Echoes magazine has a new face

    From running rapids on the St. John River to growing up in a New Brunswick village, from founding a dairy in Houlton to becoming a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand, from teaching in a one-room school to trying cows as an avocation, the winter edition of Echoes magazine covers a lot of territory and experience. Released this month, Issue No. 91 contains stories that span Aroostook County and reach beyond.
    Editors wanted to use a painting by William Lloyd Duncan of Madawaska Lake for the cover, but it didn’t fit into the frame that has become Echoes’ trademark. So they liquidated the frame and liberated the art. A wrap-around oil pastel of Stockholm, Maine, at Christmas fills both back and front covers. Duncan’s work also appears in the magazine’s center spread featuring a painting on a digital print of Annie Lindsten’s Camp at Madawaska Lake.
    Essayists in the current issue include Edith Greiner of Fort Fairfield, who was inspired by her striking inside front cover photograph of 12 horses to write an essay about “Hallelujah Moments” in her life. Glenna Johnson Smith of Presque Isle reflects on the life she has enjoyed since she retired 20 years ago in an essay titled “Re-tire” for her regular “Old County Woman” column. Lucy Leaf of Surry details how she lived a year and more on $5,000 in her column “From the Cabin.” And Editor Kathryn Olmstead celebrates the success of the Maine Winter Sports Center efforts to raise funds for the 2011 Biathlon World Cup Championships in 2011 in her column “First Person Plural.”
    The idea for a story about growing up in New Brunswick was kindled over lunch in Houlton’s Elm Tree Diner when Madelyn Crawford reflected on her childhood in Temperance Vale. Houlton native Barbara McGillicuddy Bolton of Brooklyn, N.Y., was fascinated and recorded the story of the woman who influenced generations of children and adults as director of social activities at the Houlton Recreation Department.
    Another Houlton native, Michael Clark, traces the history of the dairy founded by his father in 1938. Alan Clark wanted to start a dairy in his hometown, and 72 years later Houlton Farms remains one of few Maine dairies owned and operated by Maine families.
    On the northern border, John Robertson relives an adventure on the St. John River in 1986 that his canoeing partner describes as more scary than landing on the beach at Normandy when he was in World War II. Robertson and Rex McBreairty will never forget running the Big Black Rapids in a Gallupe canoe just after ice-out.
    The story of a frontier school teacher, revealed on the pages of her diaries, concludes in this issue of Echoes with Part III of “Sunshine and Shadow” by Pamela Snow Sweetser. In this segment, Addie O’Brien marries Charles Richardson, who had been one of her students when she began teaching at age 19 and he was 20.   
    In another continuing story, Roger Parent describes the key year in his path to Thailand as a Peace Corps Volunteer, the year when his acceptance into President Kennedy’s volunteer team came just ahead of his induction into the U.S. Army.
    Pat Stanley-Beals of South Paris tells a life story of her experiment with cows as an avocation – a temporary adventure that took too much time away from her work as a master electrician.
    Echoes 91 also contains a sprinkling of poems and a review of “Stones into Schools” by Greg Mortenson, the sequel to his best-selling book “Three Cups of Tea”, about the dramatic effect of new schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
    Published quarterly in Caribou and printed in Presque Isle by Print Works, Echoes is dedicated to rediscovering community and living simply with deep respect for nature. www.echoesof maine.com.