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Traylor’s job is hard work. He begins early in the morning, often before
5:00am. He adjusts menus to fluctuating numbers at meals as various trips
come and go. Then, too, there are new staff to train each year. Sometimes
kitchen staff has to learn the hard way that there is a good reason for
doing a task in a particular way. The incidents get funnier as they fade
into the past but when there are two hundred hungry people waiting to eat
efficiency is important.
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Two staff stories that Traylor has shared cause him to laugh as he recalls
them. One year there was a Harvard man who claimed kitchen experience and
was hired as an assistant cook. Traylor had simmered several turkeys to
make a supper of turkey pot-pie. The assistant was told to strain the
stock and save it for the sauce. When Traylor asked for the stock to
prepare supper, he found that the assistant had thrown away what he should
have saved and saved what he should have thrown away.
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One cool August
morning, a kitchen boy (who didn’t make it through the season) was
found, late for work, recovering from a night off in the shower, asleep.
The sleeping one was under a warm spray, which must have been soothing
until the hot water to the shower was turned off at the hot water heater.
A scream was heard as far as the Trail Section.
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Traylor’s principal recreation is fishing. Over the years, other members
of the Rodgers family have gotten involved in this hobby. The record fish
in the family was a bass caught by Katy in 1955. It weighed in at five
pounds, 13 ounces and measured 23 inches. Traylor’s preference, though,
is to go after brook trout in beaver ponds, a pursuit which has taken him
to some remote corners of Tuftonboro. He does not use the term “secret
fishing spots,” but he does admit to visiting some locations that he is
not at liberty to share with others. He also recalls parking the car in
different places and walking in from different angles so as not to wear in
a foot path to the ponds.
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In looking back over the
twenty-five years of his association with North Woods Camp, Traylor says
that there must have been a great deal of change in that time. However,
since the changes came gradually he says it seems like very little change
at all. He smiles and makes the comparison with marriage, saying that
Anita looks the same to him today as she did when they were married in
1941.
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