In Kennebunkport, The Hotel sat on a high bluff overlooking its own heated, outdoor saltwater swimming pool, and a small, rocky, private beach near the river’s mouth. Farther on, along the coast, beyond Gooch’s Beach, Mother’s Beach and Lord’s Point, on a good day you could make out the hazy top of Mount Agamenticus.

From The Hotel, beyond Gooch’s Beach, Mother’s Beach and Lord’s Point, on a good day you could make out the hazy top of Mount Agamenticus. Dan King photo

The summer I worked there, a half a century ago, the rooms started at 56 dollars a day per person, American plan and went on up from there. You could have lobster three times a day, morning, noon, and night if you really wanted to, and yes, your companion animal could stay there, too, but you had to rent a separate room for your animal at 56 dollars a day. There were some folks, who ate lobster three times a day, or maybe even more. I didn’t like lobster, myself.

We worked for a dollar sixty-five an hour, a bed and three meals a day, plus tips, if there were any, and we ate in the staff dining room in the basement. The food was good, often leftovers from the day before, and the master chef was lucky to have a wife, who cooked for him. The pressures of the position made for ulcers, and so the chef couldn’t eat his own cooking. We did, though, and we thought it was great.

There were two common sleeping rooms, one for males and another for females, with rows of bunk beds in each. A communal arrangement, but for those of us who worked hard it was a good situation.

With the dining room at one end of the hotel, and up, and a small, quiet bar at the other end and down at basement level, new kitchen help, waitpersons and busboys were usually broken in and familiarized with the layout of the hotel by sending them from dining room to bar and back again in search of a nonexistent bottle stretcher for the cook, or a glass wrench for the barkeep.

You know how if you stack glasses together, they sometimes get stuck? Well, the glass wrench was to unstick them without breaking the glasses. The bottle stretcher was to make the liquor go farther. The seasoned staff members usually played along with the ruse, sending them back and forth, here and there, until the gullible decided there was no such thing, and were thereupon promoted to regular status on the hotel staff.

The truly fortunate ones were invited to man the glassware washing machinery in a room behind the bar on especially festive evenings as overtime work. It wasn’t the extra pay. The lucky ones would bring along a gallon jug and a funnel to help salvage any alcoholic liquid from the glasses, as they came back from the tables, before putting the glassware into the dish washing machinery.

The combined fluids made a great punch, and we figured there was enough alcohol therein to kill off any biologics that came along with the used glasses. At any rate, nobody died from it, and we had a jug of some very interesting mixed drinks as a bonus to the overtime pay. No lesson here. It was just a summer job at The Hotel.

Orrin Frink is a Kennebunkport resident. He can be reached at ofrink@gmail.com.