Open for the Season

Karl P. Abbott

• Publisher: Red Kestrel Books
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781839740381
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Open for the Season, first published in 1950, is the entertaining, informative memoir by Karl Abbott of his family's long-time ownership and operation of hotels, inns, and resorts, from New Hampshire, to Boston, South Carolina, and Florida. Beginning with his childhood in his family's New Hampshire resort, The Uplands, Abbott would go on to manage or own popular hotels, inns, and resorts such as the Gasparilla Inn in Boca Grande, Florida, the Sagamore Resort in Lake George, New York, and the Hotel Vendome in Boston. Abbott paints a vivid picture of life at his properties, as well as providing insights into daily management, stories of his guests and workers, and what it took to be successful in the hotel business.

1. THOSE WERE THE DAYS

FATHER ran a small hotel. He used to lean against the desk and say, “What we need is folks.” He kept a pen in an Irish potato.

This hotel, The Uplands, sat on a series of terraces high above Main Street in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, in the White Mountains. Bethlehem consisted mostly of the one street, clinging to the side of the mountain halfway between Turner’s Sugar Place and Cherry Valley. For nine months of the year it was a sleepy mountain village, occupying itself with farming, logging, trapping, and just being there.

But when warm weather came, it bestirred itself with vigor. Houses were scoured and aired, carpets beaten, windows washed, and every freshly hung curtain was white as snow. Women with towels pinned over their heads scrubbed front steps. The barber’s pole was newly painted; in the livery stable the harness sets were polished; and down at the drugstore “Hen” Smith was shining up his showcases and the big soda fountain with all the spigots.

All over town neighbors were calling out: “Sprucin’ up for the city folks?”

There were just two sorts of people when I was a boy, our kind and city folk.

The last thing Father did was paint the front porch. He never got around to it until the day before opening, and then was in a cussing frenzy for fear it wouldn’t dry. Summer came on so quickly we wondered where spring had gone, and the annual rush of tourists was on us overnight.

There were thirty hotels in Bethlehem and they all opened around July 1, the day the first train of the summer season came up to Bethlehem. Opening day was the most important day of our year.

I would wake about sunup, when Fred Lewis’s meat cart clattered up to the kitchen door. I’d look out and see the well-brushed horses and the clean white cart, and Fred, in his white coat and apron, climbing down from the front seat as Father came out of the kitchen door.

Father was tall and upstanding, with icy blue eyes and a high black pompadour that made him seem inches taller than he really was. He had a temper like a firecracker and a hair-trigger sense of humor, and was the most universally loved man I have ever known. I never knew him to be afraid of anything on this earth and I suspect that he was never afraid of anything beyond. He came from Puritan stock and had a Puritan conscience, with time off for a considerable amount of fun on the side.

Fred came every morning during the season, and their meeting bubbled over with merry quips. “Say, did you hear about the feller...” Laughing, they’d go around to the rear of the cart and pull down the hinged door, so that Fred could point out the different cuts hanging inside, and the entire cart would open up, clean and sweet-smelling. “Now there’s a well-hung loin at twenty-two cents a pound,” Fred would say, hauling the cut down on the tailboard that served as a counter.

Father would shake his head and wonder what things were coming to. Twenty-two cents for sirloin steak!

Father was a Yankee trader when it came to price, but he never stopped at anything short of the best. He said the basis of a good table was good produce.

Meat buying was a ceremony that started off the day and called for much leisurely conversation. Fred had the grapevine from all the other hotels inasmuch as he went to all the back doors every morning. He was a Republican and Father a Democrat, and they would start arguing about politics until Fred would say, “Well, meat’s a-spoiling!” and drive off.

A few minutes later Ed Bishop would drive his poultry wagon up to our door. I was sure to be dressed and out in the yard by this time, because Ed would always cut a slice of cheese for me, and the full cream cheese the New Hampshire farmers made in those days was something to start the morning right and help take my mind off the fact that this was the day I started wearing shoes. I was also wearing long black stockings that itched and wouldn’t stay up, tight pants, a shirt with a collar, and even a necktie.

