Rosey Gerry told this story at last week’s Library Christmas program: It was the winter when I would soon be approaching the two-digit number of life, a magic time for most kids, with talk of new sleds made in South Paris, Maine, and Roy Rogers holsters with plastic pearl-handled six-shooters, and dolls with hair that you could comb. It was the year that the first hulahoop was presented at Christmas time — more than 100 million were sold. Bread was offered in a cellophane wrapper for the first time. It was a big year for General Mills, with the introduction of Cocoa Puffs, and the famous Jiff peanut butter. And it was the first production of the new ”swept-wing”  Dodge. These were items that were not even close to being attainable in my household. They were catalog wish items, only.

We had moved around a lot in my first nine years of life, living first in logging camps covered with tar-paper. Then, in the winter of 1954–1955, my mother said we needed to live in a real house, so we rented the ol’ George Cameron place [403 Youngtown Road].  

It was kinda cool being in a house that had a thing called a faucet that cold water came out of, and this magic thing called electric lights. The house had not really been wired in the walls, as the long snakelike wire ran along the walls and up and across the ceilings to dangling light bulbs with strings attached to pull them on... downstairs only.

Then after a couple years of living on Youngtown Road, my folks had a chance to buy a place on Thurlow Road.  A house I wouldn’t quite have called it, but a place to get in outta the weather. It was owned by a fellow named George Hills, who had started to fix it up. George was not anyone you’d want for a finish carpenter. I remember my father saying he took one 2x4 out of the wall and found 36 used nails in it.

Mr. Hills was a very generous man and sold it to my folks for $500, paid over two years. I remember the payments were $20 a month. That was a lot of money for my folks, and they never missed a payment.

But it didn’t leave much to live on the rest of the month, even though my father and mother worked most of the time — my mother working as a domestic, here and there, and my father working at the Seabright Woolen Mill in Camden.

He was making 85 cents an hour, which before taxes comes to $34 per week, and my mother was getting in a few hours a week at 50 cents an hour. All this would change in October 1959 as the State of Maine’s first uniform minimum wage went into effect: $1 an hour.

The old house had no inside walls, insulation, electricity, or plumbing. But it did have a fairly new brick chimney, which was a good thing cause I don’t ever remember us having dry wood under cover. We would cut and saw up wood for day by day use, fresh off the stump. And it didn’t seem to matter if I had cut a wood box full, or two wood boxes full, she (my mother) could burn it all in one school day.

I don’t ever remember us having a chimney fire, maybe it was because my father would cut up a  piece of old car tire and pour a little kerosene in the kitchen stove to get ’er going in the mornings.

I still can recall the covers on the old Home Clarion just a-rattling. Kept the chimney clean though. There was no money for sheetrock or boards to finish the walls. My father brought home the big cardboard boxes that the raw wool came in and nailed them up on the bare walls to help keep the cold out. He also nailed up a couple of used 2x4s and tacked more cardboard on them to partition off two rooms. So now, instead of the kids at school saying that we smelled like horses, as they had during my first year of school, they now said my sister and I smelled of sheep.

My father built a really cool two-holer out back, only about 30 feet from the house so it wasn’t far to run in the middle of the night — less chance for the boogie man to get you on a mad run. Why it was a two-holer I still don’t know to this day, as none of us wanted to be in the little building at the same time. Maybe that's why it’s called a privy?

My sister, Velma, was just starting school that year, and my brother, Monty, was still at home. He’d wait patiently for us to come home from school, either standing in the road or with his little face just peeking through the window facing down the Thurlow Road. We walked to and from the school because we were considered to be “Center kids,” and they didn’t ride the bus. Plus, Thurlow Road was not passable for four months of the year.

The next year we did start meeting the bus at Drake’s corner and riding the last 3/4  mile to school. Many a morning I lugged my single-shot bolt-action .22 to school, hoping for the chance to maybe get a partridge or gray squirrel for supper on the way home. I remember that we left the guns in the school office for the day but kept the ammunition in our pockets. It was a way of life.

