To the editor:
For my children and friends who have roots in Aroostook County, Maine you will find this wonderful video on Loring Air Force Base that was sent to me by a friend in Sinclair, northern Maine (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAH-n_UXfVw) very informative. At the beginning of the video you will see how I and my sister and friends earned our spending money or saved for college by picking potatoes. Note the hydraulic lift that lifted the potato barrels up and onto the back of the trucks. My father, Calvin T. Harmon (better known as “Bud”) invented that hydraulic lift after working on his father and grandfather’s farm in Limestone.
Note the largest hangar on Loring Air Base. My father, “Bud” Harmon of Caribou, Maine, as a master welder did a great deal of the welding on this hangar.
Note the air raid drills in the schools. I remember those very well. It was very frightening, as a child.
I was born in Presque Isle but grew up in Caribou. My mother’s (Doris Bennett Harmon) family (Lyman and Alice Bennett) were from Presque Isle and my father’s (Calvin “Bud” Thomas Harmon) family (Ray and Gladys Harmon) were from Caribou (originally from Limestone). During the time that Loring was “in full swing” my father was in business in Caribou (Ray Harmon and Sons Garage, Hershel Street) with his father, Ray, and his brothers Ray Jr. and Phillip Harmon.
Here are some of my interesting recollections of the years that the base was operating:
My sister Mary, my friends and I would sit on the front lawn of my family’s house on Collins Street and watch the stream of cars go by as the base practiced its periodic evacuation exercise, sending civilians living on base through Caribou and up north toward New Sweden.
My father, a registered Maine guide, was often called out in the night during hunting season to find some inexperienced airman who had gotten lost in the Maine woods while trying his hand at deer hunting.
While picking potatoes in the fall sometimes young airman would try their hand at picking but soon gave up as the work was too physically tough, and “dirty” and the days long.
In those days to see an African American was such a rarity that if one was spotted walking down the Main Street of Caribou we teens would run to the window of Raymond’s Drug Store (the hangout for ice cream and coke floats) to simply stare.
My family had a family “camp” on Long Lake, Sinclair, not far from the Loring Air Base Recreation Center where young airmen came to enjoy fishing, boating, swimming, etc. One incident that has become a favorite tale in the family is of the time that my female cousins, sister Mary and I (in our teens) were sunbathing on our “raft” anchored out in the lake when a boat filled with young airmen started to circle around us trying to get our attention and our names. My grandfather observing this from shore came out in his fishing boat and started to “whack” his paddle at the poor young men. On my grandfather’s next birthday my own father presented my grandfather with a very long handled paddle that he had carved so that the next time grandfather would really be able to “scare off” any such intruders.
Valley Cottage, N.Y.
