BH: [0:00:00] My wife is on board of the college. So we came to the senior projects presentation. Very interesting. Will this be part of a senior thesis for you?

 

KC: No, this is a project that Camden created.

 

BH: Oh, I see.

 

KC: And I’m helping Camden with it. I’m starting my senior project [inaudible]. Just to test levels, can you tell me what you had for breakfast this morning?

 

BH: Yes, I had toast, peanut butter, and marmalade with coffee.

 

CH: Also, Bill, would you mind silencing your telephone just before we –?

 

BH: Oh, sure. Have I been dinging?

 

CH: I think you have.

 

BH: Silence my telephone. Does this –? Oh, I just hold it down. Yeah. Okay. It’s off.

 

CH: Thank you.

 

KC: [01:06] Can you tell me what you had for dinner last night?

 

BH: [laughter] I have to think. We were out. Oh, I know. Yeah, we were at a fundraiser for MPBN [Maine Public Broadcasting Network]. It was quite a menu. They had salmon, they had some beef, they had a vegetable mix. I don’t remember. We had something small for dessert, but I can’t remember what it was.

 

KC: Cool. Okay, let’s get started. Can you tell me about your background in the area?

 

BH: [01:42] Well, yeah, going back to the beginning. I was born here at the Mount Desert Island Hospital on September 17, 1941, which was sort of an inauspicious time for young parents. I don’t know how they quite dared to do it with everything that was emerging at the time, but anyway, I grew up here in town [and] went to the public schools. In those days, there were three high schools on MDI. There was Bar Harbor, Mount Desert, and Pemetic over in Southwest Harbor. I graduated from Bar Harbor High School in 1959. I went to Dartmouth College, graduated in ’63 as a pre-med and biology major, and then went on to Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. I graduated there in 1967 [and] went on to five years of surgical residency, which was completed by 1972. I came back to Bar Harbor to join the local medical group. I stayed for about ten years but decided that I needed additional training, so I did a fellowship in trauma and surgical critical care. I couldn’t stay away from Maine, came back through Portland, Maine Medical Center, and then, in 1989, was asked to come up to Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor. They were interested in getting a trauma center of sorts started there. And so I was there until I retired in about 2007, 2008. I’ve been here ever since.

 

KC: [03:43] What do you do on the bay? What’s been your background on Frenchman Bay?

 

BH: Well, going back to the beginning. Well, let me tell you this: my mother’s family has been in this area for six or seven generations. When I was young, I used to love to hang out with my Grandfather Hodgkins, her father. He used to tell me all these stories about what Frenchman Bay used to be like. For one thing, there was something that they called a frost fish, which was a migratory fish. I think it was a tomcod that migrated up what you call Cromwell Harbor Brook. They used to go out in the wintertime, and either jig for these fish or in some way catch them, and they were good eating. Of course, by the time I was around, I had really no idea what a frost fish a tomcod was and subsequently discovered they’d all moved out. They’ve gone north with so many other cold water-requiring fish species.

 

[05:16] The right of spring back then, in my young days, was to go smelting or smeltin’. Smelt are migratory fish as well, as you probably know, come in from the ocean. There are a number of streams around Frenchman Bay that are known to be very popular spots for these smelts to run up into freshwater, where they lay their eggs and so forth, the same way the Atlantic salmon do. We did a lot of smelting in those days. There again, it’s one of those stories that has changed through the ensuing years. There just aren’t that many smelts running anymore. And then, not affecting Frenchman Bay directly, but there was back then – I’m talking about the ‘50s and ‘60s – a pretty healthy run of Atlantic salmon up Narraguagus River, which is further Downeast by Milbridge.

 

[06:26]That was some of my early memories. Of course, we all knew lobster fishermen. Oh, and there was another thing that we did in the summer, [which]was to go deep sea fishing. Well, in those days, there were multiple little businesses down on the waterfront, and some of it was for sightseeing, but there were several enterprises that local lobster fishermen who maybe retired and were looking for some other means would use their lobster boats but take people out deep-sea fishing, which meant that you’d run out probably halfway out to Mount Desert Rock. There was a place out there called Cod Ledge, I think, that was a popular place. They’d throw an anchor down; you’d sit there all day with hand lines. I don’t recall that we caught many cod, but we used to regularly catch haddock and substantial size haddock as well.

 

[07:38] The last thing I remember from my childhood is going down to the municipal wharf here in Bar Harbor and just fishing off the wharf with a handline and pieces of broken clams that you get from the fish market down there and catching flounder and pollock. There’s a thing called a sculpin, which was a pretty ugly-looking fish. You tried not to get stung by it and to kick it back into the water as quickly as you could. I don’t think we thought the pollock were very edible, but of course, the flounder were. That reminds me that in those early days when I was in college, particularly in thinking about medical school, I used to hang out at the MDI Biological Lab. In fact, one of my biology professors was on the research staff there, and that’s when I found out about their program in renal physiology and learning all about tubular function and osmosis and all that. What they used were flounders from Salisbury Cove. In those days, for some reason, you could go to Salisbury Cove just for flounder fishing and catch quite a few. For some reason, they were quite numerous there, which would be no accident; the lab would use them as a model.

 

[09:13] And then I just thought of something else, which was that Hull’s Cove was known as “Clam City.” Did you know that? Yeah, it was really the place to go if you want to dig for clams, which is not an easy thing to do. Have you ever seen a clam hoe and a clam hod and these guys who have these backs of steel and can bend over for hours digging up clams? That was so productive an area, as I say, it got the name clam city, and then that leads to another – I hope you don’t mind these sort of fragmentary things. The name Clam City was attached to the annual winter ball that took place in Hulls Cove. So the background there is that most of the people my grandfather’s age and older worked for the summer residents – summer people. Women as domestics, men as groundskeepers and caretakers, and all the rest of that. Of course, in the ‘20s and ‘30s, the social scene here in Bar Harbor was red hot. There’s just a lot of really fancy stuff, Newport, Rhode Island style of stuff going on. They would have these fancy entertainments of all kinds, including balls.

 

[10:54] So when they all went away, along about November, there was an enterprising group of Bar Harbor men who got together at the firehouse and said, “Well, we think we should have a ball, and because we’re just hayseeds, we’ll call it the Hayseed Ball.” And so they would get together at the firehouse and have this kind of ritual meeting where – “Are we going to have a hayseed ball?” “Well, of course we are.” “Well, when do we have it?” “Well, we have to know when Lent is.” Because there’s a big Catholic population here, and you had to give things up for Lent, and you didn’t want to interfere with Lent. I mean, the whole idea of the hayseed ball was to have fun. So they had to coordinate the date with the end of Lent, and then they would have a full-fledged ball, except everybody would dress up as lobster fishermen and farmers [with] bib overalls. The ladies would wear period dresses and so forth. That was the beginning of the foundation of these wintertime balls, and then other towns caught on, including Hulls Cove. They wanted to have their own, so they called it the Clam City Waybackers. And then there was one in Seal Harbor and one in Northeast Harbor, maybe even a separate one in Southwest Harbor. But I’m getting a little afield of Frenchman Bay.

 

[12:38] Just trying to think. I suppose there had been whales out there all along. But no one talked about whales very much until the more recent past when they started going well out of Mount Desert Rock. Lo and behold, at least a few years ago, there were wild whales there. [I] knew a lot of lobster fishermen and a lot of small business commercial fishermen. Virtually everybody’s family had some fishing component to it. Life here was not easy for year-round people. There wasn’t a lot of year-round employment, for example, because most of them, as I said, were employed by summer people or by businesses that were only open in the summertime. For example, the same grandfather I was telling you about drove something called the railway express truck. That was connected with the railroad that came into Ellsworth. They would meet the train [and] offload it onto trucks. The train couldn’t come down to MDI, of course. There was a station in Bar Harbor, on Cottage Street, where all of this stuff would be delivered from the train in Ellsworth, and then it all had to be delivered around the island. That’s what he did during the summertime, delivering mainly to Seal Harbor and Northeast Harbor. I worked with him from the time I was about eight until fifteen or so. That was a learning experience.

