Nat, Jane, and Gini Hall. (1939)

I was born in the summer of 1938, and when I was three years old, my parents began to rent on Moonpenny Lane - which was then known as Gifford Avenue. Some years later, because there was also a Gifford Road and a Gifford Street in Falmouth, the town asked for suggestions for a new name. One of the residents on the street, Mrs. Corbett, who lived in the fifth cottage in (facing the water - see the map on the last page), had a daughter named Penelope (Penny) and loved to look at the moon over the pond. So that's where the name Moonpenny Lane came from. This happened in the late '40s as best I can remember. There was also a sign at the end of the street with Colonial Village on it. Each family that could, took a turn at storing and maintaining the sign and putting it up again in the spring, as no one lived here during the winter - none of the nine cottages was winterized. This is the Campbells' photo of the Colonial Village sign.

Moonrise over Bournes Pond (2008). A view very much like this one provided the inspiration for the name of Moonpenny Lane.

My dad, Lois Lordin, and me, when we rented at the sixth cottage.

Maureen Bosteel, Lois Lordin, Catherine Bosteel, and Nancy Brayton (Peterson).

Our family rented the sixth cottage in, facing the water, for two years, 1941 & 1942. The family that owned it sold it to Mr. & Mrs. Leo Bosteel, whose family still owns it today. This cottage has Dutch girls on the shutters. The next two years when I was five and six, we rented the next cottage. These first four years we rented with another couple, the Lordins, who had a daughter Lois, about my age. The fathers went back to Boston to work during the week and returned each Friday. The mothers had no car; there were no Laundromats either, so all the clothes were washed by hand. I remember my mother saying that the entire cottage was covered with drying diapers on rainy days during the first years. The Bosteels had two daughters, Catherine (a year older than I) and Maureen (a year or two younger), so there were four little girls playing at the end of the street during the summers of 1943 and 1944. One day, Mrs. Estes, who owned the house at the very end of the street - at what we called the point, invited the four of us to go to her house and pick out some of her old clothes in the attic for dress-up.

One of the Estes sons, David, owns the Landfall Restaurant in Woods Hole. After Mr. & Mrs. Estes died, David used to let the cook and some of the waiters live at the point, since housing was so expensive on the Cape, especially in the summer. During that time, a group of men with "P.O.W." (prisoner of war) painted on the back of their jackets were brought in to clear the brush on the Estes' land left over from the hurricane of 1938. My mother was horrified when I came home wanting "P.O.W." on my jacket too! At first I thought the men had poison ivy, because the letters were painted on it in what looked to me like our home remedy for poison ivy (potassium permanganate), which we still use for this purpose, completely illegally and against the doctor's and pharmacist's advice. The P.O.W. guards off duty used to go in the pond, using the right-of-way at the edge of the Bosteels' property. I remember vividly watching as one of these men reached down to find out what was pinching his toe and brought up a crab.

The Bosteel house. (2009)

The Corbett house. (2007)

The Corbett house after being rebuilt and enlarged. (2009)

Mr. & Mrs. Bosteel owned a restaurant in Abington, MA called "Teel's Cabin." At that time they lived upstairs over the restaurant, and Mrs. Bosteel would go up to Abington from Falmouth from Tuesday to Sunday to help out at the bar, leaving a college girl in charge at the Cape. Sunday night was cleaning night at the Bosteel's as Mrs. Bosteel was due to arrive that night and naturally no one had picked up anything since the previous Tuesday. I got to stay at their restaurant in Abington one weekend and could have anything I wanted to eat -all I wanted was fried clams. The Bosteel's had a station wagon, a "woody," to go into Boston to get supplies for their restaurant; they were the first people I knew that had one. They were probably used at that time mainly for business, not for large families or families that traveled a lot like now. My husband's father had one at the time, too, using it to carry oxygen tanks for the drugstore he owned.

Nancy, while staying at the Ramsey's cottage.

Mrs. Ramsey's house in 1946, with Barbara Martin (Glass), her niece and present owner.

