Cape Cod Vacations

I think our first family vacation to Cape Cod was in 1954. We rented a small cottage in Dennisport on the south shore. Actually it was a duplex cottage – in our half there was a single bedroom, a small kitchen, a bathroom, and a screened-in porch which is where my sister and I slept on cots. My Uncle Tony and Aunt Vi rented the other half. The beach was about a half-block down the street. This was before Cape Cod became the touristy place that it is now. Route 6 was just a narrow two-lane road the length of the Cape, not the expressway with overpasses and interchanges that it is now.

The following year was the first of a number of consecutive years that our Cape Cod vacation was a “free” working vacation.  A man from our church, Mr. Ranft, was the assistant headmaster of the McTernan School, a private boy’s school in Waterbury (he became the headmaster in 1960). They were just a few years older than my parents.  In the summers he and his wife ran a boy’s camp, Holiday Hill, in Brewster, MA on Seymour Pond. The camp was jointly owned by them and Mrs. Ranft’s sister and brother-in-law and ran from 1947 until the early 1960’s.  The camp property encompassed the entire north shore of the lake and there were only three other residences elsewhere around the lake so it was quite private (note that when the camp was later sold the property was entirely developed and there are perhaps a hundred residences there now). 

Mr. Ranft offered our family the use of one of the staff cabins (the cabin was named “Winwood” as his name was Winston Ranft) either at the beginning of the summer or at the end of the summer if my father would help with all the tasks of opening up the camp or closing it down.  Opening it up involved setting up the archery range, putting the dock back into the water (it was taken apart at the end of the season to prevent damage when the lake froze), mowing the grass, carrying all the canoes from the barn down to the boat house, etc.  The last few years that we vacationed there I was big enough to help.

The Ranfts had two sons – Christopher who was about 4 years older than I, and Brian who was about 3 years younger. Besides the Ranfts and our family, the only other person there to help open up the camp was the camp cook – a large black lady who reminded me of Aunt Jemima. She was a very jolly person – and a really good cook (we usually had our own meals in our cabin, but got to eat in the main house on a few occasions)!

The little cabin where we stayed was more than sufficient for our family and we were able to go boating or fishing in the lake. We caught mostly perch, bluegills, and bullheads (our favorite as once you beheaded them and cleaned out the innards, you could just cut the top and side spines (using wire cutters!), roll the rest in flour and fry them. The tail and side fins were nice and crunchy and there were no bones except the backbone and one behind each gill. Nothing quite like catching your own supper and eating it just an hour or so later! I recall that my sister once caught an eel. Like bullheads, they have a pair of lungs so do not die easily when removed from the water. This one was writhing about in the bottom of the boat, getting tangled in the fishing line and anything else in sight and my father kept trying to stab it with his pocket knife to pin it to the bottom of the boat (not very successfully), while my sister was screaming because it was like a snake at her feet. But like the bullheads, it tasted quite well at the end of the day.

Our last year we did not stay in the cabin. (I think that was around 1959 – in 1960 we used our vacation to fly to Arizona to visit relatives and then started camping elsewhere each summer.) We had by then purchased our first family tent – a 9’x9’ umbrella tent and so we stayed in the woods near the cabins. But that also meant that we did not have the use of the indoor bathroom. So we dug a hole in the ground and nailed a few boards between two trees forming a “V” that you could sit on above the hole and that was our toilet for the week. We also wrapped some black plastic around those same trees to give a little privacy to the person using it. Some of the family were a little queasy at first, but we all did. And at the end of the week we just used the dirt we had removed from the hole and covered it back over. Nature at its finest!

Usually we were able to take a day or two off during the week and tour other parts of the Cape – Provincetown (which was not the artsy, hippie, gay-friendly place that it later became), Nauset Beach (right on the North Atlantic so always very cold water), etc.  Also, a favorite stop on the way back to CT was at Edaville Railroad.