This colorful memoir of growing up in the Fifties and early Sixties
in Newport, RI by award-winning poet and historian, Michael Hogan,
provides a rich and multi-layered description of the city in the
days before the building of the Newport Bridge. Then the island was
still isolated from the mainland and only accessible from Jamestown
by ferry. Downtown Thames Street had its seamy side with sailors
and marines fighting in honky-tonk bars as Destroyer Fleet Atlantic
brought troops back from Korea. Still, it was the summer home of
the Vanderbilts, the Astors and Goelets, and the aspiring young
author greeted both Eisenhower and Kennedy at the Summer White
House and made a car trip to Amherst to meet Robert Frost.
PUBLISHER'S REVIEW "Before the Jazz Festivals, the condominiums,
the gentrification of Thames Street, the Bed and Breakfasts, and
the Bridge that let the tourists and New York investors turn my
hometown into a theme park, there was another Newport. Shrouded by
fog, slowed by cobblestone streets, full of abandoned mysterious
mansions, turreted and dark, it was a town that held history as
mysteriously as the true wine in some misplaced Medieval grail.
Like all really interesting towns, Newport had its seamy side as
well. Although nowadays it is largely upscale, in 1955 there was
still the Gas House Gang, the Irish toughs of the Fifth Ward, the
sailors and the Marines in the rough bars along Thames (pronounced
then in the English way, "Tems") Street, the "Colored"
neighborhood, the rough and tumble docks, Long Wharf, the cinder
lots and broken pavement near the railroad depot, the vacant lots
and haunted houses, Tim the Ragpicker, and the Crazy Lady on
Carroll Street. There was also the Newport of the Ocean Drive and
the Cliff Walk where one could see the magnificent homes of the
last of the robber barons of the 1890s: the Duponts, the
Rockefellers, the Pierponts, the Morgans and the Vanderbilts. It
was the vacation spot of presidents and the locus of the summer
White House for Dwight D. Eisenhower and later for John F. Kennedy.
The early mists rising from the trees, the sounds of flickers and
wrens, occasionally a song bird, were part of every morning. The
bleat of sheep from a hill off in the distance, the fog horns of
destroyers out in Narragansett Bay, the thin scrape of a garden
rake were my summer music. Had my parents wished me to become a
poet, they could not have planned it better. Always on these summer
mornings there was the sense of the world being born again."
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