Woog's World / Mark Kramer revisits Westport

Mark Kramer's Westport roots run deep. His father Sidney spent a lifetime in publishing (in his 90s, he still works part-time). Mark's mother Esther owned Main Street's long-loved Remarkable Book Shop.

Mark has not lived here for many years. He made his name as a writer, and founding director of Harvard's Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism.

In 1989 he wrote a contemplative piece for the now-defunct New England Monthly. Titled "Outside the Frame: A Fairfield County Boyhood," it still resonates today. In fact -- more than 20 years after Kramer looked back -- it's as relevant as ever.

Kramer had "a proper New England boyhood," he began. "I knew everyone in my school class. I raced boats on the Sound, bucked cordwood in the autumnal woodlands, played hide-and-seek in cornfields, poured maple syrup on snow at skating parties, and during my pensive teens, wrote a poem or two among the slate gravestones of the churchyard."

His white clapboard home stood on a Revolutionary War battle site. Yet when he told people he grew up in New England, something sounded wrong.

"Westport is not characterized by austerity, piety or tradition," Kramer wrote. "Many residents have large lawns mowed by others. They are notoriously frisky (a pop tune of the wife-swapping era went, `We're all in the kitchen, playing Westport . . .')."

The Kramers moved here in 1950 -- for the education, Esther explained. In school, Mark wrote,"we were taught that our moment in the universe evolved from a sequence of Yankee events. We did units on Roger Williams, the Charter Oak, the Minutemen, clipper ships, Mark Twain, and Hartford's prosperous insurance industry. Our Thanksgiving artwork defined New England as a land of ox pulls, Indian corn, and wooden churches....

"Our teacher's generous instinct was to supply us with a surrogate, common past, to unite us. But I didn't fell altogether counted in. I'm not sure I would have even if the curriculum had included units on Polish agriculture, the wisdom of Renaissance rabbis, the Ellis Island experience, and turn-of-the-century life in Brooklyn."

The summer he was 11 he rode around town on a battered bicycle. He debated politics with Saugatuck barber John Santella, discussed tidal dams with Captain Allen at the Mill Pond, and eavesdropped on girl- and car-talk as Paul and Walt tuned station wagons at the Bridge Garage.

"These men were Italian, Irish, Polish," Kramer wrote. "They were the heirs apparent to the work ethic. They had built Westport's houses and fixed its furnaces -- and they had also bought up many of its large land tracts. While no one was looking, they had in fact become a dominating, conservative `old guard' in town politics. Oddly, their wives had become the schoolteachers who taught us the old ways."

Hector Munoz -- the only sixth-grade boy shorter than Kramer -- "was sent forth from home each day, poor kid, spit shined and gift wrapped in a blue suit and a big red tie." His parents too had come for the schools, renting a tiny apartment by the railroad station.

One day Kramer invited him home. As they ran across the lawn Hector said, "How many family live in this house?"

But in other parts of town, old Yankee archetypes lived on. On his bike tours Kramer discovered a grandmother who fly-fished, and a man who was single-handedly racing across the Atlantic.

"Certain girls, the Alexandras and Olivias of my childhood, showed up at school in jodhpurs and high black boots, en route to the Fairfield County Hunt Club; they went off on mysterious forest retreats with the Congregational Church youth fellowship and communed with a severe but just God reigning in a harsh but orderly world," Kramer recalled. Such a world "seemed not quite decipherable to me."

Jewish families, meanwhile, "had trickled into Westport for decades. We knew each other. Our parents formed warm alliances. Most of them had been raised in New York. (Utopias are the inverse of their authors' complaints, and Westport was a solution to our parents'.) They were less ambiguously outsiders than their children were. Those of us growing up there had New England, not New York, as a frame of reference, and I felt a bit to the side of the frame.

When Kramer returned home on his bike, he wrote, "I must have complained to my mother of this half-realized feeling, though I hardly had a grasp of what I was seeing. She was a great storyteller and offered a cautionary joke, about Stein, who changed his name to Smythe the Third and aspired to the country club.

"We see you drive a Rolls and have a mansion, which is all very good," the membership chairman said. "And by the way, what religion are you?"

"Oh," Smythe answered casually, "I'm a goy."

Kramer concluded: "I wouldn't learn until later that everything worthwhile is incomplete, or that I wasn't the only little proto-Yankee who was missing a few parts."

And, he added: "I wonder what's become of Hector."

Dan Woog is a Westport writer. Read more from him during the week at www.westport-news.com. His personal blog is www.danwoog06880.com; his e-mail is dwoog@optonline.net