Transcription of Best of 2015
Lisa: It’s interesting to me that I can know somebody’s name and then years and years later, end up meeting this person and this individual that I’m talking to, Scott Nash, is that person. Scott Nash is an illustrator, graphic designer, and chair of the illustration department at the Maine College of Art. He’s also the owner of NASHBOX Studios and he’s someone that I’ve known about … I don’t know, it’s probably got to be fifteen years or so.
Scott: That’s the way it goes.
Lisa: And it’s the way it goes and here you are today and I get to talk to you. I feel really fortunate that you’ve been able to come in today.
Scott: It’s nice to be here.
Lisa: Scott, you are doing something that I think a lot of people have the opportunity to enjoy which is illustration and also the book that you’ve written, The High-Skies Adventures of Blue Jay the Pirate.
Scott: I’m really into short titles.
Lisa: Yes, I can see that. Yet it’s something that I don’t think people know that much about. They don’t necessarily know why one becomes an illustrator, they don’t know how one becomes an illustrator and how one could be an illustrator who works on national shows and with national organizations and live on Peaks Island the way that you do. I’m fascinated about how you got to be where you are.
Scott: Let’s change that. We’ll let people know exactly how to become an illustrator in Portland. Let me give you a little history. I moved here about 20 years ago, I had run a design studio down in Boston and it got a little bit overwhelming for me. I suddenly found myself managing a staff of 80 people and I really define myself as a creative person and what’s important to me is to make things. Basically, long story short I started traveling around, looking for places and had good friends that were here in Maine and found it to be not only a vital creative community, but a very welcoming creative community. It’s not the least bit stodgy. We got to know people that have become in the first few, couple of years of being here that are still fast friends for us and we felt very connected to this place.
It seemed like a place where I could have the best of both worlds. I could have the quiet time that’s needed to write and create and also find a place where I could really engage and connect with a wealth of creative talent in Portland, up the coast, throughout the entire state. As a matter of fact, I refer to Maine as being a state of hidden treasures. They’re constantly revealing themselves to us and while I find that really intriguing, I also want to find a way to have them be a little bit less hidden and that’s why I’m very appreciative of being here today to talk about illustration.
Lisa: The funny thing is on the intro I almost said you can’t turn over a rock without finding an artist but I thought people might think that was really negative but I think that what you’re saying is the same thing.
Scott: You do have to turn over rocks to find creative people here because sometimes we’re hiding. We’ve come from another place and we’re thinking that we want that seclusion and actually one of the questions on the survey here that was asked was, “What would I do if I could do it all over again?” If I could go ten years back. It would be to engage more quickly. Really connect with people right from the get-go. I sequestered myself for a while but now I’ve flourished and as we talk, you’ll see that I’ve really dedicated to engaging with the community, both here in Portland and throughout the state of Maine.
Lisa: That is an interesting thing that I think we’ve talked with other artists about, there is the need to sequester and the need to have solitude and the need to create but then also the very real need to connect and in your case the need to interact and to teach and to mentor and to be a fabric in the creative community.
Scott: One of the things that I do in my teaching is I teach my students discipline and the discipline is actually a good thing and the way … I am finding this is more and more true of creative people is that we have to find a way to compartmentalize our lives so I have, depending on how you count it, three jobs that I do. Three passions. In the morning I get up on a good day, make a cup of coffee, shuffle across our deck which we call our commute, my wife and I call our commute to my studio where I write for most of the morning. Then in the afternoon, come into the studio at NASHBOX or I head into Maine College of Art to work with the students. Then I trundle back to Peaks Island, take a boat back to Peaks and spend ridiculous amount of hours at night illustrating and it seems to be a terrific time to create what I call ridiculous ideas and I’ll also embrace the idea of creating ridiculous ideas. It’s the main impetus and main catalyst for a lot of stuff, especially in kids’ media. I think it’s important for creative people and just people in general, our lives are pretty frenetic, to find ways to give yourself time throughout the day to do specific tasks and it’s worked for me and I think it works pretty well for my students as well.
Lisa: I was reading The High-Skies Adventures of Blue Jay the Pirate last night.
Scott: Thank you.
Lisa: I know you’re working on the next book.
Scott: I am.
Lisa: Which I don’t … When will that come out?
Scott: It’s called The Earthly Exploits and that is the question, especially on Peaks Island where the kids come up to me and ask me if I’m on the boat, why I’m not back home writing the sequel to this. In fact, it’s a longer process, I stepped into something that’s far more epic than I had anticipated. I have to say I’m fairly surprised that I’ve actually written a fantasy, something that could be categorized as a fantasy adventure. Now I’m pretty much through the second version of the second edition of Blue Jay the Pirate and I have a third one in mind as well. There’s going to be three in this series.
Lisa: We don’t know when the next one will come out but you’re working on it.
