Letter From The Editor

Author Sandy Phippen walks into the office and says he's just finished a book tour through White Plains, New York. "Why White Plains?" I ask Sandy. "Because I was born there," he smiles. ''I'm the Maine native who was born in White Plains."

Sandy's astonishing condition is made more clear when he says, "My mother moved down there to be with her sister in 1942 for two months - and also to be with her when she had me!"

From then on, it was Maine all the way, and "by 7th grade I knew I wanted to be a writer. I didn't tell anybody, of course. That was a good year for me. The Portland Sunday Telegram prin~ed my picture of a Miami Beach hotel - from a Maine boy's viewpoint. It didn't quite reach the moon. They ran it in mid-winter - a rural boy's view. I hadn't even been to Portland yet! I imagined Miami Beach as a huge Art Deco affair."

Of course, Sandy, now 54, would end up working in a hotel himself, The Frenchman's BayLodge - the setting for Kitchen Boy (the name ischanged to the fictional Frenchman's Bay Manor) - as a bellhop, dishwasher, chauffeur, and, well, kitchen boy. Phippen calls the Manor "my raft down the Mississippi ... my Pency Prep, even my Pequod."

Here, like some of the Booth Tarkington's novels he enjoyed asa boy ("Penrod, Seventeen, and some of his Maine-based stories such as Mirthful Haven and Mary's Neck"), Sandy's stories look across the white-table-clothed dining room at Maine's infamous Summer People, but unlike Tarkington's omniscient point-ofview, Kitchen Boy (Blackberry Books, $11.95) istold by an engaging, fumbling, forever apologizing first-person townie with dreams of his own and - where the art lies - an emerging sense of irony softened by a love for humanity. No matter how rude the Summer People have been to Sandy - no matter how heavy their baggage has been, no matter how ridiculous the fins on their cars were (the book takes place circa 1962) - these rippingly good adventures have made it to his pen as fond recollections. "Asa kid on Hancock Point, my relatives· had a sense of irony," he says,his smile widening. "I like dealing with difficult people, I guess." •