I had worked raking blueberries that summer and saved up enough money to buy a few new school clothes. Working some odd jobs around the neighborhood was enough to support my addiction to old cars — yes, that fall I had found a really cool 1938 Chevy four-door sedan sitting on the ledge over at Sunshine Wellman’s place, where Loren Hickey lives now, by Western Auto. Bought it for $20 — I’m in love!

My dad and I towed it home with a chain, me sitting at the wheel steering and him towing it, as the points need filing and the clutch was stuck. He had it running in no time, and it’s off to the back field I go. Lots of miles were put on the car in that field, over the years, as gas at Dean & Eugley’s was about 30 cents a gallon. My Chevy got about 25 miles to the gallon.

On some days I’d sneak the old 1938 down to Drake’s Corner, park in my classmate Seaward Heal’s back yard so as not to have to walk up the hill to home after school the next day. Whenever this happened, it was always a good evening of lecture and maybe a swift kick from my dad for having taken the car out on the road. I was nine years old.

1958 was also the year with all the talk about Elvis being inducted into the Army and of Sputnik falling from the sky. Our family vehicle at this time was a 1950 Chevy pickup. Many a Saturday afternoon Velma and I rode in the back to the Camden A&P store — in all kinds of weather, as there was only room for my mother, father and brother in front.

Sometimes Monty rode in the back with us, all huddled together near the headboard to keep out of the wind.

So now it was late November and getting colder by the day. Each night my dad went through the routine of draining the pickup truck’s radiator and block, as antifreeze was too expensive. Each morning, he heated water in a tub on the stove and poured it into pickup.

On the coldest mornings, he filled a big pan with coals from the stove and set it under the truck, to warm the engine base while he went back in the house to drink his coffee, while the rest of us were still asleep under piles of blankets.

One of those mornings I was lying in my old brass bed that we bought for a dollar at a used-everything place in Liberty called Bettancourt’s, sound asleep and dreaming of old cars, when all at once I was jolted awake, sure that the Cold War had erupted and here I was in a house with cardboard walls and no school desk to hide under!

It was an explosion that brought the entire neighborhood out of bed. The gases in the engine base had gotten so hot they exploded and blew the base and many other gaskets off the engine. It was an interesting morning, to say the least.

My father, who got up at 3:30 about every morning so as not to be late for work, (punch-in time at the mill was 6:50 a.m.), proceeded to drain some gas outta the pickup and pour it into the old Chevy. That was real easy because the leaky gas tank had been replaced by a five-gallon can that sat on the rear floorboard.

He then removed the number plates from the truck and put them on the Chevy, poured the hot water into the radiator, and—shazam!—he was off and running in what is now named ol’ Sunshine—my Dad’s name for all of our old clunkers.  

As a little side story, my father ran the Chevy till spring, when he finally fixed the pickup. That’s when he found some paint and wrote “Sputnik” on the pickup bumper and told everyone that that explosion they’d heard was not a satellite reentry but parts of his ole pickup!

Along in December, as snow was starting to pile up, kids at school were excited about getting a Christmas tree and anticipating Santa’s arrival.

At the school, Mrs. Wilber’s third and fourth grade classes and Mrs. Johnson’s first and second grade classes drew names for the Christmas gift exchange and colored in pictures of Christmas trees and Santa Clauses.

At about this time my father and Zan Dougherty, owner of the mill, had a little tiff and Father came home out of a job. Now, this also was a time when jobs were as scarce as blackflies in a blizzard. So we tightened down once again in our lives.

Timing and tact were not among my mother’s assets. She set us kids down and said, “Sorry, kids, but there’ll be no Christmas here this year.”

You can only imagine the disappointment on three little faces. I had been through some tough times before, but must admit, it still hit hard.  So we didn’t bother to get a tree — that would only make things worse — and my brother’s and sister’s faith in Santa was fading fast. They just couldn’t conceive that they had been that bad. Why would Santa forget them? So, the week before Christmas was a bit glum.

My dad went back to work in the woods, cutting pulp for Bill Hardy, who owned a woodlot off Cobbtown Road. I helped him on weekends, piling pulp. We’d leave the house before daylight and return after dark, both Saturday and Sunday.  

At that time, the town only plowed Cobbtown as far as the dam, so we parked there. My father had made a little box sled to haul our gas and oil and lunches as it was quite a walk to the woodlot back behind the Fields cemetery.

