The startling news this week: Camden’s Cappy’s Chowder House, a cornerstone of the “prettiest town in Maine” has closed. They might as well sail the famed schooner fleet to Belfast.
It will be hard to imagine that road down to the schooners without Cappy’s. It seems that the place has been there forever. When Jim Sharp opened his coffee shop decades ago, he named it after that waterfront institution, Erland “Cappy” Quinn. The legendary Quinn was born on Eagle Island, skippered the yacht Hippocampus II for years, and built wooden minesweepers on the Camden waterfront during World War II. Even after he suffered a head-on bus crash on Route 1, Quinn recovered enough to limp around the harbor, doing various jobs.
Johanna Tutone took over the coffee shop and ran it for three decades. She turned it into a landmark restaurant and bar, all watched by a huge wall portrait of Quinn, who never took a drink in his life. On many cold and windy nights, Cappy’s was the only game in town. Most other watering holes closed for the winter.
It was there, on one snowy night that a famous Texas transplant lamented about his lousy love life. It was a broken-man, round-table discussion of the women that had “done us wrong.” He admitted to the entire bar (at least six lonely guys) that he had once called a Texas co-ed seven different times for a date before he finally gave up. We all admitted he was the worst.
Cappy’s was great for breakfast. The famous Janice T. worked there for awhile. Janice worked everywhere. Another cowboy, Texas Larry, was there for breakfast, with his leg jiggling like it always was. Texas Larry was a nervous sort and could not drink real coffee. Texas Larry asked Janice for a decaf. She had a pot with normal and one with decaf, but the decaf was empty. She turned her back on him and poured the high test into the decaf decanter. Then she filled his mug. Texas Larry went into a nervous fit, with both legs jiggling. We never told him the difference.
You had to be there.
My birthday is three days before Christmas, normally freezing cold weather. I came home one birthday night to find two almost friends on the couch. I had just received an expense check and had to celebrate my birthday at Cappy’s, the only game in town. I suggested that we move from the couch, a suggestion that was met with lazy silence. It was cold, after all. They didn’t want to move. Then I said “I’m buying.” Honest to God, they leapt off the couch and jammed together in the doorway like “The Three Stooges,” even though there were only two of them. Cappy’s and free drinks. What could be better?
When Blue Eyes and I were active (honest) we used to go night skiing at the Camden Snow Bowl, then have “Coffee Nudges” at Cappy’s. It was a combination of relief from taking those tortuous ski boots off, warming up at the candlelit tables and a delicious, warming coffee.
Now, there are a dozen other places to go in Camden, even in the winter. But there will never be another Cappy’s with Quinn staring down on us. The Sea Dog Brewery crew is taking over, with a June opening planned. I am sure they will do a fine job running the famous locale. But still. I wonder if teetotaling Cappy’s portrait will stay on the wall.
They might as well move the schooner fleet.
Emmet Meara lives in Camden in blissful retirement after working as a reporter for the Bangor Daily News in Rockland for 30 years.