Memories of working at harbor `castle’ worth king’s ransom

During the mid-50s I worked for Stanwood and Elizabeth King of Manset at their Southwest Harbor castle, well, actually the Hotel Dirigo.

Perched atop the High Road, all the way to the end, stood one of the last of the grand hotels that once abounded in Maine. The inn was as big as a castle, and it had a labyrinth of back stairs, great halls, dining rooms, and a cellar that spread out under the hotel with rooms for housing the help, a furnace room with massive coal bins and chutes, laundry rooms for washing and mangles for ironing starch-stiff sheets, storage rooms and rooms you could only imagine about.

Today only a few of those classic hotels remain. Among them are the Rangeley Inn, the Claremont Hotel in Southwest Harbor, Northeast Harbor’s Asticou Inn, the Bar Harbor Inn in its namesake town. Many of these rambling colossuses including the Poland Spring House, Squaw Mountain Inn at Greenville Junction, Kineo House at Moosehead Lake either burned down or were razed. The Kennebunkport Shawmut Inn closed it doors for the final time.

At the turn of the century the great hotels dominated communities throughout Maine and Mount Desert Island. Many have been razed, others have burned. A few more remain along the coast in southern Maine.

When I worked there the Dirigo Hotel seemed to house a perennial crop of elderly people.

My first few years there were as a bell hop, kitchen helper, and general gopher. I had to be there in the morning to help with breakfast, and the first job of the morning was to fetch enough hods of coal to see the chef, Pop Adams and his assistant, S. Leslie King, the owners’ son, at least through to lunch. A large black ornate coal range with space enough for all the pots and pans for a day’s meals, stretched from one side of the kitchen to the other. The fire never went out and the kitchen never cooled off. Pop spent winters as a chef at the University of Maine and Les was an industrial arts school teacher.

Named after the state motto “Dirigo — I lead” the hotel still had an elegance about it with crisp white table cloths, uniformed waitresses, and a clientel that always dressed for meals. All gentlemen were required to wear at least a sportscoat and if they did not have one, one would be provided by the owner Stanwood King, from a generous selection kept in a closet just off the main desk.

This was before television in every room, before central heating or air conditioning. People lived at a slower pace.

This was not a hotel with a big turnover. Most of the guests arrived in June and stayed until Labor Day. That meant that at the beginning of every season my duties consisted mainly of moving trunks and baggage and assorted odds and ends, all that a couple would need to last the summer, from cars to rooms. It always seemed that the luggage increased in volumn as people moved from the first to the second floors and quadrupled for those on the top floor. There was no elevator in the hotel, just a tray carrying dumb waiter that was operated by ropes and pulleys.

Most of the guests that came to stay for the summer arrived in just one of two conveyances, Cadillacs or Lincoln Continentals, that seemed each year to grow longer and longer, with elaborate fins and chrome and lights, bright colors and other extras, such as trunks that could pop open at the touch of a button inside. They were the most ostentatious cars of their day and their owners saw to it that they were kept in gleaming tip-top shape.

Breakfast was a major event. Morning arrived with the aroma of coffee percolating, bacon frying, bread toasting, the clatter of dishes, the waitresses’ shouted breakfast orders, the cooks’ wisecracks, and a kitchen team ready to feed their charges. The all-purpose breakfast staple, the egg, was the star. There were scrambled eggs, shirred eggs, poached eggs, eggs benedict, sunnyside up, once over easy, boiled, but never more than two minutes or they would be returned to the kitchen. Wheatena and rib sticking cream of wheat simmered on the end of the stove. Stewed prunes, prune juice and prune Danish were popular favorites. Saturated fats? Unheard of. Bacon, slabs of ham, pork sausage fought for their place on the plates along with buttered toast, rolls and biscuits. Most people were pretty religious about their morning meal, seldom ever changing it, which made life easier for the waitresses and kitchen crew.

One of my duties was to see that the woodboxes next to the fireplaces in the lobby, dining room and library-reading room-lounge, were kept filled. Being a member of the local Boy Scout troop, along with detailed instructions from the Kings, I carefully constructed the fire with newspapers, kindling and split wood, so the fire could be ignited on a moment’s notice. Weather can change quickly on the coast.

Waitresses at the Dirigo never wrote down their orders. They were trained by Stanwood’s wife Elizabeth, better known as Libby, and Les’s wife, Betty. Some of the waitresses, like Betty Furtwengler, who was a year ahead of me at Pemetic High School, would memorize a dozen orders and come back into the kitchen, grab warm plates from the beneath the steam table, and start calling out every single order, “Sherd eggs, prunes, wheatena, wholewheat toast, ….. Boiled egg, prune juice, cream of wheat, …..and she and the other waitresses would miraculously fill those hugh trays with heaps of steaming dishes and rush back out to the dining room.

