No cream in Hattie’s chowder clear broth with salt pork, yellow onions and stone-cold quahogs she shucked with a grunt. Widowed early, a glacial erratic unsmoothed, Hattie didn’t hug or cry, she chopped clams and celery, while shell-shocked Cap peeled potatoes. Once a yacht skipper and ice-boat jockey, the Great War wrecked his nerves but not his smile for a new wife who let him feed skunks from his shaky palms on warm nights behind the warp-shingled kitchen.
Depression days thin as marsh reeds, though Watch Hill money trickled in — the Yacht Club, Ocean House, Henry Ford, Clark Gable, gentle Einstein asking for a light. Golf, tennis, hurricanes and shifting gravel inlets. People loved Hattie’s molasses bread and lobster rolls, the way she baked East Beach bass. Local fishermen…