To the Editor: Was I reading the Boston Globe on Friday the 16th, or did the carrier mistakenly deposit a National Enquirer on the doorstep, with an anonymous story of sex and death in academe high above the fold? My wife and I have shared a close friendship and close quarters in small sailboats with Susanne and Half Zantop for over 15 years.
Seventeen summers after graduating from Dartmouth in 1969, I met Half and Susanne Zantop when by felicitous accident my wife Karen and I discovered a simple, virtually secret Maine cottage community beside a stunning cove on a remote down-east peninsula. At Hiram Blake Camp on Cape Rosier -- a place out of time and exquisitely hard to find -- down a looping road to nowhere except back where you came from, Susanne, Half, and their daughters spent a part of each July in a cedar-shingled cabin called Maples, with a wrap-around porch overlooking Penobscot Bay. Summer upon summer, Karen and I shared three weeks of communal life with Half, Susanne, their daughters and other Hiram Blake families from hometowns far and wide.