An Occasional Opinion*

By WARREN D. HUSE | Posted: Monday, February 6, 2012 6:00 pm

You’ve seen me out walking. 501s, beat-up brown leather bomber and a knit wool hat that defies description (but it does keep my ears warm).

I’ve done a lot of walking, these past three months.

Thanks to the folks at LRGHealthcare’s cardiac rehab program, up on Hospital Hill, I’ve made a great recovery from open-heart surgery back in early September, when the surgeons down at Catholic Medical Center gave me a new aortic valve along with one bypass.

And though I never, never, ever was a jock in my previous existence, I have now become quite the gym rat, with a good workout three days a week at the Lakes Region Community Wellness Center.

If I were to miss a day there now, I just wouldn’t feel right.

But back to the walking.

Up until last month, I had never walked the WOW Trail, but one Sunday about three weeks ago I decided to journey up to Lakeport for breakfast at Our Place Family Restaurant. It only took me 45 minutes, one way, and was thoroughly enjoyable.

People have asked me  about the concrete foundations between the railbed and Lake Opechee, soon after you start up the trail from Messer Street and Bisson Avenue. I believe this was a warehouse owned by Isaac Sakansky. For some reason, Isaac had materials containing white phosphorus stored in the building and they ignited, giving the Laconia Fire Department some exciting moments back in the 1940s or thereabouts.

Before you get to those old foundations, you will pass the remains of the old Dow Oil Co. coal trestle, also between the railbed and the lake. Here, gondola cars filled with coal were once shunted and gravity employed to unload them into waiting trucks.

The art on various surfaces along the way is quite interesting, some of it still a work in progress.

I particularly got a kick out of the smiley faces on the ends of two oil tanks in the Dutile yards.

Seeing the back ends of Union Avenue businesses gives a different perspective and, as Dorothy Duffy remarked in her column recently, you certainly see a lot more than you do if you are driving.

Passing the Moulton Street crossing, one is reminded that it really should be Moulton Street Extension, as that thoroughfare was located totally in the “island” between the tracks and the waters of Lake Opechee until the discontinuance of the Bridge Street Bridge as a vehicular medium.

Another point of interest is the stonework in the various railbed “cuts.” Takes you back to 1848, when those Franco-American laborers were imported to build the railroad and many of them stayed on in the towns of Meredith Bridge and Lake Village after the work of laying the steel rails was completed.

As you near Lakeport Square and Elm Street, the Winnipesaukee Expo Center will dominate the landscape between the trail and the lake. Built as Building 80 in 1940 by the federal Defense Plant Corp. for Scott & Williams, its first use was for World War II military production ‘for manufacture of airplane parts.’ Later, of course, it reverted to the production of knitting machinery, which was the company’s principal product.

Still later, the Carpenter-Paterson Co. (and even later still, Bergen-Paterson), manufacturers of pipe supports and pipe hangers produced millions of dollars’ worth of components for nuclear power plants and other applications. The last manufacturing occupant was Anchor-Darling Industries.

The long, low building  nearest Elm Street, now home to the Lake Opechee Inn and Spa, was erected in 1966 to provide office space for Scott & Williams and also connected Building 80 with Building 25, a five-story factory put up by the company in 1919-1920. This last was torn down in 1991.

Last couple of times I’ve walked up to “Our Place,” there’s been too much snow on the WOW Trail, but the Union Avenue sidewalks work just fine. Perhaps that will be a story for another time.

Just a reminder that Ernest Thompson’s “Political Suicide” rings down the curtain on its current run, this coming weekend — with performances at 8 p.m. Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and a 2 p.m. Sunday matinee — at Pitman’s Freight Room on New Salem Street, Laconia.

Thompson told me he played his first professional gig, right out of college, at the old Gilford Playhouse in 1971.

Sure enough, the microfilm of The Citizen for June 29 of that year yielded Betty Trask’s review of “The Pleasure of His Company,” starring Cyril Ritchard and Maureen Sullivan.

Betty characterized the supporting role of Roger Henderson as “played superbly by Ernest Thompson who is making his professional theatrical debut in the two act comedy.”

Tickets for this weekend are still available: 603-744-3652 or www.WhitebridgeFarmProductions.com

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*with apologies to the late Alfred D. Rosenblatt, whose column of the same name ran in The Citizen in the early 1960s. Huse compiles the weekly Lakes History page which appears on Saturdays.