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| My father leaving Katahdin Lodge in November 1968. My plan was to leave with him, but I stayed to live and work at the Lodge. |
This shot was taken at the end of a fantastic week-long stay at my uncle's hunting lodge in Maine. It was Thanksgiving Day Week of 1968. That good-lookin-like-me fellow there is my father. Dad is getting ready to go back to our home town of Dundalk, Maryland, a Baltimore County suburb of Baltimore City.
I had planned on going back home with him, and then joining the U.S. Merchant Marines. That way the U.S. military couldn't draft me and send me to Vietnam.
But I am staying there in Maine to work for and live with my Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley K. Clarke, at their Katahdin Lodge and Camps in Aroostook County. They desperately needed manpower to help operate their business, and I was it.
At first, I had my bags all packed up and in the station wagon there. We were all exchanging heart felt so-longs and see-ya-laters, when Fin and Marty launched into psy-ops type maneuvers and manipulations that were designed to keep me there. They promised me use of their vehicles for my spending lots of time in town enjoying the finest kind of country-kid style fun and games; the food was always good and plentiful on Marty's dining room table; and then they said, "You like riding the snowmobiles, think of all the fun you'll have doing that."
That were all she wrote, so to speak. I yanked my suitcases back out from the Ford wagon there, and the rest is history, as they say.
For Dad and I, that Thanksgiving Week was a greatest time of our lives. It was the last week of deer hunting season. But I hadn't become interested in big game hunting yet. I was there for the country girls and good times with all them wonderful teenage Mainer kids up in that part of God's Country.
Around Katahdin Lodge, during that week in late November of '68, it was said that my father, Bob, went out to hunt four legged deer during the day, and his son, David, went out to hunt two legged dear at night.
David Robert Crews Copyright 2008
www.katahdinlodge7photos.blogspot.com
