The Milanos were also short-term owners of our house. They sold the property in June 1978 to Dora and Merrill Lank junior. He was an Eastport native who served a stint as a city police officer and also enjoyed making wreaths. Both of them had grown up in Eastport — he in the north end and she in the south — and had children.
When the Lanks took ownership, our house had a slate roof, one with a pink scalloped pattern worked it. It was sided it what Dora has called ugly blue asphalt shingles. They divided the two big rooms upstairs into four, added the closets at the top of the stairs, and installed the casement window over the kitchen sink and the pass-through to the front parlor before moving in with her mother a few blocks away.
The house was then rented to Mel Soctomah, newly retired from the U.S. Army. He was Passamaquoddy in his late 40s and moved in with his wife, three children, and a dog. At liberty to make renovations, he installed the big wood and oil-fired cook stove that occupied the kitchen when we arrived. He recalled that the flue drew well, an important consideration in a place as windy as Eastport. They then left for a stint in Florida before returning to Eastport and neighboring Sipayik for good.
Dora and Merrill divorced, though, and complications emerged after she moved on. There was a sale from Bangor Savings Bank to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on October 8, 1982, with a supplementary entry on August 5, 1983. This was during a national recession that included a depressed real estate market and foreclosures. Somehow, Gordon Greenlaw reappears in this sale.
Sometime during this period and the one that followed, puzzling rough-sawn dark ceiling beams were erected in the two front parlors — “pseudo-rustic pop 1970’s kitsch,” in the words of one current resident, or “ye old Lion’s Den tavern,” in the mind of another. Those ceiling beams are distinctive, in that love- it-or-hate-it kind of way. For us, our reaction often depends on the day you might be asking. Looking closer, touches appeared in the kitchen, like the Montgomery Ward electric stovetop that came with the house when we bought it. Monkey Ward, for the record, went out of business in 2000 and probably had no outlet anywhere near Eastport well before that. I am wondering about some of the shelves, though, and considering them her Calla’s. Or now, maybe Mel’s. Nice work, either way. Particle board cabinets that also arrived at now scheduled for replacement, as are the triple-track storm windows.
We can still ask who added the knee walls or the cosmic crab wall painting we found under the wallpaper upstairs.
Jnana's Red Barn 