Paul Kim: [0:00:06] To start, Ernie, could you please state your name for us?

 

Ernie Eaton: [0:00:07] My name is Ernie Eaton.

 

PK: [0:00:10] So Ernie, I’m wondering how old you are.

 

EE: [0:00:15] Ooh. Retired. [laughter] Sixty-six.

 

PK: [0:00:20] And where were you born? Where did you grow up?

 

EE: [0:00:25] I was born in Biddeford. My parents lived in Kennebunk. I spent all my time up until I was probably eighteen or nineteen in Kennebunk, and then, I think, eight years in Portland with a job up in Westbrook and then back to Kennebunk. So, I haven’t gone very far.

 

PK: [0:00:58] What kind of work were you doing in Portland, Maine?

 

EE: [0:01:01] I worked for a mini-computer company, Data General. I started out as a welder and ended up in test engineering, developing software and hardware to test the products.

 

PK: [0:01:16] It’s not a field or world I’m remotely familiar with. I think I’ll ask some more follow-up questions about that in a second. So, growing up in Kennebunk, what was that like? I am not from Maine. I don’t know the area very well. Can you tell me a little bit more about growing up in this area and family life in Kennebunk?

 

EE: [0:01:37] Sure. What could I tell you about Kennebunk? Kennebunk was different fifty years ago. There were a lot fewer houses. The big new houses or little houses now. Certainly, we had the historical sections and some larger places along the beach, but it’s quite different now. I think it’s more affluent. People live in nicer houses, I guess. That’s changed the environment some. We used to go out and play. I mean, as a kid growing up – jeez, I don’t even know how old I was, but probably around eight or ten, I would take my hatchet and go out into the woods and make log cabins and things like that. Play Army because we were watching the Vietnam War on TV. I think less fear of what might happen to the kids in the neighborhood.

 

PK: [0:02:54] Did you grow up in a big family, Ernie?

 

EE: [0:02:58] I have three siblings. I’m the oldest of three. We’re spread out by fifteen years, so quite a range of ages – a brother and two sisters … My wife’s on the way to Aruba for the day.

 

PK: [0:03:29] Oh, wow.  Good for her. What are they doing in Aruba?

 

EE: [0:03:33] You don’t have time for this, but my son, who went to Portland, Oregon – he had his Ph.D. when he left and went to work for Intel there. So, spend three years at Intel and really struggled with the ability to go out and play versus they wanted you to work twenty-four hours a day and be available twenty-four hours a day. He’s like, “I climb Mt. Hood.”  And they go, “Well, bring an iPad or a laptop. So, he’s a first officer on an A320 on the way to Aruba, and my wife’s going for a ride with him for the fun of it. He flies for JetBlue now. Career change.

 

PK: [0:04:15] Good for them. That’s great. I’m sorry you’re stuck in cold weather while your family gets to be in Aruba.

 

EE: [0:04:20] Well, they were going to Utah, but the plane that was going to Utah was too full, so he signed up for a trip to Aruba so he could give his mom a ride.

 

PK: [0:04:30] That’s fantastic. That’s a good son.

 

EE: [0:04:33] He’s being flexible. Sorry, that was an interruption. It’s in airplane mode now.

 

PK: [0:04:47] What was your relationship like to your siblings and your parents growing up? You’ve told me a little bit about how Kennebunk has changed, the outdoorsiness, and relationship to nature growing up, which makes sense to me. What was your family life in Kennebunk together?

 

EE: [0:05:10] Well, we were spaced by three or four years each, so our friends were different, the kids we played with. We grew up in a small house with four kids. We had a sand pit out back and played and a decent-sized yard. I don’t think – growing up, I was in scouting, but it was a different time. My brother was seven years younger than me, so we weren’t doing the same kinds of things together, so it wasn’t that much of a play. But we had a good time. Good Christmases. And the summer was go outside and play.

 

PK: [0:06:08] What kind of work did your parents do?

 

EE: [0:06:13] My mother was a stay-at-home mom mostly, although she had a nursing background early on. I think she worked a little bit in the school system as an aid as the kids were going through school. My dad was a watchmaker, as they called them. He repaired watches and clocks, so worked for a jewelry store.

 

PK: [0:06:41] How do you think your parents’ work experiences, like being a watchmaker and being in education, impacted the type of career and education that you had in your adult life?

 

EE: [0:06:58] My dad would bring me down to the shop in the evenings. He worked Friday nights on clocks as his own projects versus the regular job that he worked for the jewelry stores that he worked for. So, we saw those kinds of things. He had friends who, thinking over the years, silly things, somebody who made lobster traps, and we got a pile of the culled pieces of oak that were all cut to strips, and we used to build houses in the backyard out of them. Stack them up like Lincoln Logs almost. Another friend who was in – I think he did old engine maintenance or something like that, lawn mower maintenance, who gave me a toolbox of old extra tools and probably four or five old two-cycle lawn mower engines to go play with. So, I took things apart and put them together from a very early age. One of my earlier questions was, “What’s a carburetor, and how does it work?” And I think I was probably three or four. [laughter] So that kind of really probably defines how I progressed through the different things that I did. I got into computers in high school. Different from what you did when you first used a computer. We had a teletype freshman year of high school. Sharing a little – I don’t know if it was – eight-bit or twelve-bit computer that probably had 16K of core memory in it or whatever memory. It was shared by thirteen schools. That certainly piqued my interest in computers and definitely led to my career. Another friend was into ham radio and gave me a couple of radios to play with and read the Amateur Radio Relay League of America handbook. Most of what I learned about electronics I found in that when I was fourteen or thirteen.

 

PK: [0:09:54] I’m curious. We started the conversation by you sharing how Kennebunk has changed throughout your lifetime and how those experiences are different from when you were young. My next curiosity is, what changes have you noticed in that engineering world? So you’re bringing up how you took things apart, put them back together. I know that’s a bit of a loaded question, but how would you say that’s –?

