They say your whole life passes before your eyes before you die.
You’re telling me! I am 81 and every day is just jam packed with memories tickling my brain like technicolor movie clips. These mental flashbacks must be what it is like on Instagram, tiktok or YouTube Shorts. Lately, these sudden onset cinematic recollections from younger days have been featuring Rangeley life in the early 1950s and once again I am sitting in Mr. Esley’s Playhouse Theater, in the dark, munching on 10¢ popcorn as the lights go down.
By the mid-fifties, John Wayne and the Seventh Cavalry arrived at the Playhouse Theatre often and John Ford’s 1949 “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” must have been a very popular western because Mr. Esley kept bringing this mediocre Western back to Rangeley. And wearing my blue cub scout uniform shirt and my Sears & Roebuck cowboy boots, I kept handing over my 25¢ to Mr. Esley every time “She Wore A Yellow Ribbon” returned until the time I announced that this would be my fifth viewing of this film and he let me in for free.
From what I can glean from the dating of this photograph, the Playhouse Theatre came to an abrupt end in the winter of 1971 when the roof collapsed under the weight of snow. That collapse marked an official end to the angled marquee on Main Street that promised frequent 1950s westerns, 25¢ admission and 10¢ popcorn, and signaled the beginning of watching TV at home with a TV dinner. Even then TV screens were still on the snowy side. The first and only TV signal accessible to Rangeley station was WCSH Portland, which began sending its signal in 1953. Over on Mt Washington, WMTW started TV transmission in 1954.
We had moved to Rangeley for year-round living in 1950. After summering in Rangeley since 1940, my parents decided to move to our little cottage, recently built by S.A. Collins and Sons, on Dodge Pond in the fall of 1950 for year-round living. I spent kindergarten through fourth grade at the old Rangeley Elementary School, where the town hall sits today, including second grade with Miss Weeks and her famous ruler. And I came back to Maine for four years at Bates College (1961-1965).
Back then, in the early 1950s, the town beach in summer was a kind of day care center, and a lot of kids would spend hot summer days playing on the sand beach, mostly cannonballing off the long dock or diving. As I recall, there was minimal parental supervision.
This was a time when U.S. Mail was delivered twice a day. On a summer morning I would get dropped off at the Post Office (now occupied by Rangeley Fireplace and Stove Co.) and walk to the town dock. Before long a small crowd of youngsters frolicked in the water and on the sand beach running perpendicular to the long wharf. There were two diving boards at the end of the pier, first a regular diving board, and at the far end, a very tall ladder leading up to a high diving board that just seemed unimaginably lofty. Among the youngsters who barely dared to cannonball off the lower board, word spread that someone planted steel pipes under water just beneath the tall diving board, and if you didn’t dive just right, you would be impaled.
Come midday I would walk up Lake Street to Riddle’s Drug store where the McLafferty family ran the pharmacy, the store and the soda fountain. This soda fountain was the real thing with red stools, a long marble counter, and shiny chrome seltzer dispensers for malts and shakes. For 75¢ I got a small bowl of Heinz beef noodle soup and a nicely browned hot dog on a toasted bun topped with French’s mustard.
One day I got curious about what the underside of this marble countertop looked like. And as I got up to leave, I leaned over and examined the bottom of the magnificent marble slab. There, upside down and out of sight, in an unbroken pattern all the way down, densely packed, were decades worth of dull, well chewed chewing gum wads. This putty colored mosaic of well-masticated Doublemint, Juicy Fruit, Dentine, Beechnut and Bazookas had been stashed and stuck there over the years by customers before a meal or soda. Either that or stick it behind your ear.
A scientist could probably analyze every single one of those thousands and thousands of hardened wads and reconstruct the genetic makeup of Rangeley townspeople for generations back.
After lunch, back to the Town beach for more swimming and later in the day, a ride home along with the afternoon mail. A first class stamp was 3 cents. Donald Duck comics were a dime at Mo’s Variety.
The years flicker by and once again, “The End “appears on the screen and the lights go on at the Playhouse Theatre.
Epilog: “She Wore A Yellow Ribbon” doesn’t hold up very well, no Indians are killed and the most impressive scenes (in retrospect) were displays of horsemanship and an eloquent plea for Native American justice. Also, on our first date, my future wife and partner for 54 years, by some trick of fate, wore a yellow scarf.