Explorer Club 9/16/2025 The Trophy Room

At the Explorer Club amidst the trophies. Other than killing millions of insects throughout my life I've only attempted slain one other creature. A seagull at age seven at the end of McKinley Road, Falmouth Foresides. 1959. With my good friend Chaney Noyes. We had taken darts from his house and walked to the bluff overlooking the lowtide mudflats of Portland Harbor. Back then there was a dock for the local fishermen. Seagulls harried the sterns seeking fish. I threw a dart at one. It struck it in the wing. It fluttered to the water or continued to fly away. I never tried tokill anything again, except for cockroaches and mosquitoes.

Peter Freuchen Explorer Club - Trophy Room

My grandmother Edith Hamlin gave me a book BOOK OF THE ESKIMOS by Peter Freuchen. I still have it. Two years ago I was pleased to meet him face to face with his portrait over the trophy room's fireplace at the Explorer Club. Edith Smith was good friends with Marie Peary, the Snowbird, daughter ofAdmiral Robert E Peary, one of the founder's of the club. I had thought my grandfather Frank A Smith had been his doctor in Westbrook, Maine after returning from his stint with the Royal Canadian Medical Expedition in France during World War I, but no one is left in my family who can verify that he might have been on service to the Arctic Explorer. Edith did speak about Marie on her death, bemoaning that Marie, a hard drinker, was going to outlive her. That she did, but I dropped Marie's name at the bar in the club and showed them BOOK OF THE ESKIMOS. I am still a member.

Explorer Club Trophy Room 9/16/2025

Yesterday I was in the explorer's Club. A member in good standing for the past two years. Visiting the trophy room with three friends I told them stories about how the skins and tusks and artifacts arrived here. Hunting and exploring. I myself possess an elephant's foot from Andy Reese, ballet dancer and film maker for Club 57. He bequeathed the item after his passing from AIDS back in the 1980s. In 1991 coming down the west coast of Sumatra I recall hearing a tiger roar in the distance. It sounded like it was behind me. Chills up and town my spine.

I check ed this message and discovered once more that I had misspelled and as adn. A common occurence as I have been blessed with manulysia, dyslexia of the fingers, which mihgt have to do with that I was born a natural lefthander, however the Sisters of St. Joseph at my parochial school south of Boston regarded that as a sin or lámh chlé in Gaelic. My nana called it Kithou, which might have meant something else. I write with my right hand, but deal cards with my left. I resisted change whenever I could.