 

EE: [0:10:25] How would I describe that difference? This is a bit of a segue, but I’m involved in scouting, and one day, around the time that I think the War of the World’s remake came out, we were doing a campout, and I brought a laptop and the original, I think, The Day the Earth Stood Still movie. I don’t know if you’ve seen that, but it’s from the ‘50s, and it has references to the Cold War and nuclear – man is about to destroy the earth. I thought it would be good for the kids to see that. We were watching it, and I said, “You know, at the time this movie was made,” because they were used to all this computer-animated, not real things on TV, “the laptop that we were watching the movie on had more memory and more power than all the computers in the world, in the planet, in the universe at the time that movie was made.” [laughter[ So, that was a fifty-year range, and it’s pretty crazy to think that we would struggle with trying to fit our programs in sixteen thousand bytes of memory, and today I have a computer, and I’m struggling to fit the programs that I’m running in it, and it’s got sixty-four billion bytes of memory.

 

PK: [0:12:24] So, despite the changes that Kennebunk has gone through and that you’ve seen, what motivates you to stay in Kennebunk? What also keeps you motivated to stay in the field, even though it’s dramatically different than what you grew up learning when you were first interested in it?

 

EE: [0:12:47] I think Kennebunk is a location that’s close to my wife’s family and my family. I think we chose those areas because, one, we liked the environment and, two, being closer to family. What was the second half of that question?

 

I: [0:13:16.01] Yeah, I’m doing all the things that we’re told not to do, which is have run-on questions, multi-part questions. The second part of the question was: you’ve seen those changes in Kennebunk, and family has kept you here; what’s also motivated [you] to keep you in the engineering world, even though it’s drastically different than you taught yourself when you were young, in that fifty-year span.

 

EE: [0:13:39] Every step in my career and my life – it’s always been about learning something new and making something with it that was fun. There certainly were periods of time when there was a lot of stress, and I don’t miss that at all. But when I left technology, which I guess is about eight years ago – let’s say high-tech technology – I played for a while. I rode my bike to the airport, went flying, did a bunch of different things, and saw a friend on Facebook who was volunteering at the Trolley Museum. I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting. There’s some good work to be done there, and it’s some new technology that I’m not familiar with, even though it’s a hundred and twenty years old.” So I went and got involved and went for a visit, came home with a project, and went back and worked on enough things and solved enough problems along that way that they asked me to work for them. I do that really part-time. I spend a lot of time exploring. So, a combination of the old technology, doing research, looking at old patents, trying to figure out how this is supposed to work because we don’t have very many people to talk to. In some cases, we’re trying to put systems back together that haven’t been running in a long time. So, during that time, I got access to some CAD software through another avocation. And I thought, “Well, that would be interesting to learn how to do,” because, during my engineering career, it was more firmware and product architecture and defending the product in the field. This was something different that I’d seen done, was kind of curious about it, thought maybe we could integrate it a little bit into the museum in reproducing things, so I started making one piece of this or modeling that, trying to understand the software and the next thing you know, I’ve got the entire streetcar. And we’re now using it in the process of getting castings made and understanding designs that are hard to figure out – dimensions and shapes that aren’t obvious after something’s been rotted and worked on for a hundred years. The technology that I’ve worked on has changed, but it’s always had a little bit of computer in the background. I think maybe that’s because there’s a “delete” key and spell check. Two things that I really need.

 

PK: [0:17:16] I can’t help but think about how the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and your son also does work with tech, engineering, and how things are built. So, I’m curious to just know more about your family, your wife’s name, your son’s, if you have any other kids, and how your son’s experiences have been the same and different than the ones you had growing up in Kennebunk. And your wife, too.

 

EE: [0:17:48] Sure. My wife’s Ann Marie. I met her at Data General. She continued her career working for an insurance company doing software. She no longer works for them. I have two boys. The older, Craig, always showed an engineering interest from the beginning. We kind of knew – there’s a Dilbert that’s like, “Sorry, it’s a fatal condition. Your son’s going to be an engineer.” He’s been an adventurer. So, he did his undergrad at Rensselaer in Troy, New York, in material science and then his Ph.D. work at Penn State. During that time, he worked on his avocation, which was aviation, and became a flight instructor and was instructing while he was at Penn State. Went on to work for Intel and did that for three years, wearing the bunny suit in the fab, monitoring and helping control the processes in a world where an industrial engineer has to have a PhD to be able to do their job. It’s kind of a very – there’s a lot of science involved in that, much more than me, my background. Then he went off to fly airliners and spent all of COVID flying, which was a surprise to me. Not that he was flying during COVID but that a new pilot, someone who had started only six months earlier, would have a job doing that. But being a regional pilot, those are the only flights that kept flying. Anyway, he’s off doing that now, enjoying his life, and it fits well with him. He gets to explore. Easy access to airline tickets gets you to go anywhere in the world, and he enjoys doing that. My other son, Scott, also interested in engineering, went off to school at Northeastern to get a chemical engineering degree and casually mentioned four or five months later that he was a double electrical engineering major because they had better senior projects. It was more fun. He worked for a combination mechanical and electrical engineering company, building specialty pumps for everything from the space station to foam packing systems, and is now working for a small company in Portland that’s hoping to solve our carbon problem by finding a way to sequester it in a safe manner. So, both adventurers. He’s a bicycler. Craig’s a runner. And they both have technology in everything that they do. That too much? Am I running out of time? [laughter]

 

PK: [0:21:52] I can tell you when. Was there something that you were interested in knowing more about at this moment?

 

Jamie Gareh: [0:22:03.11] Yeah, I’d like to know more about your childhood. What do you miss about your childhood? What do you think back to when you think about your childhood?

