The "Lighting The Way" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Reading an article in my September/October copy of "The Saturday Evening Post."  Perhaps you too subscribe to this wonderful magazine.  The story began with...When America's last Coast Guard lighthouse keeper hung up her old-fashioned bonnet last year, the movement marked the end of an era.  Sally Snowman, who was 72 when she retired in December, had cared for the 308-year-old Boston Lighthouse, which is perched on Boston Harbor's little Brewster Island, since 2003.  Sometimes she donned homemade, 18th century garb for her work, which included offering public tours of the rocky, wind-staffed island - more utilitarian moods found her zipped into a Coast Guard-issued jumpsuit instead.  For 15 years of her tenure, she lived year-round in the island's 1884 Light Station Keeper's Quarters, at times riding out whiteout blizzards and fierce storms that raked the two-acre scrap of land with 20-foot waves. "I say I have salt water in my veins, and not blood," says Snowman.  "I've had a connection to lighthouses since I was yea high to a caterpillar, growing up in Boston Harbor."  Though the Boston Light was fully automated in 1998, congressional law stipulated that the landmark, which was the very first light station established in colonial America, remain manned.  The verb doesn't quite fit Snowman, who was both the first and the last female keeper of Boston Light.  She will not be replaced.  "Will I miss it?" Snowman asks.  "Yes I will."  If snowman's retirement is the poignant coda to lighthouse keeping by the U.S. Coast Guard, it comes amid a transformation of the country's coastlines that's been unfolding for decades.  Though lighthouses remain essential navigational aids for boaters, they no longer require the live-in keepers who tended lamps and rowed to aid boaters caught in deadly squalls.  And so, from Michigan beaches to Maine's scatter-shot bays, government-owned lighthouses are going to a new generation of keepers.  Since 2002, in a program run by the General Services Administration in collaboration with the U.S. Coast Guard and the National Park Service, more than 150 lighthouses have been sold off or given away to nonprofits, friends associations, and private citizens.  If plenty of would-be lighthouse keepers are eager to step into the breach left by the Coast Guard, perhaps it's because the signal lights still tug at something enduring in the American spirit.  Lighthouses remain some of the country's most beloved landmarks.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.

The distinctive red and white candy-striped West Quddy
Head Lighthouse - one of more than 60 that dot Maine's
Atlantic Coast.  This particular one was depicted by artist
Stevan Dohanos for the September 22, 1945 Post Cover.