 

[14:37] Anyway, Frenchmen Bay memories. I told you, at least anecdotally, what quickly comes to mind. Of course, my current obsession is the history of sailing, which, as I’ve investigated it – I told you, I retired in 2007, and that gave me time to settle down and do some research. And there were some family questions, first of all, that needed to be answered. There was a painting that hung over my parents’ fireplace when we were growing up, and whenever we had family pictures, we had to stand in front of this painting by the fireplace. It was a schooner. And I would ask my mother, “What’s the story behind that schooner?” And she said, “Well, that was your great, great grandfather’s ship.” “Well, can you tell me anything more?” Not really.

 

[15:53] So, when I retired, that was my first thing is to figure out what this painting was all about. That took me eventually to Gloucester and Essex, Massachusetts. It turned out that it was a Gloucester fishing schooner and that he was the captain. And that in the wintertime, he sailed that from Gloucester down to Honduras because this is the pre-Civil War banana trade that was getting going with all these banana plantations, and what evolved eventually into banana republics and so forth when the Great White Fleet and politics got involved. That was a deep dive for me into family history. That carried me to another great-great-grandfather still on my mother’s side, who was one of the first attorneys in Bar Harbor; he set up his office in 1884. His firm, which was called DC and Lynam, was the legal complement of what became the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations. You got a nice big groundhog down there, I think, running down your lawn. Became the Hancock County trustees of public reservations, which, as you may or may not know, was a group that was called together by Charles William Elliot. That’s what then became, ultimately, in 1916, sort of a Sieur de Monts National Monument, and it went on to become Acadia National Park.

 

[17:46] When I retired, I found that my great-grandfather’s law practice still existed [I] downtown Bar Harbor. I wondered if there might be something of historical relevance. He said, “Well, sure, go down.” He says, “You’re a physician; you know all about confidentiality. Don’t go near any of the ones that say ‘pending litigation’ or anything like that.” There was a whole history section down. There were twelve boxes labeled John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and so I got in touch with the folks down at the Rockefeller Archive Center, and they sent an archivist up. She spent several days going through all these files. She says, “This is all, essentially, local history. Keep it here.” So we’ve been working on how to eventually store that and make it accessible to the public.

 

[18:44] That was another deep dive. And then I just was fascinated, I think, seeing sort of both sides of the island, that is, seeing all the development that was taking place here on the Bar Harbor side, and yet these more sort of academically and ecclesiastically-oriented people who settled in Seal Harbor and Northeast Harbor and so forth. It seemed as if they had two separate conceptions of land use on MDI and that the latter group saw it as a conservation, potential preservation. Hence, they called it the trust, the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations. Whereas in Bar Harbor, it seemed to be development from the get-go. That’s when I did my deep dive into sailing. What relevance does that have to this kind of observation? I found out that in 1885, the Bar Harbor Yacht Club, which is just up the way from you, was incorporated. But there wasn’t much going on, at least in the modern conception of what a yacht club does. Then I found in the law firm this little yacht club yearbook, dated 1903, for the Mount Desert Yacht Racing Association, and the burgee, which is a little flag that identifies one Yacht Club, differentiates them – they all have their own signal – that was the Bar Harbor Yacht Club burgee on this Mount Desert Yacht Racing Association. What was going on here?

 

[20:51] Eventually, I got back down to the North Shore of Boston. It turns out that from the beginning, Bar Harbor’s interest in sailing was not in local competition but in big ocean-going yachts. So, they set out to attract the New York Yacht Club, who had an annual Downeast cruise, and the Eastern Yacht Club of Marblehead, who also had an annual Downeast cruise. They wanted to attract these sailors and all of their wealth, essentially, to MDI and specifically to Bar Harbor. Although they’ve been building hotels, big, big growth of hotels here in the 1880s, ‘90s, early 1900s. They also built the Mount Desert Reading Room, which was intended solely to entertain the yachtsmen who were coming in from Philadelphia, Boston, New York, etc. Mount Desert Reading Room is still there today. You can see elements of it in the hotel that’s down there.

 

[22:13] Then I discovered – this is a real rambling conversation, but it has to do with Frenchman Bay because eventually, we’ll get into bootlegging, you see, and the reason we’ll get into bootlegging is because Maine had a prohibition law that actually antedated the federal law. That was very much in effect while they were engineering this sort of summer sailor/summer resident destination, what they called a watering hole. That was the expression that they used for a place that could compete with, say, Newport, Rhode Island. But the problem was they couldn’t drink legally, so they needed places like the Mount Desert Reading Room, where the gentlemen only could come in and read. [laughter] Although it was Samuel Eliot Morrison – are you familiar with him? Great. He was made an admiral in the Navy, so could write the history of the United States Navy at one point. He had a summer place over in Northeast Harbor. One of his supposed quotes was, “Well, I suspect that the only reading done at the Reading Room was through the bottom of a whiskey glass.”

 

[23:38] Anyway, if you look at the dates and when these various places were built, yes, there were hotels and so forth going up. But there were a lot of clubs like the Mount Desert Reading Room [and] the Oasis Club that preceded that. The original Kebo Club was not a golf course; it was a social club. They had a racetrack out there for equestrian stuff. That burned, and when it was replaced, it was more oriented toward golf, but that was later on. Tennis facilities and then horse shows down at what used to be called Morrell Park in my day [and] is now the Jackson Lab – all that property. As you pass the lab buildings headed toward Otter Creek, there’s an enormous erratic on this left side of the road with a big bronze plaque for – I think it’s for Roscoe B Jackson, or no, it would be more Morrell, or “More-elle” we called it. Anyway, we used to call it Morrell’s Park, but that’s where they had these really fancy horse shows where they would get the foreign hands. I mean, this was fancy stuff.

 

[25:04] Anyway, it seemed as though the primary intent of attracting sailing – and by that, I mean pleasure sailing as opposed to commercial – into Frenchman Bay was very, very much oriented to the socioeconomic development, particularly Bar Harbor. There were factions of people who got tired of the [inaudible]. It really was a social buzz up here. In fact, it was so socially exciting that you can go to the New York Times archives and see the weekly Bar Harbor column. That’s where I picked up a lot of my information on sailing. They were talking about parties. They were talking about – do you know what I mean by the Building of Arts that used to be –? It was a Greek Revival building out near the golf course. They would have – Fritz Kreisler came up for the summer. They would have members of the Boston Symphony come. They would have lectures, of course. They would put on tableaus or whatever you call it when you dress up in Greek costume, ancient Greek costume, and recite Democedes or somebody like that – they did all kinds. And then, of course, they had coming out parties, weddings. There was just one thing after another.

 

[26:47] So, sailing did ultimately develop into the more conventional club sport. Initially, in Bar Harbor, some, many of the smaller designs that we’ll call seventeen footers – most small sailboats when there’s a number attached to it like a Herreshoff twelve and a half, that convention is that’s the length of the waterline. And so there were a whole group of so-called seventeens whose design originated down off the North Shore of Boston, Cape Ann area. They eventually moved up here and populated many of these fleets that were coming about. And, of course, in addition to Bar Harbor, there is Winter Harbor over on the opposite side, Seal Harbor Yacht Club, and Northeast Harbor Fleet. Each of them is having their centennial this year.

 

[27:57] So then, by the ‘20s and ‘30s, the sailing scene was definitely focused on small boat competition. You didn’t see many of these big, huge schooner yachts and racing yachts. It’s sort of gone on from there. It’s kind of interesting to look at the continued, what you might call civic discourse, as the times have changed relative to any number of issues. One of the early ones, of course, were the so-called auto wars of the late 1910s and ‘20s. That’s a chapter unto itself. The ongoing efforts to preserve land, create Acadia National Park, the ongoing efforts to develop Bar Harbor – still sticking with the development theme. The Fire in 1947 was a coup de gras of sorts for the remaining, and many of them had moved away, or because of these generational transitions that are so common, the kids said, “Well, I don’t know, I think I’d rather stick closer to home, not go all the way up to Bar Harbor. Sell the old family place.”

