Kennebunkport, Me. A Small Town Goes Prime-Time

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The only way Bob Brigham used to know that George Bush was in town was when his daughter would return from Bradbury Brothers Market and announce, "The Filipinos are here." This meant that the Vice President's household staff was preparing for his arrival. Things change. "Now it looks like a damned convention for the hearing impaired," observes Brigham, a local real estate agent, about the swarm of Secret Service men sporting earphones when Bush is in Kennebunkport.

For the record, it was on Wednesday, Nov. 23, that Kennebunkport met its first metal detector. Bush was to address his friends and neighbors -- folks like Booth Chick and Carl Bartlett -- on the town green, and his security men set one up on Ocean Avenue to screen the audience. He had survived more than 60 summers in this lovely coastal Maine town without a single metal detector, but then he never was President-elect. Trouble was, there were too many people for the lone detector. The police finally said the hell with it, just before Bush began, and let everyone in to hear the speech. "We're going to need more of them," sighs Roland Drew, chairman of the board of selectmen.

It is going to get tricky. "I can't imagine anyone here calling him Mr. President," predicts Bartlett, owner of Port Hardware. "It has always been 'Hi, George, how are you?' Hell, I've never heard anyone call him Mr. Bush."

Two days later, Bill Ward over at Port Video had a scare. He was having breakfast next door at Karens Restaurant when Bush arrived to rent a couple of videos, leading a 15-car motorcade of security and media people. "For a moment I thought my place was on fire," Ward recalls. "It reminded me of the Monty Python movie where the kid opens the bedroom window and sees a lawn full . of people. It's ridiculous for the press to follow Bush around to see what he buys. Renting Broadcast News is not a national policy decision."

Brace yourself, Bill, you are in summer White House country now. Weird things happen. Remember Plains, Ga.? "If anyone spent a dime there, that was an improvement over the year before," sniffs Ward. True enough. Plains shot into the limelight with Jimmy Carter and sunk back into the kudzu like Brigadoon. Then there was Hyannis, Mass., which metamorphosed from a decent summer community into the world capital of turquoise John F. Kennedy ashtrays. The place has never recovered from the combination of Kennedy mystique, weak zoning and bad taste.

None of this is lost on Kennebunkport's 4,500 natives. Many ponder their future at Alisson's Restaurant, where fresh rumors mingle daily with the clam chowder. Someone murmurs that the Secret Service will close Ocean Avenue, the road that runs past the Bush compound on Walker's Point, for security reasons. "If they do that, the cars will back up all the way to Wells," moans Rick Griffin, owner of the Kennebunkport Inn, envisioning a traffic jam stretching to a town seven miles away.