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 Island, and Frenchboro. Trask used to be an assistant sales manager for Ditto, Inc., in Chicago, pre-photocopier. He was [...]

 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 their car, they’d converse from the porch, they’d just pull in and they’d talk. And he sold boats that [...]

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. She paints there for hours on evenings and weekends. When she retires from her day job, as director of administration for the Bar Harbor Housing [...]

SOUTHWEST HARBOR – At Jarvis Newman’s boat shop, on Main Street in Southwest Harbor, the walls are full of framed photos of old boats. Newman was one of the first fiberglass boatbuilders on the Maine coast, producing hulls for luxury yachts, commercial fishing boats, and Friendship sloops at the rate of one every two weeks [...]

 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.” When Rich was a young kid, he liked nothing better than to hang out with his grandfather, locally renowned boatbuilder Clifton Rich. He borrowed scraps of lumber from [...]

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. “We’re not even a band,” says Mikol, who adds, “We’re free radicals.” Or maybe it’s, “We’re three radicals.” The three are scheduled to perform shortly at the home [...]

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 York Ragtime Orchestra, and a Zen Buddhist disciple. His wife, Tomoko, is a former nurse-midwife, psychologist, and college instructor. She now manages [...]

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, he has become something of a standard-bearer for the art and craft of wooden boatbuilding, through Great Harbor Boatworks, the [...]