| The
Downeast Ramblers in 1962. In the background is Blossomberry
Farm, outside Norwich, Vt. WCD spent a great deal of time as
a Dartmouth undergraduate here, drinking hard cider and playing
blues and folk and bluegrass and being around some of the most
interesting people he has ever known. |
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The
Downeast Ramblers during the same period. Musicians like Jim
Kweskin, John Hammond, Bill Keith, and Jim Rooney regularly came
up from Cambridge to hang out and play music. Keith & Rooney
opened for Joan Baez at her Dartmouth winter concert in 1961,
her first major appearance outside Club 47 in Cambridge. They
were staying out at Blossomberry Farm and there was a blizzard
and they had to make their way into Hanover through 10-foot drifts
of snow. The silence that hushed Webster Hall when Baez came
out on stage and began to sing is remembered with awe by everyone
who was there. |
| Sue
Klinck, musician, artist, auto mechanic, pig farmer, motorcycle
rider. The women -- dare one say, in these ideologically rigid
times, girls -- who floated in and out of Blossomberry Farm seem
now like the nymphs and dryads of ancient myth. Looking
back, one recalls Proust's wonderful sentence: "I thought
her very beautiful, still rich in hopes, full of laughter, formed
from those very years which I myself had lost, she was like my
own youth." |
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Another
picture of Sue, working on the changes for "Banks of the
Ohio." Her husband Sterling was banjo player for the Downeast
Ramblers.Years after the community broke up, WCD wrote a song
called "Blossomberry Farm" in memory of those days
that are gone forever. The beginning, as he recalls,
is "The pigs was in the kitchen / The corn was in the barn
/The fiddles they was tunin' in the hall/ Jonny was a little
drunk / But he didn't mean no harm / At Blossomberry Farm in
early fall." The rest escapes him. |
Sterling
Klinck (banjo) and Jack Tottle (mandolin) at the Williams Folk
Festival in 1960. Sterling graduated from Dartmouth a couple
of years before WCD arrived, which was lucky because Sterling
and Sue then moved out to Blossomberry Farm to give us all a
home away from home. Jack was still a student at Dartmouth when
WCD was there. He went on to become a great bluegrass musician
and songwriter. You can buy his latest CD by clicking here on
the cover:
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This
is not Blossomberry Farm but the Dwarfy House, which may be regarded
as its metaphysical annex. It was built by Jack Carson with his
own hands when he dropped out of Dartmouth and went to live in
an undisclosed location outside Hanover. It was sort of like
Thoreau at Walden. Jack bought the land for $200 and spent $800
on lumber and other materials. It got passed on to Dave Petraglia,
who was the guru and loremaster of WCD's group of friends. The
Dwarfy House was another part of their secret world. |
| The
thing about the Dwarfy House is that it didn't have stairs leading
from anything to anything. The living room bedroom was the first
floor, and then there was this ladder leading up to the kitchen
on the second floor, and from there you could get up to a sleeping
loft under the eaves, where you could hear the wind howling during
blizzards and feel safe and warm until morning. |
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This
is the Dwarfy House as it exists today. WCD recently made a pilgrimage
to its undisclosed location to see if it was still there. It
is still there, but now it is not in the remote woods but on
a dirt road lined with fancy summer places built by city people
who come up to Hanover to be rustic in the summer. When WCD made
his visit, the Dwarfy House itself was up for sale for an astounding
amount of money ($105,000) because it is now on a road with fancy
summer places that cost similarly amazing sums. It is a long
time since we drank hard cider and played "Cocaine Blues"
and went to bed up in the sleeping loft when the snow was coming
down heavy on the roof.
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