The Ramsey house. (2009)

We weren't able to rent the fifth cottage during the summer of 1945, as the Corbetts had just bought it and didn't want to rent. Mr. & Mrs. Ramsey, who lived in the fourth cottage (which had sailboats on the shutters), invited us to stay with them. Mr. Ramsey, who was away a lot as a traveling salesman, was only down twice during the whole summer, and we would be company for Mrs. Ramsey. She used the bedroom on the second floor while we were there, and we used the two bedrooms downstairs. This was the first summer the Lordins weren't with us. Mrs. Ramsey was the only person I ever knew who used a chamber pot; there was no bathroom upstairs. One thing I remember from that summer was that Mr. Ramsey had fireworks for the Fourth of July, which I had never had before. Also, at that time, we had a four-party telephone line (on our line were the Bosteels, the Corbetts, the Ramseys and one other person). As you can imagine, the line was constantly busy!

One of my favorite things to do during these early years was catching minnows. We did this by finding a quahog, cracking it open, and putting it into a jar to which we tied a string around the neck and put into the pond. The minnows would go into the jar to feed on the quahog, and we'd pull the jar up. We'd lie on the dock for hours watching to make sure the crabs didn't come to take our bait. We'd also catch the crabs, but my mother thought it was too much work to prepare them. In those days no one dug for clams and quahogs in the pond. Mrs. Ramsey had a deck by the water that extended out over the bank in her back yard where she would have afternoon tea for the ladies at that end of the street, but we kids weren't invited. It was during the summer we stayed with the Ramseys that I lost my fear of thunder. During one of Mr. Ramsey's visits, there was a really bad storm and Mr. Ramsey said to me, "Don't be afraid of the lightning. If you can see it, it can't hurt you." So I wasn't.

Greg Kozich is the present owner of the fourth cottage. He and his wife are still debating whether to renovate the cottage or to tear it down and build a year-round house. He let me look inside and the wood paneling on the walls is in perfect condition. No damage at all for all the years that no one lived there.

The Ballous in a rowboat, before we bought the cottage.

The inside of our cottage when we bought it. (1946)

In 1946 my parents bought 15 Moonpenny Lane from Mrs. Ballou - furnished (candles on the shutters). We took the photo below soon after we moved in. As anyone who visits us can see, the same furniture, for the most part, is there in 2009!

We used to open the cottage during the April school vacation, the week of April 19th, every year. My father would take a week's vacation. To keep warm, we had a vertical kerosene heater and we used the fireplace, too. It was so cold that we used to bring our clothes for the next day to bed with us and get dressed under the covers. One April vacation it snowed. My parents bought me a 12-foot wooden rowboat that we named "Nancy." I had learned to row before while we were staying at the fifth cottage next to the Bosteel's. The Bosteels had a dory, which is a rowboat which is pointed at both ends and isn't nearly as stable as a regular rowboat. Our house had a dock which eventually disintegrated and which we didn't bother to replace. If we had only known!

My mother and father closing the cottage. (1946)

The cottage when we bought it. (1946)

A ritual during my early years on Moonpenny Lane was putting the garbage out each night by the tree in front of the house to feed the skunks in the area. We had a family of skunks living nearby who visited after sundown. When I began to date, it used to be a challenge to get out of the car and run to the front door without bothering them. Years later, Walt had an experience with them one evening while sitting out back at dusk. A skunk walked out from the holly bush and stopped right under his chair. Walt kept very still (very brave) and did not utter a sound. Finally the skunk wandered off and Walt was able to move again.

The Harvey's house on Menauhant Road. Their granddaughter and Nancy. (early '50s)

The Harvey's house. (2007)

What is now the middle house on Menauhant Road facing the pond was owned by the Harveys, who had a granddaughter I played with. She was Mr. Harvey's son's child, and her family lived in Belmont, too. That house was so old that it had a hand pump in the kitchen and no running water. On rainy days my mother and I would go over there and play whist. I remember that Mr. Harvey used to get the last bit of whiskey out of the bottle by putting a bit of water in it and swirling it around. My husband laughed at this, but when he started doing the same thing with the spaghetti sauce jar, he said, "I used to laugh at Mr. Harvey, and now I've become him!"