 

EE: [0:22:16] That’s a tough one. Well, it was a lot more fun at times. [laughter] I don’t know. We had fun in the winter. My family wasn’t a skiing family, but you put on those green plastic boots with full socks and went out until you couldn’t feel your feet anymore, and you had fun doing that. There was a hill right across the street at the biggest house in the neighborhood, and the owners let the neighborhood use it as a sledding hill. Kids from everywhere would come, and if it was snowing, you were out there at night. We had a good time doing that. I enjoyed traipsing through the woods and didn’t know about cross-country skis, but bought a pair of K-Mart wooden skis. They were meant for downhill skiing, and I used those to get through the woods in the wintertime when it was snowing and enjoyed that.

 

JG: [0:23:48] Do you still cross-country ski?

 

EE: [0:23:53] I skied until I tore the second ACL in my knees and gave it up. I’ve done a bunch of snowshoeing. We had friends that we stayed with up at Sugarloaf, and I used to go off into the backcountry there, out a mile or two from anybody, and that was neat until you realize that you’re standing amongst a whole bunch of tracks of a cat that leaves a print about this big and it’s not a house cat. I’m pretty sure it was a lynx, and I guess it may not be a real danger to people, but the paw prints were bigger than the basket on the ski pole.

 

JG: [0:24:42] Have you ever seen a lynx?

 

EE: [0:24:45] I never saw one. I probably was noisier than I should have been, and they just left before I got near there, but I tell you, you see all the markings in the snow, and you know that you’ve just stepped into a place where they live. I stopped and looked all around me and never saw them. That’s probably the closest I ever came to an animal that I really didn’t want to come close to. I mean, I’ve come close to bears but never saw one while I was hiking, at least.

 

PK: [0:25:26] Did Scott and Craig get to have some of the DIY [do-it-yourself] hatchet, build-it-yourself nature experiences that you had growing up in Kennebunk?

 

EE: [0:25:38] We did scouting. As a family, we went camping a bunch of places, and they built up fires. I think they were less interested in chopping wood than I was as a kid. [laughter] That part of it definitely. As an affirmation of that, I guess, when Craig was at Rensselaer, he joined the caving club and was climbing down into small holes and crawling around underneath the earth. So, definitely adventuring, outdooring.

 

PK: [0:26:30] So you’re the skier, your sons are the –

 

EE: [0:26:32] Oh, they’re skiers. It’s a skiing family. They’re going to Utah.

 

PK: [0:26:38.02] I was going to ask what Marie does if your kids are all runners and cyclists. So, Marie also skis?

 

EE: [0:26:45] So, it’s Ann Marie. Ann definitely grew up in a family that skied. They lived in Sanford. There was a little mountain, Moose Mountain, in New Hampshire thirty, thirty-five, maybe forty minutes away, and they had a house full. She’s got two brothers, a sister, and a cousin who lived with them while his dad was a prisoner of war, and they would put them in their gear and load them into the station wagon and drive up to Moose Mountain and ski once or twice a week. So, skiing’s in her blood. We honeymooned in Utah during skiing season. She was going to do it today. [laughter] She was hoping to be doing it today.

 

PK: [0:27:59] You mentioned one of Ann Marie’s family members being a prisoner of war, and I kind of was wondering about some of the historical moments that you’ve witnessed throughout your lifetime and if any ones stand out more than others. Yeah, what you’ve witnessed, how it’s felt impactful to you and your family?

 

EE: [0:28:23.12] So, it was a strange time during Vietnam. We had a black and white TV that was on at suppertime in the kitchen sometimes. I don’t think it was on all the time, but I remember it being on for the nightly news, and I remember –this would have been – so, junior high started in ’69. So, it would have been from age ten to thirteen or fourteen. I remember them talking about the body counts. So, that was not something that you looked forward to do. Although the kids all played Army in the – that was a thing in the woods. It kept us active, at least. What else did I see? Space. Launching the first astronaut, the landing on the moon. All of those things were – you didn’t have any way to replay it. So, if you were going to see it, you either had to watch it on the news as a replay at six o’clock or you watched it when it happened. In school, they dragged out the TVs, and when there was – during the stepping on the moon, that kind of thing- you stopped class and watched TV. You watched the news. It was an event that you experienced that way rather than watching YouTube or TikTok or whatever. So, that. Technologies. Certainly, the computer industry thing. Again, watching – what’s the internet? I can tell you the story about the internet, but you can’t publish it. (laughter) We’re at work, and Alta Vista, which was really the first real search engine – one of the guys is going to – I’m going to make it up – St. Louis, somewhere. It was actually a city that was on the border of two states. I don’t think it was Kansas City. In any event, one of the guys wanted to go to Hooters. He was going to do a field trip, and he wanted to go to Hooters while he was there, so we searched on Alta Vista for Hooters, and it hit on an announcement of a yard sale for the benefit of the Society of the Protection of Cruelty to Animals, which was going to be across the street from the Hooters at 123-whatever street. And I thought, the moment – so you think about how you found things prior to that. You went to the library, and you looked in an index. You looked in a card catalog. You looked in an encyclopedia. You looked in the Yellow Pages. You wanted to find out where it was in Chicago; you paid an operator to look in the Yellow Pages for you. There wasn’t this ubiquitous-I-want-to-know-something, and I can search for it. I just looked at the other people, and I go, “This is nuts.” We found that out because somebody wanted to tell other people where a yard sale was, and I got that information instantly. Who would have guessed? So, I’ll take back the – be sensitive to it was Hooters, but I don’t know how you tell that story without just saying it was. But it was just so weird. I was in technology, and I understood we were building computers and all this stuff. Like, how? Who would have thought that you would find the answer to something through a path that wasn’t meant to give you the answer? And billions of answers done that way? At the [snaps fingers]. That changed everything, really, the way we live.

 

PK: [0:33:45] The three moments that seem to really stick out are the Vietnam War, the space landing, and the advent of Alta Vista and the internet. If you had to pick those three watershed landmark moments for Scott and Craig growing up, do you know what those would be?

