The First Summer I Came to Maine

by Mike Swanton

This is all I can remember about the first summer that I came to Maine.

It was around 1955. My dad built a platform over the rear seat of his 1949 Dodge sedan. The luggage went on the floor and the three boys slept on the platform. I was sound asleep when I was loaded into the car in the wee hours and driven from New York to Maine. It was an 11 hour car ride up Route 1 in those days. When we arrived it was foggy, cold and damp. I wanted to go home.

I was the youngest child, so I don’t have any idea how many summers my parents had been doing this before my arrival. My mother, Peg Swanton, told me that the first time she and my father, Bill, went up to Maine, they split the rental of the cottage with my dad’s sister Sally and her husband and two kids. The rent for Mrs. Young’s cottage was $25 per week, split two ways. The cottage was the first house on the right on 1st Street.

The front cottage on 1st Street, as it looked in 1986. It was demolished a few years later. (JH photo)

We stayed in the rear cottage and my aunt and uncle stayed in the front. There was a cast iron Glenwood wood-burning stove in the kitchen and an icebox. A real icebox. I believe it was Lester Orcutt who delivered the ice. The exterior walls had exposed framing and the interior walls were a fibrous material called beaver board. The walls were about eight feet high and stopped well short of the ceiling. You could throw your dirty socks over the wall and hope that you would hit your brother in the next room right in the face!

I remember the long path through the brush and poison ivy to the beach. We would spend all day there and when we got home they stood me up naked on the porch and hosed the sand off of me with a garden hose. Biddeford Pool has always had exceptional water pressure!

I don’t know what attracted my father to Biddeford Pool. He was brought up in the Bronx, in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge. Why was an urbanite like him attracted to such a rustic vacation? After he finished high school, and before he marched off to World War II, he had spent some time in logging camps up north in Connecticut. Maybe he was revisiting his youth.

We came up for a few summers and stayed in that cabin. Then we skipped a few years because our town had built a public swimming pool and we couldn’t afford both. We started coming back to Maine when I was about 12. Mrs. Young had died (I think she was 102) and her son Bernie had remodeled the cottage. The horse-hair mattresses were gone and were replaced with real beds. There was sheetrock on the walls. My dad started talking about retiring and moving to Maine. A year or two later we did so, on June 24, 1966.