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John and Gail Baxter are a couple who share a healthy sense of humor about life, as well as the memories of a long Coast Guard career that included stints at five New England lighthouses. John is originally from Eastport, Maine. When he joined the Army in 1955, John said he wanted to be on a ship. The Army promptly sent him to Arizona. This helped convince him that the Coast Guard would be more up his alley. John joined the Coast Guard in 1958, when he was 21 years old. Four years later he married Gail, originally from Medford, Massachusetts.
John retired from the Coast Guard after 23 years in military service. In a recent visit to their Maine home, John and Gail shared some of their memories with me.
John's first lighthouse was Mount Desert Rock, a bleak station about 20 miles off the Maine coast. There were three men on the station at all times. Each man had two weeks on and one week off. John and Gail's wedding was scheduled for April 21, 1962, while John was on duty at the lighthouse. He planned to leave the station that day for the wedding, but a storm came up a couple of days earlier. It was touch and go with rough seas in the area, but John did make his wedding on time -- barely.
A far worse storm swept the Rock on a summer night later that same year. John had the midnight to six a.m. shift and had to stay awake through the night. While sitting in the keeper's quarters, he suddenly realized his feet were getting wet. A major storm had struck, and soon the commanding officer told all the men to retreat to the safety of the lighthouse tower.
"The bad thing was that when we went in the tower," recalls John, "you could feel the tower sway, like someone was shaking it. It was scary! The next morning, when things calmed down, we went outside the tower. We had an engine room, probably 90 feet by 90 feet. And it was gone. Crushed. A boulder had rolled up onto the bank and just crushed it. That was really scary then, because we got thinking. What if that boulder had hit that tower? It would�ve knocked that over, or done a good job on it. There's no way we would've survived it. The following day they finally got us off there. When they took us off it was just like a lake out there. That's what's strange about weather that far offshore. One minute it can be flat calm; the next minute there's a storm brewing. I never want to go back there."
In the days of the old Lighthouse Service, it was a tradition for keepers and their families to bring soil out to Mount Desert Rock in summer. The families maintained small gardens until rough weather would wash out the soil. The Coast Guardsmen tried to continue the tradition.
"We had a raised garden out there," says John. "Every time somebody would go ashore, they'd bring back two buckets of soil. We tried to raise cucumbers and tomatoes. We got bushes probably four, four and a half feet high. They'd wash away. One of our guys had about ten lobster traps out there. And we had lobstermen out there. We'd watch their traps and they'd give us a few. We had plenty of lobsters."
The next stop for the Baxters was a short stint of a few months at Maine's Bear Island Light, where John served as relief keeper. Bear Island is near Northeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island, a scenic area that has been captured on canvas by many landscape artists. "It was a nice light. I loved it out there," he says.
Next was another short stay at Bass Harbor Head Light, a scenic station on Mount Desert Island, near Acadia National Park. John was then transferred to Boston. A year later he was sent to be Officer in Charge at Deer Island Light, a cast iron "spark plug" style lighthouse in Boston Harbor. Deer Island Light was offshore, but not nearly as remote as Mount Desert Rock.
"It was semi-isolated. You could jump in the boat and go ashore and get in your car. It was a little more convenient." But it could still be a scary place to be in storms, John remembers.
"There were rocks down on the sea side of it, and when waves would come in and hit those rocks, they'd just roll over the top and hit that light. There was a kid from North Carolina. Very religious kid, nice kid. And I said, 'I want to warn you. We have ghosts out here.' I knew what was going to happen. We were sitting at the table talking, and pretty soon the coffee cup goes like this (moves across the table). He couldn't believe what I was telling him!"
Many years later, John and Gail took a cruise out of Boston Harbor. John was shocked to see that a modern light on a fiberglass pole had replaced his old lighthouse.
"I got my video camera, you know, and I said, 'What is that?� Where'd it go?' I was discouraged to see that thing out there. But I've got to admit it was in bad shape. The platform on the outside was all rusted. We filled it with cement to patch it up. But I hate to see it go."
Next station for the Baxters was Rhode Island's Beavertail Light, the third oldest lighthouse station (1749) in the U.S. By this time John and Gail had three children. Their years at Beavertail, 1969 to 1972, were happy ones.
"They had the America's Cup Races down there one year, and I watched it from the top of the tower.
