North by East
Opinions, advisories, and musings from the length and breadth of Maine
Where the Heart IsMainers don't need bullhorns and cameras to pull off an extremely generous makeover.
Recently, Kenny and Pierette Bouchard, of Bowdoin, received the devastating news that not one, but both their spunky, adolescent daughters had a particularly aggressive form of muscular dystrophy. Because of their home's narrow doorways and steep stairs, the Bouchards knew they'd have to move. But how? They didn't have enough money.
The Bouchard children, Noelle, now 19, and Allison, 12, cajoled their parents into applying for an extreme home makeover with the popular reality TV show. When that gambit failed, Kenny happened to mention the rejection to his boss and long-time friend, Bill Morrell, vice president of Downeast Energy & Building Supply in Brunswick where Kenny had worked for thirty years.
Morrell took matters into his own hands, literally, organizing more than 150 friends and businesses to build the family a brand-new, completely accessible, three-bedroom ranch. And, just like the television show, they did it all for free.
"No money exchanged hands at all," Pierette Bouchard explains. "It was just wonderful."
Lead contractor Wally Hovey volunteered to oversee the eleven-week project, which began last July. Lumberyard customers donated money and auction items such as vacation rentals and a hand-built canoe to fund the project. Andersen Corporation donated $17,000 worth of windows. Wood Structures, Inc., of Biddeford, donated flooring. Mainely Trusses, Inc., of Fairfield, gave framing. Durfee's Flooring Center, of Brunswick, came up with tile. Even local mom-and-pop stores pitched in, catering free lunches for the crew.
"One thing led to another, and the next thing you know, we had a house," says Kenny Bouchard.
It was right across the street from their old one. And, last October, just before the Bouchards were set to move in, they were sent away for an all-expenses-paid weekend in Rockland while the final pieces were installed -- landscaping, paving, custom curtains, new furniture, even a handicapped-accessible van in the garage. The Bouchards were even blindfolded and delivered to their new home in a limousine.
When an entire community of Maine-grown businesses can come together like that, they're building more than just a house.
Ice, Ice, Baby
Belfast's curlers celebrate fifty chilly years of camaraderie.
Every four years when the Winter Olympics roll around, the sport of curling pops up on the radar screens of reporters worldwide.Net work cameramen jostle to capture the sweepers frantically brushing the ice in front of a heavy rock as it slides toward the target area, and television viewers marvel at an Olympic contest performed by regular-guy athletes in microfiber pants and sensible shoes ("Hey, I bet I could do that!"). But to many Mainers, all that hoopla is old news. This year, the Belfast Curling Club is celebrating its fiftieth season of brooms and stones, bonspiels and hog lines. That's five full decades on ice.
Eunice Schleicher, a charter member of the club, remembers how baffled Belfasters were when Dr. Norman Cobb, a Calais native who'd curled in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, introduced the sport in the midcoast in the 1950s. "We'd never heard of such a thing," she says of curling, in which teams of four compete to entice their stones closer to the target, or house. But Cobb, Schleicher, and a dedicated group of curlers stuck with it, eventually erecting a building dedicated solely to curling. Along the way, the clubhouse on Route 3 has been renovated and expanded, with the most recent addition being a banquet hall that's home to the dinner dances that accompany each bonspiel, or curling tournament.
Why all the fuss for such an obscure little sport? "It's the camaraderie," explains Schleicher, noting that she curled for thirty-nine years and that if she hadn't fallen and broken her shoulder, she'd still be out on the ice.
Schleicher isn't kidding about the social factor; bonspiels tend to occupy an entire weekend, with curling starting on Friday night, going all day Saturday with a break for dinner and dancing that night, then wrapping up on Sunday morning. Lest you fear the curlers take themselves too seriously, however, consider the annual Wood Family Bonspiel scheduled for late this month. Held in memory of founding member Ray Wood, this year's event features a Hawaiian theme complete with leis -- "Some will even wear shorts to curl in," says Wood's son-in-law Jim Boulier -- pineapple salsa, and a deejay to spin tunes for curlers from New England and Canada. "We do it to have a good time," Boulier says simply.
Some ice, some rocks, some good friends, and a warm meal to boot? Sounds like Dr. Cobb knew a good thing when he saw it -- and Maine is better for it.
Temporal Insanity
It's not nice to fool with Father Time.
What is it about time that makes people want to keep fiddling with it? There's something very un-Maine-like about the whole preoccupation with clockwatching. Maybe it's because we're closer to the seasons than folks whose only exposure to the outdoors is the distance between their front doors and their cars. When you live with the natural rhythms of sunrise and sunset, you tend to take the long view and have less patience with the follies of man.
Take daylight saving time, for example. Since the Uniform Time Act of 1966, DST has been pretty standard: first Sunday in April, spring forward; last Sunday in October, fall back. There was that little blip of odd timing (forgive the pun) during the energy crisis of the mid-1970s, but otherwise daylight saving time was as regular as, well, clockwork.
