Category Archives: Puffin Tales

Random stories of the activities and friends in or around North and South Puffin.

Flying the Flag

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Here are two stories from this nearly naked city. I make no claim that they are related.

In April, 1982, my grandfather looked around at his life and said, “I’m 92 years old. I’ve outlived my family except my older brother. I’ve outlived my friends. I’ve outlived all the people I worked with. Let’s move to Florida.”

Kill BillSlippery When WetIn April, 1982, the United States Border Patrol set up a roadblock at the “choke point,” the Last Chance Saloon in Florida City, to search for illegal aliens and drug runners. See, the Keys are islands you can drive to, but just one, two-lane road connects us to the United States.

The blockade of the Florida Keys backed up traffic and shut down the rum-and-beer trade in the Keys.

My aunt and uncle loved the Keys and had spent several years scouting out the best places to homestead.

Boppa read the news and the tea leaves and had a finger on the pulse from the piper on Mallory Square to Theater of the Sea, the 1946 marine mammal park on Islamorada.

Roadblocks? Pissed off populace? Seceding from the Union? A naval battle with a loaf of stale Cuban bread?

Boppa put our 1734 farmhouse on the market.

The Border Patrol stopped every car leaving or entering the Keys.

“We seceded where others failed.”

Newspapers and television alike reported on the unprecedented “Border” roadblock within the United States itself. Expectant visitors canceled reservations to come to the Keys because the news said they wouldn’t get in.

I took another moving van of furniture north to North Puffin.

The City of Key West filed for an injunction in federal court but the court refused to enjoin the Border Patrol from treating the Keys like a foreign country.

The world press asked “What are you going to do, Mr. Mayor?”

“We are going to secede,” then-Mayor Dennis Wardlow replied.

Boppa auctioned some of the generations of family furniture (remember, we came from an old Quaker farm family that never threw anything away).

And on April 23, 1982, the Conch Republic raised its flag over city hall and the schooner Western Union attacked the US Coast Guard Cutter Diligence with water balloons, Conch fritters, and stale Cuban bread to begin the Great Battle of the Conch Republic.

The Diligence fought back with fire hoses.

Conchs valiantly fought the government forces to a draw and Prime Minister Wardlow surrendered.

Boppa bought a cute little 1968 cinderblock house here in South Puffin and the rest, as they say, is history.

33 years later, Conch patriots started celebrating the anniversary on Friday and will continue through Sunday, April 26. There will be a drag race on Duval Street, a sea battle featuring historic tall ships, a parade, and a bed race that may be “the most fun you can have in bed with your clothes on.”

Feets33 years later, Boppa is gone but well-remembered and I shall hoist a Rolling Rock in honor of those who can be hoisted by a schooner with water balloons or a 61-year old man on a flying bicycle.

 

Buffaloed

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I feel some sympathy for Plantation Key resident Jim Harris. I’m afraid people in South Puffin may have laughed a bit when they heard his story.

The Keys buffalo has reared its head again. The plummeting buffalo head, an only-in-the-Keys tale, resurfaced again in a “news of the weird” article. The last time was when a so-called reality television show aired a re-creation with some scant similarity to the actual event.

Mr. Harris, then 56, had to call 9-1-1 back in 2010.

The time was 1 in the morning. He had been lounging in a chair watching television. Minding his own business. Maybe drinking a beer. Out of nowhere, a water buffalo head jumped off the wall and crushed him.

“I think a f—— buffalo fell on me!” the battered fellow shouted to the dispatcher during his nine-minute call. “I’m crushed!”

The weight of the massive water-buffalo head, nicknamed Bubba, has been estimated at around 200 pounds. It belonged to Harris’ landlord.

The mounted head of a water buffalo on the wall is frighteningly familiar.

Soon after a Stevens Dean threw me out of the dorms, four of us went together to rent an apartment in downtown Hoboken. It was a perfect place for four struggling college students, advertised as a “two-bedroom penthouse apartment in a quiet neighborhood.” The price was right, for us. $80/month at first, although the landlord raised it to $110 when he found out there were four of us. It was a fourth-floor walk-up, cold-water railroad flat in an 80-year-old brick tenement on Bloomfield Street. It had a gas stove with a built-in space heater and a gas water heater in the kitchen. It had a bathroom with barely enough room for a tub and a toilet right off the kitchen.

