7357-R2_LSLA_2020_WinterNewsletter

Shore at “Gruesome Gulch” into the ’80’s, Walter B.Gibson (pen-name Maxwell Grant - author/professional magician - creator of over 300 novel-length “The Shadow” stories ). THE ’50’S added Warren, Yerkxa & Hodgeton, Weinstein & McGovern. Imagine the East Shore, Middle Basin view as open water, with no visible cottages at all on the Western shore!! The Lots were small, and cottages too ranging from “shanty” to (For the most part), single family, with indoor plumbing in kitchen, bath, small bedroom, large “Great Room”, and either attic - or loft bedroom quarters. Outdoor living reigned! A special delight was seeing Bill Kincaid dallying forth in his Chris-Craft (reputed to have been purchased from the proceeds for doing a Chesterfield cigarette endorsement) and rendering his “I Love LITTLE SEBAGO LAKE” crisscross wave to you, as he sped along his course !

The lake was open & glorious, but the camp roadways were narrow, dirt, roads, (single car accessible in choice spots), “scraped annually - in season ” by the Town of Gray, and notoriously “pot-holed” most of each year. There were no street lights & I remember that neighbor, Judge Sanborn, had numerous trees along the road “spot painted in white paint” so that he might avoid hitting them after a busy day in court in Gray, and darkness had fallen. My grandfather earned the title “Road Commissioner” of the Lower Campbell Shores Road because of his Summer regimen of taking his wheelbarrow on countless trips to fill as many potholes as he could (from “Fish Rock” to the top of the hill at Witherm’s Farm)! He retired as Chief Dispatcher for The Grand Trunk Railroad

(Portland, ME - Island Pond, VT, Sherbrooke & Montreal, QUE) in 1938, after coming through the ranks with Canadian National Railroad & New York Central RR. He also continued his boyhood allegiance to farming by getting the Witherm’s permission to plant a vegetable garden each Spring on their land at the top of the hill. Those were “banner years”. At my grandfather’s death, the cottage was left to my parents, Theodore E. & Lillian F. Potter (in turn, it came to me). It fit well while they pursued their careers (my father at architecture for Delano Mill In Portland, and my mother, a lifelong career as an author, journalist, & editor-in-chief for National Antiques Review. I didn’t know it then, but it led to my lifelong appreciation for the beauty and good fortune to have “grown up” on Little Sebago Lake with my peers and schoolmates.

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