Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!

Back in the mid-1960s we were living in Maine while my mother set up and ran the first women’s Job Corps center at the old Poland Spring resort complex. It was quite a change of pace and place for us. Discounting my first 4-5 years as a blur of on and off images, I had spent my life in two places, a tropical valley in Costa Rica and then a grad student subsistence life in the heart of the Midwest in Madison, Wisconsin (Go Badgers!). We had moved to Maine in the dead of winter in early 1966 when I was 12 and in middle school. I thought I was used to winter by then, given all the 40-below ice fishing and ice boat sailing on Lake Mendota, but Maine was different. I think it was mostly because while I got stone cold in Wisconsin, it also snowed a great deal in those days in south central Maine. In fact, we arrived in the middle of a blizzard during which the snow in the parking lot of the hotel we were staying in was well over the tops of the cars and when plowed to the sides after of few days of non-stop snow, reached a height of over twelve feet. I recall wondering how motorists could see one another when approaching at intersections, but this had already been addressed by the locals. The big gas station give-away that winter was fluorescent colored styrofoam balls that were designed to be placed on one’s radio antenna such that there would be at least about a ten-foot warning sign that a car was approaching at any intersection that was laden with snow banks that were otherwise too high to see over. It was actually a very convenient item and just about everybody had a styrofoam ball on their aerial as a local badge of winter courage.

We stayed in Maine for what amounted to three winters and three summers. That was when I learned how to ski, play golf, play tennis and paddle a canoe across the seemingly limitless number of lakes in the area. Skiing was something we did every weekend and even most weeknights (under the lights) unless something important was otherwise happening. In the summer, I literally lived on the golf course. Our house was actually on the 18th fairway, just close enough to the tee so that a long drive with a slight slice would thwack against the back of the clapboard siding and almost always leave a small mark. It was hell on the house, but worked wonders for my summer revenue stream as no one dared dig around in our overgrown yard in hopes of coming up with their ball. In those days, premium golf balls (like Titleist) cost $1.25 in the pro shop. Since those same balls go for $5 apiece today, I can only assume that production efficiencies have allowed their price to underperform the overall inflation index. But in those days, a recovered Titleist that was in good shape could be resold to passing golfers for 25 cents. On a busy day, most golf courses can have 200 players. If we assume one in ten might hit my house and lose their ball, those 20 balls might represent $5 to me. Since caddying earned me $3.50/loop/bag and the tips averaged our to bring that to $5/ loop/bag, on a normal 5-6 hour day I might make $10 and on a damn hard day of 10-12 hours I could make $20. Any way you looked at it, adding $5 per day to that revenue stream was meaningful.

I was not idle during the winter either. I wrangled a gig during my very first winter as the busboy of the ski lodge snack bar, working Saturday’s and several weeknights per week. The deal was that if I bussed dishes on those days, I would get a free season’s pass to the dinky Poland Spring ski area, which consisted on one T-Bar lift that ran 2,000 feet up and had one main trail that would qualify as a blue run by today’s standards and had two side trails, which were only somewhat passable since only the main trail had snow-making equipment and therefore was pretty much always in service. No one would mistake this place for Aspen of Vail, but it was good enough to learn on and provide my first run at winter recreation. A season’s pass for someone my age was $50 and I figured I worked 10 weeks, so $5 a week (actually perhaps more like $10 per week since it included meals, which doubled my take. Since the minimum wage (which was a far more operative calibrator in those days) was $1.10, I figure I was earning maybe $1 an hour, which seemed pretty fair for a 12-year-old…not as much as caddying, but a lot less strenuous as well.

We lived in Maine until the late summer of 1968 when I was 14 and one year into my high school years. It was a pretty formative time in my life…less so than my upcoming three years in Rome, but about as impactful as my four years in Wisconsin. Maine was a very different place to the other places I had lived. One of the things that made it so different was that it was a truly rural environment. I don’t mean that it was more remote than that tropical valley or more rugged in terms of its weather. I mean that the people were very much more basic than what I had experienced in either prior venue. The people of Costa Rica may have been primitive, but there was a cultural aura about them instilled, I suspect by their Spaniard conquerors 400 years hence. Wisconsin was quite suburban, and even the crazy ice fishermen, holed up in their little ice shacks were educated people for the most part. But the people of south central Maine were true hillbillies. I went to the Poland Community School with them for 7th and 8th grades, so I got a feel for who they were. They generally had limited aspirations and a worldview that ended at about a 25-mile radius. Some had never been to the coast…a mere 30 miles away and NONE in my class had been out of the state.

They all worshiped the Boston Red Socks, but were surprised to learn that one could travel across state lines in a bus for an eight grade class trip to actually see them play. The tall buildings of Boston were truly a gob-stopping event to them. One of the only forms of entertainment these kids knew was at a small dirt racetrack nearby that had weekly demolition derby contests. This may have explained why every self-respecting household in the county had at least 5 wrecked cars in its yard. And it all happened on Sunday. I can still hear the radio ads that blared all week long. “Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! Come on down to the racetrack and bring your best jalopy. If you can outlast the competition, you can take home $500! (Helmets required and the management is not responsible for any injuries)”. Whenever I find myself sitting around on a peaceful Sunday morning I wonder what would have become of me had I stayed in Maine to pursue my life…and how many junk cars would I have in my yard?