each of the Hayfords' postcards is encased in a soft plastic sleeve so that both sides of each card are visible, with sheets of these sleeves encased in a fat loose-leaf binder. This arrangement is exceptionally neat and well-organized, and Donna told us from the outset that neatness and order are pervasive hallmarks of her engineering husband's passion for collecting.
Which brings us back to cars.
Upstairs in their bedroom, she said, are 12 other fat loose-leaf binders in which Rick has ordered all correspondence and information gained relative to the restoration of his other old car, a 1921 Mercer Raceabout.
That car was his father's, but Rick has painstakingly conducted research to personally restore it, by himself, to perfection, in every respect possible, from the smallest hidden set-screw in its engine's guts to the finish on its brilliantly-gleaming deep-yellow exterior.
Before we left, Donna showed us both it and the White. The Mercer is a two-seater sports car; the Hayfords got the big touring-car White, which came from California and had been used for tours in Yellowstone National Park, she explained, to accommodate the whole family as the Mercer can't.
Donna thinks that their postcard collection actually began with Rick's discovering old postcards depicting cars racing on Old Orchard Beach. Some of those are also in their collection.
"Nice people here," wrote a woman named Alice writing on a postcard from York in 1926.
The Haywards think that's still true of York folk.
And we came away that day with the impression that that's true of the collecting Haywards, too.
P.S. Donna reports that these postcard pictures can be scanned and enlarged for framing, and that, treated thus, they make good auction items or gifts for local fundraisers. She will be glad, she says, to share them.
