From The Bar Harbor Times, Sept. 14, 2000
(photos by Wilbur York added by Sean Todd)
article by Laurie Schreiber

MOUNT DESERT ROCK -- In June 1928, Wilbur York was 2 and his sister Shirley 4 when they and their parents, George and Helen York, went to live on Mount Desert Rock. They stayed for eight years.

Mr. York remembers that time on the barren, windswept, wave-washed, storm-tossed rock— a ledge of 1 1/2 acres at high tide, 3 acres at low, 25 miles out from the mainland—as the most wonderful period in his life. This year, he was thrilled to accept an offer from Allied Whale, the Bar Harbor organization which now uses the lighthouse station to observe whales, to take him back out for a visit. He called Shirley, who lives in Arizona, and she also jumped at the chance.

"We had always said we were going to go back out there," Mr. York said recently, sitting in the kitchen of his small home in Surry, "we talked with Sean Todd, and he said he'd get us out there."

Mr. Todd, Allied Whale's director, was as good as his word, and the pair visited the rock in July, for the first time in the 64 years since their father retired from the United States Lighthouse Service. Allied Whale, a College of the Atlantic organization which maintains a contingent of researchers on the rock part of the year, took Mr. York out a couple more times over the summer. He hopes to visit again in September.

"I loved it," he said after his three-day August trip.

At 74, Mr. York is a wiry man with an easy smile. A bit absentminded, he refers frequently to a leather-clad, pocket notebook, where he jots down information he wants to remember. His small home seems confining and dark, for a man who fondly recalls his youth by the vast and wild sea. But one old photo shows two beautiful children sitting with their loving parents, all four squeezed in a cozy comer by the coal-fired stove and the radio. It makes you think perhaps small spaces are less confining than they are a protective and loving sanctuary from the harsh environment outside.

Mr. York's father, George, was lighthouse keeper for eight years, until November 1936. A Brooklin native, he had been working as a warden with the Sea and Shore Fisheries Service, something like today's Maine Marine Patrol. That was probably an advantageous career, since he was also likely a rum-runner, Mr. York says. The important thing, though, is that he loved being on and around the water. So when the chance came up for him to join the Lighthouse Service, he seized it.

The service was a venerable institution, established under George Washington and divided into 17 districts. The Maine and New Hampshire district was serviced by two tenders. Mr. York remembers one of these, the Ilex, bringing supplies for the keeper, his two assistants, and the station's general upkeep.

At the time, the houses and other structures, many of which are gone now or in disrepair, were in top shape. Built in 1847 (although Mr. York hadn't known that until his first visit this summer. The date plaque on the tower had been hidden by a covered walkway when he was a kid; the walkway is gone now), the lighthouse was joined by two houses, five sheds, a paint locker, oil house, bell tower and boathouse. The main house had a roofed porch with attractive lattice rails. A covered walkway led to the lighthouse and a nice boardwalk circled the house. Inside the lighthouse, the whitewashed walls were pristine, the copious brass always gleamed. Even the brass buttons on his dad's uniform glinted in the sun.