Scott: I am. Right, I was just evading the question. It has to be finished, I have to really finish this up in the next couple of months. I’m well on the way.
Lisa: The thing that I like about this book, it is very rich in illustration and that to me is wonderful because it reminds me of the books that I read when I was younger where there was a whole world that was created and created using illustration. I think one of your earlier illustrations is of the boat that they are on and they’re lifting … I believe it’s the egg and you label the various parts of the boat. This was one of the things that I so enjoyed when I was growing up was that there would be this world and an illustrator, an author-illustrator, would take the time to actually configure the entire world and label it and it makes it so rich and layered.
Scott: You’re speaking to what I see as one of the primary virtues of an illustrated book. I just recently read a book, What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund who was suggesting that actually novels should not be illustrated, that with a writer, what we should be doing is engaging in a collaborative process where we are imagining what basically the general ideas that are laid out by the author. That’s fine if you have a frame of reference, if you’re an adult, if you have some life experience, but for kids it’s really useful to have an illustrated world, especially if it’s a fantasy realm. I’m sure that as an adult you could imagine what pirate birds would look like but I’m guessing most people can’t. I think having illustrated books helps to provide a context, especially to kids, for what this world is about.
I used to love going through … I mentioned Treasure Island earlier, I used to love those books. Those are the books that I grew up with and one of the things I especially appreciate about them is that the reading, the illustrations were sort of a reward, not that the reading wasn’t pleasurable, but it’s a reward to the reading, or it enhanced the reading in very specific ways. These are discussions that we have all the time at Maine College of Art. It’s one of the things that I really enjoy about working on this program. We’re all really passionate about narrative, about thinking about narrative, thinking about plot, thinking about character design. Not only through the writing realm, but in illustration as well and drawing and as a matter of fact, I teach an iterative or progressive sort of process where the students will use drawing as an inspiration for writing and writing as an inspiration for drawing. It really makes the whole world a little bit more real and tangible, especially when you’re working again within a fantasy realm or with subjects like …
I’ve worked on books like Flat Stanley about a little boy who’s flat and an eighth of an inch thick and I would contend that that has to be illustrated because the thought, the realistic thought of a kid being flattened to an eighth of an inch thick is not a pleasant one. I actually do want to control that and make sure that he looks like a gingerbread boy as opposed to something else.
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Lisa: For the past three years, Maine Magazine has put together a list of 50 Mainers who are really visionaries for our state. Dan Crewe is one of these 50 Mainers. Of course, he probably belonged on the first list but I’m fortunate because he’s on this year’s list and I get to speak with him this year and this happens to be our 200th show which is a very big deal for us. Thanks so much for coming in, Dan.
Dan: Oh, I’m very happy to.
Lisa: Let me give a little background about you for those who … I’m sure almost everybody who’s listening has heard of Dan Crewe or read the magazine but I’ll give your background because it’s important. You’ve done a lot. This is Dan Crewe, he’s a supporter of the arts in Maine, he is currently the president of the Bob Crewe Foundation named for his late brother. The foundation is intended to help aspiring musicians and artists find fulfilling careers and to support the LGBT community. The Bob Crewe foundation recently gave $3 million to the Maine College of Art to create the Bob Crewe Program for music and art. Dan Crewe is currently overseeing the creation and construction of the program. This is just what you’ve been doing recently.
Dan: Fill in my spare time.
Lisa: Just in your spare time. Your house was actually featured on Maine Home and Design not so long ago.
Dan: That’s correct.
Lisa: You put a lot of effort into that house. Tell me about why Maine? Why did you decide to come here? Why was it important?
Dan: Back in 1990, I had completed the sale of a music publishing company with my brother and that gave me tremendous flexibility to pretty much do what I wanted to do and do the following summer, we wound up summering up on North Haven and by the month and a half after I was up there, I came back from my bike ride and I announced to my wife, I said, “I’m not going back.” I have to understand it was sort of an internal epiphany but I had not thought what does that actually mean? It wasn’t like we were going to live on North Haven or what have you but I wasn’t going back to what we had and that precipitated a lot of action.
By September, we moved into a house up on the Western Prom and my kids never left… Went from the island right to school in Portland. The rest evolved from that. Part and parcel of that is I also had to let Bob Ludwig was a very close friend of mine and someone whom I had been advising for many years, let him know that we were not going to be building a studio in New York City which had been what we had been talking about for some time and he was … His reaction was, I thought he was having a heart attack but his reaction was, “Oh my god. Do you think we could do it in Maine?” Because he and Gail, his wife, had this personal hope that one day they could move to Maine because his father and mother already lived here. They had retired up here.
In the process, it took me about six months to do a business plan, and I came up with the idea that it would work. It may not be as big as it would be in New York City but I really knew it could succeed and as it turned out, after we did it, it turned out to be bigger than even New York. It was huge and is to this day, a huge success.