"There were people on the island (Conanicut) that had been at Beavertail. There was a lady who was 80 or 90 years old; her husband had been keeper down there. She was telling me one day her son went out the door and a rogue wave came over the bank and washed him out to sea. 'She thought he's gone, I'll never see him again.' Another wave came along and put him right back on the step. She couldn't believe it. We were sitting at the table one day. I kept hearing this helicopter. I thought the Group was going to pull a sneak inspection on me. In comes this Navy helicopter. There was hydraulic fluid coming out of that thing left and right. People on the beach were getting soaked with it. The engine just seized up and down he came. Everybody was running around with fire extinguishers and everything. They had to tow him out of there to Quonset Point. That guy -- I brought him down to the house for a cup of coffee -- he was just shaking."
Next stop for the Baxters was Vinalhaven Island in Maine's Penobscot Bay. "They said they had an opening at a lighthouse in Maine. I didn�t hesitate. I said I'll take it. We were supposed to go to Bass Harbor Head. We got up to Southwest Harbor and they said that the Commanding Officer is living at Bass Harbor; that's his quarters now. The opening they had was at Brown�s Head Light on Vinalhaven. I had no idea where Vinalhaven was. They said, 'Pack your bags and head out.' So we did. Brown's Head was a nice light."
Gail remembers their arrival on Vinalhaven. "We went out there on the ferry. We went down every road because we couldn't find the lighthouse, trailing a boat behind us. We finally found the road. Nobody there to meet us. Foggy! You couldn't even see the water. When I got up the next morning and looked out the bedroom window, I saw we were overlooking the Camden Hills. It was a pretty, pretty place."
The Baxters soon developed a social life at Brown's Head. "Once you put the light on at night," remembers Gail, "you couldn't leave the station. So people would visit us. We�d play cards."
The Baxters' son, Stephen, was born at Brown's Head Light. He is one of the last people to be born to a Coast Guard couple at a lighthouse.
Without hesitation, Gail remembers the details surrounding Stephen's birth. "Stephen was born on a Monday. The Friday before, I had to go to the doctor right there on the island. He examined me and said, 'Yes, you'll probably have this baby before long.' I came out into the waiting room. It was full of people from Vinalhaven. We knew everybody there. The doctor looked at my husband and said, 'Get the quicky set -- he's going to deliver the baby." John almost fell off his seat."
That Monday the doctor, Ralph Earle, came to the lighthouse early in the evening along with a nurse. "They gave us a hospital bed and everything," Gail recalls. "He examined me and kept talking. He said, 'This is a nice place to be. You can watch the sun set over the Camden Hills.' He gave me some pills, and the next thing I knew I had the baby. He weighed in at eight pounds. That's the way they have them out there."
"He delivered 1,300 babies," John says. "And he only had six he sent off the island. That's a good record." Gail adds, "He was a nice doctor."
Stephen Baxter was too young when the family left Vinalhaven to remember much about it, but Gail says, "In '92 or '93, he was in the Navy, and he went back to see what it was like."
John wasn't the only keeper in the family, says Gail. "I call myself Abbie Burgess Junior [after the heroine of Matinicus Rock Light], just between John and myself," she says, laughing. "This one time John had a high fever and the doctor had to come down from Monhegan, because our doctor was gone. And he needed to go to the hospital. And I called Southwest Harbor and I said, 'Now what am I going to do? You've got to send somebody down here to tend this light.' He said, 'That's your house and we can't send somebody to be in your house while your husband's gone. You'll have to do it.' I said, 'OK.' I could do it as long as I didn't have to use the generator, because I had limited experience with generators. But we did have to use the generator." High winds had severed the power line from the town�s generating plant. "I called John at the hospital and asked, 'How do I start this thing?'"
John laughs. "She did great," he says.
Gail continues, "As long as I had the phone we were all right. We had four kids -- three in school and a baby at home. I couldn't leave. It was three or four days." John recovered from his illness and things were soon back to normal.
The weather at Brown's Head was unpredictable and sometimes dangerous. "In front of the light there were two rocks called the sugarloafs," says Gail. "Once we had a storm and I watched lightning hit the rocks and it scared me to death. I was cooking one night and lightning came in and went right around the burner. And lightning hit the telephone pole at the top of the hill and split it in two."
Despite a scary memory or two, both Gail and John are nostalgic when discussing their lighthouse years, and you get the feeling they wouldn�t trade them for anything. "That was good experience, my lighthouse duty," says John. You know, I had my family, my wife with me. I just enjoyed the heck out of it."
This story appeared in the
January 2001 edition of Lighthouse Digest Magazine. The print edition contains more stories than our internet edition, and each story generally contains more photographs - often many more - in the print edition. For subscription information about the print edition, click here.
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