The Pirates of Peary Village

By Ken Lord

This is a fictional story based on the author’s boyhood. His father was a defense worker, uprooted from his home and moved to work in a shipyard where World War II Liberty Ships are built. It has some yesteryear charm, as the lives of his family touch the lives of a retired Boston janitor and a widow of Scottish heritage on the farm she owns in South Portland, Maine. The time period is the early 1940s. The US is at war and ships are being built there and in several other places in the northeast.

Peary Village was a real place, nestled just off Broadway, near Cash Corner in South Portland. It was “thrown together,” along with two other nearby housing projects, because adequate housing was not available for the influx of defense workers. The author lived at #2 N Street. Made of the least expensive materials available—cold in the winter and hot in the summer, the housing development existed throughout the 1950s. It boasted coal and kerosene heat and coin-operated major appliances. The development no longer exists.

The development had its own intrigues. It had crime. It had the same kind of social pressures that tenement housing has all over the world. The newsboy, Kris Lang, brings a bit of excitement to the area when the four Samoyed dogs begin stealing his papers. Replacing the papers were not the only issue, however. Some of those papers ended up at the homes of others who were not customers, and at odd hours of the night.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ken Lord
• Release date: Jul 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476303635

Ken Lord

Author of more than 60 works of nonfiction, fiction, biography, historical fiction, and YA. Senior citizen living in suburban Syracuse, NY. 40 plus years of computer experience and a comparable amount of adult education. ABA and BSBA from University of Massachusetts Lowell, EdM from Oregon State University, and doctoral credits from the University of Arizona. And, are you ready for this? An Avon representative for nearly 18 years, a top seller, well awarded, and "the cutest Avon Lady" in Tucson, Arizona.

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The Pirates Of Peary Village

By: Ken Lord

Copyright 2012

Smashwords Edition

Preface

Across the Penobscot River from Bangor, Maine, is the community of Brewer. The overall story begins in 1940, in the little city of Brewer. The community is considered to be a part of greater Bangor, which is known as the Queen City of Maine. Bangor is also the home of a very famous writer, Stephen King. There is a lighted water tower that from a distance looks very much like a queen’s crown.

In 1940, Brewer was known for its paper mills. Logs cut in the northern Maine woods, owned by the International Paper Company, would be placed in the Penobscot and floated down to Bangor. There they were removed at the one of the mills and made into paper. Paper mills up and down the central Maine waterways dominated the economy of the area, well into the middle years of the 20th century. Northward up the Penobscot was the reservation of the Penobscot Indians. They lived on an island called Indian Island, near the town of Old Town, near also to the University of Maine at Orono.

Bangor had two other very large attractions. One was a gigantic fairground that was home to the Maine State Fair. There, a large statue of Paul Bunyan greeted fairgoers. The other was a large airport that would become Dow Air Force Base. Further down the Penobscot were the communities of Gardner, Camden, Ellsworth, and Rockland. In Rockland, for as long as anybody could remember, there was held an annual lobster festival.

By 1940, the City of Bangor had been a city for nearly a hundred years, though its roots went back into the late 1600s. The suburb of Brewer was not quite that old, but grew because the mills had attracted people from around the state. People came from Houlton, Presque Isle, and Lincoln to the North. And they came from Bath, Bucksport, Brooksville, and Castine to the East. Downstate in the communities of Rumford and Westbrook, similar paper mills had been constructed.

John Lang came from the farming town of Brooksville, on the Bagaduce River. He came seeking employment at the Brewer mills. John was father to Harold, who in turn was father to Khristopher, Roger, Benton, Henry, Uve, and Carleen. By 1934, Khristopher had married and by 1936 had fathered the first of his three sons, also named Khristopher—now Junior. Because Khristopher Sr. was known as Khris, his son became known as Kit-Kat.

Khristopher Sr. was a plumber. It was the most recent work that he had been able to find, following what had been called The Great Depression of the 1930s. In those days work was scarce and both wages and prices were much lower than we have today. It was not uncommon for people to work for $20 or less each week, and Khris earned but $11 a week.

