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Otter Creek

TalesVOLUME IV

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as told by Dennis L. Smith

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Otter Creek Tales VOLUME IV

Summer Jobs and Winter Visitors

as told by Dennis L. Smith and written by

Karen O. Zimmermann

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© 2019 Karen O. Zimmermann and Dennis L. Smith

All rights reserved.No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced without the written permission

of the authors.

Otter Creek, MaineCapital of the World and Center of the Universe

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For all those who were born in Otter Creek, raised here, lived here, died here, live here, or have some

connection to the village of Otter Creek.

This means you.

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- Summer Jobs -

“Caddies should be seen and not heard,” were the

instructions given to ten-year old Dennis Smith. Frankie

Manchester, also known as “Isky,” was the caddy master at

the Northeast Harbor Golf Course. His job was to get the

biggest and strongest caddies out there, and so Dennis, not

big and not strong, was often not selected.

“Many days we went and waited for a job, but were never

called to caddy,” Dennis says. Caddies only got paid if

they worked, so sometimes hours were spent hoping to be

picked, only to go home with no money. Often his friend

John Adams was also left in the caddyshack with him. “We

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would talk about how we wished we were swimming. The

shack was not a great place to spend a summer day,” Dennis

says. It was dark, and some boys, like Heinz Baylor, would

pick on the younger ones. “He was never mean to me, but

he would make some of the other boys cry. He just liked to

do it.” Dennis’ father had gotten him the job, but only drove

him to Northeast Harbor on occasion. Either another kid’s

father would bring them to work, or they hitchhiked in. “Kids

hitchhiked all the time,” Dennis says, “It was just how we got

around. We usually knew the driver.”

“Did you have to wear a uniform?” I ask. He said you could

wear anything. “But, I was growing like a weed. Mother

couldn’t find me anything to wear except some hand me

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down pants that were way too big. I had to pull them up

under my armpits and cinch them in. The other boys laughed

at me, but I never cared about stuff like that.”

If there was a tournament they all got to caddy, but most

days there was no tournament, and the boys just sat and

waited for Isky to call their name. When they were called,

it meant hard work. “Some of the summer guys had me do

doubles, they thought it was smart to pay for one caddy,

me, to lug both their bags.” It was $1.25 for a caddy to carry

bags eight holes, whether it was one bag or two. Those bags

were heavy, and Dennis at ten years old was not big. Over

sixty years later he still winces, “It seemed like those bags

weighed a hundred pounds each,” he says.

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The boys waiting in the caddy shack had noon to two free,

as many of the golfers were indulging in a two martini

lunch, or a nap. “We would hit some balls, but I never really

liked playing till years later,” Dennis says. “We liked to go

swimming, but if Doug Gray caught us he would yell that we

had to get out of the water.” It was a short run through the

woods to Hadlock Pond, a tempting swimming hole, but also

the municipal water supply.

When Dennis was twelve his mother got him a job at the

Harborside Inn in Northeast Harbor. This meant leaving Otter

Creek and his family to live at the Inn for the summer. Dennis’

demeanor changes as we start talking about the Harborside.

His face softens, and it is clear those were better days.

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“There was a girl,” he begins. Ahhh. Her name was Susan

Smith, and she was going to be a freshman at Smith

College, and, though Dennis never claims this, it seems she

was smitten with him. “We would walk to the movies in

Northeast Harbor, George Brown had a theatre where the

Trust Company is now.” He says she tried to hold his hand. “I

don’t think she knew how young I was.”

Every Sunday Mildred, who ran the inn, put on a big public

dinner. Inn guests, local businessmen, and summer people

all came. “I just picked up empty glasses and tried to keep

things clean,” Dennis says. This was the evening waitstaff

and servants traditionally had off, so many folks needed to

go out to eat. The Harborside had a large buffet, and lobster

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bisque was included. “I had never had lobster bisque before,”

Dennis says. “It was the best thing I had ever eaten.” The

chef noticed he liked it, and would save a bowl in the kitchen

for Dennis. The chef taught him how to make pancakes, and

one of his jobs was to flip the blueberry pancakes at just the

right time.

