Dick Baker has lived in his 1980 Suncrest Made by Fleetwood since 2003. He bought it from an 82-year-old woman in Owl’s Head for $500. He took it because he knew that a home like that could have gone for $10,000. Sure, the roof needed repairs, it needed new doors, a few new windows, and a new furnace. But it was a clean home. The owner never smoked and didn’t have pets or children. And replacing the furnace was no problem because furnaces were Dick’s business. Especially in mobile homes. He set down in Whitefield. Two years later he moved to Waldoboro’s Medomak Mobile Home Park to be closer to clients. Mobile homes, once called ‘travel trailers,’ date back to the 1920s. They were marketed to anyone who wanted or needed mobility in a home. In the 1950s, manufacturers began making sturdier models and sold them as inexpensive homes instead. Maine ranks 20th now in the United States for the mobile home parks. Waldoboro alone has four established mobile home parks plus a scattering of informal places where residents park their homes. Skyview Ridge was Waldoboro’s first park, founded by Nicholas DePatsy in the 1960s. Medomak Mobile Home Cooperative, where Dick Baker lives, was founded in 1971. In 2007 it became the town’s only cooperative. Dick served for seven years as head of maintenance, and today he is one of eight or nine members of its Board of Directors. Before he came to Waldoboro he lived in nearby towns, including Jefferson, Windsor and Whitefield. At 16, he enlisted in the Army and served three years in Vietnam as a medic. After, he worked as a car mechanic for various dealerships in Maine, then for Roland Genthner, repairing furnaces, then for Waldoboro Oil. He went out on his own in 1976. At 79 years old, he will talk about mobile homes, but he’d rather talk about furnaces.
When someone says, “You can’t fix it,” I tell ’em, “Everything can be repaired one way or another. May cost the devil, but it still can be fixed.” I get calls from people all over looking for parts. Maybe they need something from 1972 and can’t find it. I get the call. I’ve been as far south as Seabrook, NH, as far north as Woodland and as far west as Fryeburg repairing furnaces. I’ve been in every part of this state.
This week I have a furnace to put in in Dresden, a hot air furnace to put in down in Bremen, and I may have to put a boiler in down in Pemaquid. But my days of putting in boilers are just about over. They weigh too much. My brain says yes, and my body says no. So…most of these are just cleaning.
Every furnace that burns oil should be cleaned once a year. But a mobile home furnace is smaller, so their heating systems and filters ought to be cleaned once a month. And if you’ve got animals like I do, with two cats and sometimes four dogs visiting on the weekends, you need to clean it at least once a month.
The thing I like about living in a mobile home is that it’s easy to heat. And in a mobile home, everything is pretty much straightforward. You don’t have corners to go around.
This park was pretty rowdy when I first moved here. Coastal Economic Development owned it. And they wanted to get rid of the park, sell the lot to the highest bidder. But we didn’t want that. We decided to form a co-op. I can’t remember all the things we had to go through, but it was a lot. We’re still paying back the money we borrowed from a loan company.
Beginning of the year, the lot rent was $275. Now it’s $300 because we had to do repairs on the water lines. We had some serious water leaks. We were losing 54% of the water we were being billed for by the town. But some of the lines were laid down in 1971 or 1972 when the park started, and the pipes were all plastic. In three different types of plastic pipe. And in odd sizes. All 2-inch, but with different diameters. It cost to repair them, so that’s why the rent hike. But now we’re saving most of the $30,000 we were paying the town for water, and for sewer, too, because that’s based on water usage.
Everyone here is a homeowner. Most of the people have been here ten, fifteen years. Most everyone gets along, too. When we formed, we set up rules and one of them was that everyone has to have a background check, of your criminal and financial records. If you pass, you’re good to go. Helps keep out the riff raff.
About once a year we have a cleanup day, too. Anything anybody wants to get rid of goes outside, and then we go by each home and load it into a truck that carts it to the dump. But some people are lazy. They want everything done, but they don’t want to do anything. It’s always the same people who want to do something and just do it. We don’t have much drugs anymore except one person. Guys come in, guys pull out. That’s not visiting. But you can’t prove it.
Still, the company we have managing the cooperative has their finger right on the job. Some of us got behind in our rent, and the company called us and told us how we could get money from the state, and so we applied. That helped pay some people’s back rent, including mine. Some of us also applied for fuel assistance because we’re going to need it for this winter. I don’t see how people are going to survive. The price of oil, the price of gasoline, the price of everything.
But no matter what comes, I wouldn’t go back to not being a cooperative. We have control of what the lot rent is. And nobody can come in, push us off, and sell it.
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