“Why, you’re just a poor little Downeast herring choker who’s never even sipped a martini.” She laughed and shoved my shoulder. “Say whisk that stuff away to the Wertses before the ice melts! They probably need a few drinks before they watch each other get dressed for dinner.” — From “Kitchen Boy”

KITCHEN BOY, by Sanford Phippen. Blackberry Books, Nobleboro, Maine, 1996. Paperback, 378 pages. $11.95.

Sanford Phippen’s latest book, “Kitchen Boy,” the culmination of 24 years of off-and-on writing, is a funny and sometimes poignant memoir of Phippen’s working adolescent and young adult summers at a small inn on the Maine coast. The 54-year-old Orono High School English teacher’s book also includes the description of one summer working at a restaurant at a lobster wharf in Boothbay Harbor. But most of the book’s action takes place at the Frenchman Bay Lodge on Grindstone Neck in the early 1960s.

The lodge was owned and run by two women from the New York-Connecticut area who were kind to the help but who knew how to get a lot out of them. The pair kept everybody working to get ready for new arrivals, cleaning and preparing for meals, but knew enough to let the young employees have afternoons off for swimming and reading.

“An-dy” as Phippen calls himself throughout the book, could be considered one of Maine’s servant class, so typical throughout the state, as one of those who served vacationers for low wages in hopes of getting big tips. This “Upstairs, Downstairs” situation has been so common that Downstairs work has provided much of the work for young Mainers. When “An-dy” started at the lodge, he was making $80 a month plus tips — hardly enough to go to college on, but at least something. There were some other compensations that came with the job — good food, fast cars and wild women.

Well, perhaps not wild women, mildly wild women (with one notable exception) who kept the kitchen boy’s interest up for successive summers.

Throughout much of the book, the author calls himself gawky, gooney or gormy — typical Maine words for awkward boys — tall, skinny geeks lacking in self-confidence. But this particular geek was blessed with a sense of outrageous humor, which he uses to mold his sometimes unfortunate experiences into something that will make you hurt, laugh until you hurt.

The rites of passage Phippen went through at the Frenchman Bay Lodge and in Boothbay from 1959 to 1964 produced an appreciation of hard work, a sharply honed sense of the absurd, and the proper means of communicating with our out-of-state “superiors.”

That Phippen is a very funny guy was witnessed by the audience at a reading at the Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick several weeks ago. As if reading parts of the book weren’t funny enough, his asides, adding the unprintable, had the crowd in stitches, many of whom bought the book on the strength of what they heard.

Gulf of Maine Books is owned by Gary Lawless and Beth Leonard of Nobleboro. Besides Phippen’s book, they have published or republished (as Blackberry Press) some fine books, perhaps most notably those of Ruth Moore. Lawless told me that “Kitchen Boy” has sold out its first printing and has gone to press for a second run.

To give one example of the humanity underlying the humor: Though he was college-bound himself, Phippen felt “nervous” when a group of Harvard geology students stayed at the lodge. “I don’t know what I expected them to look like, but like so many others I had overromanticised in my head. I had pictured Harvard as this awesome seat of the highest learning where demigod-like students and their peerless professors magically communed with each other in darkly paneled, richly carpeted clubs and dens.”

So God or genes gave Phippen a hunger for seeing life truthfully. This has seen him through college, 31 years of teaching, and four books which have entertained and informed thousands. His three previous volumes are “The Police Know Everything,” “People Trying to be Good” and “Cheap Gossip.” Few of Maine’s residents have created more out of the hard work they had to perform in their youth. How much more Phippen can mine out of Hancock County I do not know, but I think and hope it is a lot. I feel quite confident that those young geologists from Harvard will never do as much for Mainers as Phippen, who has written so wonderfully and accurately. One hopes he will keep up the work of preserving the truth.