Category Archives: youth

Watchic Pond Maine 1964

Watchic Pond 1964 My grandfather and his friends had dammed a stream to create a lake. A foto of my brothers and sisters reenacting the Titanic sinking. My grandfather Frank A. Smith graduated from Bowdoin in 1912. A college friend drowned in the Titanic sinking. He was older than his classmates having worked the North […]

Lisa Takes A Bath 1978

My apartment at 256 East 10th Street was a relic of tenement living. There were no electrical outlets in the bedroom. A water closet had a pull chain for the overhead tank. Warped wooden floors spread to crumbling plaster walls traveled by tribes of cockroaches. Girls didn’t like the insects, but they loved the bathtub […]

THROWING LIKE A GIRL by Peter Nolan Smith

Happy Mother’s Day From Maine

Falmouth Foresides, Maine 1957 My mother in bliss. A summer afternoon with her kids and my father. We were a happy family. Then now and forever. I’m on the far right. 8 years from my first beer. Happy Mother’s Day. We all had one. A mother. Not a beer.

4:20 4/20 2024

Police and parents demonized Marijuana during my youth. Reefer smokers were condemned by the courts. John Sinclair, the MC5 radical, was sentenced to ten years of prison for the crime of ‘giving’ an undercover agent two joints. The severity of his punishment did not deter the millions of marijuana smokers of the 60s from becoming […]