Sam Smith - Long before Bert & I, I started collecting Maine humor during my summer visits. One of my sources as a boy was Walter Stowe for whom I worked on various projects.
Mr. Stowe
appreciated having someone to instruct and demonstrate his immunity to poison
ivy by chewing on some its leaves. He had a stock of sayings of which he never
tired. He could recite a blasphemous version of the Lord's Prayer at breakneck
speed and when you asked him how much something cost, he always replied,
"25 cents, two bits, two dimes and a nickel, one quartah of a
dollah." When you picked up your end of a plank, the instructions also
never varied: "Head her southeast!" When you said goodbye he said,
"Keep her under 60 on the curves." And he offered this assessment of
a suddenly departed brother-in-law: "That fella never was any good. Now
he's upped and died right in the middle of hay season."
On the other
hand, his assessment of Clyde Johnson was more favorable: “He’s the only man who can shingle a
barn, tell a dirty story and smoke a pipe all at the same time."
When he
needed to stall while thinking of a reply, the quite short Mr. Stowe would go
into a brief shuffle, observe his feet intently, pick up his dirty baseball hat
and scratch his bald head, finally declaring, "Well now!" with the
occasional addendum "Ain't that somethin?"
When I
introduced my future wife to Mr. Stowe and told him we were engaged, he did his
shuffle and his head scratching, glanced at Kathy and then looked up at me over
his little round glasses and said, "Pretty good for a girl."
" Er,
Mr. Stowe, Kathy's from Wisconsin."
Shuffle. Hat
back on.
"Glad
to meet you anyway."
John T. Mann
recalls that Mr. Stowe had told his
father: "If I die afore the end of mud season, just stick me in the gravel
pit 'til the road dries out and the ground thaws."
By the time Kathy met Mr. Stowe he was very old.
He made do to the end. When Mrs. Stowe forbade him to repair the roof on the
grounds that a ninetysomething man shouldn't do such things, Mr. Stowe
reluctantly called a roofer, then donned his carpenter's apron and climbed to
the ridgeline where, like an aged great blue heron, he sat and supervised the
operation.
Carolyn White, who spent nearly all her young
summers on Wolfe’s Neck, recalls the season-end ritual in which her parents
would instruct her to "go over and say goodbye to Mr. Stowe, because he
may not be here when we come back next year." Mr. Stowe lived long enough
for Carolyn to repeat the ritual with her own children.
Maine's less than pompous culture could be found everywhere, even
reflected in the work of the local police department, as witnessed by a few
entries in the Freeport police log from the summer of 1979:
JUNE 14
1000 PM: A barking dog was reported on Bow Street. Officer Gillespie asked the
owner to quiet the dog and she said she would do her best.
JUNE 15
1008 PM: Officer Sloat received a report of a woman screaming on Pine Street.
He found it was a lovers' spat.
JUNE 17 230PM: Officer Walker attempted to locate an 8O-year-old woman on 1-95.
She had had a quarrel with her husband and decided to walk . . . 300 PM:
Officer Walker located the woman and assisted with the reunion.
810 AM.
Officer Carter responded to a call at the Brogan residence for a dog unable to
get out a pool. In the process of getting the dog out of the pool, the dog bit
Officer Carter. . . . 855 AM Officer Carter went back on duty after changing
his trousers at home.
Even the road signs could be fun
Big new tube
Just like Louise
You get a lot
In every squeeze
Burma Shave
Not to
mention the road directions
How much further is it to Freeport? . . . About 25,000 miles
the way you're headed.
How do I get to Skowhegan? . . . Don't you move a goddamned
inch.
Where does this road go?. . . . Don't go nowhere. Stays right
here.
How do I get to Boothbay Harbor? . . . Can't get there from
here.
When you get to big Jimmy's place down the road a piece, you're gonna wanna
take a right..... But don't!
How do we get to Topsham? . . . Don't rightly know . . .
Well, how about Gorham then? . . . Nope, don't know that eithah . . . You don't
seem to know much . . . Ayah, but I ain't lost.
Do you know how to get to Waldodoro? . . .Ayah
How do you get to Bangor? . . . Well, I usually get my
brother to take me
You never
knew when a laugh would crop up. Once, as a teenager, I drove into a gas
station, stepped out of my car into a puddle and heard someone say "How's
the watah?"
And John at
R&D Automotive told me many years
back that my brother had been in with his car. "He said he kept smelling gas . . . so I told him to stop it."
Then there
was the exchange at Ed Leighton's department store:
"How ya doin?"
"You want the long story or the short one?"
"Oh hell, give me the long one."
"Pretty good, I guess."
At my father’s
funeral I
asked Billy Maybury, the undertaker how he wanted the pallbearers arranged.
"How
many you got?" he asked pleasantly.
"Six,"
I replied
"Three
on a side."
And then there was the time Bob Guillamette, the plumber,
came to fix something. I asked him to also look at the tub he had recently
installed because the water was slow to drain. He returned a couple of minutes
later saying, "Christ, Sam, you're one of the lucky ones. Most of them
won't hold water."
Then he fixed it.