This is a continuation of Jean Chenoweth's articles on local life during her early years in the Mill Cove-West Harbor area where she was born in 1939. Barbara Rumsey

Family fun

Summers my uncle and I would row to town, tie up at the town float on the footbridge, and shop, especially at The Smiling Cow. I also loved to shop at The Wise Owl, The Red Dragon, and The Jade Lantern. After the Red Dragon burned on Commercial Street, it opened in the log cabin on the By-Way. It always smelled of fir balsam pillows. I bought maple sugar candy there for my mother and I loved to look at all the many colored yarns although I didn't knit then. When I was older, my friends and I would take a boat to Squirrel Island and swim at their beach for the day, or we'd take the Richard T. to Capitol Island for their beach. Sometimes we'd walk to the aquarium on McKown Point and see the fish. Weekends kids would haul their little wagons up and down the side roads, collecting bottles so they could get a 25-cent ticket to the Strand Theatre. I loved summer vacations.

Swimming

We had a public saltwater swimming pool, now the Douglas Carter property, that my great-uncle Bill Farmer built and ran. It had bathhouses, a diving board, a slide, and colored lights at night. I swam there summers with my friends. People left their wet bathing suits and towels on the railings to dry and my job was to gather them all up late in the afternoon and put them in a bathhouse for the night. Bill paid me five cents a day for that and I bought stamps to paste in a book to buy war bonds. Except one day— it had been very hot and Bill asked me proudly what I was going to do with the nickel and I said “Buy a Dixie cup.” He was deflated because he wanted people to hear how patriotic I was. And for those who don't remember, a Dixie cup, which cost just a nickel, was ice cream in a small paper carton with a simple wooden spoon/paddle. Its peel-off lid had photos of movie stars on them. Many years later I taught swimming and diving at that same pool. After Bill sold the swimming pool, my mother and I would swim on the little strip of shorefront we owned next to the pool. My mother loved to swim so we went every day at high tide.

Skating

My great-uncle Bill also had an ice skating rink off Williams Street. He had a small warming building where he rented skates and sold hot drinks and hot dogs. There were wooden benches to sit on outside to put your skates on and wooden ramps to walk down to the ice. He piped music outside to skate to and at night he had colored lights all around the rink. The skating rink was drained in the early summer but started to fill up again late summer. We used to catch frogs there with a piece of red cloth tied on a string. We always let them go again. We would bring turtles home for pets, keep them a while and then release them. And once we brought home a three-foot-long milk adder from Penny Lake. I hated snakes but Ken loved them. Ken let the snake out one day and it chased Henry Rice all the way down the driveway. I guess Henry didn't like snakes any more than I did.

Sliding

Winters when I was very young, my uncle would take me on a sled to West Harbor Pond to watch the men cutting ice. In the summer we would go into the icehouse where it was cool with all the cakes of ice stored in sawdust. Ed Spinney delivered ice to our house for the old icebox that set in our back yard. Winters during World War II there were horse races on the pond every Sunday with sulky racing. Small airplanes also landed on the ice during the races and people would pay to go up for a short ride. My mother always wanted a ride but we never had that much money. A bakery truck would drive onto the ice and sell pastries.

We could slide in the roads in those days. My uncle would haul my toboggan to meet me when school got out and we would slide on the snowy road down Lakeview Road, around the corner to the left, and all the way home on Western Avenue.

Local haunts

One of my best friends was Ann McVane and her family lived at the very end of Town Farm (now McCobb) Road. I think I was in fifth grade when they moved away to Connecticut. I spent a lot of time at her house and when we were old enough we had barn dances in her barn. Evelyn Keene had taught us square dancing at school. We had a West Harbor Girl Scout troop led by June Hathaway when she lived on St. Andrews Lane. I loved getting badges and going door to door selling Girl Scout cookies. Later the troop became part of the town troop and I stopped going.

We found mica and garnets in the quarries. There was an old falling-down house near West Harbor Pond and we used to go through that carefully, finding things left in the cellar. That's completely gone now. There were still parts of the old wooden sidewalks at Mill Cove and near the Oake Grove Hotel, and we walked the Wheeler Road. We cut a Christmas tree every year on our property or on somebody else's; no one cared and we didn't care if someone cut a tree on our land. Even people with no money had land!