Many ask, “Where’s Dock Square?” but nobody asks, “Where’s the dock?” because there isn’t one, as far as I can tell.
Some say, in the beginning, it was called Duck Square, and you can still see a duck or two on the Kennebunk River, an occasional blue heron or even a clutch of cormorants. But was there ever a dock remains a mystery.
To someone as old as I am, Dock Square seems at once all bright and new and centuries old, ever changing and ever the same. The barn-red movie theater, by the bridge, with its box office and projector room up over the river, is now a series of souvenir shops with beach towels, sun tan lotion and the like.
To someone as old as I am, Dock Square seems at once all bright and new and centuries old, ever changing and ever the same. Dan King photo
I can remember when the price of a child’s movie ticket went up from a nickel to 7 cents. I must have seen dozens of movies there, starring Hopalong Cassidy, the Lone Ranger with Tonto and Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, and weekly serials about German and Japanese spies getting caught by US agents, hiding out in Copra warehouses. I am still not sure what copra is, but it didn’t seem to matter to the plot of the movie at the time.
Lombard’s Ice Cream Parlor, across the street, with its marble soda fountain counter and high, bent wire bar-stool chairs, where you could sip a coffee ice cream soda, a malted milk shake, or a frappe, has now morphed into the Hurricane restaurant, and where Alisson’s Restaurant beckons down the street, there was a grocery store, that sold, if you can imagine my boyish excitement, fireworks, Roman candles, cherry bombs and packets of Chinese firecrackers with their fuses all twisted together so they made a machine gun sound while flopping around on the ground. Fantastic!
Across the square where we see the “Drip and Drizzle” selling olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and other stuff in bottles, there was the Weinstein’s Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Store, with peaches, apples, pears, cherries, melons and kumquats. And the Book Port, up over the Candle Shop, has vanished.
Ever changing, ever the same. Ice cream around the corner on a hot summer day and fresh pizza, salt-water taffy and the salty, iodine smell of the sea and mud flats at low tide. Truly grand!
There’s a special light in the sky over Kennebunkport, night and day.
Orrin Frink is a Kennebunkport resident. He can be reached at ofrink@gmail.com.
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