The Pirates of Peary Village

This is a fictional story based on the author’s boyhood. His father was a defense worker, uprooted from his home and moved to work in a shipyard where World War II Liberty Ships are built. It has some yesteryear charm, as the lives of his family touch the lives of a retired Boston janitor and a widow of Scottish heritage on the farm she owns in South Portland, Maine. The time period is the early 1940s. The US is at war and ships are being built there and in several other places in the northeast.

Peary Village was a real place, nestled just off Broadway, near Cash Corner in South Portland. It was “thrown together,” along with two other nearby housing projects, because adequate housing was not available for the influx of defense workers. The author lived at #2 N Street. Made of the least expensive materials available—cold in the winter and hot in the summer, the housing development existed throughout the 1950s. It boasted coal and kerosene heat and coin-operated major appliances. The development no longer exists.

The development had its own intrigues. It had crime. It had the same kind of social pressures that tenement housing has all over the world. The newsboy, Kris Lang, brings a bit of excitement to the area when the four Samoyed dogs begin stealing his papers. Replacing the papers were not the only issue, however. Some of those papers ended up at the homes of others who were not customers, and at odd hours of the night.