Want to wash your hands? The kitchen sink is right across the room.

The second bedroom was about the size of the bathroom but the entire apartment had 12′ ceilings, so we painted it flat black and built a bunk bed there for Tom and Bill. Their dressers and closet were in the front bedroom.

I convinced our landlord, Sam, that we could renovate a bit. Our first job was the bath room because we all really wanted a shower and a sink. We also built a breakfast bar the size of an aircraft carrier deck in the kitchen. And Sam paid us for the materials with free rent. (We won’t talk about the concrete we poured in the bathroom for the shower.)

This story is about the living room, though.

I’m pretty sure the statute of limitations has expired.

We decided that it needed a hardwood floor to showcase the green-flowered Castro Convertible sofa I had found on the street in Scarsdale.

SamMy mother would never sit down in that apartment. I never understood why.

The living room needed better wall hangings than the posters college kids typically used.

Bill had a water buffalo skull acquired in some manner from a taxidermy shop.

We were engineering students so we knew that a 200 pound skull needed pretty good support. Tom and Bill distressed a couple of 2x4s and built the L-shaped frames you can see in the photo. Bill spiked it to the wall with 16d nails.

We nicknamed the skull Sam, in homage to the real Sam, the landlord who would stand under it in the arch and harangue us. Sam’s mother-in-law lived directly under us. I’m reasonably sure she was disappointed with those darned college kids who played rock-n-roll music, mixed cement in the bathtub in the kitchen, and dragged car engines up the four flights of stairs. I’m also reasonably sure she never said “darned.” And that she whispered a word or two to her son-in-law.

We had a lease.

Thankfully, Sam never saw Sam.

Sam never fell on Sam and, in fact, never even leaned toward that Castro Convertible. And we left the distressed frames when we move out because nothing short of dynamite would have gotten them off the wall. Bill and Fred and Tom and I went back to Hoboken a couple of years ago. The tenement was under renovation which is a fancy way of saying the builders had gutted it to the bare brick and started over. I’m thinking dynamite was involved.

Next month, how Rufus claims that I shot him with a pellet gun.

 

Spreading the Word, North Puffin Style

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There exists a photograph of me in a manure spreader, waving to the crowd.

Yeah, there’s a story behind that.

Vermont has a biennial election cycle so politicians show up in force at events like Franklin County Field Days every other year. Vermont politicians also (usually) had a pretty good sense of humor.

That particular photo-op likely came in about 1988 when I chaired one of North Puffin’s two political committees. Every other year, we had a booth at Field Days (the booth lived at the telephone company for a number of years, and then in my barn for a decade, and then on to another good home). That year was Lt. Gov. Peter Smith‘s first run for Congress.

Yes, Mr. Smith went to Washington.

Anyway, Peter was at Field Days, trying to go to Washington, and I spent part of the day introducing him around. That always took a while. He and I both like to talk to people. One fellow told him all about his apple orchard and the little roadside stand his dad ran each fall. In great and glowing detail.

As we walked on, Peter turned to me with that “Why did we spend so much time?” look.

“Oh, Steve is also the president of the bank.”

Field Days has a tractor parade and there isn’t a politician born who can resist a parade. The Field Days committee didn’t want to politicize their event but they weren’t above making a political statement.

John Deere Spreader“Dick, if you can find someone with a trailer, you can tow all the politicians around together.” I think there was some hope that someone, somewhere at Field Days, was exhibiting tomatoes.

Always ready to rise to the challenge, I found a beautifully restored John Deere ground-drive spreader. OK, it had been swamped out with a fire hose, anyway. We crammed the whole load of politicians of every persuasion and party in there and everyone had a good time.

That’s just common sense.

Common sense seems to have been in short supply since then.

Shades of Chicago, Vermont
This story is from a Town about 75 miles south of North Puffin. A newcomer to politics had hoped to make a difference by running for the Selectboard in his adopted hometown this year. Sadly, he died one day before Town Meeting. That didn’t stop voters from electing him to a 3-year term; no one told them that he collapsed at his home and died.

The Town Clerk said state election laws prohibit campaigning or discussion of candidates within a polling place. An announcement about the man’s death might be interpreted as urging voters to cast their ballots in a certain way, she said.

