1956-01: Swampscott - The Willey House

When we arrived in Swampscott we stayed at the Willey House, a hotel on Humphrey Street directly across from King’s Beach. Our house was being remodeled, so we lived in the hotel for six weeks. The Willey House was an old fashioned hotel with a nightclub on the first floor and corridors of closed doors on the upper floors. It was a part of an adult world that I only had glimpses of on Alfred Hitchcock Presents and the General Electric Theater. Actually, the Willey house was a large house with three floors and it was probably as much a rooming house as a hotel. It had a bar and a bandstand and a limited kitchen on the first floor. At nights we could hear the band playing directly below our floor. Some nights we heard the amplified voice of a female singer, whom we never met. Daniel and I would clown and pretend to swoon at the little we could hear of her voice.

We did meet the band’s drummer and he gave us lessons on playing the drums. He taught us to do a drum roll, a lesson I never quite mastered. I learned to hold the drumsticks, left hand with the back up and the right hand with the palm up (or was it the reverse?), and I could follow his instructions slowly, letting the tip bounce on a stool top, but I lost rhythm picking up speed and I couldn’t achieve a continuous roll. My brothers learned, but my attention would always break and the rhythm would falter.

The only person I can actually remember that worked at the Willey House was Louie the bartender. Most evenings, we would find our parents sitting in the bar talking with Louie. The bar itself was a large oval, trimmed in dark wood and with a pyramid of glass shelves lined with exotic bottles in the middle. The works of the bar - the sinks, the coolers, and mixing counters - were beneath the bar. We could order any soft drink we wanted, and I learned to like Squirt, which was my favorite for a number of years. Louie’s Cherry Special was a favorite. Louie said he designed it for Tommy, who was two years old, but we suspected he had made them before. It was 7-Up with cherry syrup and a maraschino cherry and a splash of Squirt.

All of us, except for Michael and Daniel, stayed in the front room on the second floor. We had a small kitchenette, which served for after-school snacks and emergency hungers, but for regular meals, we walked down to a restaurant called the Hawthorne by the Sea. To my inexperienced eye it seemed to be much like a Howard Johnson’s. They had spaghetti, which was nearly the only thing I ordered. Michael and Daniel’s room was at the back of the hotel, and it was reached by going down the hall and around two corners. Daniel would spend the evening with the rest of the family in our room, even after putting on pajamas, and then he would wander back to his room as he we grew tired. One night Daniel disappeared and mother frantically sent Michael and Dad out searching for him. They found him sound asleep on top of a bed in a strange room. Apparently he wandered through the first open door he came to. This became one of the stories added to the family lore. My story from then was that I woke up to go the bathroom, missed it, and peed into the laundry bag instead. I was always fascinated with family stories and how their retelling could make them more interesting.

Another favorite story was when Mother knocked on Michael and Daniel’s room when they had been experimenting with smoking a cigar. They managed to put the cigar out in the bathroom before opening the door, but Mom kept asking whether Louie had just been there. The air was thick with cigar smoke and Daniel was looking slightly green – an expression that had me watching people’s complexion for years. The question we always asked was whether Mother knew what they were doing and kept asking about Louie as a method of teasing them. Mother would often feign ignorance when it what obvious that she wasn’t ignorant at all.

Louie wasn’t the only cigar smoker in the Willey House, a number of them would gather for a weekly poker game in the third floor lounge. The lounge had overstuffed leather couches and chairs and, on mornings after a poker game, it was filled with stale smoke, overflowing ashtrays, and empty highball glasses. But the crevices of the couch and chairs were also filled with lost change. We would come away with quarters, nickels, dimes, and sometimes ever half-dollars. Usually enough for a trip to the candy store next to Eaton’s Drugs, where they sold penny candy. We could buy paper candy by the foot, or miniature paraffin soft-drink bottles filled with colored syrup, or tootsie-rolls, and candy cigarettes. The store was old fashioned then, something out of my parent’s childhood.

One evening as walked from the Willey House to the restaurant, Michael stopped suddenly and picked up a five-dollar bill from the sidewalk. Five dollars was an incredible amount of money, and finding that much money was staggering. Daniel and I were walking directly behind him and never saw it. Michael always seemed to be lucky that way, if it was luck. Daniel’s contention was that Michael found it because he was trained from his nature studies to always keep his eye on the ground for small animals and reptiles. It was true that Michael would always find salamanders or insects when we never could, I assumed that was because he knew where to look, or maybe because he was older. But there are no standard places to find five-dollar bills, I watched the ground for years after that and never found one. I think he used the money to buy a model boat with a battery-driven outboard motor, a maroon Johnson outboard motor that I always envied. A year or so later I bought a boat with a smaller blue Evinrude outboard motor, which I liked, but you can never quite match what older brothers have.

Entering the restaurant, there was a lunch counter on the left. It was there where Michael sat one morning eating steak and eggs when Mother came in with us. Mother was outraged. Ford Motor Company was paying for our tab as an expense of moving Dad to Massachusetts, and Mother thought Michael was taking advantage of the situation. It embarrassed her, and our Mother was so uncomfortable with embarrassment that embarrassing her was something I never wanted to do. I’m still uncomfortable remembering the day Dad brought home a new Edsel convertible and took us all for a test ride. The car hadn’t been released yet, and people naturally looked at it as we drove by, and I, on an impulse, yelled, “Ten cents a look!” Mother was mortified, and turned and told me to be quiet, and I felt terrible.

It sounded exciting to eat at a restaurant everyday, but it soon became tiresome. No menu is large enough to provide much variety, particularly after you have eliminated whole classes of meals like I did. I didn’t like seafood and, for a restaurant by the sea, that took a lot of entrees out of consideration. Usually it meant spaghetti, hamburgers, and sandwiches. Once, on some special occasion, we had baked Alaska and I learned about the insulating properties of meringue. It was the fanciest desert I ever had but it was rather underwhelming, the meringue was better on Grandma Erlewine's lemon meringue pies and the ice-cream was Neapolitan which always had the worst flavors. Mainly I missed home cooking. I remember the first time we had it, when we were in the kitchen-in-progress and Mom pulled out an electric frying pan and made us grilled peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We all raved about how they were so good. 

During our time in the Willey House, we would hang out at the house as often as possible while workmen were everywhere finishing this or that. Sometimes we had take-out food there. Once I walked down to Doane's by the Sea in the middle of snowstorm to get food for all of us. I bought hot dogs in buns that were sliced on the top so they could be browned on the sides, not sliced on the side like we had back in Michigan. I got fried clams and french fries that I smelled through the paper bag as I walked back up the hill on Reddington with huge snow flakes blowing all around me. I was replaying the song, See You Later Alligator that I heard for the first time on the radio before I left.