Flotsam & Jetsam: Learning to laugh in Maine

Sam Smith

Long before Bert & I, I started collecting Maine humor during my summer visits. One of my sources as a boy was Walter Stowe for whom I worked on various projects.

Mr. Stowe appreciated having someone to instruct and demonstrate his immunity to poison ivy by chewing on some its leaves. He had a stock of sayings of which he never tired. He could recite a blasphemous version of the Lord's Prayer at breakneck speed and when you asked him how much something cost, he always replied, "25 cents, two bits, two dimes and a nickel, one quartah of a dollah." When you picked up your end of a plank, the instructions also never varied: "Head her southeast!" When you said goodbye he said, "Keep her under 60 on the curves." And he offered this assessment of a suddenly departed brother-in-law: "That fella never was any good. Now he's upped and died right in the middle of hay season."

On the other hand, his assessment of Clyde Johnson was more favorable: "He's the only man who can shingle a barn, tell a dirty story and smoke a pipe all at the same time."
When he needed to stall while thinking of a reply, the quite short Mr. Stowe would go into a brief shuffle, observe his feet intently, pick up his dirty baseball hat and scratch his bald head, finally declaring, "Well now!" with the occasional addendum "Ain't that somethin?"
When I introduced my future wife to Mr. Stowe and told him we were engaged, he did his shuffle and his head scratching, glanced at Kathy and then looked up at me over his little round glasses and said, "Pretty good for a girl."

"Er, Mr. Stowe, Kathy's from Wisconsin."

Shuffle. Hat back on.

"Glad to meet you anyway."

John T. Mann recalls that Mr. Stowe had told his father: "If I die afore the end of mud season, just stick me in the gravel pit 'til the road dries out and the ground thaws."
You never knew when a laugh would crop up. Once, as a teenager, I drove into a gas station, stepped out of my car into a puddle and heard someone say "How's the watah?"
And John at R&D Automotive told me many years back that my brother had been in with his car. "He said he kept smelling gas . . . so I told him to stop it."

Then there was the exchange at Ed Leighton's department store:

"How ya doin?"
"You want the long story or the short one?"
"Oh hell, give me the long one."
"Pretty good, I guess."

And there was the time Bob Guillamette, the plumber, came to fix something. I asked him to also look at the tub he had recently installed because the water was slow to drain. He returned a couple of minutes later saying, "Christ, Sam, you're one of the lucky ones. Most of them won't hold water."

Then he fixed it.