The Halls' cottage (1937).

The Halls' cottage, with addition on right side.

During these early years we used to see the younger two of the Hall girls (from the third cottage, the one with the ducks on the shutters), Gini and Nat, on the dirt road playing tennis. I would stand behind Nat to fetch the balls she missed. I soon got tired of that! Each spring, all three girls (Jane, Gini, and Nat) would pull up every blade of grass from their front yard and bring pine needles (wrapped in sheets) from the Estes' property on the point to cover the front yard. In later years, Roger and Nat would bring the pine needles by the bale from North Carolina as the new houses had been built on their free pine needle supply!

The first three cottages all had pine needle lawns. One summer Mr. Lange, who lived between us and the Halls, let one of his friends use his cottage for a week. This friend thought that Fred would really appreciate it if he got rid of all those unsightly pine needles on his front lawn. When Mr. and Mrs. Lange came back, their jaws dropped in surprise. "What happened to our pine needles?" They had to go up to the end of the street the next spring and re-needle their lawn.

The duck blind behind the Halls' house, Anne Egan and me.

The Hall/Campbell cottage (2009).

The Halls had a duck blind by the water, which Mr. Hall would use in the fall and winter to shoot the ducks. It had all the conveniences, a pot belly stove and bunk beds. He also had clay pigeons set in the water in front of the blind.

I used to baby-sit for the Estes grandchildren, and it was scary walking home from so deep in the woods. I also baby-sat for Nancy and Doug Whipple, Jane's children. Doug was always good about going to bed, but Nancy was NOT. She wanted to stay up and keep me company, partly because there wasn't much age difference between us.

In 2007, Gini Campbell Patterson took her father, Roger Campbell, on a biplane that went over our street. Gini had a camera and this is what Moonpenny Lane looked like.

Aerial view of Moonpenny Lane taken by Gini Patterson. (2007)

Mr. & Mrs. Shave. (1975)

Mr. and Mrs. Shave had a summer house directly across the street from our house. They also owned all the land from that house to Menauhant Road and back to Pasnecoy Lane.

When I was fifteen, Paul Shave was my best friend. He was the son of Ruth and Lewis Shave, who lived across the street. Paul is the youngest of five children, and he would introduce himself by saying, "My name is Paul, and my last name is what your father does in the bathroom every morning that begins with 'SH.'" He thought he was so clever. Every now and then Paul and I would pack a picnic lunch and row our boats all the way to the end of the pond to eat it; this would take all day. His father used to keep cigarettes in a humidor and Paul would "borrow" one every once in a while and we'd smoke them. My first cigarettes! One fall, we came down to close up and scallops were washing up on shore, both on the beach and from the pond. We got them by the bucketful, with no real effort at all. We decided it would be easier to take them home out of the shell, so we shucked them on our dock. Mrs. Shave called Paul home with a whistle (a different number of tweets for each kid), and by the time he returned, the seagulls had eaten all his shucked scallops. To this day he thinks I took them. When driving, Lewis always went the long way around, in order to take only right-hand turns because lefts were very hard to take, especially on Route 28. Walt always used to laugh at this, too, until he started doing the same thing himself!

When the Shaves retired, they built the house on Menauhant Road (#522). The cottage on Moonpenny was only used by their children and grandchildren when they visited in the summer. As the Shaves grew older, Walt would stop by every morning on his way uptown to get his newspaper, to see if they needed any bread or milk, and Daniel, our grandson, would keep him company. Also, in the early days before trash collection, the Shaves would bury their garbage in the back yard. Before they passed away in the late '80s, the trash had disintegrated, leaving sinkholes all over their yard.

When we attended the memorial service for Nat Campbell at the Coonamessett Inn in 2006, Walt and I saw, after many years, Nancy Shave Wigley of Woods Hole, Paul's older sister. We sent her a copy of Memories, and she responded with the following:

Walt with Jerry, in his driveway.

Jerry's home after his renovation.