Dennis had his own room under the eaves and worked seven

days a week from eight in the morning to ten at night, with

just a few evenings and afternoons off. He was sick once,

the flu he thinks, and locked himself in his bedroom for two

days. “I just wouldn’t come out.” They didn’t call his mother,

they just decided to fire him. He found out later that the

chef, whose name he cannot now recall, got Mildred to give

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him another chance. The next year he got a job at the Bar

Harbor Club, and that was the end of the lobster bisque and

walks with Susan Smith. “I have never had lobster bisque as

good as that chef made!” he says.

Dennis’ next summer stint was as a towel boy at the Bar

Harbor Club. He handed men their towels, picked up used

ones, and cleaned the shower stalls. We laugh when he

remembers that, because years later he became the owner of

a shower business in Otter Creek, which he still runs. Fred

Small, who was called Pat in peculiar and head-scratching

island fashion, was the head man at the Club. Pat’s son

worked at the club, too. He was a bit older than Dennis and

made homebrew up in the attic. He also bartended, and

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mixed a whisky ginger cocktail for Dennis. “That was good

stuff,” Dennis says. But Pat took it away from him. Dennis

also cleared glasses and dirty napkins. “That green drink

was real popular,” he says. “Alcohol was a big thing back

then. The club was really a drinking club.” There were tennis

courts, and a freshwater pool and a saltwater pool, so a few

members did do something other than drink, but Dennis

never swam in either pool. “We were not allowed.”

“How did you spend your summer vacations as a kid?”

someone will ask Dennis. “Oh, at the golf course, the Bar

Harbor Club, and at that big inn in Northeast Harbor,” he

replies. “Working!”

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- Winter Visitors -

“Fox are easy,” Dennis says. He is referring to tracking

them in the snow. “They make a simple straight trail.

Coyotes have bigger prints, and are not quite as focused

and unswerving as a fox’s trail.”

We follow tracks when we see them, usually just short

distances, but often we get a glimpse of another creature’s

life. We might learn what they ate, or where they slept. Fox

tracks, and most animal tracks, are pretty much the same

today as they were in the 1940s and early 50s, when Dennis

was a boy. Following tracks was something he grew up doing.

His grandfather Lawrence Senior used to hunt fox in Otter

Creek. Like many in rural Maine he made a living weaving

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together different jobs and ways to earn an income. He

was a caretaker for the Dunham family in Seal Harbor and

hunted foxes for their fur. Dennis loved listening to his

grandfather tell stories of long days on Dorr Mountain

trailing a fox through the hillside, with the long shadows of

the bare trees on the snow. Back then foxes were plentiful,

even a nuisance.

His grandfather used dogs, two blue tick coonhounds, to do

the running and the legwork, under alder brush and around

rocks. He and his hunting partner Mart Davis followed a

more leisurely route, and stayed out of the thickets. There

was a photo of his grandfather and Mart after they had

returned from a full day’s hunt. Their dogs were at their

feet. Beauford, Dennis’ grandmother, always shook her

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head when she saw that photo, “The men looked worse

than the dogs!” she would say.

Dennis wanted to hunt foxes like his grandfather, but

by the time he came of age the land was park land, and

there was no more hunting. He imagined himself a hunter,

though, and one day stalked a red fox. He spent half the day

tracking that fox, through the black woods, along Hunter’s

Brook, losing the trail and picking it up again. “I decided

that fox was going to go further than I was, and just back-

tracked home.”

Hunting was not a sport, but done for survival. Pelts were

traded for money for tools, or meat was used to feed a

family. Dennis was hunting for rabbits for the stewpot

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with Paul Richardson and Bobby Hopkins, members of the

Otter Creek family. An ermine popped its head up from a

woodpile, and Bobby raised his gun. “You shoot that ermine

and I will shoot you,” Dennis said. “Why did you stop

him?” I asked, expecting to hear how beautiful the ermine

was, and that it’s death would be pointless. “Bobby had a

12-gauge, it would have made a mess of the pelt.” Dennis

replied.

