Life in the sixties in America was a bit different than it is now.
I can only relate to my experiences and a few things I heard growing up about the era. My experiences come from a small coastal town in Maine.
I began my schooling in the early 50′s in a small coastal town. The school had two rooms on the first floor which held grades 1-3 in one room and 4-6 in the other.
On the second floor there were 3 rooms for grades 7 through 12. I don’t remember exactly but I believe there were 3 teachers for grades 7-12 and a teacher for each of the two rooms on the first floor.
I have no idea how many students there were in the school, but I do remember that there were about a dozen in my class when I started school. I believe at the time the town had a population of not much over 600.
Most of us walked to school although as I remember there were a very few that lived far enough away to get picked up by a school bus. The school busses I remember were just a station wagon.
I could either walk up the road, or take a path leading from the back of the school that ended down by a bridge that led off the island. I lived right on the end of the island but people other than kids used the path to get to the stores and to their boats or do business in the small business area of the town.
There was a book written about this very town. The name of the book is “Down on the Island, Up on the Main”, A Recollected History of South Bristol, Maine. I don’t own a copy, although I know many of the people that contributed or are mentioned in the book.
Having grown up there, I believe I experienced much of what is taked about in the later years, which for me begins in the 50′s. Even at that time, I was quite young to remember much of what was in the book, and almost none of what happened before that. I think it is natural not to remember many things as a child because it seems that most children are mostly interested in playing and not very much in history.
I do know the life in a small town of that nature is so far from what life is like in small cities is very different.
We lived without modern electronics. This would be quite a change from today. I do remember the phone lines were party lines and the people who could afford phones needed to count the number of rings to know if it was for them. With the party line, one could pick up the phone and listen if other people were on the line. Often a phone would get answered without the correct number of rings and a call would get interrupted, but at that time people were basically polite and it was a small matter.
Obviously there were a few, that would get overly upset, as well as having others that would pick up the phone to get the news from the people talking and just hope they didn’t hear them pick up the phone.
The phone thing is just one of the things that I overheard adults talking about that stuck with me. They seemed to be enjoying talking about others that were so unscrupulous as to pick up a phone when they knew the call wasn’t for them.
The business area consisted of a lobster pound, a post office, a drug store, and a grocery store. There was also a large store near the old steamboat wharf but it had long since been closed by the time I came around, as well as the small gas station or garage on the north end of the small commercil zone.
I probably wouldn’t even know it had been a gas station but it had an old orange “Oilzum Oil” decal on the window. Everything closed up by 5 O’clock on most days.
Most people with cars made sure their cars were at least half full of gasoline because the closest businesses that were available were 13 miles away in Damariscotta and on Sundays, especially during the winter, you most likely couldn’t get any gasoline.
There was another post office about a mile and a half from the bridge. The office was located on the south end of Rutherford’s Island which comprised a large amount of the population of the town.
The old steamboat wharf was only used for commercial fishing and had long since been shut down to the ferryboats. The improvement in roads by the 50′s is the probable reason people no longer needed to get supplies to and from Damariscotta.
The drygoods store which had been converted to a family dwelling had been closed for a number of years. I do believe it was open for a while and there was an apartment in the back end where a family lived. It was beside the town library on the hill heading south from the bridge.
I plan to describe the town more in my next post.
Tags: 1960's America, Living in America, maine