Cutting pulp didn’t bring much money right off, as you didn’t get an account of how much wood you had cut until it was yarded in spring, but you could draw on it (about half). My point is, it was not much money, but it was a job for now. I do remember how good the butter-and-bologna sandwiches tasted toasted on a brush fire in the middle of the day, and how I waited patiently for lunch.

In all the years of that type of living, my parents never once considered calling on the town. It was just not in their realm of thinking. Pride is a strong force that has been around a long time.

So, two days before Christmas, there was no tree at our house, no Christmas dinner planned, and a dark cloud seemed to hang over the western side of Thurlow Road.

There were only five houses on the road at that time, and in a small neighborhood word travels fast. There was one family by the name of York that had moved to Lincolnville from upstate New York back in the 1940s. They had a little dairy farm next to the last house on the road. They were good people, kept mostly to themselves, went to a little church just up the road from Petunia Pump. It had been a Methodist church at one time, but now was occupied by this little group of people called Seventh Day Adventists. The Adventists had come out of the Millerite movement, which faded away following the Great Disappointment of 1844. (Another story for another time.)

Two days prior to Christmas, a car pulled up out front of our house. The Yorks and some other people got out and started lugging in bags and boxes of groceries, including ingredients for a Christmas dinner.

One bag was full of wrapped presents.

How excited those three little sets of eyes became as all that good stuff came in the door!  After they left, Mother — holding back tears — said, “Well, if we’re going to have Christmas, somebody needs to run and get a tree.”

In a flash, on went my boots and jacket. I grabbed the ax and headed down back through the snow after a special tree.  I found a great one about five feet tall, dragged it back, and nailed a couple of boards to the bottom of it for a stand. We had few decorations, but strung pieces of cardboard we cut up with scissors and colored with crayons. A little after dark, Father came home and asked what was going on.

All of us jumped in, jabbering all at once with excitement. Then Mother calmed us down and told him the story. His only comment: “They didn’t happen to leave any beer, did they?”

All in all, we had no TV, only kerosene lamps, no plumbing, but we were all well. We were together as a family, we had food in the cupboard, a few presents under the tree, green wood off the stump in the wood box. And I can faintly remember later in the moonlit night, hearing my parent’s bedroom window opening slowly and the regurgitating sound of the old 45/70, followed by the familiar words, “Everything’s all right, you kids go back to sleep,” and knowing that, since he very rarely missed, there was a good chance we’d have deer meat on the table Christmas day.

Christmas time seems to bring out stories. Here’s one from Kim Murphy, Camden Hills Regional High School Choral Director, about a rainy afternoon last week in Camden:

OK. So I will be the first to admit that I was NOT looking forward to caroling yesterday at 4 p.m.  (Just to bring anyone up to speed, this was for extra credit for some students, and trying to reschedule the Christmas by the Sea caroling which had been cancelled due to pouring rain.  A good number of students said they could join me at 4 p.m. downtown, and I promised hot chocolate at the end). 

Except, now the weather was dark and drizzly.  So gross, yucky.

But I just didn’t want to send out yet another cancellation notice to my parent email list.  So I thought, maybe no one will show up!  Then I can go shopping! But I heard through some teachers that they heard about kids talking about the caroling, so it looked like I would have to go through with it.

 3:50 p.m., Murphy’s Luck in place: I snagged a parking spot right next to the Village Green (our meeting spot).  No kids in sight.  Good!  Should I wait in the car?  No. I should be “visible.” So I put on my boots, warm coat, hat, gloves, grabbed lyric booklets and waited out on the Green.   Still no one in sight. I may be off the hook!

 At the stroke of 4 p.m., I see Jac sauntering across the green to the flagpole, our usual meeting place.  He’s wearing a Santa hat and ready for caroling.  (Darn! I think!)  Jac and I talk.  I asked him about the delivery of the canned goods to the food pantry (his community service) and actually asked why was he there to carol since he had already done his community service. 

Come to find out, it was for the promised hot chocolate!  Well Jac, I say, if no one shows up, let’s reschedule this for Friday.  It’s supposed to be sunny on Friday, and really, it’s just miserable out here.

