It must have been a slow news day at the Portsmouth Herald back in 1946 when the call came in from the kitchen at Wentworth by the Sea Hotel. While preparing 300 ducks for a banquet, the chef’s assistant, Frank Graham, discovered one with an extra pair of legs.
A newspaper photographer rushed to the scene and cleverly re-staged this picture with the four-legged duck. Graham (seen scratching his head) loaned me this photo for my book, Wentworth by the Sea: The Life and Times of a Grand Hotel, but by an oversight, it was not included. Graham did appear in the book when he dressed as Adolph Hitler in a 1946 masquerade ball. He served as a meat-cutter when the hotel reopened after World War II under new management.
James and Margaret Smith, a Colorado couple, had purchased the “exclusive” 256-room hotel and its contents for $200,000 from owner Harry Beckwith. The sale included staff dormitories, many outbuildings, “The Ship” swimming pool and theatre, a golf course, the dock, several hundred acres of prime waterfront land in New Castle and Rye, plus a separate house just over the Little Harbor bridge. The Smiths, like Beckwith, initially ran an “exclusive” hotel, avoiding non-Protestants and people of color, but eventually had to adapt to changing times. They sold the Wenwroth in 1982 for an estimated $5.8 million. (Photo use courtesy Frank Graham)
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STRANGELY TRUE: Yes, there is a four-legged chicken on display at the Woodman Museum in Dover, NH. And yes, I wrote an entire novel that hovers around that incredible museum campus. Can you name that history mystery? It currently has 4.8 stars out of 5 on Amazon. My photo of the chick is pretty bad. I guess you’ll have to see this oddity for yourself in Dover.
Four-legged chick at the Woodman Museum in Dover, NH (RObinson photo)
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