 

EE: [0:34:20] I don’t think that there have been distinct moments like those. Phones have become more available – the portable phone, smart phone. So, moving the computer into the size of your hand and being as powerful as anything you had before that. We miniaturized that camera in the phone and made it common that everybody walks everywhere. We weren’t bringing film. We were still using film when the kids were young, so I guess they’ve seen that. I don’t know that they would recognize it as a transition because it happened pretty early. It’s not an obvious – it’s not such a big moment, I don’t think. They’ll have them maybe when we get nuclear fusion power working or something like that.

 

PK: [0:35:42] So, given all the logical advances that you’re recalling and that’s coming to mind, is there anything that you feel like, despite all the advances, it still worked better before it evolved?

 

EE: [0:36:05] So clearly, you can do a lot more things with the time that you have, and that’s good. I would say most of the negatives are the growth that has happened to change what the community is like. We have more people here. Having more people makes you more aware of crime and the concerns associated with that, and then kids end up being more protected. We gave our kids pretty free reign with regard to their bicycles. Craig would ride up to Sanford to go to Grandma’s for pizza [laughter] and all around, and I think that shaped them. I don’t long for a time when there wasn’t a computer. (laughter) I can still go out and chop wood or play or whatever, and maybe that’s one thing that – trying to figure out how to word this. Growing up, the experiences kids have are more around that device that they have, less going out and exploring things, and less not being interrupted by a text message or a phone call. I mean, you had to plan your day. When you went somewhere, you weren’t in communication with people, be that in your backyard or driving somewhere, riding your bike. It was an adventure. You were more on your own. Maybe a little bit of missing that. Yeah, I don’t have any really good answers for that.

 

PK: [0:38:39] Nostalgia for adventures and community, it sounds like.

 

EE: [0:38:49] I mean, this is kind of inevitable, but we always think that in order to be better, we have to grow it. Businesses have to grow to be better, communities have to grow to be better, and yet the reason we grow is because we attract people from places that have grown more than ours, and they don’t want to live in the denser population and the denser city. I miss that part. I mean, this was definitely a woods when I was growing up, and most of the street that I lived on was woods, and we played in woods that’s now just full of houses. Now we have to drive somewhere to go experience that.

 

PK: [0:39:45] Are there some questions that are coming up for you right now?

 

JG: [0:39:46] No, no, you’re on forty, so if you want to end it.

 

PK: [0:39:51] Yeah, you want to switch?

 

JG: [0:39:51] Yeah.

 

PK: [0:39:53] You want to take a five-minute break?

 

EE: [0:39:50] Do you guys like coffee or tea or anything …?

 

PK: [0:40:36] Do you think Scott and Craig are going to come back this way when they settle down? It sounds like Scott’s in Portland.

 

EE: [0:40:45] Scott’s in Portland. He loves the city. His biggest thing that prevents him from settling down is he has to buy a house to move the piano.

 

PK: [0:40:57] It’s beautiful.

 

EE: [0:40:59] It is an incredible – so, he went to Northeastern, loved piano, played music all through high school. If you look at this thing. This is just crazy. It’s German-made. He came back from college and spent a year – at least a year, I think – searching to find the piano of his choice. He settled on this brand, and then he went to Vermont and looked at a piano there. He ended up buying this one on eBay from Kentucky without having gone there to see it. He hired a piano tuner who was in the Guild – researched and found somebody to go look at it to tell him the condition of it, and he bought it. As he put it, he spent all the beer and pot money that others did during college on his piano. That’s a new car. It’s a 1985, I think …

 

JG: [0:42:49] I actually do have a follow-up question. So, talking about the moon landing, which is – I haven’t met that many people who have experienced witnessing the moon landing.

 

EE: [0:43:10] While I wasn’t there. [laughter

 

JG: [0:43:12] [inaudible] You saw it on TV, right?

 

EE: [0:43:16] Yeah, black and white TV.

 

JG: [0:43:09.26] When did you first see it?

 

EE: [0:43:17] Well, it would have been when it happened.

 

JG: [0:43:18] You watched it live.

 

EE: [0:43:19] Yeah. I know I watched it live. We watched the launches. What’s his name? The anchor that we – I’m trying to think of his name. The news anchor, CBS News, Walter Cronkite. [laughter] It didn’t seem as manipulated news back then, and it was quite different than the – I mean, Space X’s launches and success has been amazing, but when they do a launch they seem to have some kids who are just kind of social media telling the story on their channel. It was quite different when you were listening to the – they just stopped regular programming. When they launched a bit rocket like that, Saturn rockets, everyone watched.

 

JG: [0:44:39] Did you think it was possible before it happened?

 

EE: [0:44:42] I don’t think, as kids, we questioned whether it was – I mean, we knew it was an adventure, but I don’t think I understood what the challenge was. I mean, it was cool.

 

JG: [0:44:59] How old were you?

 

EE: [0:45:01] What was that? ’69, ’68? So, I would have been thirteen, twelve, thirteen.

 

JG: [0:45:10] As someone who seems like a pretty scientific mind, what are the thoughts –? When you saw it happen for the first time, what are the thoughts you had? Did it trigger any thoughts at all?

 

EE: [0:45:22] I’m trying to remember something that happened a long time ago. What did it trigger? I mean, probably a sense of adventure and obviously wondering what we were going to do next, not ever imagining that it would be fifty years, and we’d be celebrating it fifty years, and no one’s gone back. I guess I don’t have any deep thoughts about – again, whether that affected my interest in technology and whatever – I’m sure it did. I don’t know. I never thought I was going to be an astronaut. I had glasses. [laughter] That kind of ruled that out right away.

 

JG: [0:46:34] So I’m looking at this going – you know what that is? It’s AstroTurf, right?

 

EE: [0:46:39] No, they’re scallion seeds. I had this bag.

 

JG: [0:46:47] [inaudible]

 

EE: [0:46:48] I moved the bag – no, I was going to grow some.

 

JG: [0:46:53] Scallions?

 

EE: [0:46:53] Yeah. So these are the seed pods.

 

JG: [0:46:56] Do they grow in this weather?

