To the Housing for the Elderly - January, 1965

This could well have been a practice walk for us, the jaunt from our intown "estate" to the group of apartments on the right side of the tracks where many of Rockport's senior citizens are housed today. For the hour could be near at hand when we could be among their number taking advantage of the state's foresight.

It was just before Christmas, the day was excellent, but brittle cold, and the course up Broadway. It was a busy Sunday with the cars headed for Bearskin Neck and the shops. The town parking lot holding over a hundred cars was jam-packed. Like on a summer Sunday wherever parking is allowed, all spaces were taken.

The wife and I kept our four-footed boxer and her 60 -odd pounds on the leash knowing we were wandering up a way that could be called cat alley. Age has not yet softened Molly's feline feelings. A standout as usual was the Snow house on Broadway of deep red brick, 2 and a half stories high. It is one of the very few of its find left in the parish of Sandy Bay. We are very impressed with its beauty.

The town fathers had saluted Christmas by hanging eye-catching wreaths in the windows of the town office building. Rockport no longer has a town hall. That may have been good enough for our fathers but not for us. Now we use the super duper school gym to do our pressure voting at town meetings.

The fire station went along with the Yuletide spirit. But Mother Nature was a backslider in this regard for she had dropped not a flake of snow on the ground. Insead she'd kept the grass on the Methodist Church lawn a warming green. We passed by what was once known as the Iron Balcony, where we stopped many a time to pick up the wife for a Sunday walk along the Rockport shore before the town got fenced in and town landings vanished from public use. We recalled hearing old Capt. Johnson, owner of that Iron Balcony, relate his hair-raising experiences fishing in the North Atlantic in the dead of winter. That's another chapter lost in the town's history.

Speaking of history, we are reminded that the town is losing a good bet if it doesn't get somebody who can write interestingly and sit down with certain elderly folks, say sixtyish and above, and take down their stories of the town's past before it is all forgotten and some outlander provides a garbled account that smacks of the sea serpent nonsense.

Up by the once officially condemned old school house, afterward the historical society house and Community House, a weather-beaten structure that is still an active alert community house for many folks in the town. Sometimes even humans are condemned as having outlived their use, only to find 'tain't so.

And could be to the youth of our unusual town, the seat of the anatomy of fulsome living, is that faded old cannon of iron ball-heaving naval warfare. We could see our children playing horse on it; we could see hundreds of other tikes, girls as well as boys clambering all over it. The gun does have value, even though it lacks culture.

Those homes for the elderly! We're getting there, but don't forget at our failing years, an inch is getting to be a mile. You just don't gallop down the remaining span unless the devil starts prodding. Down Railroad Ave., past Cap Green's, the stately ruler of the town's "senate" of the past with his wealth of colorful chapeaus. There's one of the bonafide Rockporters who ceould provide many a good story of the old Rockport and prove to certain ones that this town has been far from apathetic through the years and is just as far from apathetic today.

And here at last is the entrance to our so-called Housing for the Elderly. The wife and I hate that term. It sounds like you had provided a corral for wasting humans. Maybe we wouldn't mind so much if it weren't that within these most attractive units resided many of our friends who are paying rent just as many of us do through town.

Our hats are off to the Rockport committee in charge of building these apartment houses. Site of a productive farm, the grounds have been smartly landscaped. And for Christmas, a tall Christmas tree was aglow with Christmas lights that welcomed you.

We again viewed one apartment where we often play bridge with a so-called elder and his wife, where the male elder, supposed to be on the bend, for his alleged "tottering" years still does a good week's work - not all six days but part of the week. He's too smart to quit. To us, it seemed like a good home for many.