 

[29:35] And then the Fire of ’47 had a pretty devastating effect on the remnants of that. There was still enough around by the time I grew up, but it was a very, very different place. The fire intensified, I think, Bar Harbor’s focus on development. There was a total conversion to tourism at that point in time. The middle class had emerged after the Second World War. People actually had vacations. They had a little money they could spend. They had automobiles. That was a very definite emphasis on the part of the town planners in Bar Harbor. But getting back to Frenchman Bay, in 1956, your other neighbor up the shore, the Bluenose Ferry, came in. That was another – you have to cross Frenchman Bay to get to the dock on Eden Street.

 

[30:52] I know Natalie Springuel. I hope you’re interviewing her. Or maybe you’re looking for old-timers who have local connections like me, but she knows so much about cod fishery and about landings – just amazing. I’m wearing this hat on purpose; it’s the MDI Historical Society. I just retired as the chair of the board over there, but I’m still, of course, involved. Natalie’s on our board, and she just has an incredible amount of information. I’m trying to look back at other Frenchman Bay-related things that pop up. I was visiting a woman last summer who has a place down on Schooner Head. Schooner Head is a little extension of private property which comes awfully close to Acadia National Park and, I think, provides an example of what could have happened had Acadia National Park not been created. There would have been houses all over the ocean drive and everything, as you might imagine.

 

[32:11] But she was giving me – I was invited there because I was interested in the Lynam family, and there’s a Lynam cemetery down there that, to their credit, they’ve gone to great pains to preserve that cemetery. But then she also showed me a platform way up on the top of Schooner Head. And she said, “There used to be a cannon up here.” “Really?” I said. I wondered, “What could that possibly be about?” because another of my research interests is the War of 1812 and the whole history of the British blockade, the proximity to Halifax, Nova Scotia, blockading all the way down. British frigate came in in 1814 into the great harbor of Mount Desert. It was the so-called Battle of Norwood Cove [if] you’ve ever heard of that? That’s an interesting episode. You can read about that in Chebacco; two or three years ago, I wrote an article about that.

 

[33:29] Oh, so War of 1812, and I thought, “Huh, does he go back to then?” I did a little research on it and found out it was during the Spanish-American War.

“Remember the Maine” was the expression because the battleships of the day were these weird-looking things with backward stems. This is back during Teddy Roosevelt’s time and the Spanish-American War, the war in Cuba. Teddy and his men storm the hill, and he becomes President of the United States. The United States begins to assert itself internationally with this sort of gunboat diplomacy [and] went to the Philippines. But part of it was in the Spanish-American War, which really took off by 1896, I think it was. And somehow, the battleship Maine was blown up in Havana Harbor. People in Maine apparently assumed, “Well, the Spanish are going to come for us, so we have to build fortifications.” So, on this property, on Schooner Head, there’s a remnant of the platform that a cannon was built on because they were afraid they were going to invade Frenchmen Bay.

 

CH: [35:03] Bill, do you know anything else about the military history of the Bay?

 

BH: Well, getting backward to the Revolution, I know a few little scraps. I can give you a couple of names. Privateering was very, very common in the Revolutionary War. A merchant ship would file for a so-called letter of Marque, M-A-R-Q-U-E, which was basically approval of the government of the country for you to be a pirate, a legal pirate. And so there were a number of privateers that sailed out of Sullivan, I think. I think the name Crabtree may be somewhere in that history. He has an interesting first name. It’s Agee. A-G-E-E, and sometimes it’s A-period-G-period [A.G.]. But Crabtree is the surname. So there’s something going on there in the Revolution.

 

[36:21] [I’m] trying to think if there were actually any engagements. Of course, the U2 stories of World War II landings over in Hancock Point. The US Navy took over the Bar Harbor waterfront in World War II, and they used Bald Porcupine Island for torpedo practice. These torpedo planes would swoop down, and I don’t know if there are still some people alive who could tell you about actually seeing this happen. There was a fellow named (Harridan?) who gave an interesting talk at Jesup a few years ago. When they knew the Navy planes were up, they go up on Strawberry Hill or somewhere where they had a view and watched these come in, and poor old Bald Porcupine was getting balder by the torpedo, I guess. I don’t think there was a naval battle here. It was further down in Penobscot Bay where there was definitely stuff going on around Camden, and there was a Penobscot River expedition, I think, an attempted one in the Revolutionary War. And then there was one in the War of 1812 where they went all the way to Bangor and raised havoc with Bangor.

 

CH: [37:50] Can you tell me a little bit more about the landing at Hancock Point? If you know any more.

 

BH: Well, I used to go to a barber in Ellsworth. His name was – if you can believe this – Dante – D-A-N-T-E, of the Inferno – Forni, F-O-R-N-I. And the Fornis lived on Hancock Point. During World War II, his mother, supposedly on a snowy night, saw two or three men in trench coats walking along the roadside. Of course, there’s really some–purposeful, well-inbred paranoia anyway, in most rural settings. But these guys, they just didn’t fit anything. So, she reported them, and they were ultimately caught, I think, in New York. They managed to – but supposedly, they were put ashore on Hancock Point by a U-boat that was able to slip up in here.

 

[39:10] The other famous German vessel was the [Kronprinzessin Cecilie] or something like that. It was an ocean liner, a German ocean liner that found out as it was en route to Hamburg or someplace from New York City that the United States had declared war on Germany, and so they turned a hard left and tried to find a port where they could be declared, I guess, a neutral entity or something. There were wild parties back then. That’s all in The New York Times, too, and there have been books written about all sorts of romance novels of the day were – all sorts of made-up stuff. But there were two brothers here – Fabbri. Are you familiar with the Fabbri memorial? So, I think there was Ernesto and [Alessandro], I believe. They were brothers. I think they were fairly wealthy, but they were crackerjack with early forms of communication, and they built these towers, or a tower down on Otter Point, which was apparently used in World War I. There was a period of time during the [Kronprinzessin Cecilie] – whoever she was – out here in Frenchmen Bay. It was suspected that perhaps the Fabbris were German sympathizers. I think they sent the Secret Service up here to do an investigation. [laughter]. But this is all press history. I don’t have anything definitive, but I’m sure Earl can tell you mountains of stuff about that. But I’m just trying to think. I know your focus is on Frenchman Bay, and I’m just trying to think of any other historical elements that might be relative and pertinent to what you’re trying to put together here.

 

 

CH: [42:01] Bill, do you sail on the bay?

 

BH: Yeah.

 

CH: Can you talk about that a little?

 

BH: Sure. Being a local boy and working during the summer, I was not offered by my family to take sailing lessons. And this is somewhat to do with the dichotomy between local kids and summer kids. Plus, my mother didn’t have a very lofty view of the summer people because when she grew up, that was in the twenties and thirties, there was still a big residual faction of summer people here who had very definite attitudes about local people. My mother, until her dying day, never liked summer people. Anyway, [laughter] by the time I was back here and functional in the early ‘70s, a lot of that dichotomy had settled down, the Bar Harbor Club and become more available to local people – in fact, they depended on local people because a lot of the summer community had moved away, though Kebo had become a golf club, and it very much depended on local people. That was a sort of confluence of sorts.

 

[43:29] When I was here in the early seventies, the Bar Harbor Club was struggling because of the departure of the summer population, and they wanted to interest local people in sailing. So they began to offer sailing lessons [and] sailing programs – opened up their students’ sailing classes to local people through the YMCA, for example. For a period of time, that was a pretty thriving operation. They also had the participation of the MDI Bio Lab. They would come up with a big contingent and bring their families with them, and so there were a lot of kids from that community who took sailing lessons there. That was my involvement and really when I learned how to sail. Then we had a few pursuit races and some beginning competition there. So, that’s where my sailing experience in Frenchman Bay began.

 

CH: [44:36] Where were you sailing when you were learning?

 

BH: Out of the yacht club. I mean, I had learned how to sail when I was a resident. Back in the late ’60s in Portland, I bought an eleven-foot thing made out of yellow styrofoam, [laughter] and it had a lateen sail on it like a sunfish or a sailfish. Are you familiar with them? Very simple rig, but you could learn all the basics. At least you could read the wind, you could figure out where it was coming from, you could trim your sails – all very basic. But I always thought perhaps there was some genetic predilection for just wanting to be out in a boat that was blown around by wind. When we moved here, I bought my first serious sailboat, which was a small thing called the Rhodes Nineteen. We tried to get that class going at the Bar Harbor Yacht Club. The most we ever got were two or three, though, so it never really developed. But yeah, you get in a boat, the sails, and you do it.