 

EE: [0:46:59] I’ll start them shortly. But somehow, I spilled them here, and I didn’t realize it, and I’m like, “Look at all those little black things? What’s that?”  And then it’s like, “Oh, yeah.”

 

PK: [0:47:11] Do you garden as well?

 

EE: [0:47:12] Yeah, I wish. I enjoyed gardening when I was growing up. So that definitely – there’s a part of my life that I didn’t tell you about, that I didn’t think of. But here, the trees are so tall that – we had a garden for a while, but in the thirty years that we’ve been here, they’ve grown in even more, and it’s kind of eliminated the garden. We grow plants, but they just can’t get around to putting vegetables out because they don’t get enough energy from the sun to do it.

 

JG: [0:47:48] Why do you like gardening?

 

EE: [0:47:48] It was something that we always did. As a kid, we had a couple of good-sized gardens. I’m not talking about a farm or anything. Maybe forty or fifty by a hundred feet, so decent. Grew corn, and you name it – vegetables. Tried everything. Tried peanuts. Tried celery. I ran a little truck garden or a bicycle garden, if you want to call [it] that, and would sell vegetables to the neighbors in the surrounding quarter of a mile diameter probably.

 

PK: [0:48:42] What’s a bicycle garden?

 

EE: [0:48:43.18] Well, they called a truck garden someone who farms and brings the vegetables to market with their truck or whatever. Reid was a truck gardener – Reid Chapman. I had a stand-out front, and I would sell vegetables. Then, I had a route that I rode my bike with a bunch of people. This is the difference between today raising a kid and then. Mom didn’t come with me. Dad didn’t come with me. I got this idea to sell to the neighbors. I sold greeting cards from the back of Boys’ Life magazine. So, Christmas cards to raise money to buy my sleeping bag and whatever gear I wanted for scouting. When I started selling vegetables on a stand out front, instead of just Kool-Aid or lemonade or whatever, I ended up with a number of people that would buy vegetables from me. I’d ride and get an order and then come back, get them, and drop them off. That was all just go out there and do it because nothing’s going to happen to you. Today, the Boy Scout troop wants to sell wreaths; the kids don’t go out and just knock on doors – cold calls to sell wreaths; the parents sell them for them, or they sell them to their family and maybe to a couple of next-door neighbors. There’s none of that entrepreneurship that’s enabled by being free to do something like that at that age.

 

JG: [0:50:41] So we’re going to move on to Salt a little bit. So, I have a notebook here. I’m going to write stuff just because if you say something, I want to go back to later in the interview. I’m not writing anything about you or anything.

 

EE: [0:50:52] That’s fine.

 

JG: [0:50:54] You were in high school when you were in Salt. What year was your freshman year of high school?

 

EE: [0:51:00] I think it was the junior year of high school that Salt started.

 

PK: [0:51:05] What year did you start?

 

EE: [0:51:05] What year did I start? It was ’69, ’70 I think. ’69 was the first year.

 

PK: [0:51:15] And Salt started in your junior year?

 

EE: [0:51:20] Yeah. I’m trying to make all that work, but I’m pretty sure it was my junior year.

 

JG: [0:51:26] What kind of a kid were you in high school?

 

EE: [0:51:29] I was a computer geek. I wasn’t into sports. I certainly wasn’t on the football team or anything like that.

 

JG: [0:51:48] Did you like your high school?

 

EE: [0:51:49] So, I struggled with certain things – reading, writing, [laughter] maybe the social aspects of it. But I had fun. I had a number of classes that clicked with me.

 

PK: [0:52:14] Which classes were they?

 

EE: [0:52:17] Science and math.

 

PK: [0:52:19.06] That makes sense. It checks out.

 

EE: [0:52:19] And oddly enough, one that was really a combination of history and English and technology. We’ll talk about that, I’m sure.

 

JG: [0:52:32] What about the history and English class did you like?

 

EE: [0:52:42] Well, it was Salt.

 

JG: [0:52:45] That was the Salt class. Ah, okay. So we’ll get to that.

 

EE: [0:52:46] We had some very interesting teachers. But I’m going to say that memorizing dates and names are the two most difficult things that you could give me to do, and that’s history. That’s a lot of what history is. It’s certainly a lot of how history was taught. You had to know the dates that someone was president or when the war started and when it ended, and those are not the things that I do well.

 

JG: [0:53:30.21] So what was different about the way Salt engaged with history that you liked?

 

EE: [0:53:35.09] It’s probably because we were experiencing it rather than just reading about it. So, the seeds had been planted for Salt before I got involved in it. A few of my friends went down to Georgia to meet the Foxfire team. I think it was Rabun Gap, Georgia. They did that during the summer in preparation for this class. I got involved probably because of hearing about it from another friend, Jay [York], who had been part of the first engagement and was into photography. So, that was a match. Spelling and writing weren’t a match, but we got over that. I knew Reid. There was other people that knew Reid. My dad had introduced us to Reid because he had grown up in his younger years in that neighborhood where Reid lived and knew him as a kid. I didn’t realize it at the time, but as we got more involved in the magazine, it was more than just interviewing people and learning about what they did; it was the technology of printing. The printing company that we used published the local newspaper, the weekly newspaper York County Coast Star. It was just downtown. They had a large offset printing press, at least for Kennebunk, and did printing jobs, not just for their paper but for other things. Printed our magazine. And Pam’s relationship with a principal, if not the owner of the business, got us into the printing press room. Before the press was set up, we got involved in the camera work; we got involved in the process that transitioned the words to strips of paper with font – the right font on it and then the (paste-up?) work to put that together, the processing of our photographs – our darkroom. Then, at the press, we were in the process – where the process camera is – I don’t know if you’re familiar with that. They had this huge camera. Its film was the physical size of the page or the sections of the page that had pictures in it. Basically, you photographed everything onto film that was the size of what you wanted to print, and then you laid that on a piece of aluminum sheet, which was then exposed with a carbon arc [inaudible] ultraviolet light, very bright light. Eventually, that [inaudible], and then they etched the exposed areas of the aluminum, and that changed the aluminum’s desire to either attract ink or water. And then, in the printing press, the spun around and was wet, and then ink was applied, and the ink would transfer onto the paper. But there wasn’t any – prior to that photo offset process, they used type, which was raised, and that’s how you got the ink onto the paper. This was done that way. So, we were involved in all of those processes. We didn’t do it every time, but we got to be in the darkroom, we shot stuff up, we were there when they made the plates, we were there when the presses were running, we were there when we bound the magazine afterward. For that time, I can’t think of another class that I ever heard of where students actually got that involved in the whole real process. And that was the fun part for me; it wasn’t transcribing the tapes and trying to write something on yellow-lined paper with a pencil that was spelled correctly, [laughter] or edit the stories without a computer. I mean, we had typewriters. That was the technology then.