They had been tracking snowshoe hare in six inches of

snow in January or February when the ermine popped

up.“Rabbits are full of fleas in November and December,

it’s hard to clean them and not have fleas in everything,”

Dennis explains, “and forget March hares! They can run

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for miles.” He tells me about how hares court in March,

leaping high in the air and spraying urine on each other.

I had never heard of this, and that spring when we were

walking in the grainy snow we followed some hare tracks.

There were tracks on top of tracks, coming and going, going

in circles. Crazy. “Looks like a hare party,” I said, and we

saw red-orange drops splattered about. The red in the urine

is not blood, but caused by pigments in the evergreens the

hares eat.

Dennis also followed mice trails. This was not for the

dinner table, but just because he liked to. “They leave such

beautiful little trails, dragging their tails in the snow, then

disappearing under a tree root or some other place.”

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Days are short in winter, and almost every day after school

Dennis would meet his grandfather and walk in the woods.

If the dogs were not with them, they often startled a

partridge out of the snow. “They fly right into snow banks

to escape the cold,” he says. “It always made us jump!”

Partridge didn’t always plan wisely when they were making

an escape dive, though. Dennis tells of them flying right

up between someone’s legs and into their coat, although it

never happened to him.

“Gordon Robbins told me he had a partridge fly right up

under his raincoat,” Dennis says.”He reached down to hold

his coat closed, killed it and ate it.” I asked if he cooked it

first. Dennis said he thinks so but doesn’t know.

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I tracked, too, before I met Dennis, and our first date was a

hike on the pothole trail in Otter Creek. He had never hiked

it. The fog was what he calls “dungeon thick,” and we kept

losing sight of each other. Coyotes were more populous

then, and I squatted to look at some scat on the granite

ledge that was our trail. He came back when he realized I

was not right behind him. When he saw me crouched he

got down beside me and broke off a twig to poke. “Bone

and fur,” he said. We looked at each other over the scat, and

knew there would be many more trails in our future.

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Mart Davis, a bluetick coon dog, and Lawrence, Sr. The family barn built by Julius and Martha Smith

is in the background, and still used today.

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The Story of Otter Creek

For six thousand years things were pretty predictable in Otter Creek. Every summer ancestors of the Wabanaki tribe would hunt, fish, gather berries, harvest shellfish along the waterfront, and drink from the springs of fresh water.

In 1604 Samuel Champlain brought his boat into the creek for repairs, and Otter Creek entered written history. Both the French and English claimed the land, and while they disputed, smugglers used the cove. In 1794 the land was divided between Eden (now Bar Harbor) and Mount Desert.

The early settlers—families named Walls, Bracy, Davis, Richardson, and Smith—are the ancestors of many of today’s residents. Fish houses were built, and the waterfront was a place of work and gathering. In 1910, Otter Creek had ninety-

seven residents, most of them descended from these families.

From 1871 to 1881 Cyrus Hall quarried here, and remains of his granite wharves still exist.

Grover Avenue (formerly Old County Road)was once the main street, and a wooden bridge connected the east and west sides of Otter Creek. There were two wooden bridges before Acadia National Park built the current causeway, which effectively blocked use of the inner creek.

Fishing, quarrying, and farming are replaced with other trades, but ask any native and you’ll find they still gather mussels, go smelting, or have a residential lobster license and a spot for vegetables, keeping the connection to their ancestors alive.

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Dennis L. Smith and Karen O. Zimmermann

Dennis Smith was born in Otter Creek and had the misfortune to leave while attending school. He came

back in his early twenties and has helped all his children to acquire homes here, too. He still owns the house his

father Larry renovated and the barn his great-great grandparents Julius and Martha Smith built.

Karen Zimmermann has lived in Otter Creek for decades and cannot imagine living anywhere else.

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Otter Creek TalesSummer Jobs

and Winter Visitors•••••

as told by Dennis L. Smithand written by

Karen O. Zimmermann

These reminiscences of seasons past by Dennis Smith reveal a less technological

time and a sense of village life in the 1950s.

Otter Creek, Maine