 

KC: [46:04] How often do you find yourself sailing nowadays?

 

BH: Well, as often as I can. The problem with sailing is crew. If you have somebody that you sail with regularly, or a pair of people even, then that can dictate what size of boat. But most of the time, I like to single-hand. It’s not because my wife or kids don’t like to sail, but they have too many things going on themselves. I’m sailing now relatively small, eighteen/twenty foot sailboats that I can single hand. Frankly, I like the solitude. For about five years – I bought a bigger boat several years ago and raced over the Northeast Harbor fleet in their looters class until I found out that – see, we have eleven grandchildren, and most of them are here in the summer, and there are lots of picnics. You can’t always control the wind. So, when you get a call from your wife at 4:00 saying, “Don’t forget the picnic begins at five,” and you’re out in the western way, dead-calmed, then that creates a little conflict.

 

[47:33] It was a great experience to compete in a fleet of serious sailors. But now I found that I just love to go out and experience it. I think Frenchman Bay is the most beautiful place to sail in this area; it really is. I mean, there are just so many little places you can tuck into. You guys go over to The Hop very often? You know where The Hop is? You’ve got to go to The Hop. Or up in the Flanders Bay, the little nooks and crannies up in there. It’s really a wonderful spot.

 

KC:  Do you know why it’s called The Hop?

 

BH: Haven’t the foggiest idea. You can speculate almost anything. It is connected to Long Porcupine, of course, by bar. Hop, skip, and a jump or something. I don’t know. I don’t know if there are other Hops around.

 

CH: [48:39] What makes those spots so magical?

 

BH: Well, I think it’s the result of preservation efforts. I think there’s a real ethic of preservation and conservation and seeing value in quiet and lack of development. Maybe, in a way, having grown up here when it was quieter when there was less development – maybe my personal case is, well, maybe it just kind of reminds me of some of those old days, except I never went to any of those places. I was working for my grandfather in the summertime. But having discovered them and seeing our family, particularly our grandchildren’s delight in going to those places and just knowing that if it’s just you two going out there, you can make an overnight over anything. Drop the hook over behind – oh, what’s that little island just before you go into Sorrento that was recently –? Why am I blocking that? Bean. Bean Island. You ever been out to Bean? Yeah.

 

KC: [50:06] What do you use to navigate when you’re sailing?

 

BH: Well, we do have a powerboat, too. We have radar and all the plot charters and all that stuff, so if we want to go further away – if the fog curtain falls, we don’t worry about it. We’ve got devices, but when you’re out sailing in a small daysailer, you pick your day. If you get into fog, it’s really incredibly astonishing how disoriented you get because of the wave motion. If you don’t have a land fix, and you thought, “Well, let’s see, we were going by about a thirty-degree angle across the way,” it doesn’t work. So you really need your compass.

 

KC: [51:08] Do you have a particular story about getting stuck somewhere and needing to navigate out of that?

 

BH: Well, let’s see. I’ve never gone aground and been stuck in that way. I’ve hit bottom a few times but managed to keep moving.

 

KC: What about the weather? Like a storm, maybe.

 

BH: Yeah, I remember one day. I had a little thing. Have you ever heard of Herreshoff, the boat builders down in Rhode Island? There’s a thing called a Herreshoff twelve and a half. There are a lot of them around. This one was twelve and a half feet on the waterline, so it wasn’t a very big boat, and there was a gaff rig [and] a triangular sail. It has a straight mast and a boom; it’s called a Marconi rig for some reason, but an older type of sail was one where you had the boom in the mast, and then partway up the mast, there was a gaff that went off on an angle. The mainsail was then held by the gaff, by the mast, and by the boom. It was kind of a trapezoidal mast, and they were very common on schooners.

 

[52:44] Well, this little boat had a gaff rig. I was out at Pretty Marsh Harbor, and all of a sudden, this squall came up. I didn’t have an engine or anything, and I didn’t have any reefing points on the sail. And so you just have to – fortunately, it was a beamy boat, fairly wide so that it wasn’t that tippy and so you could manage a heavy wind and not get knocked down and that sort of thing. But then you reminded me of one of the first stories – and this is the best story – that happened years ago when I was in high school. Yes. Bowdoin College had been given what is today called the Atlantic Oaks [Atlantic Oceanside Hotel] – it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump from here. That used to belong to Sir Harry and Lady Oaks. It was the Oaks Estate, and Sir Harry was from Dover-Foxcroft. But he struck it rich in a silver mine or something like that, and for some reason, went to the Bahamas and was knighted and became Sir Harry Oaks, and then he was murdered. So his estate up here didn’t have Sir Harry anymore. His wife, by virtue of his Sir Harry-ness, was known as Lady Oaks. He had gone to Bowdoin, and so she donated the whole property to Bowdoin College.

 

[54:31] My mother was a kindergarten teacher and used to have to take summer courses. Bowdoin decided to put on summer school for teachers. The professor – he was actually the debate coach and professor of English at Bowdoin – came up with his family. My mother came back from the course one day and said, “You ought to go up there and meet Professor Thayer’s daughter. She’s really nice.” So I did. So we became friends. Well, he had a sailboat, and I had virtually no experience sailing. That was before I had my yellow Styrofoam one. But we thought we could sail this boat. It had something called a centerboard. You put the centerboard down with an iron rod. You’d pull up on the rod, and the centerboard would come up. You push the rod down, the centerboard would go down.

 

[55:41] So we got out on Bald Rock. [laughter] You know where that is. Big, big squall came up, blowing right out of the north. And so the centerboard drifted up. I pushed the handle down, and it just disappeared. So we had no handle because we obviously became disconnected from the centerboard. The center board floated up. We had no way to go against the wind. You have to keep your head under these circumstances. Well, we were fortunately headed straight for Bar Island, so we just put the sail out and drove it right up on the beach on the backside of Bar Island out here. And fortunately, the tide was out. We did our best to make sure the boat wouldn’t float away when the tide came in and were able to get off the bar. Then we knew some people who lived right there and could call. I don’t know who we called. I think I probably called her parents. [laughter] But anyway, that was the most hair-raising tale I’ve ever [had]. Oh, and then there was a night out on the Gulf of Maine. But that’s a long way from Frenchman Bay.

 

KC: [0:57:16] How do you usually launch? Where do you usually launch your sailboats from?

 

BH: Nowadays, I do it from John Williams’ boatyard. A small boat, you can back it down a ramp, and it will float off the trailer. I used to do that with one of my smaller ones. But putting a trailer and its axles and wheels into saltwater is really hard on them. It’s easier now just to have them lifted off and plop it in with those things that lift boats and put them in the water – I’m blocking the name of it.

 

KC: And where did you use to launch boats?

 

BH: I’ve launched them from Bar Harbor. That was a bad decision. [laughter]

 

KC: Why?

 

BH: Well, there’s a stone ramp that goes down. If the sea’s coming in at all, you’re right up against all of the stone understructure that holds up the pier. Got banged around a little bit in there. Did it off Hadley Point one time. I’ve done it back when – off West Street. There used to be a place called Young’s Lobster Pot, and it was a place to go down there. I’ve launched boats over at Pretty Marsh, over at Bartlett’s Island Landing way over there. That’s a long way from Frenchman Bay.

 

KC: [59:05] And Young’s Wharf. What happened to it?

 

BH: Oh, are we on or off the record? [laughter]

 

CH: We can take it off the record if you want. We can strike it.

 

BH: Well, Tom Walsh took care of everything down there. It disappeared when Tom Walsh bought all that property. I’m going to get really nostalgic on you now, but not so very, very long ago, but particularly when I was growing up, that whole section of West Street from the intersection with Main Street Hill was just a lot of really cool, quaint little local businesses. Right on the corner there of Main and West was Cunningham’s Hotel. I never went in it, but it was just there. Bill Casey’s barber shop was just up there, and that’s where I always got my haircut – summer and winter and fall.

