Sagadahoc Stories 131: 7/4/03
Good Deeds
| It began with a generous offer. The newly reconstituted Merrymeeting Municipal Band was searching for a place to practice and perform, and they offered $6500 to the town of Bowdoinham to build a “gazebo” at the town landing. Inevitably: a committee was committed. Six interested parties convened in the old Coombs School on a winter evening to brainstorm an ideal stage/bandstand/gazebo to grace the waterfront park. |
| Summer evening concerts at the landing have been a great success, but an unsheltered 12’X16’ plywood platform has its limits as a stage. I can remember The Buzzards playing one rainy evening when water was running down Earl’s guitar and my mike was arcing each time I got close to it. Certainly there was no way a 55-piece band could all get aboard that bandstand. The committee made a list of parameters – for a dream stage. |
| They looked at pictures of acoustic shells and shed roofs, pre-fab bandstands and fancy gazebos. None of them fit the bill. Gazebos didn’t offer an open stage-front for theater and dance performances. Other designs were too high-tech or too much like naked sheds. The committee agreed any new structure at the landing should be esthetically appealing – and “look like Bowdoinham.” I suggested a post-and-beam bandstand, and we set about finding a proposed design for such a thing. |
| The quest went no further than the town lunch counter. When the design parameters were described to the boys at Jeanine’s (the Town Landing Place) one noontime, Mitch immediately saw the ideal structure: a truncated gazebo, with a wide stage-front, and a hammer-beam construction. A monkey-puzzle for the local post-and-beamers, among whom Mitch is a prime offender. He roughed out a sketch on a napkin, and the idea took shape. |
| Brent offered to make a scale model to sort out the design problems. Various members of the lunch crew paraded through Brent’s shop during the next week, adding their two cents. Messages were carried back-and-forth to the committee and the bandmaster. Brent cut and fit, made suggested changes, and put the hot-glue gun to it. The model was beautiful. It looked like a Shakespearian theater. |
But when the modeled bandstand was costed out, the price
tag was considerably more than $6500. At least three times as much, or
more. Even with the municipal public works guys doing the groundwork,
and with some donated labor and materials, this was going to be an expensive
proposition. Just the same, pictures of the model were circulated, and
the model itself was displayed at Jeanine’s and the town office,
to elicit comments. |
| What the display elicited was more generous donations: from Fred Hare, who runs the local factory adjacent to the landing, from Jeanine, and from a increasing list of local givers. The town was determined to only build a bandstand if it could be done without using tax dollars. But every time it looked like the project might die aborning, someone else would sweeten the pot. |
Brent committed to contracting the construction, and Mitch lined up pine and hemlock to be sawn at Bickford’s mill. He started chipping the timbers in April. It was a fantastically finicky fiddle. All the minute design puzzles. All the compound angles of mortise and tenon to cut and fit. Brent wanted to do fancy-work on the braces, the queen posts, and the massive kingpost which would be at the center of the wheel. His shop began to fill up with band-sawed pine.
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As soon as Public Works could get on the site, Kevin and Pete dug the hole, and by mid May Bamford had set up the forms and poured footings, frostwalls, and the crowned cement floor the posts would be bolted to. (A wooden stage floor will be added later, if the money can be raised.) |
Mitch, Brent and Kenny (a master timber-framer from John Libby’s outfit) finished their massive Lincoln Log kit the second week in May. |
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Brent had filled every cranny of his shop with scrollwork braces and finnialed hammerbeams, and he carted them to the site on demand. |
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An ad hoc framing crew turned up on a Tuesday morning to assemble the posts and beams on site. Bruce delivered the monster posts and rafters under a lowery sky, then Mitch, Brent, Max, and I started humping the timbers and fitting together the first bent on the stage platform. The moment of truth. |
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By 10AM we knew that not every connection had been perfectly pre-cut. But Mitch had done an amazing job of leaving just enough fat on the iffy joints, so there was never a short tenon or an unsolvable angle. Tom Barnett showed up to join the fray, and by lunchtime we’d wrestled half the front bent together, squared, drilled and pegged. By then it was also pissing rain steadily. Brent kept concocting tarp shelters until we had a flying canopy overhead. The tools were more-or-less dry, while the kibitzers were kept at bay. |
Tuesday afternoon the crew got the front bent assembled, and half the center bent. Whenever the rain slacked off, a cluster of sidewalk superintendents gathered, and some would lend a hand to the process. During the days of assembly and erection a dozen different locals stopped by and laid hands on the timbers: David and Bob, Mike and Michael, Hal and Ian, Pete and Otavio, and all those I’ve forgotten. |
It took three days to compose the two big bents and the three half-bents to go around the back arc of the bandstand. We had them stacked on the platform ready for the big crane to pick up on Friday morning. Rain continued on and off all week, but the black flies stayed home, and the gawkers were scarce. Building a complicated new structure in the middle of town might have been a three-ring circus, instead of just the one ring. |
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Erection day promised more rain, but it started off just chill and gray. The crane truck lumbered into the landing shortly after 7 AM. A good crane man can lift a huge structure like a baby, then set it down on a dime -- and Chuck the boom guy is the best. The front bent came up smooth as silk and nestled into the bolted aluminum bases (which Morris manufactured in East Bowdoinham), with only a bit of chizeling and tunking. It was braced off, and the real finagling began. |
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Kenny had shown up for the final assembly, and he scrambled aloft like a timber-ape. As the center bent came up, all the connecting girt timbers and braces had to be fitted in until the whole box was square and tight. Then they were all drilled and pegged together. |
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By noon the crew was swinging the first half-bent around to the back of the stage. This is where the angles all compounded, and Mitch futzed and fussed with a chizel and plane to get each joint snug. Because none of the back arc could be pegged until it was all together, it began to look like a spiderweb of come-alongs and clamps. |
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It was sometime around 3PM that the last half-bent was swung into place, and the ultimate frigging began. Like the pieces of a big wagon wheel that all had to snug up at once. |
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The whole crew was clambering on the structure in a cold drizzle, tunking with commanders, tightening clamps, levering come-alongs. Mitch and Kenny were cutting and trying the last joints, while Chuck nudged the bent inches at a time with the big crane.
