Last week when I was a docent last week at the Waldoborough Historical Society, Al O’Donnell came in to buy eight bricks from the A.D. Gray building. I carried them to his truck, and then Al followed me back and took a seat to shoot the breeze. So, I turned on the tape recorder.
I was born in 1936 in Bucks County, PA, and I lived there until I got tired of it. God tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Get your butt up to Maine.” So, I said to Joan, “When you get done teaching this year, we’re going to Maine.”
And she said, “How?”
I said, “We’re going to buy a farm or something. We’re going to Maine.” You see, every time I’d come up here, I loved it more and more.
We packed everything in the U-Haul, and up we came. We bought Nelson’s Shuman’s old house in North Waldoboro. We moved in 1969, my wife and five kids. Of course, Joan was from Maine, born and raised in Portland. And boy, was she happy to get back in Maine! Except for the first three days in that house. Cry, oh my God, did she cry. She loved that house, but she had a lot of work to do, getting the furniture put around and this and that.
To me, Maine was like when I was kid back in Pennsylvania, with a lot of farms. And I worked on a number of them. Come spring, we started pulling corn. But first we had to milk the cows. And we had sixty cows. Then, after breakfast, we started pulling corn. I was glad to see the corn come in the spring, and glad to see it go in the fall.
In Maine, we didn’t farm much. I planted some potatoes. A little garden. And then Nate Packard came, and we restored the barn. And the house? Well, when you don’t have that much money, it takes time. Took us thirteen years.
Joan taught in Jefferson for 28 years. But that’s nothing. My daughter taught 41 years. She was at the middle school up here.
And I was a roofer. I’ve even done a little bit in slate. My father was a slate roofer in Pennsylvania. One day, he said, “Come on and help me.” I must have been about ten or so. He had me lugging slate up a ladder, and he was using it up faster than I could get it up. That was an experience.
There’s danger to roofing. I fell off a barn roof forty years ago, and boy, oh boy, that hurt for a while. One time someone called me about the roof on the button factory. They thought the roof was leaking in places and they wanted me to repair it. Well, it was four storties off the ground, and I said, “How’m I going to get that stuff up there?”
They said, “Well, we have an elevator.”
And I said, “Well, how do you get it from the elevator to the roof?”
“Well, you have to have somebody helping you.”
And I thought to myself, “Well, I don’t think this is one I want to take.” It was too big a challenge because I work by myself.
I remember another time. We had a southeaster, and it was wintertime. I’d stripped a whole roof in Friendship, and I’d papered it all. That night the wind came up, and it rained. And I said to myself, “I’ve got to get to Friendship because that tar paper is going to be all over the harbor.” Well, I got there, and the paper was still intact. I got lucky on that one. But, it was a minister’s house, so maybe that helped, too.
Anyway, one thing led to another. Joan died in 1997 of cancer, and that was not good. But she told me, “Al, you’ve got to get out there.”
I’d say, “What do you mean?”
“You’ve got to find another woman.”
And I’d say, “Why do I have to do that?”
But I did. I found Eleanor Ricker Bickford, and she was an excellent woman, too. She just passed away four years ago. I’m just bad luck. Now I’m seeing a woman from Jefferson who I’d met from when I coached Little League way back.
I’ve met some really good people. Peggy Cooney was one, and Polly Storer another. Patsy Storer is still alive, and what a character she is.
I met Peggy because my son is a landscaper, and he was down there doing some work for her, and you could hear Peggy holler over a 40-knot wind. But my mother was loud, too. You could hear her screaming a half mile away, oh boy!
I liked Peggy and her sisters. They always used to dive off the bridge to go swimming in Damariscotta. I thought that was funny. Yup, the life here is very interesting.
When I first moved to Maine, I thought, “Maybe I can get a deer. So, the first morning I went out, and I heard these guys laughing in the woods. And stupidly, I left my rifle against a tree while I went over to see what they were doing. They were taking the leaves off a deer which they’d shot the night before. Before the season started. I said, “Jeez, I didn’t hear a shot.” Big mouth.
They said, “Well, that’s them new silent bullets they got, hah hah hah”.
You know what was funny? They got out to the road with that deer, and the game warden was waiting on them. The guy across the road had been waiting for that same deer to cross, and he didn’t get it. He’s the one that ratted them out.
Yup, I would move to Maine again. I’d do the whole thing again. There’s a lot of good people. Most of them would do anything for you. So, in turn, you do it, too. One day a guy came to me and said, “You were a dairyman once, weren’t you?”
I said, “Yeah, why?”
He said, I’ve got this Hereford heifer over there and she needs to be milked.”
And I said, “Well, why don’t you do it?”
He says, “I can’t get close to her.”
I says, “Okay, I’ll come over and see what I can do.”
When I get there, I says, “Do you ever use anything out of that green can on the shelf?”
He says, “Yeah. I use it on my hands all the time.” “You should use it on the cow!”
That cow’s udder was so chapped from the calf sucking on her. She was swelled up, oh my gosh. Well, I got her tied up and milked her. Then I put some of that bag balm all over her and milked her out, and she went “Ahhhhh.”
Got a whole bucket of milk out of her. That cow was so full of milk that she just wanted to get rid of it. Who ever heard of sitting down and milking a Hereford? That’s a beef animal. But I liked that. Not everybody can do it. I’ve liked all my experiences.
I like helping people. I used to help some of the older ladies, like mowing grass, not big lawns or I’d do whatever small project they needed, like making a handrail. I’ve helped a lot of older people. There was a retired WWI military officer, Captain Pollard who used to live down on Friendship Street. He asked, “Could you do something for me? Could you put a roof on that old shed?” I said, “Sure, I could do that. No problem.” So, I did and didn’t charge him labor. He only paid for the materials, and it wasn’t much.
I can’t do that now, so I go and visit people. Yesterday I stopped to see a friend of mine, Jim Clark, up the road here. I spent three hours with him. I hadn’t seen him in over a year, and I felt bad because his wife died, he’d lost two sons and the only daughter left is as frail as anything. But we had a long conversation, and I think he felt better after I left.
The kids keep saying, “Dad, you can’t do that, dat dat dat,” and I say, “Leave me alone.” I’ll keep working my one day a week at the food pantry, and I’ll keep visiting people. Tomorrow I will stop in and see someone else. I haven’t talked to him in a long while, either. You see, there’s not enough medical people checking on people. We have to do this. I should have visited Lloyd Light, but I didn’t get there, and he died this Mother’s Day. He was a chicken farmer all his life. We’re dying off, and that’s exactly the way it is.
Leave a Reply