 

[1:00:22] Then, across the street on the water side of West Street was this place called the Fishnet. It was just a classic Downeast – almost like Thurston’s Wharf if you’ve ever been over there, except it was classic-er than Thurston’s Wharf, and it was owned by a guy named (Anthony Filliataz?) – F-I-L-L-I-A-T-A-Z or something like that. It was a great place to go because you could have a shore dinner, or if you wanted to fish off of the wharf, you could go over there, and he’d always give you a little box of broken clams so you could use them for bait. And then moving further west on West Street from there was where the Youngs were. One of them was a guy named Robin Young, who was in my high school class. They had something going on there. I’m not sure exactly, as I can recall, but there was a wharf there. Then, back much further in time, it was something called the Clark Coal Company. You ever heard of that? That had a big coal wharf there. It’s surprising to me that as many – that there was that large a coal business here once upon a time. But evidently, there was because Clark Coal Company brought in big barges of coal and offloaded them. There were coal sheds and everything built down there. There was laundry right on the shore side about where that Italian restaurant is now.

 

[1:02:25] Then you came to the Bar Harbor Club. But then, on the south side of West Street and beyond Roger Cunningham’s hotel was Young’s Lobster Pot. Absolutely the best place to go for fish chowder – anything you can imagine. It was a thriving place. We were all kind of – I mean, you have to accept change. I don’t want to sound like a conservative or something like that. I think what going off to these places and throwing a hook over and just being in a sort of semi-wild place like Flanders Bay is the authenticity of it. It’s honest. You can say this is a real Maine. I suppose if you feel like you belong here, you can say it’s really me. Thinking about those old establishments down there, even the Frenchman Bay Boating Company, felt more authentic in that era as to the way it is now.

 

[1:03:56] Oh, I forgot the Dairy Joy. There was a Dairy Joy, where you can get the ice cream. There was a Dairy Joy. Let’s see, if you come down Main Street hill, you turn right? Frenchman’s Bay – or what do they call it – was still there. There was a little room just before he turned left and went into the parking area. It was a little room – maybe fifteen feet of room there. And it was this little building – it was the Dairy Joy. There used to be a telephone booth on the wharf. Also, the visitor’s center was on the wharf too. My daughter Amy was working at the Dairy Joy one summer when she was a teenager, and she had to make a phone call. So she went down to the phone booth, and there was somebody in the phone booth talking on the phone very, very avidly. Finally, Amy tapped on the window, and this guy turned around, and she just about fainted. She opened the door. She says, “Are you Superman?” And he said, “Yeah.” It was Christopher Reeve. [laughter] It really was, in a telephone booth. [laughter]

 

[1:05:29] Anyway, I got carried away here. I was just trying – there was one other – the beach. You could actually go to the beach in Bar Harbor, just down below the hotel. I don’t know whether they did special maintenance of it or not, but there was a float out there, and it was a public beach. You could go there. It was good most of the time. There have been improvements in sewage treatment. I remember some bad things floating around in the water. I won’t go there – Frenchman Bay. Although they said, that’s why the clamming clam city was so good.

 

KC: How is that? How does that work?

 

BH: [1:06:31] This is complete folklore, I’m sure, but back in the day, when they built these summer houses, they just run a pipe out. That was it. You can still see some of these old remnant pipes in some places where the beaches have eroded. They claim that the reason the clamming was so good in Hulls Cove was because there were several pipes that ran out there, and apparently, that provided great fodder for something that the clams liked. I hope the clams didn’t – who knows what clams do, but they filter everything, right? That’s good water that comes out of the clam on the other end.

 

CH: Yeah, but they can synthesize all that stuff, and it gets bad.

 

BH: I don’t eat clams.

 

CH: There’s one of those pipes right over there.

 

BH: Yeah.

 

CH: This house, there’s a pipe that literally leads right out to the ocean.

 

BH: [1:07:34] Oh, sure. Yeah, they’re all along here.

 

KC: When’s the last time you’ve heard Hulls Cove referred to as Clam City?

 

BH: Oh, well, I’m a Clam City Waybacker. [laughter] I told you about how the hayseed ball people from Bar Harbor would get together at the firehouse and go through the ritual, “Well, will we have a ball this year?” And they never said no, of course. And then they’d decide, “What are we going to eat?” It would always be dried fish. What was the other thing? Salt fish and – I don’t know. Oh – “And will there be an intermission?” Because you weren’t really supposed to drink at the ball. Although they did wait until the event was over. There would be about a two-hour break for the orchestra at about 11:00. Then you’d go to somebody’s house, party for a while, and then the real hardcore people would come back about 1:00 in the morning and dance until dawn or thereabouts. Unfortunately, COVID has done a number on a number of these old institutions, plus age. It’s hard to keep younger people involved.

 

KC: [1:09:13] Do you have family members who work on the Bay?

 

BH: No. I take that back. I have three grandchildren and a son-in-law. Yes. Alicia is twenty-three. Olivia just turned twenty-one. She’s a third-year student at Husson, studying to be a physical therapist. Alex just graduated. They all earn their summer money lobstering. They all have lobster licenses. It’s provided an interesting upbringing for them.

 

KC: Where do they fish out of?

 

BH: Where?

 

KC: Yeah.

 

BH: Bar Harbor.

 

KC: Did they do a student license program? How did they break into the industry?

 

BH: [1:10:17] Their father. He’s been lobstering for years. He’s one of those hardcore guys that fishes twelve months a year. When the lobsters head out, he goes out to sea. In the wintertime, he’s going out around Mount Desert Rock. So far, so good.

 

KC: Can you tell me about your perception of the bay? What was the bay like when you started working on it, and how that changed?

 

BH: Well, I guess I would say there were a lot more traditional boats around back when I was a kid growing up here or even in the early ’70s. Were there more lobster fishermen then? Very likely. Were the lobster boats seemingly smaller? I think. They’ve really gotten huge. They [inaudible] in some of them, they’re so big. The sightseeing boats were very traditional-looking sightseeing boats. We didn’t have these high-speed catamarans and all of that sort of thing, of course. I don’t think anybody knew there were whales out here, so there was no reason to go out. Well, the furthest you’d go out, as I say, was Cod Ledge for deep sea fishing. So, I think it would be mostly related to how various types of power and sailing vessels have evolved over fifty years or more.

 

KC: [1:12:19] Who else was on the water at the time, and how has that changed [since] when you first started sailing on the bay and being on the bay?

 

BH: Well, I don’t know if I have a very good sample size. You know, as I was sailing more regularly in the seventies with Bar Harbor Yacht Club, we’d see people from Sorrento out sailing, obviously. Never saw the Winter Harbor people because they’re around Schoodic Point. It seemed to me that there were a number of big trawlers around back then. There was a guy named Levesque. What was his first name? He had a great big steel trawler. I think there was – you would see them coming in and out of Bar Harbor. A trawl would go way off and do serious fishing way out. I’m not sure they even came back to Bar Harbor as a port all the time. Frequently, they’d go into Portland. It’s where most of lobster – I think most of the brokerage for seafood is down there now – Rockland.

 

KC: [1:13:53] What’s your perception of the ecology of the Bay?

 

BH: Well. You know, the flounder have gone. Tomcod have gone. We went out with Eddie Monat several years ago – took our grandchildren out. He is something else, he and Captain Evil [Edna Martin]. But I’ve heard him say that what he sees on the floor is substantially different. When we were having – I got involved in the Norwegian salmon farm thing [American Aquafarms] and went to a few meetings of DHS [Department of Homeland Security] and heard what people had to say, t particularly people like Henry Sharpe, who were doing some independent – or got some independent studies on flow, for example, tidal flow in the bay. I think there’s a general perception that the bottom is much, much more sterile than it was. I don’t think you can count on catching haddock now. I’m not sure that you could count on catching a flounder.

 

[1:15:37] So, I think, just in my anecdotal experience – nothing scientific about this – there’s been a progressive reduction in species that you used to see fairly readily. But you could say much the same about bird life, too. And – oh – Eiders. Eider population is way down, and that probably has to do with mussel scarcity. The Eiders, at times, used to be so plentiful off Bar Island, between Bar Island and Bar Harbor, that there was a fellow named Dale Coman, who was a connection with the MDI Biolab. He was a professor of pathology from the University of Pennsylvania. Real good friend. Wrote a couple of really nice books – Pleasant River. Anyway, he could claim that he could go down there any day with a spotting scope and see a king eider. I was never able to verify that. But you could hear them at a distance.

