News

Making do without a crony counter
North Pownal store closes lunch bar
By Elizabeth Prata

When the North Pownal store decided to close its lunch counter, it was like the shot heard around the world.

Though the place would still be open for breakfast, the men of North Pownal who gather for lunch heard that their midday hangout was to be no more, they did what men have done since time immemorial - they built a fort.

At any number of diners, bars, social clubs, or restaurants, the time honored tradition of sipping coffee, teasing your cronies, and bantering with the waitresses has been going since time began, practically. The day wouldn’t feel right without at least one good joke swapped, one waitress made to blush, one tall tale stretched a bit more.

The fort didn’t come about right away. The men moseyed across the street to a convivial space under the oak tree at Alan Bradstreet’s and set up a plastic table and chairs and ate their sandwiches and talked of the news and solved the problems of the day. One of the problems was this certain chair had a broken leg. A baseball bat was attached at the right spot and voila, no more complaints. But summer in Maine is short and soon things would not be so pleasant, and the men decided to do something about it.

“We had this idea,” said Alan. “We had all this junk in our barns and we thought, what would it take to build something?” He said that every guy has half a roll of something or other in the garage, justifying to the wife the space it takes up by saying, ‘this will come in handy someday.’ As for the rest, there was room near the oak tree, there were men, and there was a landfill.
Soon the lumber and flooring and foundation materials came trickling in. “Nothing here is built by sound engineering, it’s all determined by the size of what we could scrounge.” Alan points to the roof. “The pitch of the roof was determined by the length of the 2X4’s we could get.” Alan says that after a while it became a point of pride not to spend any money, the rule was, everything had to be second hand. “Except for the caulk. You can’t use second hand caulk. And nails.” The ropes under the floor are really stage risers, found and immediately nabbed. Paint was donated. The roof was donated. The building started coming together. Above, Bradstreet.

Alan estimates that it may take a couple more weeks to finish. “We need 20 feet of drip edge. We need a piece of 8X8 linoleum. Some better plastic chairs would be nice.”

Alan adjusted the tarp as the rain steadily picked up. He was excited as he thought of the project getting finished and having a nice hangout again. And it even has a name. “The North Pownal Think Tank and Adult Day Care Center,” he said with a grin.

Caption-Bottle cap checkers by the pot-belly stove, Mast General Store, Valle Crucis, NC, since 1882 and now on the National Register of Historic Places.