O Provincetown!

TIME AND THE TOWN--Mary Heaton Vorse--Dial ($3.50).

After Mary Heaton Vorse had lived in Provincetown some 35 years, a native said to her one day: "We've gotten to think of you as one of us." Author Vorse was tickled silly. A hectic career as a pinko labor reporter and foreign correspondent has left her with little that is so permanently satisfying as her adopted home port, Provincetown--the fishing-&-tourist village at the end of Cape Cod.

Time and the Town is her rambling, sentimental, intermittently colorful account of this famed tourist haven, artists' colony and birthplace of the Provincetown Players. But most of all, it is the story of Provincetown's permanent population.

Sailing Under Water. When oil was commercially developed in Pennsylvania late in the igth Century, there wasn't much left of the whale-oil market. But there were still fish. Most Provincetown fishermen began to fish off the dangerous ledges of George's Banks, "a terrifying piece of water, so treacherous that for many years no one fished there. . . . Let a blow come up and a vessel drag its anchor and come into collision with an other and there is no record of the crew of either one surviving."

When holds were full, the great 125-ft. schooners would race back to market in Provincetown--first in, highest prices. "They left their fishing grounds with a 'keep 'er full and drive 'er.' They kept on canvas until the water came around the helmsman's neck. They tied their halyards aloft so they couldn't shorten sail. A coastwise steamer came to anchor in Provincetown Harbor, reporting, 'Had a fishing boat pass me sailing under water.' "

The sea and its storms are always in the minds of Provincetowners. The town owns a number of dwellings officially called "Widows' Houses," where seamen's widows may live out their lonely lives rent free.

But times have changed. Provincetown is no longer a one-crop town. Besides fish, it now has vacationers.

Automobiles and Prohibition brought the first neap tide of tourists to Provincetown. The Cape was a great place for liquor smuggling in those days, and outlanders flocked to the isolated village at the end of the Cape for drinking, dancing and "freedom." When Prohibition went, part of the excitement went too, but none of the tourists. Now "the churning froth of summer people [has become] so dense it seems like some monstrous growth climbing up over the little white houses, and one wishes that an equally monstrous hose could be taken to it, making the place clean again." Tourists are one subject about which Author Vorse can be more native than the natives.

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