Ya think? Like maybe that they should vote for someone who was, well, alive?

Politics, the art of the possible? Nah. Politics, now the art of the weird.

Fortunately, I was unable to unearth a copy of the photo of us spreading the word.

 

Carpentry

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Tales from South Puffin.

My dad was a great cabinet maker. He liked fine wood and had an innate feel for grain and flow and hand. And I think he particularly liked sawdust. He made a lot of it, milling and shaping replacements for the cabin on one boat or crafting a table in another, building a bureau for a friend or a Chippendale-style mirror for our hall. There are a small number of (unsigned) Chan Harper pieces around southeastern Pennsylvania.

We no longer have any of the wooden boats he kept afloat but I do use the small walnut side desk he built for my grandfather.

Sadly, I’ve come to believe he was an lousy carpenter and yet he did a bunch of it. I think doing a lot of get-it-built-carpentry runs in the family.

I remember my grandfather building on and building in the baggage room at the Station. That became his wood shop. I remember my father building on and building in the chicken coop after he moved his father’s tools uphome from the Station. That coop became his wood shop. I remember building on and building in my barn in North Puffin. That barn became my wood shop but it is also where I built a race car, and some boats, and machinery prototypes, and our kitchen cabinets. Twice. And I remember my dad building a workbench and a lattice “cage” here in South Puffin. That became his wood shop here.

I’ve lived here 10 years now and built another set of kitchen cabinets in his shop but it really hasn’t ever met my own needs. I want to have room for my big rolling toolbox here and pull-out shelves for hardware and a home for the table saw and …

All in about 16 square feet.

My dad built a heavy duty bench with shelves under one side and a cubby for his tool bureau under the other. Above that was a kitchen cabinet made partly of particle and pressed board. The cabinet was disintegrating. The workbench was an inch too short for the table saw and a foot too long to fit my own tool chest. He had short louvered cabinet doors to protect his tools but the bench was open to every caller. Note the past tense.

Disassembly took a long time because he notched or mortised every 2×4 in the frame, applied resorcinol glue and then lagged all the parts together. Did I mention that disassembly took a long time?

Common practice for something as simple as a workbench is to pin or lag any stretchers and posts together and call it done. That adds up to rugged, potentially square, construction.

I made a mistake. I measured the space as I was taking his bench apart and assumed it was pretty much square. I don’t know how he built it so far off but it was an inch out in the 20″ width of the bench.

My replacement bench is about 30″ deep and only half an inch out across its 76″ length. The only glue I used holds the drawer boxes together. I have full size louvered doors that I can close to hide any mess.

The hutch/shelf is in place and loaded with all the tools. I’m pleased to report that it has lots more room than my dad’s original shelves and I now have them organized in a way that I can actually see and find stuff. I’m most pleased with the way this little project has worked out.

And when one of my kids or someone I don’t know takes that workbench apart, they’ll probably think, Boy, that Harper was a decent cabinet maker but he surely never used a square when he hammered this workbench closet together.

<sigh>

 

Floodstock

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I never got to the 1969 Music & Art Fair everybody still talks about. I was in school in beautiful, downtown Hoboken and we were all too serious to drive a couple of hours north to stand around in a muddy field in the rain for a long weekend to listen to rock-n-roll music. Heck, we could get that for free (or for the price of a couple of beers) right across the river.

I got a sort of second chance.

The Trout River pummeled Montgomery, a small town halfway up the mountain on the eastern border of my County. Our friends and neighbors there lost houses, clothing, furniture, food, cars … The lasting image I have is the same as Marathon, Florida, after Hurricane Wilma or New Orleans after Katrina.

Fortunately, no lives were lost.

Local water supplies were destroyed, flooded septic systems polluted lawns and wells, and the residents had to dig themselves out by hand.

One of my musician friends said, “Hey, why don’t we have a concert to raise a few bucks to help out.”

This is the story of why we had no phones at the show, but I have to tip a rary to get you there:

THE MECHANICS OF A BIG CONCERT
Floodstock took about 23 days to organize, probably a record for a concert with two stages, a world class headliner in April Wine, and 17 other exceptional entertainers. We applied for and received an Act 250 permit, AOT permissions, and created a plan to shut down the airport in the event of problems. There were no problems. And it didn’t rain even a single drop.

