Cheerful farewell for Bernard postmaster
BERNARD – Year-round and summer residents here were popping into the post office throughout the day, on July 27, for a retirement party for Linda Musson. Musson will retire from nearly 25 years as...
View ArticleLocal film pro leads blockbuster life
SOUTHWEST HARBOR – Somewhere on the Maine coast, a middle-aged man, Rusty, shouts, “It was a freak accident, Maynard! When are you going to get over that?!” Maynard, seen in the film’s frame from...
View ArticleA family’s Friendship, a fleet’s friendly ways
SOUTHWEST HARBOR – Three generations of Zubers are aboard the Friendship sloop Gladiator on a terrifically hot Saturday in July. “Did you see, last night? There were, like, a thousand squids over...
View ArticleIsland Artisans: A vibrant cooperative
BAR HARBOR – Celebrating its 30 anniversary this year, Island Artisans is a vibrant shop that showcases the works of more than 100 Maine artisans. The cooperative got its start with a group of just 11...
View ArticleKyle Stanley: From experience, a message to teens to be safe
On October 19, 2001, the lives of a Tremont family changed drastically when 18-year-old Kyle Stanley was in a car accident that nearly cost him his life. Kyle Stanley is seen here in 2001, at age 18,...
View ArticleRichard Stanley and wooden boats: From legacy to beyond
SOUTHWEST HARBOR – Ever since he was a little boy, Richard Stanley has been immersed in a world of the finest craftsmanship at the hands of some of Mount Desert Island’s top wooden boatbuilders. Today,...
View ArticleIkemiya: The ragtime, sparkle-divine Peace Farm state of mind
BAR HARBOR – Masanobu Ikemiya is a concert pianist, conductor, and recording artist, a foremost exponent of American ragtime, the founder of the summertime Arcady Music Festival in Maine and of the New...
View ArticleHouse concert impresario Steve Peer: “The coolest guy we know”
ELLSWORTH – There’s a hubbub of cheerful chatter, and it’s difficult to make out what Celtic/rock contemporary/fusion musicians Carmel Mikol, Rachel Davis, and Darren McMullen are saying. Music...
View ArticleA Rich heritage: “All I wanted to do was build boats”
TREMONT – “I built boats from the time I could walk,” says Robert “Chummy” Rich. “Most of them wouldn’t float. If they did, they’d float upside down.” Fifteen-year-old Chummy Rich is seen launching,...
View ArticleSteve Spurling: 92 and still building boats
SOUTHWEST HARBOR – At Jarvis Newman’s boat shop, on Main Street in Southwest Harbor, the walls are full of framed photos of old boats. Steve Spurling with the Norwegian-style pram currently under...
View ArticleLinda Kelley: Art, energy, a sense of play
BAR HARBOR – Linda Rowell Kelley likes time by herself in her A-frame studio, a hundred yards down a brushy path from the home she shares with her husband Terry. Linda Kelley works on a painting that...
View ArticleJarvis Newman, early fiberglass trend-setter
SOUTHWEST HARBOR – “We’d be having dinner or dessert out on the porch on a Sunday night, in the summer, and these people, sometimes the old-timers, would drive up and they wouldn’t even get out of...
View ArticleThe Esther II: A father’s boat, a son’s heart
TREMONT – Back in the 1940s and ‘50s, Charles Orville Trask used to set out from Bass Harbor and head 20 miles offshore to lobster fish and tub-trawl for hake around Mount Desert Rock, Great Duck...
View ArticleBunker and Ellis: How two men played pool and became boatbuilding icons
“We worked nights, Thanksgiving, New Year’s, even Christmas,” Raymond Bunker said in 1979, not long after his 32-year partnership with Ralph Ellis ended. “Often, we worked until nine o’clock or...
View ArticleAdequate: A Bunker and Ellis gem, an admirer’s fulfillment
Rod Lucas had never really thought of buying his own powerboat. Thanks to his mother’s outdoorsy nature and his grandmother’s summer home on the Southwest Harbor shore, he grew up with a love of...
View ArticleConundrum meets wit: Rich and Grindle build boats in a barn
SOUTHWEST HARBOR – Roger Rich and his friend Ralph Grindle founded Rich & Grindle Boatbuilders in 1946, building boats in Rich’s barn at Tracy Cove on Clark Point Road in Southwest Harbor. The...
View ArticleO Richtown brothers, where art ye? Searching for a long-past boatbuilding...
WEST TREMONT – Wooden boatbuilder Richard Stanley, his wife Lorraine, and I are sitting in the cockpit of the 1902 Friendship sloop Westwind, a multi-year restoration project that is up on jackstands...
View ArticleEugene Walls stopped by Bob Rich’s shop, stayed 21 years
G. Eugene Walls Jr. in the U.S. Navy. Courtesy Elaine (Rumill) Smith/Tremont Historical Society In the spring of 1946, Eugene “Gene” Walls went down to Robert “Bobby” Rich’s boatbuilding operation,...
View ArticleFisherman Laurence Newman: Snow, fog, “whatever, we went out and set the trawls”
So there I am at the Southwest Harbor Public Library, stumbled across a trove of oral history cassette tapes recorded under library auspices in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. I was trying to find a...
View ArticleWar boats, draggers, sportfishermen, trawler-yachts: Bink Sargent navigates a...
In 1937, Lennox “Bink” Sargent took a break from his studies in engineering at Harvard University, and from his summer internships with Boston naval architect A. Loring Swazey, to work for Henry...
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