 

[1:16:57] That’s one of the things. I think, in the wintertime, particularly the winter ducks that are here, you could always hear. Well, we called them old squaws. Sorry. I think they call them pintail ducks now or long-tailed ducks, but they’re an Arctic bird that comes down here for their summer vacation. Particularly in a snowstorm – talk about being in a place, sort of standing down on the ocean drive there near Alligator Rock; it’s snowing, and you can’t see very far, but you can hear the [imitates king eider call]. The old squaws off there. Don’t hear that much anymore. I’m sure the bird populations have been affected equally. It’s hard to find mussels anymore.

 

KC: Why is that?

 

BH: I don’t know. They’re overfished, or there’s something different. Something ecologically different for them. Something they depend on. I don’t know. They say water temperature has a lot to do with some of the fish species, perhaps lobsters, too. I mean, are we going to see a migration up to Newfoundland of all the lobsters? They’re complaining down in Massachusetts [that] there’s a scarcity of them. I think a lot of people get confused data because they think that the paucity of cod [gives] a little bit of a survival advantage actually to lobsters, but despite that –

 

KC: [1:18:46] How else has the bay changed?

 

BH: Cruise ships. That’s the big one.

 

KC: When do you remember the first cruise ship coming in?

 

BH: Oh. QE II [Queen Elizabeth II]. This is back in the early ‘80s. Everybody went crazy. Here was a real ocean liner. That probably was sometime around ’81 or so. I’m not sure, but never seen anything like it. People were lining the rocks and getting into every imaginable powerboat and going out there and just going around and around the QE II. One guy, a private pilot, flew a little too close to the smokestack, and the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] got after him eventually. But it was like a holiday. I don’t know whether that was actually the beginning of anything. I’ve never read or done any particular research myself on the history of the cruise ship phenomenon here. I was pretty much on the road until I – well, I was away in the middle ‘80s, late ‘80s. So, I don’t know firsthand any – or have any impression of that. But when you could still go to Cadillac Mountain without a reservation, go up there, see these things down there, or boating, particularly out of the yacht club. I think that’s the major change, and it’s a worrisome one, of course.

 

[1:21:09] I actually testified in a trial last week. They wanted me to recall what it was like before cruise ships, and they wanted to know my subjective opinions about traffic on a cruise ship day. I avoid Bar Harbor like the plague. It’s awful. I mean, it’s not wholly the cruise ships because Acadia vehicular visitation obviously seems to go up every single year. They seem to come whether we have COVID or not. So, that’s a reality. I have the feeling that the National Park Service really tries to do something about controlling traffic. I don’t think the cruise ship industry has any interest in controlling traffic at all. With the takeover of West Street by people who, in my opinion, have a major, major conflict of interest, I don’t see that there’s any motivation on their part to try and regulate it either. So, that’s the big change.

 

KC: [1:22:41] What do you find most worrisome about the impacts of increasing tourism? What do you find most worrisome about increasing tourism? You said that it was worrisome.

 

BH: Well, I think there is a capacity ultimately anywhere. I read, I read Lincoln [Steffens?] all the time. I think he’s a great investigative journalist, and he has data, I think it was probably in his column – the extent to which our infrastructure here in Bar Harbor is affected by this influx of summer visitors – the strain on the water disposal system, what the town has to pay. I think that’s the other thing is that townspeople, people who pay taxes here, wind up paying for a lot of the effects of summer visitors. I know I sound like a cranky old conservative now. Maybe I don’t. Maybe conservatives want more business. I don’t know. The labels are difficult these days. [laughter] But I just think that there has to be some recognition that there’s a limit, that there’s enough. If there’s a capacity that can be managed. But it’s not ten, twenty percent per year growth in order to be in business.

 

KC: [1:24:31] And do you think that ultimately affects the bay as well?

 

BH: Oh, yeah. I don’t see how. I’ve read what people have said about the degree to which the cruise ships themselves pollute the bay, keeping their diesels running, high sulfur diesel that they burn. Yeah. It all winds up in the watershed.

 

KC: How have the people on the water changed in Frenchman Bay?

 

BH: Well, I’m not sure it’s particular to Frenchman Bay. I think I just saw a red star out there. There are very rude people, particularly pleasure boaters, who like to bomb around at thirty knots and leave big wakes. We have a powerboat, a very traditional one, probably displaces eight thousand pounds. But the wake that they put out, I have to turn that boat in; otherwise, we’re rocking side to side. I don’t want to disparage pleasure boaters, but I think that there are a few of them who – they need some etiquette lessons. I think there is a kind of emphasis. I read Wooden Boat Magazine and am involved in the wooden boat community a bit. And there’s a lot of debate. Do you ever read Maine Boats, Homes, and Harbors? It’s out of Camden. They’re supported by advertising, and they have to advertise a lot of the – well, increasingly, they’re advertising electric boats now, that’s going to be forever. There’s still a lot of gas and diesel stuff out there and stuff that wants to go fast as opposed to sailing. So, I think there are communities of people who sort of cast a critical eye on some of the behaviors of people with big powerboats.

 

KC: [1:27:31] How has the look of the bay changed?

 

BH: Well, I’m just sort of going around. I don’t know. I was going to say – I mean, there are some exceptions in terms of visible big structures in high places so that they – I thought there was some respect for skylines or something, whether there was an ordinance or something. But when you’re out on the water, you are aware of more mostly residential houses that are visible from the water. The offshore islands, I don’t think, have changed much. I think, for the most part, when you have Acadia National Park and Maine Coast Heritage Trust and just go on down the list – Frenchman Bay Conservancy, which is a great organization, by the way – we’ve got a lot going on here that most places don’t have in terms of trying to appreciate the future, particularly as far as the ecology and the [inaudible], and all that’s concerned. I think we’re very fortunate.

 

KC: [1:29:13] How has what people do on the water changed?

 

BH: Well, I think there are fewer lobster fishermen, particularly year-rounders. A lot of that is just because it’s a hard life in the wintertime. I think I would like to see more, kind of hybrid industry, say between lobsters and mussel farming, or lobsters and kelp farming, or lobsters and – so that it would be mutually beneficial both to somebody who’s trying to make a living and yet not being so unifocal that if something happens to that species, it’s a crisis, but rather to be more sort of multicultural if you will. That was the other thing – this fish farm. That’s just a monoculture of these salmon. It’s awful. Thank God we were able to at least delay it. I hope they’ll never be back.

 

KC: [1:30:34] What about the Bay has not changed in your experience or opinion?

 

BH: Smells. You can’t be completely objective in your view of things, and I think one of the reasons that you’re happy to be here is on the subjective side of things. My wife Cookie said there’s a particular smell on foggy evenings that’s sort of a combination of exposed flats sort of wafting in from the bay and hamburgers cooking somewhere. [laughter] It just instantly – you’re there. I think the essential sights, smells, sensations, in general, are still there. You have to know where to look for them sometimes or pick the right season. Go out in December. You may not be able to smell quite as well because it is cold. But you know the sound of that surf crashing in. So it’s all there. Yeah.

 

KC: [1:32:15] What do you value about the bay?

 

BH: It’s where I came from. I think that’s kind of more than just this simple reference to the fact I was born here. We all come from the sea. And someday, we go back. This is a little bit of a personal story, but we lost a son. He was only twenty-five. He was a trombonist. Grew up here. Miraculously went to Juilliard. Of course, he wanted to study with Joe Alessi. And he was in – he graduated, got a job in San Antonio, and on December 14th, he was murdered. This was ’95, maybe. Not sure when. But anyway. Every December 4^th, my wife and I go down to the ocean drive. Sorry. We still have some of his ashes. And we throw them in. So that’s kind of what I mean in that the sea is where we come from and eventually return. There’s some part of us that can’t be destroyed. The elements are still there. There isn’t a fire hot enough to cook them. So, I didn’t think I’d do this, but I think that that’s the essence of it. And you don’t have to be born here to belong here. You know, I think of you guys. Why did you come to the College of the Atlantic? What do you love about the school?

