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Advocate Archives
1938, 1965, 1975 on the Outer Cape, where were you?
January 27, 1938
What Is Provincetown Like in Winter?
Bud Beauchamp Gives His Impressions
Winter came on Friday. There were four inches of snow on the ground that day, and the wind got around into the northwest and started blowing, and after the sun went down you needed a coat. When it’s cold that way you start downtown and halfway there you have a good legitimate excuse for dropping into Mac’s to warm your ears, and maybe having a quick one before you go out again. Or you sit by the fire down at Taylor’s over a crock of ale and hear all the dirt that’s gone on in the last twelve hours or two days, or six months, depending on how long it’s been since you were downtown the last time.
You don’t see any old ladies in flopbrimmed hats and eight yards of pastel-tinted smocks sitting up on that pet hill on Bradford Street painting that same old scene. You don’t see three thousand people getting off the boats everyday and dashing up the streets with a picnic lunch and a dollar and a quarter camera looking for something quaint. And you can park a car on Commercial Street at any time during the day or night, providing you have a car and can afford to run it.
Maybe it’s dead in winter. Enough people will tell you that, but I wouldn’t know. There’s always something to do. You catch a movie once in a while, and on Wednesday and Saturday nights you might wander up to the Beachcomber’s and knock over a few frames of billiards, and on odd nights you can promote a penny ante poker game and spend all night losing seventy-five cents and drinking a gallon of beer. On good days you can walk in the dunes, or hike up the beach after a storm looking at the uprooted piling, and talking to somebody out looking for a set of steps that left unexpectedly during the night.
Pretty dull, maybe. We’ve had a couple of good fires, and some guy went nuts the other night and that will give us a topic of conversation for a week.
January 28, 1965
Ozzie Raises Flag for Departed Hero
Provincetown joined the rest of the country in tribute to Britain’s dead leader, Sir Winston Churchill, but unique among ‘round the world tributes must be S. Osborn (Ozzie) Ball’s star-studded personal response. In tempestuous pre-dawn darkness Sunday morning Ozzie hoisted the Union Jack to half-mast on the storm-swept outpost of the United States that is Truro’s Ballston Beach.
It was 3:25 a.m. when Ozzie turned over in bed, flicked on his radio, and against the sound of the winds, heard the announcement of Churchill’s death. He dressed, shoveled his way to the car, drove 10 miles through snow, sleet and wind to Ballston Beach — and there he climbed through drifts to a flagpole on the highest bluff of the Ball Trust property.
The frozen halyards on the flagpole would have defeated anyone less expert with ropes. Ozzie is 76 — and the winds could have flattened a younger man. But when Ozzie floundered his way back to his car, the Union Jack was flying at half-mast. He lost a shoe and a storm boot in the drift — found them by patient searching of his tracks.
It was still pitch dark when Ozzie got home, mission accomplished. He is an early riser by nature and while he is normally up by 5:30 a.m., this was earlier than usual. When he has something to do, however, he does it, he says, and an early start on the flag-raising would allow him plenty of time to get to early services at the Church of St. Mary of the Harbor.
January 30, 1975
Wellfleet Dike Goes to the Jury
Years of dispute over Wellfleet’s Herring River dike will reach an anticlimax at a meeting in Boston this morning held by the state Department of Natural Resources.
With the $260,000 dike already built, the DNR is trying to determine how its December 1973 order of conditions for the dike may have been violated and by what means it can still be executed.
The main question expected to arise at the meeting is why the state Department of Public Works’ November 1973 contract for construction of the dike was not modified after the DNR order was issued. The DNR order, superseding and strengthening a similar April 1973 order by the local Conservation Commission, called for the maintenance of the salt marsh which was regenerating behind the deteriorating old dike.
The unaltered DPW specifications have produced a dike which duplicates the 1908 structure. The old dike was built to connect the basin to freshwater.
Work is at a standstill, no saltwater is flowing, and the dike is still in the hands of the DPW pending adjustment of the tide valves. Whether they will be chained partway open to allow saltwater flow — a possibility mentioned several times by Malcolm Graf, associate commissioner of the DPW’s Division of Waterways — probably depends on the outcome of this morning’s meeting.
Graf said Wednesday afternoon he expected to attend the meeting, along with Jack Ahern, DPW resident engineer during the construction, and possibly Frank Maguire, district engineer.
Also expected to attend are Charles Frazier, Wellfleet’s legal advisor; Richard Plante, Wellfleet executive secretary; Wilbur Rockwell, chairman of the Board of Selectmen; Kirk Wilkinson and James Maguire (chairman) of the Wellfleet Conservation Commissoin; and A.C. Jones, treasurer of the APCC.
Commenting on the deaths of over 500 bushels of clams from lowered water levels, Frazier said, “Some of the people talking about about shellfish problems don’t know what they’re talking about. What the hell good are the clams if they’re under water? You can’t dig them, and they don’t contribute to the economy of the town.”
For its part, the APCC has written Brownell asking debate on the relative values of fresh and salt water be ruled out for the meeting, on the basis that the issue was decided two years ago.
The January 27 letter read in part, “There remains only the urgent matter of setting the three valves properly to reproduce the tidal flows that existed before the old structure was closed. We trust you will preset rules of the meeting so as to prohibit more of the shilly-shally which has destroyed the shellfish population, drastically lowered the level of water in the freshwater marshes above High Toss Road, and will soon destroy the rest of the salt marsh community.”
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Jan 27th, 2005