Everybody used the large vacant field to the left of the Shaves' cottage for soccer games, kite flying, frisbee, and other sports.

After both Mr. and Mrs. Shave had passed away, the five children agreed to subdivide the land. Paul (my friend, who now lives in Belize) inherited the summer house, which he sold to Jerry Hoffman from Schenectady, New York. The Baumbergs bought the field and built a house, which became #12 Moonpenny. In 2008, the Goodman-Tappers bought this house.

Jerry was a bachelor who insulated and added on, so that the Shaves' cottage became year-round after he retired from teaching high school German. He used to pull his pet Schnauzer, Franz, all over creation in a wagon tied to the back of his bicycle. He became a Davisville activist, knocking on doors and organizing all kinds of community improvements. He organized the first of two paintings of the Old Menauhant Bridge and raised money to plant yellow rose bushes in the triangle of land just before the bridge. We watered and weeded them for a while but, sadly, the weeds took over again. Jerry was called by some the "Mayor of Davisville" and, after he died, the DelTortos bought the property in 2004 and two years later, erected a larger home at #18 Moonpenny.

Clinton Brayton (left) and Fred Lange with the Langes' cottage (penguins on the shutters) between them, and our cottage to the left. Notice the Cape Cod lawn!

Nancy in the hammock next to the screen porch.

Mr. Lange on his roof, fixing his TV antenna.

Mr. Lange.

Mr. Lange, who lived next door (penguins on shutters), was a technical troubleshooter on the night shift for WEEI. He was like another father to me. He bought the house next door a few years after we bought ours. He had a white picket fence around his front door. Soon afterward, he let one of his wife's co-workers use the cottage for a week as a favor, and the friend decided to thank the Langes by raking up all the pine needles in the front yard, pine needles which Fred had spent days hauling from the Estes' woods! Fred used to take me to the racetrack (his favorite place) in Rhode Island, probably Lincoln Downs, and he tried to teach me how to bet. He could figure the odds. He told me to pick a horse, which I did, and while the race was going on, I would be loudly cheering my horse. Before the race, he had placed a bet for me. When the race was over and I was so dejected because my horse had lost, he would hand me the winning ticket! So much for my betting skills.

When I bought my kids a rowboat in the '60s, Mr. Lange was the one who put leather on the oars, braided the rope for the anchor. He also put the hooks into two trees in the front yard for the hammock.

He would always come over for coffee during the week, but when his wife was there, it was as if he didn't even know us. His wife came down every Friday afternoon, and every Friday he cleaned the house as if his life depended on it, which it probably did. He had a heart condition during the last three years of his life, so he was afraid to go out in his boat by himself. He moored it in Green Pond, and he would invite me to go with him, after having taught me how to use the radio and to start the engine in case of a problem. One day he took a boy who was fishing from a rock on the Green Pond jetty out for a ride on his boat. The boy saved his life by calling the Coast Guard after Mr. Lange had a heart attack on the water; he had taught the boy how to use the radio. After that, Mr. Lange never went out on the boat again, but never sold it either. It was in his driveway for years.

The Lange/Moore house. (2007)

Mr. Lange died where he would have wished, standing at the rail, watching the horse race pass by. When I told my son, David, that Mr. Lange had died, he said, "I wish I hadn't known him, 'cause then I wouldn't hurt so much."

Mrs. Lange later sold the cottage to Clay and Karen Moore from Connecticut.

View of the cottages on Moonpenny Lane taken from Mr. Harvey's house across the pond. (early '50s)

The cottages from the shore of the pond behind the beach. (2009)

The original channel to the pond, seen from the old bridge to the beach on Menauhant Road.

The same view in 2008.