 

KC: [1:34:56] I wanted to be by the ocean.

 

BH: Yeah.

 

CH: Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that with us.

 

KC: Yeah.

 

BH: Well, ultimately, I think all stories are personal. When you’re looking for objective information, there’s always the personal element of bias. But I think when you’re talking about experience and deeper things like that, there’s always a personal element. So, thanks for listening.

 

CH: Oh, my gosh. Of course. We’re so grateful for that.

 

BH: Yeah.

 

CH: [1:35:42] I think we should move to the maps.

 

KC: Yeah. Yeah. So Camden’s been writing down locations. Well, is there anything else you wanted to say before we ended this part of the interview?

 

BH: No, I think I’ve enjoyed it. I think–

 

CH: Yeah, we really enjoyed it.

 

KC: Yeah. So, yeah, as I said, Camden’s been writing down locations. We’re going to roll out this chart. If that’s all right, we’ll have you circle some of these locations.

 

CH: So the purpose of this, basically, is that if there’s anything you’ve mentioned, but either we wouldn’t be easily able to find on this chart or –

 

BH: Yeah. You’re doing geo maps or GIS [Geographic Information Systems] stuff.

 

CH: And I’m also going to ask you if you would – I’ll mention some of the places that you mentioned, and then I would love it if you would draw us a little map of West Street the way you remember it if possible because I really felt there was something really compelling about the way you described it. And I think it would be really phenomenal to have that visually as well. Here’s the map. I’ll go ahead and mention some places, and then if you could just circle where they are, I’ll give you a number to write beside them.

 

BH: [1:37:03] Okay.

 

CH: You mentioned that there were some streams where people would go smelting. Also, if you don’t know, that’s fine.

 

BH: The most famous one is over here in Hog Bay. Let’s see. Way up here. It’s just barely on your chart here. Let me circle Hog Bay.

 

CH: Yeah. If you could just do a big circle right in that area. And then if you could write a one next to that, I would really appreciate it.

 

BH: Okay. You can see the inlet to the stream that comes down – I don’t know what the name of the stream –

 

CH: Would you mind just circling that or doing a line down that as well?

 

BH: Yeah. You had to be careful because in those days we didn’t use nets. We got right out in the stream with – you know the old Bert and I story was a – low boots or high boots rolled down low? Anyway, the boots only came up to just below your knee, so you had to keep an eye on the incoming tide because that’s when the smelts came in. Otherwise, you’d be over your boot tops. Okay, That’s one.

 

CH: [1:38:30] Did you write a one?

 

BH: Yeah.

 

CH: Yeah, you did right there. And then you mentioned flounder catching, I’m pretty sure, in Salisbury Cove.

 

BH: Yeah.

 

CH: If you could just circle that as well for me.

 

BH: Sure. Right Here. Let’s see. Well, the Woodland Cottages. What’s that? Emery. Okay. It’s right here. It’s not called – oh, little, tiny Salisbury Cove. You want me to circle Salisbury Cove or where we actually went to fish for them?

 

CH: Where you went to fish for them, please, if possible.

 

BH: Yeah, right out here. I’ll just put it right here.

 

CH: And that would be number two.

 

BH: Yeah, that’s sort of on its side. I hope you –

 

CH: That’s totally fine. Right. And then you mentioned the ball in Hulls Cove. Was there a specific place that would happen?

 

BH: Oh, yeah, absolutely. It’s the little schoolhouse on the hill. Let’s see, this is the road that goes down the shore. Okay, so it’s right here. I’ll put the three right there if that’s okay.

 

CH: [1:39:47] Great. A lot of them actually are pretty like – you mentioned a station on Cottage Street where stuff would be delivered from Ellsworth after the railroad arrived.

 

BH: Right.

 

CH: This map is not super detailed there. So, when you draw the little map of West Street, could you also –

 

BH: Yeah, I’ll put it in there.

 

CH: Perfect. The Morrell Park.

 

BH: Right. Let’s see, Kebo. These topo maps don’t have the greatest roads on them. That’s Eagle Lake Road. That must be Ledgelawn Avenue. What?

 

CH: Are you looking for Main Street coming out?

 

BH: I’m looking for the Jackson Lab.

 

CH: I think JAX is right there-ish.

 

BH: There-ish?

 

CH: Yeah.

 

BH: Okay, well, that’s where it is. Just put a circle there?

 

CH: Sure. And then a four.

 

BH: Yeah. Okay

 

CH: [1:40:52] And then you also mentioned a Greek revival building by Kebo.

 

BH: Oh yeah.

 

CH: I’m assuming by the golf course?

 

BH: Yeah, right. The Building of the Arts.

 

CH: Building of the Arts, you said it was called?

 

BH: Yep. Let’s see. We’re coming into the golf course. This detail isn’t very big. I’m going to put it roughly here. Okay. You can see where it was for yourself. If you know where Ledgelawn Avenue is, go almost as if you’re going to go to the dump, but you don’t. You make a right-hand turn on – what is the name of that road?

 

CH: Cromwell Harbor?

 

BH: Yes. You go up the hill, past the cemetery, and through that stop sign. You with me?

 

CH: [1:41:58] Yes.

 

BH: And then go beyond there, and it’ll be right on the right. There’s a hillside with a couple of homes being built along up in there. There is a flat area with a bunch of mailboxes on it. There may be a road sign now because they developed the top of the hill. They did a hideous thing up there. Sorry. That’s where the Building the Arts was.

 

CH: Cool. Very good. I’ll do some looking for that. And then, if you could also – you mentioned the Western Way, which was with regard to sailing.

 

BH: Right. There is the Western Way right in here.

 

CH: Could you just circle that whole area and call that six?

 

BH: Yes.

 

CH: [1:43:02] And then, if you could find The Hop for me.

 

BH: Right here.

 

CH: You can circle that and call it seven.

 

BH: Okay.

 

CH: Thank you so much. John Williams boatyard?

 

BH: Right. Somes Sound. Let’s see. It’s roughly here.

 

CH: Okay, if you could just do a – yeah, wherever it is, and then an eight. Those are the notable locations. What I’m going to do is I’m going to fold this map in half. Then, we can turn it around so that edge isn’t going to roll upwards. I would love if you could draw me a little map that shows West Street and maybe also mention that place on Cottage Street, roughly if you can. I wrote down a list of locations as well that you mentioned, which I’m happy to read back to you. But if it’s easier just to draw it from memory, whatever makes more sense.

 

BH: [1:44:11] Okay. This is going to be fairly crude. So we’ll put West Street here. And that will come down and then turn into the wharf. Okay. And along here – now, let’s see. Before we get to the wharf – let’s see. So, here’s Main Street Hill. Let’s see. I guess I can do that up to a point. Maybe about there. Then I’m going to – so, I’ll complete West Street here. Yeah. This goes out and becomes the parking lot, sort of like that. That’s where the DQ [Dairy Queen] was right there. And this is where Superman was.

 

CH: [1:45:21] So, that’s the phone booth.

 

BH: That’s right.

 

CH: Perfect.

 

BH: So then we put in – we’ll put in Cottage Street. There’ll be some intersecting streets that I won’t have been alert enough to leave a gap for.

 

CH: That’s fine.

 

BH: Okay. Let’s see. This was Cunningham’s Hotel. You want me to put a number on that?

 

CH: If you could just label it Cunningham’s Hotel.

 

BH: Okay.

 

CH: That would be awesome

 

BH: I’ll be generous with Cunningham’s Hotel. Do you know Sheldon Goldthwait?

 

CH: I don’t.

 

BH: You interviewing him?

 

CH: I would love to hear more information.

 

BH: [1:46:22] Oh, my God. He’s a gold mine.

 

CH: Sheldon, what was the last name?

 

BH: Goldthwait. G-O-L-D-T-H-W-A-I-T. No E.

 

CH: Okay. Do you have a contact for him, or would I be –

 

BH: Yeah.

 

CH: Okay, great. I would love that at some point.

