Summary
ALMOST 80 years ago in old Fair Haven, my chums and I were doing the boys-of-summer thing. In the late 1920s, we could walk past the boozy Old Barge, an acknowledged Prohibition-era speakeasy on North Front Street, to head over the Grand Avenue bridge and sit in on the Lancraft Fife and Drum Corps' early evening rehearsal. It was held at oysterman Ed Lancraft's oyster dock and sail loft on the other side of the Quinnipiac River and the music then was generally in Yankee Doodle mode. So sturdily ingrained in the texture of that old riverbank neighborhood are the fifes and the drummers' paradiddles and (even when the windows were covered) the beery conviviality of the Old Barge that both institutions are still making news in 2006.
The Lancraft musicians are upscale today in their club rooms and hall in North Haven. They will be playing on Aug. 26 at the Westbrook Muster after appearances at the Deep River Ancient Muster in July and in June at the 100th Jubilee of the Swiss Drum and Fifers Association in faraway Basel, Switzerland, on the River Rhine.See the full content of this document
Extract
Editor's Note: Time and the River in Fair Haven
The Old Barge has silenced its river-tide creaking with a concrete foundation, but it still looks like a stage set for Eugene O'Neill's brooding "Anna Christie."...
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