The Way it Was
By Kate Moore Alpert

   With town meeting and Memorial Day coming up in May, the old Moore archives brought forth some remembrances of those events in days gone by.

    Town Meetings were held in February when I was growing up in Eastham and they were in the Town Hall auditorium, i.e. the original 1912 town hall before the addition was added. The same town hall auditorium where on Christmas Eve Santa Claus would come down the chimney to dispense a present to each child in town. I can remember to this day, Santa calling Katherine Moore to the stage to pick up her gift.

    My father, who was born and brought up in Eastham, loved this town and worked hard to preserve it. Weeks before town meeting he would spend hours pouring over old town reports, looking for every penny that could be shaved from the present year’s budget, when other solutions might be found. Dinner table conversations were about town expenditures and politics and for this youngster it did get rather tiresome, since I preferred to discuss why did we always have to buy our clothes from Sears and Roebuck or Montgomery Ward.

   On town meeting day he would arrive at the town hall armed with the previous year’s town report and the present year’s warrant. He had read every word, checked every figure, and knew what the figures meant; he may have known it more thoroughly than those who put it together.  He would stand there holding the microphone in one hand and the town report in the other, asking questions and demanding answers. He could indeed be nitpicky but certainly there was hardly anyone present at town meeting that had more knowledge of what was going on in town. The population in town during most of the 1940s hovered around 500, and on town meeting day most of the adults in town would crowd into the auditorium sitting on the old wooden chairs, listening to the three selectmen that were most likely hoping the crowd would vote for every item put forth in the warrant. Town meetings were less structured in those days, just the three selectmen sitting around a small table, with Foster Atwood acting as moderator.

Does the town need this budget item?

   My father attended his last town meeting in May 1983, and passed away later that year. Although I was living in Boston for all those town meetings held after my graduation from Orleans High School, I would venture to guess that at his last town meeting he was probably there with the town report, asking the same questions as in years past. The above picture was taken at the May 7, 1980 town meeting when a zoning amendment was defeated which would have permitted Angelo’s to build a supermarket in North Eastham.  Was Maurice Moore in favor? My guess would be yes, as it would have benefitted the town and its residents.

   Votes at the ballot box on the same issue were 328 yes; 202 no; short of the 2/3 majority needed for a zoning change. The "whiskey" ballot box in the photo below has gone the way of high button shoes!

No, she's not voting for Prohibition

Flags and Flowers For Those Who Gave

When I was a child at the 3 room Eastham Elementary School, the end of May meant walking with the principal Otto Nickerson and all eight grades to the cemetery for Memorial Day to lay flowers on the graves of fallen service men. We would leave the school and walk up Schoolhouse Road, past the old decommissioned 1869 elementary school (now the Eastham Historical Society Museum) and out to the highway, Route 6. We stopped at the WWI memorial on the plot of land located at Route 6 and Doane Road to place flowers at that stone with the brass plaque naming those men who had served and perished in the conflict. Then it was down the highway to the Congregational and Soldiers Cemetery and the Evergreen Cemetery. No police escort, in fact there was no police department in town then, only the constable, Harvey Moore. But in the early 1940s there were not many cars on the highway anyway. It was during WWII; Wellfleet and Provincetown had their own grocery stores and pharmacies so those residents had their everyday needs in their back yard. Two car families were a rarity, if not non-existent. I always looked forward to that day—it was a way of getting out of school for a few hours, and it was fun.

Ready to march

 The elementary school band (such as it was), a drum, clarinet and trumpet, maybe a cymbal, under the baton of Mr. Nasi would play a Sousa march, and when at the cemetery the Star Spangled Banner, and Taps. The school had about 60 students between the eight grades. The tradition still exists today although the procession walks down Schoolhouse Road to Meetinghouse and crosses at Arnold's (under police guidance). I found the above picture from my mother’s archives, from the June 6, 1974 Cape Codder. Although the tradition has not changed much since I was a youngster, the dress certainly has. The boy standing somewhat alone with his back to the camera says it all—the peace symbols sewn onto the back of his jeans jacket, in fact most of the students in jeans and sneakers. No jeans and sneakers when I went to the elementary school. Dresses, skirts and blouses, sensible shoes which I rebelled against, but had to wear anyway. I did manage one time with a great deal of cajoling to convince my mother to buy me a pair of saddle shoes, from Sears and Roebuck of course. 

   Memorial Day services were conducted by the town on the grounds of the Town Hall.  The town hall then was the original as built in 1912, and on the grounds was a grand white bandstand.  For the 4 years I was in high school, I had the distinction of reciting the Gettysburg Address at that bandstand. I remember standing there in my white dress (probably from Sears & Roebuck) reciting that piece, the elders of the town sitting with their flags, the kids running around not paying any attention to an address that some 85 years before had fixated the nation, my parents in the front row, and my wondering why I was having to do this every year.

   N.B. The WWI memorial is now located on the front lawn of our Schoolhouse Museum. I believe it was moved there when the National Seashore in 1963 was constructing the new entrance road to Doane Road. There was a house located on the land where the new entrance was constructed with the traffic lights. The monument sat on town owned land next to that house.

Looking Back to 1776

   This piece came from Katherine Moore’s Thursday, May 6, 1976 Cape Codder Eastham column.

“200 YEARS AGO

  In looking back to those Eastham men who joined up with the Cape Militia or who went off-Cape to find their places in active duty, we may wonder if they left their ploughs in the furrows, as at Concord and Lexington, or did they furl the sails of their fishing boats for the duration? In its earliest days Eastham was the Granary of the Cape with its acres of corn and a lesser amount of barley. Land had been cleared to make that farm-land; trees had been cut down for the houses of the settlers; with trees and brush protection gone, wind and sand erosion was taking its toll.  ‘By Revolutionary times the over-planted land had begun to play out and men had turned more and more to the sea for their livelihood.’ The quote is from “Eastham’s Three Centuries” by Donald G. Trayser. Henry Thoreau, on one of his trips to the Cape in the middle 1800s wrote: ‘The farmers are fishermen-farmers and understand better ploughing the sea than the land.’

   A few years after the close of the Civil War, fishing declined and farming again came into its own, but a different kind of farming and with some new agricultural products. This farming cycle lasted well into our 1900s and we shall hear more of these later farmers, some of whom many of us knew.”

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