My grandfather was a school teacher and had the summers off. When they arrived for the summer they took a hired horse and buggy to get down to the house with as many supplies as they could take. However, he had to go back to town two or three times each summer and would do this by rowing his dory on an incoming tide to the bottom of Cove Rd. and walk up to the market. He would row back on the out-going tide, basically an all day trip.

Before electricity we used to pump fresh water with a pitcher pump located on the beach just below the bluff.

During World WWII my grandfather would together with Arthur Tenney check houses to see that they were properly blacked out; no light showing. We had one of the first beach buggies, ours was a Model A Ford station wagon with 900x13 Riverside tiers. People always named their buggies and ours was called the Silver Comet, the Callanans called theirs the Red Raider and Bob Hersey called theirs The Galloping Ghost. I recall in 1952 we had the organizational meeting for the Massachusetts Beach Buggy Association in the town parking lot at Nauset Beach. We all had numbers and ours was 52. At age 13 I used to drive the entire length of the Beach from Nauset Inlet to Chatham.

When I was young boy in the late '40's I would walk down Doane Way, a dirt road at the time, with my fishing gear and row out in our dory and catch flounders. Our record catch on April 19th weekend when we traditionally opened the house for the summer was 104 flounders. We had hand lines with two hooks and often got double headers. This all went away in the seventies due to offshore draggers and winter dragging by local fisherman.

Another form of fishing was spearing flounders by drifting on a clear day over Aunt Sarah Doane's flats just below the Mill Race. At low tide you could clearly see the outline of the flounder buried in the mud and you had the luxury of picking out the big ones. We also kept lobster pots in the Mill Pond and had good catches.

One of our favorite outings was to take the boat up to the Eastham Marsh and spend a day or several days at our beach camp, named the Shack very near Henry Beston's famous Outermost House. We would always get a bucket of quohogs in the pot holes on the marsh and the softshells next to the marsh. For years I used to duck hunt from the Shack and it was a sad day in 1978 when the entire north beach lost every camp on it and was completely flattened. In my life time their has never been a storm that did so much damage to the beach as that one. It wiped out a mile and a half of twenty foot high dunes that were forty to fifty yards wide.

Bill Farnham