My Surf Beginnings

I grew up in Norwell, a small town South of Boston, during the early 60’s. The middle child of seven including four boys and three girls. One of the highlights of my youth was getting packed into the family wagon and going to Paragon Park with it’s carousel rides and the wooden “Giant Coaster” we all called “big rat” that towered over the beach scene like you would see in a movie.

Paragon Park Coaster

When our real 60’s Griswold mobile pulled into the Beechwood Village in Yarmouth on August 17,1967 it was not the first time our family had been to the cape. My father’s family actually has a long history here on the cape which I write of later. Recently, however, My dad owned two cottages in Eastham and I can still remember sitting on the beach and watching the Target Ship come into view as the tide went out and going out in a boat one day and seeing it close up and I was around when they bombed it once as practice.

 My dad sold two cottages in Eastham and taken I assume his profit to buy a 50’s style cottage colony along Rt. 28, the main route through the busy town of Yarmouth in the middle of the Cape. 

Our family moved permanently to the Cape on August 17, 1967 according to my brother Barry. “The Beechwood Village” would serve as the family home until the day I graduated from High school when it sold In 1978  the same day as my 18th birthday - weird?? 

I don’t remember going over the bridge but certainly the smell and feel of the new surroundings will be with me forever. I can ever still see my sister Sharon and I running through the bushes along the back and front sides of the old house we couldn’t get into as the older folks unpacked whatever we had brought. I was seven. 

The Beachwood Village's 24 original cottages were classic cape cod summer vacation getaways with some bigger two or three bedroom family units and some smaller one bedrooms love shacks!. 

While not oceanfront, we were close to Parker's river and the marina down the road. The local drive-in theater was also almost across the street. Seagull beach was just over a mile away was a Nantucket Sound beach and as such doesn’t get any surf action. Our first winter we lived with all seven us kids sleeping in one room on two triple bunks beds and the baby Darlene in the crib in the middle of the room. The house we left in Norwell had been massive so it was certainly some cramped quarters.

The next spring my dad shuffled around a few smaller ones to add to our house along with a small addition making a long extension of bedrooms. His deep knowledge of engineering with the most incredible skill of  using just jacks and round posts to move the building over 100 ft. look like a cinch. A few years later my dad would actually move everything he had put together for us to live across the street to another lot and built a huge 6 bedroom and four bath that overlooks with huge l-shaped pool and dominates the landscape of RT28 still today. 

As I would grow up and learn years later our grandfather had been an engineer in the Seabees during world War II and had worked on both the airports on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket early on in the war. I never knew my grandfather. He died from injuries suffered during the war when my dad was only 16. My great grandfather was also a builder and we weekly passed by a beautiful two story mansard roof house that he built in Dennis during the early 1900’s. 

I grew up playing along Parker’s river and running through the bogs trying to keep up with my brothers. I worked at the Yarmouth Drive-in across the street and then later next door at Jerry’s Dairy Freeze the local clam shack right across from the drive-in where almost all us in the family worked. The local beach in Yarmouth had zero waves and would get any action there until I hit my driving years and we would go there to party and make out in cars. Once a family took me up to Nauset Beach and I saw real waves for the first time. I tried going in but got thrown back and the family left saying it was too dangerous and we left. .....