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The final tenons had to be cut with the slightest of spirals to twist into place as the bents came together. And then it was a unit. A magnificent and magic space. A cathedral-barn. A timber-frame gazebo. A Bowdoinham Bandstand. Staring up into the radial architecture makes your head spin. |
| It was raining harder, and the crew thinned out. By 6PM only Mitch and Kenny were still cutting and fitting purlins on the roof while Max and I picked up the site. Brent had gone off to a prom thing for Ivy. The hardcore couldn’t quite bring themselves to leave the scene of the crime. |
On Saturday morning Brent and Mitch fitted the last of the purlins, and finished the details of the timber-frame. I’d carved a pair of theater masks to go up in the top triangles of the front bent, and we installed them, grinning and frowning on cue. It began to rain hard after that, and we decided to give it a rest
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| It was Memorial Day weekend. That night the Buzzards played at a benefit dance for the bandstand up at the Town Hall. About 35 people turned out in the downpour, and added $500 to the pot. Right now the cost is somewhere around $24,000, with something like $19K already donated. |
| If the structure itself is amazing, the spirit that went into it is equally so. Not just the collaborative effort in the design and fund-raising, but the community ethos surrounding the project. Aside from some knee-jerk grumbling about “wasted tax-dollars” from the Breakfast Belligerants, there’s been nothing but positive energy about this bandstand. |
| And the construction was a study in egalitarian carpentry. Everyone on the site is normally self-employed, every man his own boss, and there wasn’t a single order given all week. Mitch and Kenny may have been in charge, but nobody was a boss. If you had a question, it was answered by those who knew. When a job needed doing, someone was on the spot. If you needed a tool, someone was handing it to you. There were no accidents, and no one was hurt. There was lots of laughter on the site. If the spirit of the builders goes into what they build, this bandstand is going to be a happy space. |
| Are you feeling all squishy about small towns after reading that? OK. Now the Paul Harvey version. Yeah, the bandstand is beautiful, and works like a charm, projecting acoustic music all the way to the bridge. And the town concerts are drawing big crowds, with squads of little kids dancing and cavorting in front of the stage. Brent and Mitch et al did a splendid job. But the pettymindedness of small-town politics sure soured my joy in this project. It’ll be a while before some of us volunteer to build anything for this town again. |
The bitching never quit. When the bright red roof went on the bandstand a chorus of criticism said it looked like a Pizza Hut. My theatre masks were deemed unsuitable and in bad taste by some members of the committee and the kibizing public, so I took them down. It’s sort of exciting to be banned in Bowdoinham. To crown all: the municipal band renegged on their initial donation. So the town designed and built a performance space to suit the band’s needs based on a false promise. |
| The contrast between the goodwill and community spirit of those doing the construction and the critical negativity of the hands-in-pockets public is a study in local roles. No good deed goes unpunished. |
| It may be indicative of the bad feelings surrounding the finale of this project that nobody has done a thing to the site since Brent and Bruce packed up their tools. It still looks like a construction site, without a touch of landscaping. But the bands play on. |
AFTERWORD: The town did get around to landscaping at the end of the year, and a lovely stone wall now hides the cement frostwall and provides an access ramp. With plantings in the stonework, it’ll look splendid. We are still asking for donations to pay for the creation, so the grumblers about town money being spent of fripperies weren’t so out of line.
It still galls me that I proposed post-and-beam, sketched up the design parameters, got Mitch and Brent involved, gave a week’s labor on site, and donated two masks, only to get spat on by the local critics. But Fred Hare, bless his generous soul, liked the masks, and asked if he could buy them to put on his building next to the stage. He built a new portico entrance to FHC Inc. and had me install the masks facing the stage. I added a third mask, of a cross-eyed face with one of FHC’s brain probes sticking out of his head, so the tableaux now is of before-during-and-after brain surgery. That’s what anyone should have, if they want to volunteer for civic duty in a small town. |
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