Enjoy the Journey: Scenes from a Life On & Off the Road

CHAPTER 1

The Race

In the mid-1950s I did a lot of hitchhiking. I remember, one day, standing on a manhole cover saying to myself, I can’t go any lower. I started thinking about where to go and ended up at the Portsmouth Route 1 traffic circle. I started hitchhiking, not knowing where I was going, and ended up in New York City. I was thirteen years old, just looking around to see what life was all about. I got a couple of donuts and hitchhiked back to Portsmouth that same day. I showed my twin brother and a friend the receipt for the donuts, and they didn’t believe me. But this is how my hitchhiking started. At twelve or thirteen years old, I felt like I was seeing the world. But, in fact, I’d hitch to, for instance, New York, buy some lunch, and then hitch back to Portsmouth. I stood many mornings at the old traffic rotary, which is still there, bypassed by Interstate 95 on the west, and ponder which direction to travel. If it was really cold I’d go south, if it was hot, up north to Maine. On nice summer days, I’d head north-west to the lakes region and the White Mountains.

I was hitchhiking before I really got into meeting people in school, which I attended only occasionally. The kids I hung out with skipped school quite often, too. We usually played pool when we skipped. Because I was more used to hustling and making money by shining shoes and doing odd jobs, I thought pool boring. But I did get good at it, and the game was mind clearing for me. My identical twin Conrad often covered for me by attending my classes. The teachers never knew the difference.

Those of us who regularly skipped each had our own reasons. My childhood background was probably a big contributor to my itch to travel. My mother’s parents had moved to Derry, New Hampshire from New York City, where her father had been in vaudeville. He’d been involved in bootlegging liquor for the mafia and had had to hide out.

My father was a dairy farmer and milkman. He met my mother delivering milk, fell in love with her, and they were married. He was 32, she 16. Her father, aware that the McKinneys had owned the Pierce Arrow-Packard agencies of New England, and assuming the family had money, had told her my father was a good catch. At the time they were married, though, my grandfather had lost nearly everything in the Depression. All he still owned was a 21-room house in Derry called Elmcrest Farm, which sat on a hill overlooking Beaver Lake. The farmhouse in Derry was a summerhouse. The main family house was on upper Elm Street in Manchester, New Hampshire. I recall being there once when I was very young, and being impressed by the long, wide stairs. I’ve heard that the house was featured in a Hollywood movie.

My grandfather and father expanded the small, roughly 300-acre dairy farm, buying more cattle, machinery, and milk processing equipment in order to be able to sell to a larger market. They renamed the farm McKinney Dairy, which was printed on the milk bottles. My father and mother lived in an apartment on the McKinney Homestead.

From what I know now about alcoholism, I’m sure my mother was an alcoholic, and probably had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder as well because she never stayed in one place or with one husband for very long. Many times she packed up and moved with us kids to various apartments around Derry, always leaving a note so my father would know where she was so he could pay the rent, and, most of the time, eventually talk her into returning to the farm.

During World War II my parents moved to Springfield, Massachusetts where my father worked for a short time in a Smith and Wesson gun factory, his contribution to the war effort. Conrad and I were born there. They moved back to Derry when we were about three months old, into an apartment built off the barn next to where the milk was processed. My mother had two more children, girls, during the time we lived in Derry. Because we were frequently left alone, Conrad and I spent most of our time in the big house with our grandmother, Billie. Gram didn’t want my mother in the house, or the girls, who, because she didn’t think they were her true grandchildren, were cared for by a neighbor or sitter. I learned recently from one of my stepbrothers that another reason Gram didn’t like her was because my mother was Catholic. My grandparents were Protestants whose forebears had arrived on America’s shores on the Mayflower. My grandmother was directly descended from Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island. So I guess the family’s strong aversion to interfaith marriages shouldn’t be surprising.

When Conrad and I finished second grade, my mother packed us kids up and moved to Portsmouth, to find excitement and love, according to one of my sisters. We lived in the Puddle Dock section of a neighborhood along the Piscataqua River called Strawbery Banke, after the abundant strawberries that grew along the riverbank. It was a commercial waterfront, all dirt roads and water with bait shops, horse stables, rooming houses, piles of iron and other junk, and a coal yard.

Puddle Dock was also Portsmouth’s red light district, supported, like the city’s more than two-dozen bars, by the large numbers of servicemen from the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and Marine and Coast Guard bases. During the time we lived there, you couldn’t give property away. We moved from house to house, at one time living at Pitts Tavern on Court Street, a bar in which, according to history, George Washington was served. Always concerned for his family, my father followed, leaving the dairy farm.

My grandfather had operated the Pierce Arrow and Packard agencies he’d had when my father was a boy out of a large building he owned in Boston next to Fenway Park. The large CITGO sign is on that building today. My father had grown up with chauffeurs and money, and attended private schools, graduating from Governor Dummer Academy,