The Ear on the Cliff

Look across the cove on your left, back the way you came. In the First World War, that shore was the best pair of ears in America. Alessandro Fabbri was a rich man with a summer place here, a radio amateur and an inventor, and he'd built himself a powerful wireless station. He talked to ships at sea. One of them was the Treasure Ship, the Kronprinzessin Cecilie. He had crossed the ocean aboard her many a time, and he knew her captain personally. When America went to war, Fabbri offered the Navy a station on Otter Cliffs for one dollar a year, this island's favorite price, on one condition. He would command it. The Navy took the deal, and in nineteen seventeen a millionaire went to work in uniform on his own cliff. Now here's a thing nobody had planned on. The summer folks came to this shore for the quiet, and so, it turned out, did the Navy. With that quiet at its back and open water in front of it, Otter Cliffs could hear Europe when no other American station could. It became the most important site in the war for taking in messages from across the Atlantic. And on October the sixth, nineteen eighteen, five weeks before the guns went quiet, the first bulletin about the armistice came in over that water, to that cliff. You'd think they would have put up a statue. What they got was John D. Rockefeller Junior, who wanted the old station off his ocean road. The Navy said it would go, if he built them one just as good. So he did, over at Schoodic, across the bay. In nineteen thirty-five the Navy moved out, and the road you've just been driving came through. The best pair of ears in America is a picnic area now.