One Kennebunkport Summer Visitor Always Gets Presidential Treatment

If you can’t decide what to order at Mabel’s Lobster Claw restaurant you can always go with the baked stuffed lobster and peanut butter ice cream pie that the President of the United States had when he was last there.

Or if you are having trouble making up your mind in the Port Jewelry store, you might want to look at a gold cross with a chain similar to the one Barbara Bush bought recently.

Or if you are uncertain about how to satisfy your desire for fast action, you could ask to see a remote-control model speedboat like the one George Bush bought for himself when he visited the Golden Goose Toy Shop a while back.

“The Bush family has been summering here for so long, there’s hardly a shop or restaurant in town they haven’t been in,” said Ann Livermore, proprietor of the House of Brass, where “just the other day Barbara Bush stopped by to pick out some gifts while the President was across the street renting a movie at Port Video.”

‘Our Summer Visitor’

There is also hardly a shop or restaurant among this coastal resort town’s 75 shops and 40 or so restaurants and inns where you can’t hear a firsthand story about the man who has been referred to in a local editorial as, “One of our summer visitors who recently landed a good job in Washington.”

Not that there weren’t good stories about Kennebunkport even before visitors started asking directions to the then-vice president’s spectacularly sited and easily viewed ocean-front home out on Walker’s Point. (So easily viewed, in fact, that the Secret Service considers it a security headache.)

One of several small communities, including Kennebunk, that are known collectively as the Kennebunks, Kennebunkport’s first claim to fame was as a shipbuilding port.

During the 19th Century the Kennebunks turned out about 800 vessels and became prosperous enough to foster such extravagances as the Wedding Cake House, a truly gaudy and still-standing private home. It serves as an excellent example of why some men should not be allowed to choose gifts for their wives.

By the end of the 1800s the shipbuilding industry in Kennebunkport had died of a common ailment known as “getting squeezed out by the big guys.”

But it had already been replaced by another industry that was to prove lucrative in its own right--catering to summer visitors, many of whom found the rugged New England coast and the small-town New England life so much to their liking that they built elegant vacation homes.

One such visitor was George Herbert Walker, President Bush’s maternal grandfather. In 1902 he built a “cottage,” as well-to-do New Englanders tend to call their many-roomed summer mansions, on a rocky promontory now known as Walker’s Point. Since the day Bush was elected President it has become more commonly known as the Summer White House.

The shops have arrays of such presidential memorabilia as post cards, T-shirts, coffee mugs, beach towels, tote bags, baseball caps, books, medals, paintings, Christmas ornaments and--rumored to be coming soon--presidential pizza.

At a gift shop called “What’s in Store” you can buy a pair of bedroom slippers that have a puppet-size likeness of Bush sitting astride one foot, and Mrs. Bush--complete with pearls--sitting astride the other.

A Framed Letter

The Atlantic Cotton Co. offers a George Bush T-shirt just like the one hanging on the wall above a framed letter that says “Love the design--George Bush.”

Another letter from the President is displayed at the Zamboanga gift shop, where you can get a plaque, made from genuine weathered barn board, that’s shaped like the state of Maine and features in its collage of Maine attractions a likeness of George Bush.

At all but the few art galleries and studios whose proprietors will show you to the door for even suggesting that they might be influenced by what the public wants, you will find that Walker’s Point is a popular subject for drawings, watercolors and oil paintings.

Even more popular in many shops are the “kinder, gentler” George Bush masks on which are printed a warning that says they are not to be worn by small children or Dan Quayle.

Yet even the possibility, when a neighbor asks how your vacation went, of being able to slip on a George Bush mask and say, “Read my lips,” hardly compares to a better one: That’s when you found a great little restaurant where you were waited on by the same waitress who served the President of the United States . . . and you left her a bigger tip.

Coming home from Kennebunkport with firsthand stories about Bush is relatively easy. Simply go into a likely looking shop (the most likely are those with a signed photograph on the wall) and, while acting as if you are thinking about buying something, casually ask if the President has ever been in.

If the answer is “yes,” and if you are polite and patient and continue to act as if you might buy something, you are liable to hear a good yarn about his visit.

You might hear, for instance, how Bush has a tendency to tell the same jokes he told on his previous visit. Or how until shopkeepers got used to the Secret Service men who precede Mrs. Bush into a store, they assumed that the very out-of-place-looking characters were there to rob them.

Or you might hear--in fact, you can just about count on hearing--who is going to win the presidential election in 1992.