Penobscot-Piscataquis-Hancock Counties
38
That Never Again Summer Working at Moosehead Lake
I
by John Redden
t was 1,000 years and 54 summers ago that I left home and experienced 3 special months that could never happen again. During the summer of 1966 I worked as a bucker in the north woods of Maine next to East Outlet in the Moosehead Lake area and took a few steps into adulthood. The story begins at the Swarthmore train station platform in early June. Jim Wire, Hank Simmons and I had just graduated from Nether Providence High School in Wallingford, PA, and along with Sam Caldwell, who had just graduated from Swarthmore High School, were waiting for the local commuter train to take us into Philadelphia. From there we would
Left to right: John Redden, Mike Isgro, Hank Simmons and Jim Wire. Photo taken at Squaw Mountain Camp
board a bus for Waterville, Maine. At the time, I took it for granted that my dad, Clarence Albert Redden, was a respected mechanical engineer at Scott Paper Company in Chester, Pennsylvania and in the 1940s and 1950s was the chief engineer at the old Hollingsworth &
Whitney paper company in Waterville. So, via his connections, my dad got all four of us jobs as buckers in northern Maine. We would work out of a logging camp that was in the vicinity of Squaw Mountain, Indian Pond and East Outlet of Moosehead Lake. Looking back on it, it’s amazing the arrangements were ever made because my dad was very safety conscious and understood that the job had its inherent dangers with chainsaws in an environment of moving logs and heavy diesel equipment. My dad also understood that his then arrogant son had the maturity level of any invincible 18-year-old. But he must also have calculated that I needed
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