In 1954 I was working for Mrs. Carey, a real estate agent who lived in Menauhant on Central Avenue, doing billings for Mr. Carey, a maintenance man. One day I got a ride to work in the morning and, by 11:00 a.m., it was raining heavily and blowing. The reason I knew the storm was really bad was that I saw the rescue truck going past Mrs. Carey's house toward the beach, pulling a boat - to rescue anyone left in the houses at the end of Menauhant. That's how I realized that there was a hurricane, one named Carol. At lunchtime she asked if I wanted to go with one of the kids next door to the boatyard at the Menauhant Yacht Club, where her husband was pulling boats out of the water as fast as he could, so I did. The wind was so strong that it actually bent you over. After the wind had died down, Mrs. Carey drove me home - up Central Avenue, down Route 28, and Davisville Road, because the road by the beach was washed out. We had to cut through the Shaves' yard because Moonpenny Lane had a low spot in the road before our house and it was flooded. My mother had just returned to the cottage after being evacuated by the civil defense. My father, who had Parkinson's, had been carried out of the house by two men to a house on Davisville Road, through the back of the Shaves' woods. The ocean had come up to the back porch step and to the side of the garage! The causeway was under water - there was a car in the pond that never made it over the causeway. Before the civil defense people evacuated my parents, people on the street had gathered at our cottage: The Corbetts, their company, their cat, and Mr. Lange, who lived next door.

The Corbetts brought food for lunch - and in their rush to leave, only cat food was found in the bag. We had no electricity, so we had no water, either. To flush the toilet, we would get a bucket of pond water. Fortunately, we had gas, so we could cook, but we all took sponge baths in Mr. Lange's front yard with water he got from a hand pump connected to his well in the front yard. It was ten days before we got our power back. Only the people who lived in Davisville were allowed to travel on Davisville Road because of the fear of looters. We had to get a pass at the Town Hall to let us onto Davisville Road to get home. Two days after hurricane "Carol" passed, Mr. Lange asked my mother if she wanted to go for a ride in the ocean (he had a small boat) to see what the coastline looked like. She went, but was very afraid she'd find a body in the water. There were five people that lost their life in that storm, and one of the bodies was later found to the left of Shanklin's house, washed up by the beach.

The original bridge and channel to the pond, before the channel closed up.

The opening to the pond before the new bridge was built (early '80s).

In the '70s this spot would be in the middle of the channel to the pond. Today, the sand from the beach covers much of the bridge deck. (2008)

My great aunt, Aunt Georgie Warrington, would spend her two-week vacation with us when I was a teenager. At that time, the opening to Green Pond had just about closed and was the pond was filled with seaweed. The pond smelled awful! When we'd go up to the store, Aunt Georgie would gun the car going over the bridge at Green Pond and put a clothespin on her nose. I wasn't in the car with her very often, but it was always an interesting ride.

Another major hurricane came when my son David was about 14, in the mid-seventies. We came down from Walpole to get the cottage as prepared as we could, and then went to the beach, as it was still a beautiful day at that time. While we were at the beach, the police drove by with a bullhorn, telling everyone to evacuate the area along the coast. If you didn't have a place to stay, you were to contact the Civil Defense. Ann Barcelo, who was visiting her parents, Frank and Katherine Cartalano in the middle cottage across the street from the pond, came swimming with us. After supper, the wind began to pick up, but there was no rain. We decided it was safe to stay, even though the police were still telling everyone to leave. About 11:00 p.m., Gram woke me up, saying it was time to leave because of the strong gusts. I didn't want to leave, so Gram woke up David, and we all went downstairs to vote on what to do. Gram voted to leave; I voted to stay; Dave voted with Gram - so we left, pillows and blankets in hand. We were the only ones left on the street by that time. We drove to the East Falmouth fire station - there wasn't a soul on the road and they told us to go to the school at the end of Maravista Avenue. We joined a few hundred people in the gym, babies crying, dogs barking, and cots all taken by then. Someone gave Gram his cot. Dave and I lay down on the floor around midnight. By 2:00 a.m. they announced that the storm had passed, so we left. The only Civil Defense person at the school was very young, looking to be about 18. The next morning we found the windows at the cottage caked with salt from the spray, with no rain to wash them clean.

In the early '80s our pond opening, which used to flow under the bridge at the beginning of the beach, closed up entirely, with local people digging a narrow opening through the beach in the winter to let out a little water.