Sometimes if Ed came earlier he would meet Fred, and the talk lasted longer. Ed was a Democrat like Father, and they were always hatching plots to help defeat the Republicans. But there was no business rivalry between Ed and Fred because Ed’s wagon carried only poultry, butter, eggs, and cheese.

Father would buy dozens of the big brown eggs every day. He said they were richer and fuller than the white. He considered fourteen and a half cents a dozen almighty high.

By this time the staff had arrived. The girls would start setting up the dining room, the chef would open his reign in the kitchen, and Father would take a last swing around the house to see that everything was in order. There was the last-minute worry of touching fingertips to the piazza to see if it was dry enough. It looked pretty as a strawberry bed, with the dozens of newly painted rocking chairs set out, red and green. Father would march on through the lobby to see if the floor was like a mirror—we’d polished it by hand with butcher’s wax—and out along the gravel walks to see that every dandelion was dug out of the lawn—another of my jobs.

Mother would be whisking through the upstairs rooms to check the linen and see that every bureau had its fresh bouquet.

As soon as we heard the whistle of the first train, Father would send me running down to the station to help. Lem and Dan, our driver and porter, already would be there.

Pretty nearly everyone in Bethlehem was down to see the train come in, and would be, night and evening, all summer.

Our coach stood in the long line of coaches backed into the row of stalls by the station. All the hotels had their coaches down to meet the first train and all were exactly alike, made by the Abbott-Downing Company of Concord, New Hampshire, the same company that had made all the Concord coaches that crossed the plains.

Lem made a fine figure sitting on the box. Lem was a character. He had lost the index finger of his right hand and always said he wore it off pointing out the god-damned mountains to the city folks. He was sweet on a redheaded chambermaid at the Uplands and pursued her so persistently that it annoyed my mother. Rumor had it that he did not confine his attentions to the daylight hours, and once when Father called him on the carpet and asked him if he had slept with Maggie the night before, Lem looked him right in the eye and said, “Not a damn wink, sir.”

Dan was out on the platform with the other porters. Each hotel had one porter, and each porter had one uniform, and it was new and a surprise and had to last all season. There was always a lot of advance guessing as to the colors and styles the different porters would wear on opening day.

The train consisted of one engine and a couple of passenger cars, and came rushing in all out of breath with much whistle blowing and bell ringing, like a little old lady late for tea.

Dan began hollering, “Uplands” at one end of the platform, and I took up my post at the other end and yelled, “Uplands” too. Usually the first trainload to arrive would be an excursion up from Boston, run by a jolly fat man who herded his people off the train and into the coaches like a distracted shepherd dog tending his flock. The horses backed and filled, the long line of coaches wavered, porters shouted, drivers swore, and city folks climbed into the wrong coaches and out again, dropped parcels and parasols, lost their baggage, and called out greetings. Dan and I kept sharp watch for strays, and no matter where people said they wanted to go, we assured them ours was the only coach that went there. Sometimes guests were with us for days before they realized they were in the wrong hotel, and by that time they liked us so well they stayed on.

When the coaches were full, whips cracked and the horses started the race out of the station yard and up the hill to Main Street. I’d cut across lots to tell Father the first coach was coming.

Lem brought the coach in on the gallop, and there, alighting at the side piazza of the Uplands, were the summer people—the wonderful foreign “city” folks from far away.

Later I would find words to fit these people—assurance, authority, savoir-faire. Then I could only wonder, helping Dan carry their luggage in to the desk. “Help Dan with those bags, Karl,” Father found time to say in a low voice. “Don’t let him sweat out his uniform!”

