Ernest J. Banks

Ernest Banks (1873-1933) was the 7th and last child born to Cyrus King Banks and Abigail Works Banks. I must have seen him on an earlier trip to Goose Rocks Beach with my parents, but I will never forget meeting him during the summer of 1917, or 1918. 

It was in a dark room lit by two kerosene lamps where I was introduced to Ernest’s radio. It consisted of an open topped pince box about 10” high and wide, and it must have been almost 3 foot long sitting there in the front room of the beach cottage. Two heavier wires extended from the contraption down to the floor where they were clamped to an automobile six volt wet battery. The front panel of the set had about six large dials. Smaller dials, switches and phone jacks took up most of the remaining space. 

Ernest put on a headset, and the other three were offered to my father, my brother Rich, and to me. Squealing noises came to my ears while the tubes inside were warming up. Finally we heard voices from far away fading one moment and then coming back.

I think we hear about tex stations that night--mostly talk, but two or three had music. The next morning when I looked inside the set, I saw a maze of jumbled wires, radio tubes, condensers, tuners, and capacitors all hooked up to B, C and D dry cell batteries.

Ernest had built the whole set by himself, sending away to several places for plans and parts he needed. As I look back it seems so strange that radio existed at that time in a house which had no electricity, no bathroom, a cast iron cooking stove, and a hand pump in the kitchen sink for water.

In the summer of 1925, I was put on a Pullman car in New York and sent to the beach. That was the summer when I got to know Ernest. All the previous winter he had been building a thirty foot power boat in their large barn in Biddeford. He had it hauled to the Saco River just below the Pepperell Dam. As soon as it was launched, he got onboard and sailed five miles to Biddeford Pool, and then five miles of ocean to arrive at Little River before the tide started to go out. His sisters, Nellie, Hattie and I were waiting as he came ashore on the west branch of the river right next to Ivory Emon’s Boathouse.

An hour before high tide the next day he took us all out for a spin to Timber Island, over to the Western Rocks, amd nearshore all the way back from Batson’s River.

Ernest was not one to remain sitting about for long. Three days later we again walked to Little River to see him off on a two month’s voyage to Bar Harbor about one hundred and fifty miles to the northeast. 

A year or two later he sold that boat as he had built a twenty foot open sailboat in the meanwhile. He took me out sailing and fishing many times that year. He could handle all the sails singlehanded, and he had a smaller sail near the stern which he would set up on days when the wind was lower.

By 1926 or 1927 he’d become fed up with staying at Goose Rocks. The telephone company had put a pole on the Banks property to service their next door neighbor. It could easily have been put on the other property, but the utility would not listen. Ernest broke up his old row boat for kindling wood for Nell and Hattie, got on his bike, and never came back.

He was not unprepared, building a cottage on Little Ossipee Pond near Waterboro Center. He had bought a small peninsula on the far side of the lake where he had a good sized cottage along with a boathouse containing a rowboat plus and eighteen foot speed boat with a sixteen horsepower outboard motor. The fishing was very good in that pond and he spent most of his summers there.