Franklin County Field Days donated the site that had housed the Grateful Dead two years before. We had a great fence but had to build new stages.

Floodstock was a family event, so a kids’ store set up a corral with toys, activities, and volunteers to keep the kids happy. We also had a splendid hospitality area for the handicapped and for folks who needed a place to sit down and relax in the shade, thanks to the Town Manager and his merry band.

More people have asked how we got nearly 700 custom tee shirts so quickly; here’s that story.

Natalie LaRocque-Bouchard designed the Floodstock logo and e-mailed it to me for the website, for posters, and for other publicity. A Northfield shop owner offered as many shirts as we wanted for the cause. The shirts were stored in bins in his converted mill building in Northfield; all we had to do was come down, count them, and truck them home. Two peeps volunteered. They drove to Montpelier Thursday afternoon to deliver the AOT contract and to pick up the shirts. They didn’t know about counting them, so they retaliated by picking an extra extra EXTRA large florescent orange shirt for me. Unfortunate, a traffic incident delayed them as they approached home with the load. Our printer finally received the shirts late Thursday evening and printed them Friday morning. We gave away shirts to almost 400 volunteers, community groups and band members, and sold the rest on Sunday.

Frank Barnes of 8084 and I co-chaired the effort.

Most of the back stage folks signed the orange shirt while I wore it all day Sunday.

MY REMEMBERIES
The biggest concert I’ve ever presented left my brain toast, my feet mush, and I couldn’t stop smiling. In 78 hours the Field Days/Grateful Dead site went from a bare field to a dual-stage major concert site, to a bare field again. All with volunteer help. Everyone who helped out took home a host of wonderful images; in no particular order, here are some of mine.

The National Guard lashed 4 flatbed trailers together for the main stage, leveled them with blocks and jacks, then built an extension out of Field Days’ bleachers.

The Friday afternoon phone call from Grover: “We can power the sound or the lights, not both.” While we searched frantically for a 120 KVA generator (rarely available at the local home center) and tried redesigning the sound, the Swanton Village Electric team quietly found us enough juice.

A pediatrician lopped the ends of the staging with his chain saw.

We ran short of volunteers around 5 p.m., so a whole gang simply stayed over and worked a double shift.

April Wine’s Myles Goodwyn hit the first chord and the lights in the production trailer browned out. The lights danced with the beat for the rest of the show.

Tech guys slept in hammocks strung under the trailer-stage through some of the loudest sets.

Jesse Potts bragged to me that he had never sounded so good. Jesse, I was in the crowd. The tech guys for each stage had a little friendly competition going and everybody sounded great!

Rebuilding the Field Days fence Monday afternoon with Highgate Town officials and friends.

The April Wine setup on stage included a canvas enclosure to hide the drum set until their show started. I was backstage for the 8084 set, watching April Wine drummer Jerry Mercer in his private tent play beat-for-beat with 8084 drummer Scott Belisle.

ZE PHONE ZE PHONE!
Cell phones were not widespread in Vermont in 1997. There may have been a cell tower. Somewhere. We needed a phone line but NYNEX/Bell Atlantic was dragging its collective feet about installing a temporary phone line to the Field Days site (the wire was already there — all they had to do was flip a switch back in the office).

At 4:59 p.m. Friday, I was in the Town Clerk’s office, on the phone pleading with the NYNEX supervisor who had his hand on the switch.

At 5 p.m. Friday, NYNEX turns off its phone lines. Bang. Static. Dead air.

I sat down. I hung up the phone gently. And I had an epiphany.

100 years from now no one would remember we couldn’t make any calls.

THE ENDING
All the bands played for free.

Vermont received about $7.5 million in Federal aid. That takes care of roads and bridges. It didn’t help the individual homeowners and renters who lost everything.

All Floodstock ticket revenues went to the Montgomery Flood Fund.

The Bands
April Wine
8084

Blues for Breakfast
Cobalt Blue
Jesse Metcalf & Good Knight Moon
Jessie Potts
Joey the Clown
John Cassel and Friends including Will Patton
The Johnny Devil Band
Land of Yo Variety Show
Mark Twang
Mary Ellen Missett (Frannie the Clown)
The Nobby Reed Project
Nocturnal Emissions
No Prophets
Patrice & Kathi
South Bound

Yankee Pot Roast
Zephyrs