 We were just about to let this caroling idea go when who shows up but McKenzie!  OK Only three of us.  Maybe I can still reschedule this thing.  It’s gross out here. Who’s going to even hear us?  So, I told McKenzie we would probably reschedule. 

In the meantime, since we all (all three of us) are here, why don’t we try a carol?  Jac suggested Little Drummer Boy.  Not bad. We actually sounded OK, not so bad.  OK, I said.  Maybe Patric is working over at Stonewall Kitchen. Do you want to go in there and sing for him?  Off we go.  No Patric, but we sang for the customers and two workers.  Not bad. They smiled, two little kids were intrigued, one customer joined in with us. We were a hit!  Off to French and Brawn. One carol in each store. This should get us over to Camden Deli for hot chocolate!

So, we decide to go to Camden House of Pizza, because Mr. Soldatos is so good to us (makes pizza for the musical cast and crew every year) and I brought Women’s Choir and Chamber Singers in there last week (free soda!). 

On our approach to Camden House of Pizza, we decide on Jingle Bells (and definitely sing the second verse).  We get there and there is no one in there, so I hesitate. 

I have already sung to Mr. Soldatos twice in the past week and there’s someone in there (his son? A delivery guy?) talking to him in the kitchen. Maybe we shouldn’t disturb him. 

Jac, Kenz and I are discussing whether or not to go in.  And on the same whim that propelled us out and about town (the Three Song-ka-teers as we called ourselves), we decided, what the heck, let’s go in and sing!

 Dashing through the snow. We were joyous!  We were loud!  Mr. Soldatos is smiling!  The man he was talking to — not his son, not a delivery guy — turns around.  We are singing!  It takes me a second to notice... we are singing to John Travolta! Oh my, oh my, oh my, oh my! 

My eyes widen in recognition and he is smiling that wonderful, beautiful grin of his!  I want to jump up and down and scream like a little teenager. John Travolta!  But we are in the middle of Jingle Bells and the song must be sung and finished well.  Smile, smile, sing, sing, and we were in tune! YES!  What a delight.  At the end of the song — I say — May I shake your hand, Mr. Travolta? 

He comes over and talks to us, shakes all of our hands; I start gushing and babbling about how my son dressed up like him in a seventh grade talent show; somehow I stopped babbling (Thank God) and we all wished each other Merry Christmas!

Outside – we quickly walk away – with grins on our faces.  I say to Jac, can you believe it? We just sang Jingle Bells to John Travolta!  Jac is smiling as much as me. We are thrilled.  

Kenz says, who’s John Travolta?

And then this morning before church, I heard the following traveling tale: A young family, the daughter and son-in-law of my pew mate, was flying Boston to Chicago the other day to spend the holidays with his family. It was Mom, Dad, their three-year-old daughter and one-year-old twins. Mom and Dad are each wrangling a wiggly, squirmy baby in their arms through the whole long flight through the night. As the plane makes its approach over the city, the little girl, glued to the window, squeals excitedly, “There’s Chicago!” pauses, then in the same loud voice, “what the hell is Chicago?”

Finally, here’s part of the story I told at the library program last week: I met my sister for the first time 25 years ago. She has our mother’s name, Margaret, but she goes by Maggie. As a member of the family, albeit belatedly, I get to call her Bitsy, her childhood nickname.  We’ve never spent a Christmas together, Bitsy and I, nor a Thanksgiving, Easter, or even a birthday; meeting in mid-life as we did, we each have obligations in other directions on holidays. Still we manage to spend a couple of weeks together most years, either in Maine or Louisiana.

Besides, I’ve had a perfectly good brother all along. Bill and I, he two years my junior, grew up bickering, pinching, tattling, and generally annoying each other until sometime during college we realized we were each other’s best friend.

When I think of Christmases past, Bill’s such a big part of it — the anticipation, the excitement of the morning, the photos of us in bathrobes with big eyes. Later on, it was planning the perfect gift for him, a handknit plaid sweater in several colors that was finally finished at midnight on Christmas Eve stands out, a sweater he actually wore for years, until he outgrew it and gave it back to me. Sadly, I finally outgrew it, too.

