At the Inn one never knew when Bumblebee, who buzzed while he cut out paper dolls behind his back, or a woman with a shoulder full of parrots might show up for a night’s stay. As a boy, Bob Cairns was not only given a childhood run of this 1800s historic inn, he grew up under the elderly wing of Louis Dielman, the owner and octogenarian the Baltimore Sun called one of Maryland’s most influential historians. In the 1940s and 1950s this generous raconteur peopled his New Windsor, Maryland, inn with comped characters, oddities who had guested there during the Dielman Inn’s early 1900s heyday—days when Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia emptied the cities for cool recreational summers at this grand hotel. But one doesn’t have to read between the lines to find this memoir’s centerpiece. It’s the boy’s loving “grandfatherly” relationship with Mr. Lou and those Inn dwelling storybook characters and the tales they paraded through his childhood. So, no Mommy Dearest here. This is a memoir peopled with the echoes of the love and laughter of a boy, an old man, and the ancient edifice they simply called The Inn.