1968 CHRISTMAS LETTER

Hello! Hello! This is station KEARNS sending you our annual
Xmass greeting from 23 Pleasant Street, Andover. It seems
as if quite a bit has been going on during these 12 months.
Frank, now a junior in physics at Merrimack College, spent
the summer far up in Vermont on a government watershed
project--his first prolong stay away from home. He loved
the people, the landscape--real rural with herds of cattle
in the fields in which they worked. John graduated from
St. John's Prep in Danvers and went on to become a Freshman
at Merrimack. He loves it and has just been chosen book
review editor for the quarterly literary magazine--the first
freshman so appointed. He loves to write poetry, it just
seems to be a part of him. He also likes the out-of-doors,
having a job with a landscape gardener this summer and now
walking a route during the Xmas rush for the postoffice. He
took a long, interesting trip into Canada this summer going
a couple hundred miles a day on his motorcycle which he has
now sold and replaced with a Volkswagen. He has returned to
the piano in earnest and it sounds pretty good. Mary began
taking voice to bring her singing up to average and has
profited by this. Recently she was in a school musical
singing "Matchmaker". She has started modern dance and
loves it. These young people have a lot of energy.--Betsy
still plays football and loves her sports. She took the red
cross baby sitting course and has begun to sit outside the
house. Bless her, she is always a willing sitter for her
parents. She has continued piano lessons. (Forgot to
mention that Mary directed a play for young people in an
amateur theater group in which Betsy had a part. Emily
continues her learning. She decided she wanted to visit
Grandma and Grandpa Wrinkle this summer so she and Betsy
spent a few days there. Jere is a ball of fire and is the
1st grade this year. Dottie can print her name and is such a
vital person---a real interesting person to have around.
Don continues to enjoy his photography. He has worked (in
addition to his teaching) this year on a special project--
the math end of a water contamination problem. He took a
week trip into Nova Scotia with a long time friend, Ralph
Parrotta--they slept in the station wagon and just moseyed
along. Mother took her long-yearned-for trip to Missouri on
the occasion of her Uncle Francis and Aunt Anna's 50th
wedding anniversary. Saw her mother's and her dad's birth
place and visited with her cousins and their wonderful
families. Sister Zoie returned to her own home town and
home for the first time in 25 years--Uncle Francis' sister
from California and his son Frank were there so he was able
to say he that he had a coast to coast celebration. Another
big celebration this year was our beloved Grandma Spooner's
90th birthday.

That is about all the news so we will sign off with a
sincere wish for all life's blessings in the New Year for our
dear friends.

Three A.M, Orono Calling

Something wakes me at 3 AM in this Los Angeles suburb, but what I hear is the long ago tin clatter of a rusty alarm clock in a musty tent in a backyard in Orono, Maine.

Orono in the fifties was a sleepy town in the center of Maine, on the banks of the Penobscot River. In the winters the days were short and cold and the snow piled high, but summer days were long, and moisture and fog from the river turned everything green. Spreading trees shaded sidewalks and back yards, and grass grew so lush that children spent an entire week barefoot, only putting on shoes for Sunday service.

I was eight years old that summer, and my brother John was six. We roamed the town unsupervised, walking up to the center of town, exploring the fields that sloped down toward the river, or hanging out at various friends’ houses.

There were two forces that anchored the children’s’ universe in Orono. The first was the River. A large Northeastern river, the Penobscot was wide, grey and deep. It flowed quickly through Orono, and its banks were steep and slick with mud. Parents warned their children of the dire consequences that would befall them if for some reason they got near those banks. We heard tales of drowning, and, perhaps worse, tales of the punishment that would befall us if we even got close. For the most part we gave the banks of the Penobscot River a wide birth.

The other force was the railroad. The Bangor and Aroostook was a small railroad, now long gone, whose reason for existence was to haul the potato crop out of the farmland of Northern Maine down to the coast. Unlike the river, we were on close terms with the railroad. A single rusty engine pulling a few dozen cars would shake us children to our bones as it came right through town, down a little gully with grassy slopes, then across Pine street, our main route to school. The railroad crossing was marked by a faded white wooden “X” with “RR Xing” painted in peeling black paint. It was up to every driver approaching and every kid walking along the track to look for the train and listen for the slow blasts of the whistle.

After Pine Street, the train headed toward the river, where it crossed on a railroad bridge. This bridge loomed large in children’s mythic lore. It was long, spindly, and had a narrow wood planked walkway alongside the track all the way across the bridge. There was no fence or gate to keep anyone from walking out on that walkway. If you got caught out there on that long bridge when the thundering engine headed across, followed by clacking cars and grinding steel wheels – we were sure that no child could survive. One teenage boy who was said to have deliberately stood out there when a long freight came through was viewed by all of us as a living legend.

So we young children were intimately familiar with these lumbering freight trains of red white and blue box cars filled with potatoes and flat cars stacked with logs from the Northern forest. We would put pennies and nails on the track, sit up on the bank as the freight trains past, and gleefully run down to survey these results after the train had gone. This all seems dangerous, but it was hard to be surprised by these trains. You could almost feel the rails come alive when the train was a ways away. They were slow moving and noisy, the whistle was loud, and so none of us ever worried too much about playing and walking on the track.

But these were freight trains. We never saw a passenger train. There were rumors that one came through in the dead of night, and it was so fast and quiet that if you were on the track when it came through it would run you over before you even knew it was there. Our Dad was always willing to entertain our quest for information, so without seeming too interested we asked him about passenger trains on our tracks. A few days later he told us that the only passenger train that ran through Orono Maine came through town at 3 A.M. Well! Now this sounded like adventure!

My brother and I had for several weeks that summer been sleeping out in the back yard in a musty World War Two surplus pup tent. We found an old wind up alarm clock in a closet, snuck it out to the tent, and set it for two forty five. We woke up the next day as the sun peeked into the tent. The rickety old clock was still ticking, but some how or other we hadn’t set it right. So that day we conducted a number of tests, figured we had it, and set it again when we went to bed.

The alarm clock jangled in the dead of night. We fumbled around to quiet it for fear that someone would hear. Our eyes were sticky from sleep, but we pulled on our baseball caps and headed up Pine Street barefoot in the dark. Somehow it didn’t seem as dark as we had imagined it would be. We were exposed, and imagined the eyes of every neighbor and parent watching through black windows as we heading up toward town. But no one appeared, nothing moved. We reached the grassy bank overlooking the track, sat down in the grass and waited.

First we heard the faint click and sigh of the rails. We looked off toward the North, and sure enough we could see the headlight searching across the fields and down the track. Then the light flashed along our bank, and the train was here! At the head was the smooth bluff nose of an F3 locomotive, travelling fast and grinding its wheels as it raced around the curve toward Pine Street.

Nothing terrible happened to us. The wind pulled our hair and pajamas as the engine flew by. We grabbed glimpses of people asleep in their chairs through the windows of the smooth sliver cars. And then it was by us, the rounded tail of the last car swaying slightly and the red tail light growing fainter in the distance across the bridge, drawing our eyes with it down the far off track. We sat for a while after the rails grew quiet. We got up slowly and stepped off the bank onto Pine Street. Turning toward home, we could feel the pull. It lingered in the air, drawing us South down the track, toward places that we couldn’t name, away from Pine Street, and Orono Maine.


Frank Kearns