In Maine: A Crank for All Seasons

By Melvin Maddocks

One afternoon last April, in the central Maine town of Dover-Foxcroft (pop. 4,000), Charles MacArthur was standing beside the canal lock that feeds water from the Piscataquis River into the hydroelectric plant of Brown's Mill. He heard a strangely squishy, popping sound. "It was sort of like a baseball bat hitting a rotten stump," he recalls. The bulkhead below the 600-kw generator bulged from hydrostatic pressure and quietly let go. MacArthur (who owns the mill) turned, horrified, to see 100 tons of concrete, studded with steel reinforcing rods, tossed lightly into the springtime air as thousands of gallons of water poured back into the river with the agonizing casualness of all spilled energy.

At 50, MacArthur is a peculiar homegrown Yankee product, one of those ingenious cranks who are likely to do the Republic some good--in spite of itself. Hardly had the dam fallen than he was on the phone to Washington, inquiring cheerfully about a low-interest loan. He happened to be (he explained to the voice going uh-huh on the other end) just the American that President Carter always talks about. He was--reverent pause--a small businessman. He also happened to be another of the President's favorite people: an energy-crisis fighter, an advocate and indeed a practitioner of "small is beautiful" technology. Hydroelectric plants of no more capacity than the one at Brown's Mill, he told the now fast-fading uh-huh in Washington, are being built for $6 million. Could a taxpayer in good standing borrow $30,000 to restore a single little bulkhead? Hello? Hello?

After nine phone calls, MacArthur located in the labyrinth of the Department of Energy (DOE) a harassed man with, he swore, 3,999 other dams to worry about. He informed MacArthur that he might have become eligible for a loan by conducting something called a feasibility study, if only the wall had collapsed two months before. Now--too bad--the deadline for feasibility studies had passed.

Nine more days of phone calls and $114 later, MacArthur hung up and announced to all who would listen: "Trying to deal with the Government is like having a hippopotamus for a ballet partner." Finally he went to a local bank for his $30,000 and turned his attention to what he calls, as though the words were engraved in stone, The Project.

As a visitor to Dover-Foxcroft soon sees, in purely material terms the project consists of a complex of five buildings MacArthur bought for $100,000 with a mortgage taken out last July. Dating back to 1867, Brown's Mill stands in all the interesting stages of decay known to brick, mortar and wood. As MacArthur takes you on the conducted tour, picking his way buoyantly through the rubble, he can manage to see Brown's Mill as a stranger sees it--but not for long. For MacArthur, in this cavernous tomb to New England's vanished woolen industry lie the makings of a Utopian community, or at least a working model of the 1980s. Behind the bleak, randomly broken windows he imagines 92,000 sq. ft. of space filled by maybe 60 different cottage industries, all running off the mill's hydroelectric power. An ad listed under business opportunities in the Maine Times reads in part: "Abandon ulcers, all ye who enter here ... serene, supportive, imaginative 'business hatchery' for starting second careers. Heated, lighted spaces $1 a day."

Already MacArthur has found half a dozen converts, a tiny band of practical-minded natives. Paul Atkinson, dry and leather-lean, with a wit to match, is in the process of setting up a cabinet shop. He plans to beat the high cost of lumber and control the quality of his product by sawing and milling his own wood. An old chicken incubator stands by for ingenious use as his kiln.

Almost lost in the corner of one particularly vast floor, a number of tables of plants bask under fluorescent lamps. "The only water-powered African violet farm in the world," MacArthur announces with a mock-grand wave of the hand to introduce the domain of Cliff Shafer. A big, soft-spoken man with kindly "Please grow" eyes, Shafer patiently fights the presence of mildew on his gloxinia and mill cats in his potting soil. In Maine, the greenhouse, which costs about twelve times as much to heat as comparable space in a factory, is a faltering institution. Shafer can easily sell everything he grows at the mill to retail florists and wholesalers in nearby Bangor.

Above and beyond all the other recruits there is Hermie Nutter. Hermie more or less came with the mortgage. On a now rusted water tank, next to patriotic graffiti of World War II (BUY WAR BONDS, REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR). Hermie scratched his name and the date when he first started to work at Brown's Mill -- 1939. Over the years he did just about everything, from repairing spinning frames to caring for the steam turbines. Even after the mill, in its last metamorphosis as a leather tannery, closed down five years ago, Hermie stayed on as maintenance man. Now, on a lower floor crowded with alternative vehicles (from steam cars to electric motorcycles), Hermie's project within The Project is to adapt to battery power a gas-powered vehicle he detests: the snowmobile.

But Hermie's primary function is to keep asking MacArthur: "Are you sure you want to do that?" When MacArthur gets carried away with visions of an electric soil floor capable of growing 25 Ibs. per sq. ft. of the ripest, reddest, most luscious tomatoes, or the old red barn complete with a nature-food restaurant and live music. Hermie clamps down hard on reality and plays down-Maine Sancho Panza to MacArthur's Don Quixote. Then MacArthur will begin to talk about solid things--like the twelve-by-twelve beams in the old red barn, all meticulously mortised--and down-to-earth ideas.

"I'm a mechanical engineer, not a social engineer," he says in his guise as realist. "I was an English major at Bates. The nearest I came to formal science was a minor in geology. That's all right. The Teton Dam and the Hartford Civic Center were both designed by engineers. The state of Maine's made up of tinkerers --they'll tackle anything--and maybe that's what the world needs now."

Other credentials of a hard-nosed variety may then be displayed. MacArthur the successful businessman: founder of Graphics, a company devoted to making sophisticated copies of engineers' blueprints. MacArthur the licensed pilot and balloonist who ten years ago soared over the Arctic Circle in a basket of his own making, Q.E.D., Charlie MacArthur is no starry-eyed idealist. Charlie MacArthur is no nut. And having more or less settled that question, he can relax and go back to all the other things Charlie MacArthur is, including owner of the biggest clubhouse a boy and his gang could ever dream of.

There are just so many things for a creative crank and entrepreneur to do! He has to get cracking, for instance, on marketing his Katahdin Hiker, made from peeled alder, which he pays industrious Dover-Foxcroft youngsters 20-c- a staff for reaping. MacArthur drills a hole for a compass, brands the name on the side and plans to sell each walking stick for $1.95, with a suggested retail price of $3.99. The alternative-vehicle regatta, now in its fifth year, is never far from its sponsor's thoughts. Every June, at MacArthur's urging, riders on two, three or four wheels -- variously powered by electricity, methane, charcoal, chicken fat or even sewer gas -- race 6,288 ft. to the top of Mount Washington, N.H.

It is only when he broods on the wasteful internal combustion engine that MacArthur comes as close as he knows how to discouragement. "We won't get out of the gasoline car till we're driven out with whips," he says. One night, when the Department of Commerce and a couple or three Government agencies had failed to answer MacArthur's latest jeremiads -- in which he likes to point out that there is, in fact, an Electric and Hybrid Vehicle Development Act on the books (and when are the feds going to do more than press release it, hmm?) -- he tapped out a letter to Amy Carter. Since the adults were being so obtuse, why didn't Amy and her chums -- the consciences of the future -- stage an alternative-vehicle regatta on the White House lawn? In due time a postcard made its way to Brown's Mill with a picture of Amy on one side and a message on the other: "Thank you for being my friend, Amy Carter."

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