Do Pass Me My Paddle, Old Sport …
2 Oct
Maine’s Bangor Daily News, HERE, remembers the now-defunct Conduskeag Canoe and Country Club in an interesting story about turn-of-the-20th-Century recreation.
According to the Wayne Reilly piece, the Conduskeag Canoe and Country Club more closely resembled a contemporary country club or a leather-chairs-and-brandy-snifters men’s club than what we’d recognize as a modern canoe club.
Instead of introducing kids to canoeing or teaching adults the finer points of whitewater technique or canoe racing, in 1908 the Conduskeag Club was adding clay tennis courts and producing “a bright farce, full of catchy music” for its members Club leaders may have even been planning the golf course the club would add in later years.
The club apparently did owe its inception to its namesake watercraft — the club began as a Bangor canoe rendezvous. A hundred years ago, the club, which claimed in its exclusive membership many of the lions of the Bangor citizenry, did host a Fourth of July canoe parade, replete with fireworks, at its Penobscot River location.
“A canoe parade, with canoes lighted with Japanese lanterns, is one of the most charming water sights imaginable,” the Daily News reported at the time.
Sounds like a jolly fine show, my good man.
