Richard Hawes' roots run deep at Westport Harbor and he recently shared stories from this lively corner of town with a Westport Historical Society audience.
The phone rang at 4 a.m. one snowy February morning during Prohibition. "Bring Richard down to the beach club but don't say anything to anybody," said a friend of Richard Hawes' father.
"There were about 100 people on the beach, about 20 or 30 skiffs and a rum runner was ashore on the rocks," said Richard Hawes describing the scene. "The boss man was pacing the beach in a Chesterfield coat and a derby hat and all the other fellows looked like pirates, rowing out to the boat on the rocks and bringing in cases of booze.
"Trucks would come down and back up onto the entryway to the beach club and fill them with booze until they got the whole thing unloaded and everybody disappeared. The next morning, the beach club where they'd broken a few boards was all fixed up with beautiful new boards and there was a case of scotch in front of the door."
It got nasty, though, with shootings and mobsters. Mr. Hawes said he was relieved when Prohibition was over.
Mr. Hawes, who was born in 1916, recalled the goings-on in Westport Harbor in an interview conducted and videotaped by Jim Panos and Nancy Burkholder. About 50 people watched the video at a gathering sponsored by the Westport Historical Society on Sept. 21 at the Council on Aging.
In the comfort of his armchair, Mr. Hawes told stories about the Westport Harbor Aqueduct, a place called "The Casino," and the Howland House. He talked about night patrols in World War II to spot German submarines.
Mr. Hawes has a prodigious memory. His recollections of manners, mysteries, and occasional mayhem in his part of town were peppered with a sense of humor as dry as salt marsh hay. His clipped Yankee accent steamrolled the letter "r" turning it into an h (harbor, in Hawesspeak = "haabaa")
His stories tacked back and forth between his and his wife Anne's family roots in Westport Harbor. He recalled the social life of the times, the various incarnations of the Elephant Rock Beach Club - including its pummeling in the Hurricane of 1938 - the formation of the Acoaxet Club, and the provenances of many harbor homes.
At the time Mr. Hawes' father bought property and an 1811 farmhouse from George Brayton in 1926, the Harbor area was rolling farmland.
"My grandfather and some of the Tripp family, which is my mother's family, came to the Harbor area variously between 1885 and 1916 and a good many of their children and grandchildren are still living," he said.
Mr. Hawes said there were no houses then in front of the Howland House and few houses along Atlantic Avenue.
"I've been around a little bit from here to there but most of my life's been spent right here in Westport Harbor," Mr. Hawes said. His absences included four years in college, one in law school in Virginia and a couple of years "off to war in a Navy ship."
In 1930, he returned to live with his mother and father year round. His grandfather's house on Atlantic Avenue is still standing.
Anne Rogers Hawes was raised in a house perched on the shore at the end of Acoaxet Road. It was damaged in the 1938 hurricane but repaired in time to be the site of her sister's wedding in 1939. In Westport Harbor, it takes more than a hurricane to wreck plans for a wedding.
Mr. Hawes called the Elephant Rock Beach Club "a wonderful place for us to play in those summers. There were benches, a big porch with big roof, and outjuts on the seaside of it and individual bathhouses and a shower."
Since then, there has been a lot of damage from hurricanes but each time, the structures have been rebuilt. The hurricane of 1938 provided the first knockout and Hurricane Bob the latest. Mr. Hawes showed dramatic photos of powerful waves shoving the first club, called "the pavilion" onto what is now the parking lot on the other side of Atlantic Avenue.
The video presentation occasionally sounded like the History Channel with an echo chamber. Every time Mr. Hawes paused to recollect a name of place, someone in the audience would invariably pipe up with the information, moments later to be remembered by Hawes as if he'd heard. Occasionally, Anne Hawes got into the action as well.
While describing some of the older houses in the harbor, Mr. Hawes reminisced about summer parties and dances and the great view from the Howland House.
While detailing the succession of owners of homes in his neighborhood, Mr. Hawes said, "Tom Rogers' present house was owned by Charles Chase, his wife was a relative of mine. Everybody's a relative of everybody else around here."
That comment drew a round of laughter from the audience.
"The Acoaxet Club was formed by a group of people from my father's generation who came to Westport in the teens (1900s)," Mr. Hawes said. That's when they purchased a farm that had been foreclosed. Earl Charlton matched the money the men from the Harbor raised. Within a year they'd built a golf course. The original farmhouse is still part of the clubhouse.
Mr. Hawes called Westport plumber Everett Coggeshall, "the oldest living plumber in the United States when he died in 1996." His recollections of Mr. Coggeshall and other inhabitants of Westport Harbor depict a place with no end of colorful characters.
A eye out for UBoats...
Among Mr.Hawes' many anecdotes of life at Westport Harbor was this one from World War II.
"After World War II what was known as Harbor Inn was owned by the Macomber family. Charles Macomber's son-in-law Herbert Ogden and my father used to parade around at night on patrol," watching for German UBoats," Mr. Hawes said.
"One night he was parading around Howland Road and Herbert was parading around the Harbor House.
"Herb said, 'Why don't you parade here and I'll parade up there?'
"Why would I want to do that?" my father asked.
"Otherwise it doesn't seem like we're doing anything!" Herb said.
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