Peter Behrens's Blog, page 445

Snowy 1936 Chevrolet 3/4 ton

  

Larry Watson and 1957 cars

Jalopy Journal has a good rant about the ubiquitous '57 Chevy stealing thunder from other great cars of that year, like this Eldorado. All his examples wear Larry Watson custom paint. I've found a few more great Larry Watson '57s on the Kustomrama site:

Maine Vernacular: Phippsburg Peninsula

Took a Sunday drive with BB & HBB,  exploringthe Phippsburg peninsula (and hiking Morse Mountain trail to Seawall Beach).  Classic Maine saltwater farm: big house, summah kitchen, back house, barn Not quite a standard issue Cape, with the door offset
1774 Inn  Money from shipbuilding and the maritime trade built some grand houses in the 19th c.

City of Bath, Maine's shipbuilding (as opposed to boatbuilding) town.

Pair of Chevrolets (1945, 1996?)

California sunshine. Could use a bit of that in Maine today. from Michaal S Moore in the Bay Area.

1932 Chevrolet & Penobscot Narrows Bridge

 Caught the little Chevy outside Camden while  heading downeast on the 2nd snowy day of the year. Yikes! it's only mid-November. Still, I love that drive. It always feels like coming home, which it is. Love to cross that bridge over the Penobscot. Even on a steel-gray November day, Maine is beautiful.

1971 Volvo 164 & The State of Maine

As you can tell from recent posts, it is getting harder and harder to get 'live' shots of old iron out on the roads, here in the State of Maine. By mid-November most of the good stuff, from Kittery to Fort Ken, -has been put up in barns for the winter. But I met this 1971 Volvo while walking the backstreets of Bath this morning. The car is a completely original, one-owner machine. And, yes, it was going into winter hibernation this afternoon.
BTW, I've just had my Volvo 850 Wagon renovated at Alan's Auto in Portland, a local legend. An interesting experience. Not inexpensive, mind you, but interesting. They seemed unusually committed to doing excellent work on Volvos. More later.
You hear it less often than in the past, but some people (Mainers, mostly) still use "State of Maine"
 instead of just "Maine" in ordinary speech or, even more commonly, in prose. For example, our weatherman will sometimes say "up here in the State of Maine". The training ship for Maine Military Academy is The State of Maine. (Maybe because calling any ship the Maine  summons ghosts of Havana harbor and  the Spanish-American War, as in "Remember The Maine!")
But Vermonters (for example) don't speak of the "State of Vermont" whereas "State of Maine" is still a very common phrase. I suspect it goes back to Maine's unhappy history as a 'province' of Massachusetts. After statehood in 1820 (admitted to the Union as a Free state, part of the Missouri Compromise) impatient Mainers were probably eager and proud to speak of State of--and not Province of, or District of--Maine. 

1955 Nash Statesman

 The car was for sale at Motorland in Arundel, Maine.

1956 Task Force Chevrolet. Benicia, Calif.

from our man in the Bay Area, Michael Moore.

Satanic Mills

Maine's a state that has lost most of its manufacturing jobs. There's a human cost to that. But whenever I walk down Main St. in Biddeford, heading for the Saco River which powered the textile mills, I'm reminded there was a huge human cost to manufacturing, too. Now being paid in China, I guess.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts, and the WSJ

Patrick Leigh Fermor in Ithaca, 1946; from An Adventure by Artemis Cooper Photograph: (Handout)Today we're stopping at the Literate Department of Autoliterate, but--never fear--there are still plenty of aged trucks to come.
I have been reading Patrick Leigh Fermor this autumn. After finishing A Time of Gifts on Cortes Island last month, I'm absorbed in Between the Woods and the Water. The books are narratives of Fermor's famous walking trip from Holland to Constantinople, in 1933, age eighteen.
(Volume III of the walk-book had not appeared when Leigh Fermor died in June 2011, at the age of 96, and  people feared it never would. But he had been working on the manuscript of A Youthful Journey until weeks before his death, and last spring it was published in the US (by NYRB Classics) as The Broken Road. The title was not his—Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron, PLF's literary executors, chose it as a way of indicating that it is not “the polished and reworked book he would have most desired,” though Artemis Cooper insists that The Broken Road is nonetheless “vintage Leigh Fermor”

Written nearly half a century after the journey, the books are a palimpsest of memory, literature and learning. A long-lost Europe is encountered through the sensibility of an bold 18-year-old adventurer and refracted through the learning and experience of a much older man who has led an extraordinary life. (A major in the Irish Guards in WWII, PLF was also an SOE operative, and famous for kidnapping a German general on the island of Crete.)

Over the last couple of years I've been lucky enough to teach at Colorado College. My English Department colleague, the poet David Mason, knew Paddy Leigh Fermor well: Mason's book News from the Village is largely about their long friendship. The paragraph below is excerpted from Mason's Wall Street Journal piece written after PLF's death.
"Never inclined to introspection, Paddy was endlessly curious about the world, and that curiosity distinguished his life and writing from our confessional age. He insisted that the reference library be near the dining-room table for consultation during mealtime arguments. Once, as he recounted in his lecture, The Aftermath of Travel, he started researching "the distribution of crocodiles on the Upper Volta River, where I had never been or ever wanted to go. I took down the right volume of the Encyclopedia, but must have opened it at the wrong page, for three weeks later I had read the complete works of Voltaire, but I still knew nothing about the distribution of those crocodiles..."
Thanks to Nikolaus Hansen, the German publisher, who has forwarded a photograph of Patrick Leigh Fermor playing croquet.