The Town had a chance to buy Cockenoe Island for $75,000 dollars about 1952. The RTM turned it down quickly! My favorite spring fed swamp was filled in and houses built with septic tanks, a sewer system voted down, and now all the things I will mention are -- You know the rest of the story.

But we have great family memories of Old Mill Beach(We lived up the Hill). My mother would bring me down to the beach in the afternoon at high tide. I was about five years old. I learned to swim there. (Later, I was on Staples High School's first swimming team, 1955-56.) If the tide was going to be low, my mother would bring me along at about 4PM and she would carry me across the first channel which was right in front of the sandy beach and was deep and narrow, filled with rocks and seaweed and strange creatures like dog fish sticking out of holes and rock crabs wrapped around the rocks to blend. I was afraid she would drop me in her struggle with the current or I would get caught by the waters as I hung from her arm,just missing the swirling water which was up to her knees in the middle. And then on across a small unnamed sand bar to the second channel. This one was sandier and wider, not so threatening, and with wonderfull and delicious mussel beds!. I was glad when my father could carry me, but even he had a struggle in that first channel. However, once over on the "big sandbar", I could just run all over the place, so much fun! Throw shells at the gulls(no terns).Typically my mother would dig a pail of steamers for dinner.

When I was old enough, I would do the claming. At the end of the big bar we dug(raked) cherry stones, and then out on all the different long narrow sand bars which paraded out and out seemingly forever. Some of these produced great steamers- you have to know where. During the hurricanes of the early 1950s, one could pick up a bushel of chowder clams in 15 min from the Old Mill Beach. Did you ever see an 11 year old trying to carry a bushel of these huge clams up the road? Anyway, out beyond all bars, if one knew what to do, one could harvest a good batch of roaming sea clams. Watch out for the spider crabs!! Watch out the tide is coming in! At high tide this was almost to porgy fishing grounds. One was not far from the oyster beds where the drag boats worked. That was next!

When I became a teen I kept my 22ft gaff rigged sailboat, "Lotus", in the small channel that crept up the west side of the beach going by the remains of Schlaete's pier which had been toppled by the huricane of 1938. The Schlaete Estate was an abandoned mansion and was used by Nazi spys during the war-let me tell you!

In the winter, I took her mast down and slipped the Lotus through the boat gate in the first bridge and over to Capt Allens. With a perigee tide at the full moon in Sept, I could float it up on the salt marsh and into a cradle. Many nice wooden rowboats and a few sailboats were kept in the channel by Schlaete's pier, year after year, until the big hurricanes of the early 1950s destroyed about all and retired the rest. . But the queen of George Sherwood's Old Mill yacht club in the 1940s was "the sharpie" as I knew her. It was a beautifull, classic 28 foot New Haven sharpie, perhaps the last on the Sound, and which belonged to Capt Allen and family. The harbor was made for it, and she was also slipped through the boat gate in the first bridge to set on the marsh for the Winter

As I grew older, and with my friends, we tended to swim at the two bridges where we could dive and be carried under the gates with the swirling current of an incoming tide. Great fun! If you cut yourself on a barnacle-covered rock, you would be sure, while the blood streamed down your leg,that the salt water would heal it.

The Pond and its salt marshes were mysterious and cut through with strange channels and pools. Pirates buried treasure here. At low tide, with the gates open, one could slug it through the clean muck of the Mill Pond and get clams like you would not believe!! And during most winters, the satin-like ice carried us and our skates like the wind, most all the way to the railroad tracks.

The only other beach was Compo where all the people went. We used to picnic at Compo, at the rocks near the cannon, on a Sunday eve. My Grandfather always wore a suit and tie, a true victorian!

And Longshore -- originally much of Longshore was my direct ancestor's farm (until about 1750). He was David Sherwood and is buried in the church yard at Greens Farms Congregational Church. I have a copy of the deed. His son-in-law was John Carley who was my 5th greatgrandfather. These families were in the thick of the Revolution and so had many of their records burned deliberately by the British.

But probably the greatest fun activity at Old Mill(as well at Compo) was the fishing for 4-6 inch snappers, (thirty or more people on a Saturday morning in the late 1940s) then 10-12 inch snapper blues(butter in the frying pan!), and then for distinctive tasting tommy cod or frost fish. This all began in August and went to November. July was the time to line the bank near the second bridge to lure blue claws with salt pork and have a crabfest. Night fishing with a full moon for stripped bass! Only the big kids did that. But I do remember catching mackrel off the Cedar Point Yacht Club dock in October. What a busy place to grow up! What variety!

Bob Lefler