But this year, thanks to the Energy Policy Act signed by President George W. Bush in 2005, DST arrives on March 11 and departs on November 4, three weeks earlier and a week later than normal. The reasoning goes that the change will save energy by giving Americans more sunlight later in the evening. U.S. Department of Transportation studies have shown that DST cuts electricity usage by about 1 percent per day. During the height of summer when days are long that makes a certain amount of sense. How that rationale applies to the depths of spring and fall, when there's not much sunlight on either side of noon, remains something of a mystery.
The whole daylight saving time concept started with Benjamin Franklin in one of his merrier moments. While an American delegate in Paris in 1784 he wrote a tongue-in-cheek essay, "An Economical Project." The United States tried DST in 1918 after seeing it used in Britain and other European countries. It was so unpopular Congress repealed it the next year, overriding President Woodrow Wilson's veto. President Franklin Roosevelt brought it back during World War II. DST became a local option after the war, a confusing situation that was finally resolved by that 1966 law.
This latest change comes with the condition that the U.S. Department of Transportation study its impact and report the results to Congress, which has the option of tossing the whole idea and returning to the old schedule. Canada is adopting the change, too, not out of any deep sense of conviction but because the United States is doing it. Sounds like temporal imperialism to us.
Notice, please, that none of these ideas came from Mainers. We may have our quirks, but we know better than to try to pull Father Time's beard.
Bankrupt Urban Myth
Maine's Millionaire's Row is shorter than we thought.
It's one of those little tidbits that Mainers have always taken a sort of perverse pride in -- the idea that Maine, poor as it is, has more millionaires per capita than any other state in the nation. The fact that California, Connecticut, Idaho, and North Dakota all have made similar claims at various times has always been viewed as mere wallet envy by the less fortunate.
Oh well. According to statistics compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau using Internal Revenue Service numbers, another Maine myth has dissolved in the face of fact. The report shows that in 2001, Maine had approximately 12,000 millionaires in a population of about 1,275,000, or about one per 106 people. Even neighboring New Hampshire beats us, with 17,000 purse-busters in a population of 1,236,000 people, one for every 73 residents. Massachusetts reported one for every ninety-two people.
"It's something we've fancied for a long time," mourns Laurie Lachance, former state economist and current president of the Maine Development Foundation. "I'm guessing it comes from the high number of wealthy summer people. They gave the impression there were more millionaires in Maine than there really are."
In absolute numbers, California tops the list with 572,000 millionaires, or one for every fifty-nine people. New York followed with 317,000, one for every sixty residents. As for the (other) pretenders to the throne, Idaho doesn't even come close, with one for every ninety-nine residents, nor does North Dakota with one for every 128 Dakotans. But Connecticut pushes the competition into bankruptcy with 83,000 in-state big bucks, one millionaire for every forty-one residents -- ranking them first on the per-capita list.
Maine can still take solace in other urban myths, such as the idea that Portland has more attorneys per capita than any other city in the country. As for millionaires, one for every 106 people means it's likely everyone knows someone with a seven-figure bank account. "But how come I'm not related to any of them?" Lachance asks.
Gimme Shelters
An Aroostook shed business helps a unique community thrive.
Sturdi-Bilt Sheds in the tiny Aroostook County town of Smyrna has never advertised, doesn't send salespeople to tout its product at home and garden centers, and doesn't have a contract with a big-box store. It also doesn't have a forklift, electric power, or even an answering machine for its single telephone. But it does have more than enough business to keep Ervin Hochstetler and his crew busy for the next year while sustaining Maine's only Amish community in the bargain.
The storage-building business is one of the major industries for Smyrna's small Amish community, which began with a single family in 1995 and now includes seventeen families and a handful of homespun businesses. "This year we'll sell about 250 storage buildings," says Hochstetler's son and "right-hand man," Joas. "That's the maximum we can produce with this building and the workers we have." The only power machinery the company uses is an air compressor to run saws and nailguns. It hires trucking companies to deliver its sheds to customers.
Joas Hochstetler says the company sells its sheds and doghouses mostly by word of mouth, plus through a few lumberyards such as Granville Lumber in East Holden. The structures, made with Maine and Canadian lumber, range from six by eight feet to twelve by thirty-two. Prices run from $650 to $2,795, plus any options the customer might want and delivery charges. "We buy lumber by the truckload," Hochstetler adds. "Our siding comes from Robbins Lumber down in Searsmont, for example."
In a market where even Wal-Mart sells plastic garden sheds that snap together in minutes, Hochstetler has carved out a niche with high-quality wooden buildings with uses limited only by the imagination of the buyer, from backyard storage to playhouses to small garages. Joas says his father is deliberately keeping the company small. "We had three crews working in three different shops at one time," he recalls.
Ervin Hochstetler moved his family to Smyrna in 1996. He had operated a storage-building business in Tennessee and started a similar business in Maine when it became obvious to the first Amish settlers that the Aroostook growing season was too short and markets too far away to support the sect's traditional agricultural lifestyle. Since then the company has become key to the community's survival in a place they've grown to love.
"We really like it here," Joas says. "The climate and the location are hard to beat. Our family had a hard time handling the heat in Tennessee." That's not a problem in the County.
