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6 a Rolls Royce at the pier. We had dinner at a place called The Viking and I've a note on "the sailors," so I don't know whether this was a ritzy place and the sailors were associated directly with the Cup races, or it was for the proletariat and the sailors were hired help. At any rate, I believe we took off for Plymouth after dinner, drifting up through Fall River and cutting east at Taunton and heading for the shore again. My first note on Plymouth says: "Family life--children." Alas, it is too brief and I simply cannot recollect much about the Libby family in a detailed way. In 1934, Bill was probably in his early or mid-20s so he may have had some teenage brothers and sisters. I seem to remember some charming sisters who may have been in their upper teens. Suddenly it comes to me that Bill's father was with the Plymouth Cordage Co., a prominent rope manufacturing concern, my mother having had a few shares of its stock. I can't remember what Bill's parents looked like but I'm sure they were both friendly and thoroughly charming. I believe their home was on Plymouth Bay, the yard running down to the water. The view from the dining room window evidently was out over the harbor and beyond that, Cape Cod Bay. That Sunday morning, they dispensed with church to show me around the neighborhood. We visited Buzzards Bay where I was to go with our Erie Yacht Club Sears Cup crew around 1948; at the time, Rog, who was to be one of that crew, was two-years old. We crossed and recrossed the Cape Cod Canal and I marveled at the very rapid current in the canal, caused, I think, by the big difference in the tides in Cape Cod Bay and Buzzards Bay. We rode through the cranberry bogs and the miles of low country covered with nothing but scrub growth. And finally they took me to the monument at Plymouth rock where the Pilgrims stepped ashore and I thrilled as I seldom had before, at the thought that [[underlined]] my own forbears [[/underlined]] had actually passed over that rock, their feet had touched it and walked over it. At the end of my notes are three enigmatical items: "Italian vermouth--Photo children--Memo book." The first item suggests the possibility that we had some sort of a libation before or during dinner. The second indicates a photo was taken of the Libby children but I have never found it anywhere among my records and assume the Libbys took it. And the last indicates that I signed a guest book before we departed for New Haven Sunday afternoon. I have no record at all of the return drive but as I look at the road map here now, I see so many towns in the general vicinity that have come to mean something to me over the ensuing years: Places like Yarmouth, Chatham, Barnstable, Falmouth, Woods Hole, where the New Haven's great summer fleet of Cape Cod trains used to stop; and Woods Hole reminds me too, of our memorable trip to Martha's Vineyard about 1960, as does Vineyard Haven and Edgartown; and then there are New Bedford and Fairhaven which always say Ben and Toni Luther to me; and Provincetown where we once drove while on our one and only Cape Cod vacation way back in the 30s I guess.