Early evening is a beautiful time for a walk along the beach. (2004)

The same view in 2009, after the town built dunes in front of the bridge.

On Foster Road, in the '40s and '50s, there was a big house that had rooms to rent called "The Captain's House." It was the first house on the left by the beach, right next to the right-of-way to the beach we used at that time. In those days we didn't use the public beach; nobody did, and there were no lifeguards. The Captain's House served breakfast to the people who rented there. In the mid-fifties, it was sold. The new owner, I think his name was Haddad, had a fire which destroyed most of the house. All that's left now (2008) is the garage and an enclosed area where they used to hang laundry. There was also a tiny one-room cottage on Foster Road right next to the bridge that the Captain's House used to rent, that was washed away by the hurricane Carol in 1954. We had a mattress and a door from that house in our yard after the hurricane. The Captain's House burned down in 1971 (March 13).

After the fire at the Captain's House, Mr. Haddad had three new foundations built right next to where the old house used to be. The local Davisville people objected because of the septic tanks and leaching field being so close to the beach and the pond. Also, the three foundations on Foster Road were huge, more like for motels than the private dwellings they claimed they were. One was partially built, but it burned down before it was finished. Nancy's mother, Alice Brayton, remembers the sky being filled with fire on that night, September 13, 1977. The empty foundations just sat there in the dunes behind the beach for years until they either sank into the sand or someone took them out. The beach we used the most was reached by a right-of-way that was basically an extension of Pasnecoy Road, but it's overgrown with vegetation now.

The following is the text of an article published in the Falmouth Enterprise on Friday, September 16, 1977:

Flynn and Haddad apparently took the hint that they weren't wanted. No further construction occurred, and the three foundations were finally removed sometime in the eighties. In 2003 the town acquired the property as an extension of Menauhant Beach, and we currently use it ourselves.

Moonpenny Lane and the original channel to the pond. Moonpenny Lane had just been widened, regraded, and paved, and the land to the left of the Shaves' cottage was still an open field. (1983)

The Menauhant Road bridge after Hurricane Bob eroded the beach and blew sand onto the road. (1991).

The beach end of the bridge as seen from atop the new dunes. Sand, sea grass, and bicycles have taken over the bridge. The sea grass to the left of the fence was planted as part of the dune building project. (2009)

After the channel to the pond closed up in the early '80s, the town dug a new channel in the middle of the beach near where the raft used to be. They moved Menauhant Road behind the parking lot and built a new concrete-and-steel bridge over the channel. The three houses before the beach lost some of their front yards to the new road. The old bridge and road were still used as the entrance to the parking lot, and we passed the parking lot attendants each time we went to the beach.

In 1991, Hurricane Bob severely eroded the beach near the bridge, to the point where the roadway was starting to collapse in places. The town closed the old bridge to everything but foot and bicycle traffic, dug up what was left of the old Menauhant Road, and moved the parking lot entrance further down the beach.

During the winter of 2008/2009, the town of Falmouth dredged Woods Hole Harbor and used the sand to build a large dune starting in front of the old Menauhant Road bridge and extending all the way to the west end of the beach where the Captain's House used to be. The dune is large enough that the two houses at the end of Foster Road no longer have a view of the ocean. All they can now see is the sea grass that the town planted on the back side of the dune.

August 2009 saw two special events in our lives happen on the same day. Not only did my husband and I celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary, but our daughter Linda was married in our backyard!

Back when Colonial Village was built, things seemed to stay the same for the longest time. The people, the cottages, the narrow dirt road, everything. Maybe it's the distance we have to look back in time that makes it seem that way, maybe the lightning-fast pace of change today -- probably both. Anyway, as I bring Memories of Moonpenny Lane up-to-date once again, with the Glass and Coppinger cottages probably about to be torn down and year-round houses built in their place, I know that in the future we'll look back and call the way we live now "the good old days."

A family of ducks hoping to get some more crackers from our daughter-in-law Donna.

Nancy waters the nitrogen-capturing shrubs the Conservation Commission made us plant at the foot of the property. Note Penelope peeking over the shrub.