|
Castine’s
Main Street
prize
Castine’s Main
Street prize may be the Pentagoet Inn, run by husband-and-wife
Jack Burke and Julie VanderGraaf. |
Julie VanderGraaf
conferred briefly with a head waitress about a menu item at the
Pentagoet Inn, then ushered the visitor to the lounge.
It was in the dimly
lighted lounge that the more than 100 photographs, sketches and
paintings of famous and infamous world travelers became apparent to
the guest. In the center of one wall was a large oil portrait of V.I.
Lenin, one of the Bolsheviks who ushered in the USSR in 1917.
But on another wall
was the photograph of a band that included a friend of husband-wife
proprietors Jack Burke and VanderGraaf. The friend is important to
the couple but two or three spots to one side in the picture was an
unobtrusive Peter Sellers. Sellers also is featured in two other
photographs.
People proud of
being Mainers may take pride in pointing to the photo of Maine
Governor Angus King, placed near the ceiling on the wall where Lenin
resides.
Burke is a retired
US Foreign Service officer who was last in the African nation of
Sierra Leone. It has been his custom for many years to buy up
artwork whose subjects are—or were—political leaders or
entertainment celebrities.
Just above Peter
Sellers is a stiff-backed man in jodhpurs astride a horse. His
expression was one of stoicism and after a second or two the visitor
recognized the former Emperor of Japan, who surrendered to Allied
Forces in 1945. |
