After Labor Day the whole town seemed
different. Most of the summer people had
left. When we lived down the Cut, we’d
still run into a few tourists along the Boulevard in mid-September—“stragglers,”
everyone called them.
They’d be snapping pictures with their
“Brownie” box cameras. Or they’d be
getting their own pictures taken by Louis Blend, who held onto his post in the
circle in front of the fisherman’s monument until the days grew cold and the
rains washed down Stacy Promenade and the wind blew the leaves out of all the
trees along Western Avenue.
Louis would snap your picture—it couldn’t
have cost more than a quarter in those days—and the most fun would be watching
him develop it right there, dipping the print into a little tank of chemicals,
washing it off (you could smell the “hypo”), and handing to you in a stiff gray
cardboard “Souvenir of Gloucester” frame.
How many of us have had our childhoods
recorded in a series of images by Gloucester’s
only street photographer? Can you see
yourself now in bathing suit or shorts in front of the statue, the backdrop
always a façade of Western Avenue
houses?
Still, you always knew when summer was
over. The days felt different. And the light was different, too, as it had
been since the last few weeks in August: more oblique in the morning, sharper;
falling earlier in the evening, the trees casting long shadows at suppertime
when you’d limp in after scrimmage along the river bank. No more baseball now, just the World Series
on radio.
Of course, school was just around the
corner, if it hadn’t already started.
During the last week of August there would be the annual ritual of
shopping for school clothes. Your mother
would drag you around Browns or the Empire, or in and out of Goldman’s or
Grants. If you refused to make those
obligatory trips, you’d probably end up with clothes you didn’t like—shirts,
for example, the color and style of which you wouldn’t be caught dead in at
Central Grammar.
So it was best to submit to the ordeal of
trying on slacks that had to be cuffed, or the embarrassment of seeing yourself
with those droopy trousers in several views in the big mirror of the men’s
department in the Empire with the rest of the customers looking on. Henry Weiner sold me my first pair of long pants
there, and I’ll always be grateful that he didn’t patronize me because I was a
kid. Later, in high school, when you had
the freedom of buying your own clothes, you could also go to Bloomberg’s or
Alper’s for your back-to-school wardrobe.
After we’d moved from the Cut to Rocky Neck
in 1951, Labor Day was a more dramatic event.
The number of customers in our store and in all the shops and
restaurants on Rocky Neck would decrease markedly. You could tell the difference the day after
Labor Day. The Neck would literally be
deserted. Slowly all Dad’s
“regulars”—Richard Hunt, Stan Farrell, Tommy Morse, Bill Sibley, Joe Garland,
Jerry Hill, Harry Wheeler, Walter Kidder and Parker Morong—would reappear to
take up their old stools at the counter for those long fall and winter nights
of coffee and talk. Come winter, Dad
closed early and we actually got a chance to sit down and talk together as a
family before my brother and I went to bed early on school nights.
Summer ended precipitously in East Gloucester.
One day you’d be walking past the Hawthorne Inn Casino, the “deli”
thronged with bathers from Niles Beach, Johnny Windhurst and his Dixieland Band
screaming away upstairs at night with us kids on the back porch taking in the
music breathlessly; and the next day, it seemed, the Casino would be empty,
boarded up like the rest of the cottages, silent. And with the sharp winds of coming September
nights the whole place would take on a forlorn air, the Rockaway Hotel and the
Harbor View, the Delfine and the Hawthorne Inn, the Fairview and the Seacroft
Hotel, all “closed for the season,” as the signs on them would read when we
walked past them on those chilly nights after Labor Day to discover that summer
had indeed gone, disappeared just like that, and all of us here somehow left
holding the bag.
(from A Walker in the City: Elegy for Gloucester, Lost & Found, available at local book stores and from Amazon.com)
(from A Walker in the City: Elegy for Gloucester, Lost & Found, available at local book stores and from Amazon.com)