 

JG: [0:59:39] Obviously, Salt’s evolved a lot and changed a lot in the fifty years since you were there. The technology we use has obviously all changed a great amount. How do you feel about the way Salt’s changed throughout the years?

 

EE: [0:59:57] I’ve read the articles that were produced. I haven’t kept up as well as I should’ve with the more recent products. I think, for me, the articles and everything else are great. I think I did listen to a podcast or two, but it was at a time when I really wasn’t listening to podcasts that much, and I found those interesting.

 

PK: [1:00:35] What were they about?

 

EE: [1:00:35] Oh, it’s been so long, I don’t remember. I guess the biggest difference between Salt then and Salt now was the – I mean, we were much younger, a swarm of people trying to accomplish something that was just – you wouldn’t expect to happen, I guess, at the age group. We went out and reached a – I guess maybe one of the differences is the people that we wrote about were in our community, mostly. So we were more strongly connected to them. You are writing about Portland, and that’s not as strong a connection to me today as it would have been if I was living in Portland. Is that enough?

 

JG: [1:02:02] That’s enough. Do you think Salt has stayed true – what it is now – do you think it’s stayed true to its roots? You can answer honestly because this is about getting the honest truth about Salt. I mean, do you think it’s stayed true to its roots?

 

EE: [1:02:17] Well, it’s so different. I mean, Pam set out to have this be what it turned out to be while it was in the high school, and then was kind of – she was challenged by the control that the school wanted over the program. When a school is selling a product and money is coming in, you want all the money to go through the accountant, and you got to apply your budget and ask for money; the two aren’t linked. She really wanted to run it like we had a little business running a magazine. It was obvious that when we sold magazines, we were going to invest that money in darkroom equipment or new typewriters or whatever is needed – a light table. It was going to be managed that way. I don’t remember the exact thing that pushed her out, but ultimately, it didn’t work for her, and she took Salt outside of the high school environment. That was a big change, and it was attracting a different age group, and as you experience, not necessarily just young college kids, it was people of different ages. They were trying to build boats for a while. So, that was quite different. I would say that wasn’t true – it was a mix of learning crafts beyond documentation studies, I guess. It’s been interesting to see it evolve. It’s been interesting to see it survive, I guess, this long.

 

JG: [1:04:27] Have you been following it throughout these fifty years?

 

EE: [1:04:30] Off and on. So, I’m connected through a good friend, Jay, who was one of the original members. He lives in Portland. He’s in the art community. He went to Maine College of Art. He is tied into what’s happening and whatever. We connect several times a year, and that’s how I’ve stayed connected through the evolution of it. I’ve been to a few events along the way.

 

JG: [1:05:20] You talked about Pamela a little bit. Do you remember what your first impressions of her were when you met her?

 

EE: [1:05:34] She certainly had more energy than a lot of – I mean, I had some teachers that had a lot of energy, but this was a different energy. It wasn’t following the standard path. An English teacher wasn’t much interested in photography or the process of printing something. So that was unique. We had fun with her. Again, a different time. We needed to go on an interview. Nobody had a car. She gave us the keys to her Corvair, and we took her car. I’m not even sure they’d allow you to do that, and you’d probably have to have hundreds of forms and parental sign-offs to be in a car with somebody else that age for [deserving] reasons.

 

JG: [1:06:48] How close of a relationship did you have with her when you were there?

 

EE: [1:06:53] I didn’t stay connected to hardly anyone in high school. Life kind of happened to me, I think, as a kid. More than –

 

JG: [1:07:08] What do you mean by that? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.

 

EE: [1:07:22] You see people who go to school, and they’re motivated to accomplish something. They’re going to get this grade because they’re going to accomplish, they’re going to do this, they’re going to end up being a senator, you know. That was not how I experienced my life. [laughter] I had no idea what I was going to do when I grew up. So, off and on, I think, we connected with Pam. While in school, I don’t remember the occasion, but she hosted dinner at her house, so there would be a big group of people. I distinctly remember that. Not so much for the topics of discussion but for the crazy Siamese cats that she had [laughter], who would run in the room, go right up the curtains, across the curtains, and back down the curtains. And the good food we had.

 

JG: [1:08:39] Was she inspiring to you, would you say?

 

EE: [1:08:40] Certainly. And I had no idea how tough a life she had during a bunch of that. She lost her husband. I don’t remember if it was while I was in school or afterward, but there was a – yeah, this is the part I wasn’t good at in high school. [laughter] Yeah, deep thoughts.

 

JG: [1:09:24] It’s okay. [inaudible] It’s totally okay. So, you worked mostly on photography while you were there? Or you did a bit of writing, too?

 

EE: [1:09:36] So, if I try to characterize what I did, I’m not sure I had the best photographs, but I was in the photography club. I took pictures, I went on interviews, and I worked on articles. That doesn’t mean that the whole book has got me in it because it doesn’t. There was a lot of – I can’t even tell you if I have my name on more than one or two articles. But it was much more than just writing that article or doing that interview.

 

JG: [1:10:25] What was the first piece you made that you were like, “Wow, I really like doing this, or this is really cool?”

 

EE: [1:10:29] Well, it was fun from the very start. The first issue had –

 

JG: [1:10:37] What was the first piece you did?