Father and Mother were always out in front to welcome their guests, Father at the foot of the stairs and Mother at the top, and young as I was, I knew that in dignity and good looks none of the city folks had anything on them. Mother was beautiful, tall and willowy, with black eyes that laughed, and she wore her lovely black hair in a huge pompadour and always had a bunch of fresh flowers at her waist. Her complexion was peaches and cream and she never used a cosmetic in her life. Everyone loved her, and she was the intimate and friend of every woman guest who came to our hotels. She had a temper to match Father’s, and when I erred she had a way of thumping me on the head with her thimble that would leave a bump aching for hours. But when the going got rough, she had pioneer New England courage that never faltered.

Father and Mother were a team. They were New Hampshire to the bone, and the land there is so rocky they have to sharpen the sheep’s noses so they can reach the grass between the stones. Three or four generations born in the White Mountains insure hardy stock.

Father had left home at fourteen and found work in a potato starch factory, shoveling potatoes from twelve noon to twelve midnight. Another fourteen-year-old boy worked the other twelve-hour shift.

My parents married with no insurance against the future except courage and good health, and they made their way up with hard work, frugality, and good will.

They started in the hotel business the way it started in early America. First the farmhouse, with maybe a room or two for guests, then a larger kitchen, a croquet ground, perhaps eventually a tennis court. This was the evolution of the country inn and its keeper, “the friend by the side of the road.” Father opened his first hotel in 1884. Multiply each year since by two seasons, summer and winter, and I have just completed without a break our one hundred and thirtieth season as hotel men, father and son.

The arrival of the “regular” guests was most sedate, with murmurs of polite greetings and the quiet renewal of old acquaintances. They were mostly from New York, Boston, Hartford, New Haven, and Stamford, and another large contingent from Jacksonville and Tampa. Among these families I remember the Wilkies, Taliaferros, Corchmans, Davidsons, and Stocktons. Some would arrive with their own teams and coachmen.

There were quiet flutters of greeting. “How well you look! How the children have grown!” They were delighted to see Father and Mother and one another again. Father and Mother, welcoming them, offered these sophisticates the comfort and savor of a home in a pastoral setting of great beauty and a gracious mingling with old friends. This was the charm of the resort hotel that brought the city folks back to us, year after year.

Our little lobby swarmed with men in single-breasted coats, pants with creases, stickpins in their Ascot ties, derbies, and gold watches with heavy chains. Later they would appear with straw hats and white flannels and blazers of a brightness we never saw at any other time in Bethlehem. The younger men carried mandolins. All a practicing Lothario needed in those days was a mandolin and a pound of Huyler’s chocolates.

The women were decked out with bustles and leg-o’-mutton sleeves and big hats piled with feathers, birds, flowers, and veils worn over high pompadours. Voluminous as their dresses were, women brought no more luggage than they do now. Today it is not unusual to see a woman guest with ten pieces of luggage—one for nothing but shoes.

My furtive attention was focused on the children. Resort hotels frown on children now, but large families then were taken for granted. The little girls didn’t interest me much, with their buttoned shoes, ankle-length skirts, and high collars like those their mothers wore.

But the little boys were eyed with plans in mind. How we country kids loved enticing the city kids onto a hidden wasp nest or into eating a Jack-in-the-pulpit root with results excruciatingly funny—to us!

We put most of the excursion people in “Angel Alley.” This was a series of small rooms up under the roof, with bowl and pitcher and slop jar, which we sold for two dollars, American plan, the standard excursion rate. Not a hotel in Bethlehem had rooms with private bath. Uplands had one public bath on each floor and charged twenty-five cents for the use of it.

Behind Angel Alley was a big room with about twenty beds which was a dormitory for the young men guests. Father called it “the Ram ...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1. THOSE WERE THE DAYS
• 2. INDIAN SUMMER
• 3. FLORIDA FRONTIER
• 4. PINEHURST
• 5. FRONT!
• 6. FIRST COMMAND
• 7. GASPARILLA INN
• 8. THE EVERGLADES
• 9. FIRST LINK
• 10. BIG TIME
• 11. CAMDEN
• 12. FLORIDA BOOM
• 13. MERRY-GO-ROUND
• 14. PARDON MY OPERATION
• 15. “THERE’S A SMALL HOTEL”