“Booth Tarkington returned for the season (1942) and signed up as a member of the state’s auxiliary coast guard patrol. Every afternoon, weather permitting, he and Captain Stanley Thirkell would cruise the coast in the Zantre, looking for German submarines. (At the end of the season, Tarkington would joke, ‘I understand that the Nazis were so afraid that I would try to speak German to them that they remained away from the coast. . .’) Tarkington provided more meaningful support for the war effort by writing propaganda for the Red Cross and the U.S. Treasury’s war bond drives.”
Joyce Butler in “Kennebunkport, The Evolution of an American Town”