Spring Inspection Tour Bearskin Neck April 1964

For the wife and I to take a Sunday walk without our friendly four-footer Molly is a rarity but on this Sunday morning, it was a "mustie." We were invading "Catland" otherwise known as Bearskin Neck. And to the brown bomber, all friendship ceases when it comes to spitting felines. Us, we'd like to keep our cat-owning friends down there and elsewhere.

The calendar may say that this Spring officially opened on March 21, but in our book the season of hope really opened its big blue eyes wide and beaming on April 12--at least in Rockport.

As we left our house in Rockport on foot all the way the 65 pound old gal sensed what was up for she looked away around the easy chair's starboard quarter, her fawn-colored eyes lifted up to us so soulfully that our resistance came close to breaking. Afterward we heard through the grapevine, that there are some citizens of the Neck who wish a cat-chaser would stalk their preserves for a space. Wonder why?

It was a walk before the sun was over the yard-arm, a walk into several alleys where abided what might be called alley cats of the four-footed variety except the cats were too well bred.

Across the street we passed through the first alley headed by a sign of really peeling words noting to those with imagination that it was not a thoroughfare. A fair-to-middlin' code decipherer might have made it out if he had time.

At the far end we looked over the fence into the back yard of the former House of Rapp. That yard was just coming alive after a bitter winter, its crocuses were out, its tulip bed was pushing upward for the day of blooming.

Into Dock Square to our left was a home with scaffolding for shingling the roof, and down the main stem with a fiery cheroot tipped at an angle in his mouth was a saunterer Ingolff Thompson, Saint Mary's sexton, window gazing.

We came to Bearskin Neck to be greeted by a sign that read, "Entrance to historic Bearskin Neck," only to read a second sign just below it which shouted, "Dead End." Historically dead? Well, hardly. It's just that when you hit the rocks by the bay, you've had it , brother. What's deader than the end of the road.

The wife and I were thinking of another summer stroll, mostly before dark, that we took almost nightly down here as we again saw the railed-in piazza atop the colorful pewter shop, the "millyuns" of new and old lobster pots stacked sky-high back of the shops. A new note in that back space that well might be called Motif Lane, was a wee weather-beaten shack labeled "Harbor Master's Office" whose window boasted the kind of mature "art" that brings sparkles to a grampie's eyes.

One difference in the back of these stores since we started the Neck meanderings a quarter century ago, is the colony inhabiting apartments that have sprung up, overlooking the inner harbor. After one shuddering look at the water-logged old Maine coaster Eva S. Cullison alongside Wendell's Alley wharf, we sauntered up through Dana Vibert's lobster shop into the main drag again where we enjoyed the sight of that mammoth arched window fronting the second floor apartment of artist John Chetcuti.

Down Wendell's (Tuna) Alley we wandered to note the elaborate changes. Ed and Doris Coleman's "House of Glass" moved into where Hedlund's Restaurant was up to a year ago. It was the kind of day that broughtout the real wealth of color from the great assortment.
Contractors King & Lilja of Rockport have built a new structure next it, a coffee house with a top deck from where folks may lunch at leisure and enjoy the yacht races. Eddie Donovan, the lobster king, will remain in his old stand.

To the end of the Neck where the town fathers have built a rotary for autoists to save them from backing up to return to Main Street. The town did a good job on this turn-around.
For the wife and me, it was a comfortable tireless walk of a Sunday morning. Try it yourself sometime before your legs quit.

J.P.C., Jr.