 

EE: [1:10:39] I’m pretty sure it was Planting [Planting’s Only Half of It] – the first piece was Reid Chapman.

 

I: [1:10:45] Okay. What was that about?

 

EE: [1:10:48] Shit. [laughter] I got to get it right. Planting’s Only Half of It.

 

JG: [1:11:18] You did the writing as well for it?

 

EE: [1:11:19] So, it was a group. Three of us. Jay took some of the photos. Seth [Hanson] took some. You’re not going to be able to just open it – I guess maybe you can, that one. Unfortunately, I don’t have the original. It’s somewhere, but I don’t know where it is, so I didn’t bring the properly cut –

 

JG: [1:11:50] It’s okay, this is great.

 

EE: [1:11:51] But there’s more creative writing in this than all of the creative writing I’ve done since then, [laughter] which says something.

 

JG: [1:12:07] Did you like exercising that muscle?

 

EE: [1:12:09] Like I said, that was hard. I mean, it was a neat subject. I was interested in Reid. Reid was somebody that I had met earlier in my life. I don’t remember how young I was the first time I went there. We’d go there once or twice a year, at least. I helped weed a little bit. We helped put his firewood in. I have an old engine from the blacksmith’s shop that was next door.

 

PK: [1:12:51] You kept an engine? Do you still have it?

 

EE: [1:12:54] So my dad bought it. It’s about a hundred years old now. It powered the – probably a lathe and a drill press in a blacksmith’s shop next door to – it was on his property. I don’t know when it became on his property, whether he bought it or it had always been there.

 

JG: [1:13:25] Were there any pieces either that you were involved with or that were just made while you were there that stand out to you today that you still remember today?

 

EE: [1:13:37] Articles?

 

JG: [1:13:38] Yeah, articles or photographs or really anything.

 

EE: [1:13:41] I mean, there were many things that were interesting. The lobsterman, collecting sea moss. Do you know why you collect sea moss? Do you even know what sea moss looks like? [laughter] They used it to – it was a source of – here, I’m going to not pronounce it right – carrageenan. It’s what makes your toothpaste smooth. I have no idea who or how that was processed, but there were people with rusty pickup trucks that used to go rake the – it’s not the typical – it’s a seaweed, but it’s not necessarily – it’s not kelp; it’s a particular variety.

 

JG: [1:14:46] What kind of skills were you taught at Salt, and how were you taught them?

 

EE: [1:14:53] You’re looking for details that I wouldn’t – do I know? So, we worked as teams, which was something that didn’t happen a lot, probably. The group that wrote that article worked together, interviewing, photographing, transcribing, formulating the article, and then interacting with the chief editor or the editor-in-chief, which was Pam [laughter], to get it into a shape that – she made sure that we did a good job, and that was the job of the editor-in-chief. So, we interacted with that and tweaked the articles. I did that at a time when it was a typewriter and not, like, opening the file up and saving a new version.

 

JG: [1:15:58] How involved would she get with editing, and how much freedom would she give you?

 

EE: [1:16:07] Yeah, poor memories of exactly that interaction. I do remember getting that feedback of how to change it in a way that worked better. Yeah, I don’t have sufficient recollection of that to really kind of tell a story.

 

JG: [1:16:41] How did you find that Planting’s Only Half of It article? Where did the idea come from to make that piece?

 

EE: [1:16:50.07] I think that we sat around – you’d call it brainstorming – trying to think of things or people that we could interview. Of all the people in the community that I had interacted with, Reid was clearly the person who had probably the most story to tell and was the biggest character. Larger than life character.

 

PK: [1:17:31] What was he like?

 

EE: [1:17:32.] He was crippled up. He walked around with two canes, bent over ninety degrees when he was walking around. That doesn’t describe him. But it tells you how much he suffered. He just loved planting and growing things. At that point, he was living alone; I think his wife had died. His daughter lived next door. Describe the character. In the winter, we’d go over there, and we always brought in a bunch of wood because he had a hot-air furnace, but he really lived in two rooms: the kitchen, which had a big cook stove, and what was probably a living room or parlor, which had become his bedroom, I think. And the place was just soot-black inside because the stove was always – when you have the pot lid off, and you had stoked her up, she was coking, putting out some smoke or whatever. The oven door was open because you sat there with your feet in the oven to warm them up after you came in from outside. He just had a way of telling stories that it was just obvious that he was a prime candidate for what we were trying to do. And it turned out we were right because he was interviewed many times and got some pretty good lines out of him.

 

JG: [1:19:53] How did you know him?

 

EE: [1:19:57] My dad grew up in the neighborhood where he lived when my dad was a kid and had stayed connected. His family moved to another part of town – my dad’s family had moved to another part of town, probably when he was twelve or thirteen, somewhere in that age, I think. But still stayed – my father was twelve or thirteen, but he still stayed connected with Reid. And Reid would have been a generation older, I think, than my father.

 

JG: [1:20:37] Was Kennebunk the type of place that everyone knew each other?

 

EE: [1:20:43] Well, it was easier to know everyone when the population was under a thousand people. I think people knew more – it was still big enough that not everybody knew everybody, but a lot of people knew my dad because he worked at the jewelry store downtown, and everyone needed their watch fixed because that’s what you did. But I don’t know that everybody knew Reid unless you bought vegetables from him.

 

JG: [1:21:18] Was there anything you didn’t like about Salt when you were there?

 

EE: [1:21:28] Having to spell. [laughter] Having to get the spelling right and knowing that – when we go look at the archives now, we’ll know how well we did. I think I was good at letting somebody else do that. No, I think it was very successful at what it set out to do. I don’t know to what extent it has become a model for a more hands-on experience, but there are certainly a lot of schools that do that kind of thing now, and I think it was quite successful at that. It may have taught us more about things that weren’t English than somebody designing an English curriculum would want, but I think in the end, we learned a lot.

 

JG: [1:22:36] What do you think are some of the biggest lessons you took away from your time at Salt?