 

BH: And then over here. I think probably the Frenchman Bay Boating Company came – like that. I mean, this isn’t going to be a scale. There’s the DQ. FBBC [Frenchman Bay Boating Company].

 

CH: Love it. I’ll note what that is down here.

 

BH: I’ll put a little ramp down and a dock out here. Okay. I think there was always a little space there. But then, this is the Fish Net. I’m just going to call it the Young family operation [laughter] because that’s a little different than Young’s Lobster Pot. So Young’s Lobster Pot was roughly in here. And then was the Clark Coal Company, I think, along in here. Then, this is the laundry. Bar Harbor Laundry. Sheldon [Goldthwait] would probably have some corrections here. And then this is all Bar Harbor Club.

 

CH: [1:49:19] And around what years are we looking at when we’re visualizing this?

 

BH: Let’s say 1955 through – I don’t know when. I wasn’t here when all of this construction took place.

 

CH: Sure So 1955-ish

 

BH: 1955-ish. I graduated from high school in ’59. I would say up to the mid-’60s. Oh, I’m going to put another place on here, too.

 

CH: Please.

 

BH: Coming up the hill – Testa’s Restaurant.

 

CH: I was going to ask – you mentioned Bill Casey’s barber shop.

 

BH: [1:50:21] Yeah, right there. An arrow right there. You want to know where my great, great grandfather’s business was located?

 

CH: Please.

 

BH: Harry Coff was there. There’s a building still standing. I have to put a little driveway in here so you can get around the back of Testa’s. So this building has an old-fashioned storefront that says 1887 still. That was Asa Hodgkins and Son. He built a lot of the summer cottages around [and] built the Pot and Kettle Club. My grandfather’s name was also Asa Hodgkins. [laughter]. Anyway, so there was Testa’s. On this corner was something called Green Brothers. This is where I learned how to play pinochle. [laughter] Green Brothers was a gathering place because, in the winter, a lot of these men, who were unemployed because there was no summer estate to take care of, would gather at certain times during the day. Now, my grandfather was a perfect example. Asa II was my grandfather. And he’s the one who worked for the Railway Express Agency. The Railway Express Agency was open all year round, but the business really dropped off. About the only thing they did in the wintertime was ship out mice from the Jackson Lab [laughter] and occasionally other things. So he had a – I used to live with him a lot after my grandmother died, and he had a daily sort of circuit that he ran, which first would be to drive uptown and go to Green Brothers, where a bunch of the guys would be playing pinochle and catch up on the local news. Then he’d go over here. This was Boots Harris’s place, which is now called Route 66.

 

CH: [1:53:56] Yes.

 

BH: Boots Harris. And that was the soda fountain. Pick up the morning newspaper. He always had a Bromo-Seltzer every morning. When I was young – the way you mixed up a Bromo-Seltzer – there was an inverted blue bottle with a knob that would dispense, say, a tablespoon. So he put a glass under it, put one tablespoon of this powder in, and then in another glass, you’d fill it up with tonic water, and then you’d pour them back and forth. I don’t know what Bromine does for you, but he had to have it every morning. I was upset because I couldn’t have one. So Boots made me up what he called a pink lady, [laughter] which was – I don’t know – kid stuff. And then just down – oh, this was Perky Douglas Bakery. Douglas Bakery. Then, this is the Railway Express Agency right here. I’ve written it out once, so I’ll just put REA, okay?

 

CH: [1:55:28] Yes.

 

BH: So there was a place. And then the biggie. Well, see, this is Rodick’s – little, tiny. He also had a soda fountain. And then we had the big one here, which was the Criterion Theatre. And then the town offices were here. The Oddfellows building. And then there was a street that went down here called Rodick Street. The Rodicks were a big family name here. Bar Island used to be called Rodick Island, for example. When they had their typhoid crisis here in 1873, they decided they needed to form a common water supply because everybody had wells, and they were probably just little artesian wells. So that’s when they put in the sluiceway down from Eagle Lake. It was literally a sluiceway first. And the Rodick family put it in because they had a background in logging, and that’s how you make water move in the logging days. You just make a V-shape sluice. Well, summer people didn’t think that was [inaudible] – so they formed the Bar Harbor Water Company or something like that. But anyway, I digress.

 

[1:57:29] This general area down in here, and I’ll just sort of fill it in loosely like this, was called the backyard. There were all kinds of little, tiny houses in here. It would be called affordable housing, maybe. There was a Czechoslovakian family who lived down there – Johnny (Nyrich?). And one of the places that they would all gather would be in the Railway Express Agency office as well. He talked about being out in the boat. He said, “And that day, we shot twenty-five of them.” I said, “Jeepers. Twenty-five eiders?” And he said, “No, seagulls.” [laughter] They were eating seagulls. The other thing is that – oh, I haven’t told you about bootlegging, but we’ll leave that maybe for another time. But that’s another important use of Frenchmen Bay. I forgot. But that’s connected with the Criterion Theatre. Of course, you probably know the stories about speakeasy and so forth that was there.

 

CH: [1:58:57] I work there, so I’ve seen the tunnels. [laughter] I would love for you just briefly to say it for the recording.

 

KC: I haven’t heard this.

 

BH: Oh, well, the Criterion Theatre was built – well, I should know exactly. You know exactly.

 

CH: 1932.

 

BH: ’32. Okay. And the guy who – I don’t know if he owned it or just ran it was George McKay. He was a very enterprising guy. We’ve mentioned prohibition, of course, in terms of the Mount Desert Reading Room. But it was stated that there were several rum runners in town, all over the island, as a matter of fact. In fact, if you want to pick up the real story, go to the Historical Society website and go to the back issues of Chebacco. Ralph Stanley – you’ve heard of him? He wrote several articles in the early days of Chebacco, and one was on rum running. It’s very interesting. He spares no surnames at all.

 

[2:00:19] Anyway, George McKay supposedly could dispense spirits from the back of the Criterion Theater. What else? There was (Danny’s?) market in here. Specialty goods. Only open in the summer. He would come over to – I’m going to put it about here on the other side of Rodick Street, where Swan Agency is now. That was the IGA [International Grocers Association] store run by – oh, why am I blocking? They were from Salisbury Cove. Then Danny would come over, find the best looking [inaudible] he could find [laughter] at the IGA store, take them back to his place, polish them up, double the price, and tell them they came from Boston. [laughter] Very enterprising in those days. I can’t remember what was in here anyway. So that gives you –

 

CH: [2:01:40] That’s amazing. Thank you so much.

 

BH: Yeah. I’m trying to think of if there’s anything that’s really obvious and slipped my mind. But that’s what they did in the winter. And I used to hang out with my grandfather after school or on weekends, and he’d start uptown. He lived down by the hospital, Wayman Lane, start uptown. He’d go to Boots Harris’s place first, get his bromo, [and] check out what was going on over at Green Brothers. Maybe go down around the wharf, sit there for a while, see what was going on, and then there was a barbershop on School Street, which is way down here – (Morris Brendel’s?) barbershop. That’s where he’d go for a shave and basically gossip – catch up on what’s going on, tell stories. Storytelling was huge anyway. Who were the people who had that IGA store?

 

[2:02:56] But Sheldon Goldthwait will make me look like an imposter, even though he wasn’t born here. He’s got the most amazing genealogy database I’ve ever seen. It’s all local. He knows everything about everybody. He knows where all the automobile garages were. There were four or five of them at one time. The grocery stores. There was this School Street Cash Market. Oh, I didn’t put it in –right across from the Criterion – the A&P. That was the big grocery store in town. Atlantic and Pacific – Hatch’s IGA. That was much smaller. A&P was the big one. The sports shop was in here, but we don’t – anyway, we could go on and on forever.

 

CH: [2:04:12] Perfect. And I think –

 

BH: Sheldon and I get together. Can you possibly record a conversation between two old guys on that thing?

 

CH: Definitely. We are definitely capable of doing that.

 

BH: It’d be worth it.

 

CH: Heard.

 

BH: It’ll be worth it.

 

CH: Once we turn this off – do you think this is a good time?

 

KC: Yeah.

 

CH: Great. Then we’ll turn this off. I would love to get –

 

[2:04:44]