Many of the waitresses came year after year from the Milo and Brownville areas, but we also had a number of girls (you could call them girls then and no one was offened) from the Southwest Harbor area and the offshore islands of Frenchboro, Swans Island, Islesford or Cranberry Isle. They were all beautiful but too old for me to even consider dating, that is as if I’d even stand a chance. But, in those days, even if I could have dated them I wouldn’t have because I had given my heart to Annette Funacello, who I was convinced was the most beautirful girl in America when she looked me directly in the eye and sang “How will I know my darling, How will I know my love,”

As I grew older I became more realistic and realized that my fondness for Annette was puppy love. Real love came with the discovery of Sandra Dee in “Summer Place.” I still have the poster announcing the film from my second job at Howard Robbinson’s Park Theater, where I sold candy on the night of movie performances and ushered and cleaned up the following day. But I digress. Sandra hurt me deeply when she married Bobby Darin, so I dropped her. She had her chance.

Summer in Maine, as coastal residents like to say, “is our best week.”

Most evenings a gentle fog would roll into town, bathing everything in mist. Even on the hotest summers with infrequent rain, most of Mount Desert Island seemed to stay green, because of that gentle misting every night.

On those days when it rained and temperatures dipped, we could have several days at a stretch where the cold and dampness moved through corridores and into the rooms of the elderly guests.

That always meant more work for me, because on those days I had to spend more time in the cellar stoking coal into the furnance. The hotel had no centeral heating system so as soon as the old people began to feel the chill, they filled their bathtubs with hot wawter to steam heat their rooms. We had to keep the flue to the furnace open so we could keep up with the demand for hot water in the rooms and still have enough for the kitchen dish washing and sheets and towels in the laundry.

Sometimes I had to perform room service duties. We didn’t actually serve meals in the rooms, but we did provide services for those who might be ill or were entertaining guests. Usually it consisted of taking up trays of hor d’ourves of crackers, cheese, smoked mussels, and various dips and tonic, ice or ginger ale. The guests’ most popular drinks were Manhattans, Martinis or Scotch and Soda. I remember one time I really flustered a resident when I caught him pouring one bottle of liquor into another. He wanted me to get rid of the empty bottle and tipped me generously. I didn’t know why, but when I showed them the bottle to be disposed of and mentioned the brand name of the bottle left behind, the men in the kitchen all got a big laugh. That resident had always been considered cheap, a poor tipper, but from that day on he always tipped me generously.

The several hours between the closing of lunch and before the preparations for supper, most of the help were free to leave. On most any good day, I could be found peddling or hitchhiking to and from the Bluffs or Ike’s beach at Echo Lake. By then I had outgrown the sandbeach by the Girl Scout camp. No one my age would be caught dead there. That was for children.

On those days when guests were expected in the afternoon I hung around the hotel waiting to unpack the cars and carry the luggage to their rooms. That was usually a good day for tips, which represented as sizeable portion of the income. To this day I can’t remember what an average weekly salary was, but It was enough to buy an occassional Pizza from Solly Caruso’s, see a movie or get candy and other snacks, buy the latest Pat Boone, Elvis Pressley, Harry Belefonte, the Platters or Fats Domino 45 rpm records, and still be able to pay for all my school clothes when September rolled around.

Waiting for the guests to arrive, I would frequent the room off the dining room that served as a library, reading room and parlor. I’d start the fire place and you could smell the heat as it pushed its dry air through the dampness of the room. There’s no heat like wood heat. The book shelves were filled with just the right kind of books, old musty books by long forgotten authors and interspersed with old illustrated copies of the classics.

After lunch some of the guests would sit quietly rocking on the covered veranda that wrapped itself around the hotel, others took the time for a nap, some golfed and still others were in with the crowd that did the Jordan Pond House tea in the original birch bark dining room or they joined the cocktail party circuit.

Late afternoon preparations for the evening meal would begin, and then it was clean-up. The season ended on Labor Day. It seemed the days were endless and repetitiious, but I’m glad I had the opportunity to have been a part of that era.

In the fall of 1960 lightening struck the roof and the building erupted in flames while Stanwood and Elizabeth slept in their room on the ground floor. They were rescued and had to watch the work of a lifetime go up in flames.