Sinister forces were at work in the world at this time. In the Far East, the Empire of Japan had begun to conquer other countries of Asia and the islands of the western Pacific Ocean. In Europe, a war had begun between Nazi Germany and its neighbors. Not yet involved with the war, the United States was officially neutral. It was, however, involved in supplying the European allies’ armies and air forces with weapons, including airplanes. From 1940 to early 1942, when the United States entered the European war, we helped our allies.

In order to be able to ferry large bomber aircraft to England, the government built several large air bases on the East coast of the country. Khris, in 1940, went north to work, helping to build an air base in Limestone, Maine, near Presque Isle. It was called Loring Air Base. From Loring, heavy bombers were flown to England. Khris’ income rose and he made good money for the times. He was deferred from military service because he was very important to the building of this base. He trained and worked as a steamfitter. Because of a lack of housing near the base, he left his wife and son, Kit-Kat, in Brewer, near to his parents and the rest of his own family.

The United States officially entered World War II after being attacked on December 7, 1941. By this time, Loring Air Base had been completed, and defense workers were refocused on building transport ships known as Liberty Ships. Shipyards were being built in Bath, South Portland, and Kittery, Maine. They were also built in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; and at Charlestown, Massachusetts, near Boston. Khris found work at the shipyard at South Portland, about one hundred-fifty miles to the south of Bangor.

As had been the case when Khris worked at Loring, there was little available housing in South Portland. The closest that he could house his little family, now with two sons, was in a bungalow at Old Orchard Beach, about fifty miles from his work. The description of bungalow didn’t do the place much justice. It was a one-room summer cottage with neither heat nor insulation. The bathroom was merely a closet with a hanging curtain before it. There was no kitchen table or chairs.

The bungalow’s gas stove and refrigerator worked only if quarters were put into a coin box. One quarter was sufficient to cook a meal, but it took six quarters every day to keep the electricity running to the refrigerator. Kit-Kat slept on a couch on the front screened-in porch, where he could be awakened to unhook the screen door when his father returned home from his second shift job at about 1 a.m. Kit-Kat was now six years old and about to enter first grade.

As the cold weather of October 1942 began, it became necessary to find better shelter, and Khris found another place, also there in Old Orchard, to house his family. Again, it was a one-room place, but this time a large one-room place, with windows and central heat, if you can consider one large pot-bellied stove in the middle of the floor central. That was a stove that burned kerosene, and a 55-gallon drum was kept outside the door from which a smaller tank would be filled and carried into the house.

To help pay for the apartment, two of Khris’ brothers joined Khris and his family and also went to work in the shipyard. They pooled gasoline ration stamps, a wartime necessity that limited how much gasoline a person used. With those stamps to use, Khris bought a car. That situation didn’t last long. Since neither brother had a military deferment, they were both drafted into the U.S. Army. The lack of the brothers’ gasoline ration stamps now became a problem requiring the Lang family to move closer to Khris’ work.

By 1943, the housing picture in South Portland had begun to change. Among the new construction were two government housing projects—Peary Village and Mountain View—built to house shipyard workers and their families. Khris and his wife managed to scrape together a 10% down payment (of a $9,000 purchase price) on a very small two-bedroom Cape Cod house with a full basement and an unfinished attic and moved in. That number today seems somewhat astounding, as the average home price in South Portland in 2003 is $178,000. They would remain there until 1946.

In December of 1945, the last of three sons was born to Khris and his wife Olga. When Kit-Kat’s youngest brother was born, there was not enough room in the second bedroom for three boys, so he got to have a room of his own, on several square feet of floorboard nailed together in the center of the unfinished attic, where he would have fallen through the ceiling into a room below, had he walked in his sleep, and where he was trapped until the folding ladder was hauled down in the morning. By the spring of 1946, the need for men for the war had become acute. Khris was drafted and ordered to report for Army service in June of 1946. In early June, the Allied armies invaded France at Normandy, on the English Channel, and the war in Europe was on its way to a close. Further inductions were cancelled. Khris never had to go. A month later, however, the shipyard closed. No more Liberty cargo ships would be required. During the month of June the finishing touches were put on the ships being constructed, but no new keels were laid. And Khris went from being a highly paid defense worker steamfitter to being unemployed and with no income other than meager savings.

Because they couldn’t sustain the payment on