Yankee Summer: The Way We Were

When the ladies of our summer community started wearing shorts, smoking cigarettes and driving cars, many of the local women felt the end of the world couldn’t be far away. Certainly the Lord would not let such happenings go on for long.

But gradually nearly everyone except dear old Nellie Ingalls became less upset at the changes and the folks from "away" didn’t seem to be quite so strange any more. True they played golf, sailed boats, wore white suits and funny hats, talked weird, wore wrist watches, read "foreign" newspapers and magazines, and carried tennis rackets around a lot. The young crowd drove open top roadsters, let their arms and sometimes their legs hang out over the doors, and made, what seemed like to us, a lot of noise.

I feel lucky to have lived enough in the pre-World War II era to experience much of what our ancestors had endured. I visited an old time working lumber camp once, my family made soap, vinegar, butter, and raised a variety of animals and poultry. I was also fortunate that our town contained a neat collection of rock solid Yankees, old Scots, new French Canadian farmers from north of the border as well as the big group of city folks that invaded our town each summer. In the next town, a group of quite different Italian, Scottish, and French granite workers provided us with an exciting Saturday night whenever we wanted one. All of them affected our lives in various ways.

In the thirties most of the country, including the rural areas, were very depressed. By living on a farm we certainly did better than the poor people in the cities. Everyone here still had the survival skills that our ancestors had developed, and we never had been used to prosperity. We raised most of our own food, cut our fuel, and had generations of experience of dealing with things that consistently go wrong.

It was also a good time to be young. Unlike the grownups, we didn’t feel threatened by the new ideas and inventions that were appearing, and none of us had any memories of better times. None of our neighbors were any better off than we, and we didn’t envy the more prosperous summer visitors who had to spend most of the year in cities. The radio now kept us informed of a world that we had known of only in our geography books, and finally we could begin to almost feel a part of it.

A large lake had brought the earliest settlers to our town. The fish furnished abundant food during the first years of clearing land before they could plant crops. The outlet furnished power to run a sawmill, gristmill, shingle mill, sash and blind industry, wagon factory, and several other shops. Only the sawmill and wagon factory was working when I was growing up, and folks from the cities, had completely bought the entire area that ringed the beautiful lake except for a small public beach. If we went to the village in summer we heard a Babel of New York, Princeton, Hartford, Boston, and Philadelphia accents.

The "foreigners" not only brought in strange words, but also curious customs, some quite offensive to the century old traditions of the natives. The new people got very close to peoples faces when they talked and some waved their hands vigorously as they spoke in a way that made the Yankees nervous.

Whenever things got too comfortable, a preacher came to town with a camp meeting to warn everyone of the imminent ending of the world because of our immoral ways, and everyone thought he was talking about the newcomers. He would yell about the Chicago Fire, San Francisco earthquake, tidal waves, wars, and threats of wars as signs of the soon to arrive, Armageddon. Some of the prophets would even set the day and hour for the trumpet to sound, and one of them urged his listeners to dress in white and sit on their roofs to await.

Of great interest to me was the one lady spiritualist who was left from the great movement that had swept the country earlier. She held seances, and put people in touch with their contact dead relatives. I always wanted to go and watch a table rise slowly in the air, but never had the chance. We did hear the story, probably made up, of one man who wanted to contact his dead wife through a medium. Finally he got through and asked her what Heaven was like. "Well, its nice," she admitted, but it’s not Vermont."

No longer was our town all Congregationalists and Methodists. We now had Roman Catholics who held a mass in Latin, and listened to a sermon in French each Sunday. A group of Seventh Day Adventists celebrated their Sabbath on Saturday, and sometimes upset their neighbors by haying, plowing, and cutting wood on Sunday.

The summer crowd didn’t try to convert us to any new religions, but some of their customs appealed to the younger set, more than their elders wanted. Farm boys began going without shirts and caps, and wives began to drive cars. Pipe smoking men who had previously considered cigarettes a sissy habit, began buying the so-called coffin nails, but always carefully explained that it was only to save the constant relighting of their pipes.

We kids were fascinated with the airplanes that occasionally landed on the lake or in fields near the village. It seemed to us that the world promised by Popular Science, the Tom Swift books, and Buck Rogers might now be within reach.

We were also learning some isms--fascism, communism, socialism, and Nazism. People were worried that Germany and Japan would fight the coming war with death rays, deadly germs, nerve gas, and fantastic explosives from dive bombers. Newspapers warned about the Yellow Peril, whereby billions of Orientals would take over the world. The German Bund was becoming a new threatening force in the cities, and they were setting up camps throughout the country to train the youth in "the new order." All things for which we feared our county was unprepared.

But most of this had little effect on our area. Europe was still far away, Japan even further, and much closer were hard winters, mortgages, poor farm markets, and the host of the tribulations that, we were told, "human flesh is heir to."

But it was summer vacation, and the dreaded high school was two months away, beyond that, who knew what? Would we follow the traditions of ancestors, or be swept up in something quite new, something for which no one we knew seemed ready for. Some days it all seemed exciting, and we could hardly wait. But at others it seemed more than a little frightening.