Memories of Memorial Days past

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Ron Joseph of Waterville, a wildlife biologist who recently lived in the Piscataquis County town of Shirley, wields a pretty good pen.

This being Memorial Day weekend, he said he’d like to write something Memorial Day-ish for the paper. Being brought up to never look a gift horse in the mouth, I said for him to be my guest.

When he dropped the piece off one day last week I had an even better idea: I would run it disguised as the Old Dawg’s weekly column. I get out of a little work. He is pleased as punch. You get a different slant on things. Everyone makes out like a bandito.

Pretty tough to find a better deal than that these days. Check it out:

No one event captures the flavor of small-town life in Maine more than a Memorial Day parade. And that certainly is true in Shirley, which has a population of about 200.

Each Memorial Day, about half of the town’s residents gather in front of the Shirley Volunteer Fire Department. Cheers erupt when big yellow school buses from Greenville lumber into town, carrying the high school band.

Since Shirley is too small to have a high school, Greenville lends its band — after its own parade is over. Second fiddle is better than none, we reason.

Last year’s featured attraction was a 1938 Diamond T fire truck — washed, waxed, and decked with miniature USA flags for the occasion.

It took the band, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and others about 15 minutes to organize behind the fire truck. Ten minutes later, the parade was over.

Or so it seemed.

While I was raking my lawn, I heard someone yell, “Here they come again.” I leaned on my rake to watch the band make a second pass through town, after executing a U-turn at the cemetery.

“I’ll bet the folks in Bangor don’t watch the same parade twice without moving,” I said to myself.

On the return trip through town, Otis Gray, driver and proud owner of the 1938 fire truck, turned on the siren — which turned on the spectators.

“Give another blast of the horn,” someone yelled. Otis obliged. Otis told me later that he had forgotten to turn on the siren at the start of the parade “due to all the excitement.”

I witnessed my first traffic jam in Shirley that day. Three Massachusetts vehicles, one pulling a $20,000 boat (about half of what I paid for my house) waited in line for the parade to end at the Grange hall.

One driver rolled down his window and remarked, “It sure looks like a friendly town, with people waving at the band and the band waving back.”

“It certainly is,” I replied. “But those aren’t friendly waves. We’re just swatting blackflies and mosquitoes.”

As I watched the parade come to an end — the band filing back into the school buses, with red lights flashing — I was reminded of a Memorial Day 20 years ago in Bingham.

Three high school friends and I were returning from a fishing trip in Jackman. We rolled into Bingham just as its parade was concluding. No sooner had I reached third gear on the other side of town than a policeman pulled me over.

The lights and siren on the town’s Studebaker cruiser flashed and wailed as a pot-bellied policeman walked up to my dad’s Jeepster. He leaned over, counted heads, and said, “OK, boys. Come with me.”

We sped off in the Studebaker over a paved road that turned to dirt and pavement now and then. No words were spoken. Instead the officer stared only at the road ahead.

After 10 minutes of silence, I took a deep breath and timidly asked, “Excuse me, officer, but where are you taking us?”

Without turning his hed, he replied, “My wife has been nagging me for weeks to move the wood cookstove in our kitchen. I need four strong backs to do it.”

We all breathed a collective sigh of relief.

After moving the Home Clarion stove from one end of the kitchen to the other, we were fed a pot roast dinner. While enjoying homemade apple pie, we exchanged a few fishing yarns. After dinner we were driven back to our vehicle, and resumed our trip home.

Otis Gray backed the Diamond T into a bay of the Shirley Volunteer Fire Department, signaling the end of the Memorial Day festivities.

“You can’t beat a parade,” he said.

No, you cannot, I thought.

Especially in rural Maine.

Kent Ward is the NEWS associate managing editor.