 

EE: [1:22:50] Who knows? Maybe it’s just the ability to go knock on somebody’s door and talk to them. Yeah, I have no idea.

 

JG: [1:23:07] As someone who you said was shy as a kid, do you think it helped you kind of break out of that box?

 

EE: [1:23:13] Oh, I’m not sure I broke out yet. [laughter] Yeah. It certainly was one of a handful of moments in high school that you could ask me about, and I could tell you a story. There are certainly a lot of them that I don’t think about, or I got the grade and moved on.

 

JG: [1:23:45] Do you have any memorable favorite stories from when you were there?

 

EE: [1:23:50] In Salt?

 

JG: [1:23:50] Yeah.

 

EE: [1:23:53] One you can’t publish. That day that she gave us the – so, this is more – this belongs in the story about Pam, and her daughter wrote it and she didn’t know it. She didn’t know about the story. That day that Pam handed us the keys to the Corvair, we went and did the interview, and then on the way back, we stopped and picked up litter on the side of the road, specifically beer bottles and liquor bottles, and filled the backseat, the floor up to the seat level with all of these beer bottles. Brought it back and parked it in the parking lot at school as a joke – and she wasn’t happy with us.

 

JG: [1:24:50] On Pam?

 

EE: [1:24:51] On Pam, yeah. [laughter] I mean, you think about it: You send some kids out in your car during school hours, and they come back with a car full of empties.

 

PK: [1:25:02] That’s why you sign paperwork.

 

EE: [1:25:03] [laughter] That’s why we sign paperwork now, exactly.

 

JG: [1:25:10] How was her reaction? What did she do?

 

EE: [1:25:12] She didn’t yell at us or anything, but she gave us some sort of look, I’m sure, that meant we weren’t supposed to do it again. And chuckled probably a little bit amongst it. She could see the humor in it.

 

PK: [1:25:31] It didn’t lead to a loss of car privileges, though?

 

EE: [1:25:34] No. I can’t remember exactly where we went, but this is another piece of the history of Salt. So, part of how did Salt – Salt became a thing because somehow Pam heard about the effort that was done for Foxfire, right? Some of the people from Kennebunk went down to learn from their experience, bring it back, and adapt it to what became Salt magazine. Something similar happened. We went to a place up in Maine, and I can’t remember the exact – I don’t know if it was – it was somewhere in the country – Windsor, Palmyra, Whitefield, somewhere in that direction, I think – and spent a couple of days there, talking about Salt with their students. We went on some interviews with them. I honestly don’t remember the exact mechanism [or] whether they were already writing articles. I don’t think we ever published an article based on that, so I think it was for them. I never followed what they did. But that was an interesting – the teacher lived about a mile in.

 

PK: [1:27:31] Were they at [inaudible]?

 

EE: [1:27:36] No, so that was in Georgia. That was in Georgia. This was up in Maine, [where] we were going. It was this huge school district that encompassed a dozen towns, and all the kids had a forty-minute ride to school. Big area, small population, rural area. The teacher lived in a house with no electricity that sat in the middle of a property that was a mile drive in to get to it in the middle of this big field. They had old World War II walkie-talkies, or maybe they were Vietnam era – I don’t know – that didn’t work really well. I think they snowmobiled in and out. I think you parked near the road and snowmobiled in and out because it wasn’t worth plowing. They had oil lamps, the Aladdin ones that glow more like a Coleman lantern; only it burned kerosene. But it vaporized the kerosene like a hand pump in the kitchen sink. We had a big spaghetti dinner there as part of our visit. Big gathering with teachers. It was kind of fun. I’ll leave out the part about the hard cider, [laughter] which was something that you could do back then. The beauty of this is I went looking in some boxes for stuff when you were coming. So these would have been pictures that I took, I think because I have them printed out. I think that was the teacher. I’m really confused about that. I don’t know exactly whether that is the context of where – my memories suck at this. But I know this had to be – I remember us going to a blacksmith’s shop and the guy making some stuff up. It was hinges or something.

 

PK: [1:30:22] Which one was the teacher?

 

EE: [1:30:24] I think that was the teacher. Jay would remember, but I don’t. But anyway. So, I mean, that was another – what class did you go to where you were asked to consult with another school on how you were learning? We got more of a package deal with Salt than we did with any other class.

 

JG: [1:30:55] Last question, and then I think we have to go. So, you seemed to have followed a very scientific career path after high school or a more technical career path after high school, which is different from Salt, but do you think there are ways that Salt influenced the way you think or influenced your career in any way?

 

EE: [1:31:23] I guess maybe not in obvious ways. I mean, certainly, I’ve done writing since then, more technical writing. I enjoy my camera and take lots of pictures. In my effort at the Trolley Museum, I think I probably draw on that interest in history and trying to tell that story through a variety of media, be it photographs, computer-generated, written, or even video, which we didn’t do back then.

 

PK: [1:32:18] I think for me, when I hear you tell your story, I think of how much you enjoyed the hands-on experiences that Salt had and your time afterward, as well as being a part of a team. I think you had a lot of those already before Salt too, it seems like. In future jobs, you’ve also continued to maybe be a part of a team and doing things with your hands. Is that fair?

 

EE: [1:32:45] Well, you get more done with a team than you do by yourself. And certainly, I’m a hands-on – I work on my car still. I’ve learned a lot of swear words working on the car, but at the same time, I enjoy, after it’s done, the accomplishments of doing things with your hands.

 

JG: [1:33:09] Are we done? We got to go?

 

PK: [1:33:11] Does that sound good with you? You said you wanted to stick around if [inaudible].

 

EE: [1:33:15] So, if you want to fill in a hole [inaudible]

 

JG: [1:33:16] I think I’m out of battery,

 

PK: [1:33:17] Oh, you don’t have any more battery?

 

JG: [1:33:19] No, my computer ran out of batteries. All my questions [inaudible], but I can find them on my phone …

[END OF INTERVIEW]