Back to Bitsy. I soon learned I had five siblings on my birthmother’s side, and none of them knew I existed, since Margaret died when they were children.

Bitsy’s Christmas memories, the good ones anyway, sort of stopped for her at age 12. She does remember how our mother used to make a candy wreath for them, tying hard candies to a ring along with a scissors on a ribbon, so the children could cut off a piece. They cut their tree near the place they camped every summer, a memory they all share with fondness.

And they had a table, Bitsy says, a big, round table with a Lazy Susan in the middle. For her it represents the heart of their family life, that big, round table. She even knows who has it now. In the chaotic time after Margaret’s death, father remarrying, household breaking apart, some neighbors got the table. Bitsy saw them not long ago, and yes, they still have it.

As the baby of five, including three older sisters, Wally’s Christmas memories are tied up with siblings, too. At least the good ones are. (There’s a certain wreath caper he and another 13-year-old pulled off one year that doesn’t bear repeating.)

One year both his mother and stepfather had health problems, involving an operation for her, and some other ailment for him. “There’ll be no Christmas this year,” announced the man who’d never learned how to be a father to this brood. Fourteen-year-old Pat, who’d mothered Wally from the beginning, was determined her baby brother should have a tree. She found one, bought it with her babysitting and bean-picking money, and hauled it home alone.

Pat, who famously tangled with the stepfather over almost everything, stood up to him again that day and said this tree was for Buddy. (I only call him “Bud” when his family’s around, never Buddy. It’s that family nickname thing, again). Wally’s never forgotten it. And, by the way, not long ago, he tracked down the stepfather’s grave at Togus for Pat; together they visited it, so she could stand over it and tell him she forgave him.

This isn’t the end of our siblings. Here it gets complicated, so don’t worry if you can’t follow our family tree.

After finding Bitsy and learning of our mother’s early death, and of my other four siblings, I continued to batter at the walls of secrecy that surrounded my origins. Most adoptions before about 1970 were “closed”, the secret of the child’s parentage sealed forever.

I did finally learn my birth father’s identity, and along with it, the existence of three more siblings. He was a sailor bound for the war, no surprise to someone born in 1944 under less than proper circumstances. He landed at Anzio in Italy, the southern front of the European invasion. He survived and went on to lead an apparently successful life.

Inspired by my success at unearthing relatives, Wally worked on a secret of his own: the identity of his father. Along the way he met Shirley, yet another sister, nine years his senior.

She was able to fill in the details of their father’s life; he turned out to be a veteran of World War I, who at the age of 17 went into France with the Marines. His life didn’t go so well. The Depression found him selling apples on the streets of Providence, after losing his job as a factory foreman.

In one awful week, when Shirley was an infant, he and his wife lost their little boys, age four and six, to a forgotten childhood disease; one was named John and the other, Wallace.

Some 10 years later, while at the Togus VA hospital, where he alternately worked as an orderly and was ill as a patient, he would father another son in 1939 and name him for one of the little boys he lost.

Have you kept count? That’s 16 siblings between the two of us. I draw no deep meaning or great conclusion from this. Just that Christmas is about family, and “family” can be defined any way you want.

Tom & Nelle Crowley sent out this message on the Lincolnville Bulletin Board Dec 21: “By now we all may know about the Verso Paper Mill shutdown and how 579 employees lost their jobs when the mill closed on 12/1/14.  Many of you may have already considered this but I just found out another way to help those folks this year at the St Thomas Episcopal Church this morning.   You can go online to donate easily and 100 percent of your donation will go to the families and individuals from the Verso Mill.

 As for us, we have been blessed beyond all prayers this year and will be donating to the Bucksport Families in place of gifts to others and in their name this year.  After all, I doubt that my grown children need a nifty knife sharpener or a cool wine opener!”

 A group of Youngtown Road residents will be taking a letter of concern to the Selectmen at their Monday, Dec. 22 meeting, requesting that the DOT do a study of the Youngtown Road to determine if the speed limits are currently appropriate for the road. If you think this is a problem they would appreciate your support. The meeting starts at 6 p.m.

Note that the Town Office will be closed at noon on Dec. 24, and all day Christmas. School gets out at noon on Tuesday.