Originally appeared in the March 2013 Nauset Neighbors Newsletter:
Randy Bartlett spends much of his time these days fishing in his small skiff in the serene beauty of Gull and Higgins Ponds, which he can see from the windows of Gull Cottage, the antique home he shares with his wife, Pat, in the National Seashore in Wellfleet. It is a long way from his crib in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, when he and his mother were fortunate not to be in the kitchen, which was destroyed, and his father, a navy pilot out on a mission, was fortunate not to be in the harbor.
From that beginning, Randy spent his early years as a “military brat,” as he calls himself, living in California and the west coast, Chile, Newport, R.I., Jacksonville, FL and Copenhagen, where his father was the naval attaché. Randy went to the American High School in Frankfort, and is now writing a coming of age novel of friendship and loss set in the mid 1950s in Copenhagen and Frankfort from material drawn from his life.
Randy began his college career at the College of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA, and then transferred to American University. He spent his summers in Woods Hole, where he met Pat Avery, whom he married a year after getting his degree.
Between college and graduate school, Randy went to Ecuador with the Peace Corps, worked at NIH in the Office of International Health, and then joined the army in 1966 as a lieutenant one step ahead of the draft. He was given orders to go to Vietnam, but his orders were changed to a tour in Washington DC in charge of Medical Intelligence in Latin America. He left the service three years later as a captain and went on for his doctorate at American University under the GI Bill.
Randy holds a PhD in History, and is Professor Emeritus of History at Cape Cod Community College, where he taught for 35 years. He is well known around the cape for talks on his dissertation topic, Lorenzo Dow Baker, the noted Wellfleetian banana entrepreneur who launched a company that eventually became United Fruit. Randy's next scheduled talk will be part of Wellfleet's 250th Anniversary Celebration this summer.
Randy and Pat enjoy whitewater canoeing, wilderness camping and sailing, and have traveled widely with friends who are master birders, from whom they learned to identify and appreciate birds. They are challenge-level square dancers, and have two children and three grandchildren, the main focus of their lives. They also run a bed and breakfast in their beautiful home in the National Seashore, which has been in Pat's family for over a century.
Randy restored three wooden boats, a canoe, a Herreshoff 12 ½ antique 1919 sailboat, and the wooden skiff he now uses mornings and early evenings on Gull and Higgins Ponds when the weather permits. Randy loves fishing, and he loves the quiet beauty of his surroundings.
There are times when the quiet is disturbed by nature herself, and not by man and bombs. One day, a sharp-shinned hawk grasping a live bird in its talons flew in a straight line in front of Randy five feet above the pond. The bird was struggling to be free, but suddenly the hawk dropped straight down from the sky, holding itself just over the surface with spread wings so that the prey was underwater. It was an awesome sight. After about fifteen seconds, the hawk flew up with the drowned prey. Randy had never seen anything like it before, nor have many others. Randy plans to spend many more hours in his skiff.