TRYING TO SNEAK A SMOKE

When I was a kid my friends and I went to great lengths to pick a secluded spot, or spots we thought were secluded, to smoke, drink or otherwise misbehave but the parents in this little island town of 1200 were an alert and conspiratorial bunch and we often found our clandestine activities woefully transparent. 

One day in 1958 we picked up a pack of Camels from the Cascade Lanes and headed down the little six-foot-wide alley between L. R. Smith and Helen Wadworth’s Restaurant to enjoy a smoke and to share a little bottle of vanilla extract we’d pocketed at E. G. Carver’s and a much larger bottle of Haffenreffer malt liquor we’d persuaded our customary adult resource to get for us at Tibb’s Store.  The resource ordinarily charged us a nickel per bottle but on this day, sensing our eagerness, soaked us for a dime.   

The Cascade Lanes – where we got the smokes - was O. V. Drew’s very busy bowling and pool emporium.  League bowling took place every night and the town was divided into imaginatively named teams of men and of women involving nearly all the town’s adults.  Similarly cyclical pool and billiard tournaments meant the place was jumping nearly every day and certainly every evening.  I was one of about a dozen adolescent pin setters who risked life and limb, certainly fingers, to return ten candlepins to their respective standing positions after each three-ball frame was bowled. For ten cents a string, my fellow pin setters and I huddled on a little ledge above the lanes as deadwood flew in all directions.   Three strings would give us the 27 cents we’d need for a pack of Camels and a few pennies to spare.  Proprietor Drew, a clinically calculating retailer, kept an open pack behind the counter and would make single cigarettes available for 2 cents apiece thus realizing a 33% profit beyond the profit he made from selling a pack for 27 cents.   

The east side of the alley was the west wall of Helen Wadworth’s restaurant.  Helen was famous for her Codfish cakes, wonderful mouthwatering creations served three at a time with a little pile of homemade sausage patties and home fries that started out in the oven before being transferred to a huge stove top sauté pan to be finished off with peppers and onions.      

The west wall of the alley was L. R. Smith, a busy and bustling clothing store that sold oilskins and other foul weather clothing to lobstermen but also all sorts of children’s outfits and infant needs, men’s and women’s clothing, casual along with fine formal wear.  . 

Upstairs over the clothing store was the telephone exchange.  A team of local ladies, all mothers, all members of the operator’s guild and all among the most well-informed of the aforementioned conspiratorial parents, handled and now and then monitored every phone call made by anyone to anyone without exception.  The operators, there were four of them, manned the switchboard, one at a time, 24 hours a day and, except during the colder months, with the window open. 

As we headed down the alley toward mischief we’d have heard, had we paused long enough to listen, first the sound of ringing then my Patricia Crossman’s, my Mom’s, voice,

“Hello” 

“Pat, this is Mabel down to the switchboard.   Phillip & Jo Jo just headed down to the carriage house and Phillip was smoking and carrying a bottle.” 

“Land sakes, Mabel, will it ever end?  Thanks for calling.  I’ll send his Dad right down.”