Lisa: You’re talking about the Gateway Studios.
Dan: Yes, that’s right.
Lisa: We did have the opportunity to interview Bob and actually his wife Gail was in the studio with us and it seems like they were able to … You were all collectively able to bring some pretty big names to Maine.
Dan: They still do. It is probably one of the best mastering studios in the world. At the time, early on because in ’91, we officially opened in ’93, but we actually opened November of ’92 with our first couple of artists but by the second or third year of our operation, we exceeded our ten year goal. It’s a raving success.
Lisa: Where are you originally from?
Dan: I lived in New York but had moved to Connecticut. I was at that moment living in Weston, Connecticut with my wife and my two young girls. Bob was in New York City. It was quite a transition for both of us, really.
Lisa: Why music? What was it about music that got you into the music publishing business and has kept you interested all this time?
Dan: I always tell this little quote joke. People ask me all the time how to get into the music business and I say, “My experience is this. You go to the Naval Academy, you graduate from the Naval Academy, you serve and become an officer in the service, and you get out and go to work for Bell Laboratories and then your brother comes and asks to have lunch with you one day and says, “Would you think about coming into the music business with me?” What had happened is the Four Seasons started to break wide open, my brother didn’t know what to do, and he came to me to help and I joined him and the rest is all history. I’ve been in the music business since 1961.”
Lisa: You were able to work for quite a long time, in fact up until his death with your brother in a very close capacity.
Dan: My brother had a series of physical problems that developed but in the last three years, four years, it became very serious and I had to bring him to Maine and put him into a nursing home. Up until then, we had been in business and I had always been in the role of fireman might be the word. We had built, in the 60s, he and I had built a hugely successful production and publishing company. We had a lot of #1 records, top 10 records and part of which is the history that has been shown on Broadway with the show Jersey Boys which is basically the story of one of our groups called the Four Seasons.
The interesting part of that is when we were doing all of those records, when we were doing the Four Seasons and Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels and Lesley Gore and all of those artists that were ours that we produced and released records by, we had this attitude that this is just music for this week and are we on the charts this week and what role are we on the charts? How many sales have we had? No one would have thought that records and music that we were creating in 1961 through 1966 or 67 would find itself on Broadway in the 2000s and be quite honestly, one of the biggest financial hits in the history of Broadway. It’s still running on Broadway, it’s in its ninth year on Broadway. It’s in London, it’s in Las Vegas, it’s got a road company, it’s had companies in Australia and Canada and South Africa.
Quite honestly, you can’t conceive of that. You can’t look forward and say, “This is what’s going to happen with our lives.” It altered a lot of the things that we could do and as a result of Jersey Boys, one of the great benefits is the Bob Crewe Foundation because what do you do with all this success? Basically Bob and I decided is to pay it forward and so hence we formed the foundation and of course, at the time my brother was still reasonably well but then he had this very tragic fall. The next day we were supposed to go and celebrate the fifth year of Jersey Boys in New York and he fell down a flight of stairs and pretty much permanently damaged his brain and so that set this whole cycle for the next three years or so for him, downward spiral. It was a very tragic episode for all of us but sad because he can’t enjoy what we’re now able to do. It’s tough.
Lisa: You’ve had a lot of tough things actually.
Dan: Yeah.
Lisa: Your daughter Jessie died nineteen years ago and we had her mother who is now Sidney on the show. He was telling us about how this impacted his music because he went through a gender reassignment surgery.
Dan: Oh yeah.
Lisa: You’ve had a lot of things.
Dan: Jessie’s death was the most significant event in both of our lives. Certainly it still profoundly affects everything I do and think about. There isn’t a day that I don’t think about Jessie. So much of my motivation is about the concept, that this is a concept that I have in that she hasn’t been able to live her life out and I’m living out her life for her, doing the things that I really am convinced she would have done. She had this belief, she had righteous indignation. She was going to correct so many things and she did. She had a major impact on her classmates who talk about her and still talk about her. Jessie was a phenomenon, she was a phenomenon, but I do mean this when I say that at one point when I really didn’t know I would be able to go on because of the grief, it was that realization that I had to make a difference that I had in her name do something to make a difference and that’s what I’ve been doing.
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Lisa: It isn’t often that I have the opportunity to interview a set of brothers, a set of sisters, a set of siblings of any sort on the radio show and today, I have that privilege. Today, I have with me Lou and Paul Ureneck. Lou is a former Nieman fellow and editor in residence at Harvard University. He is a professor of journalism at Boston University now. He was deputy managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and editor of the Portland Press Herald. His writing has appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, Boston Globe and Field & Stream. A former Fulbright fellow, Ureneck is the author of Backcast, which won the National Outdoor Book Award for literary merit and Cabin: Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine. His latest book is The Great Fire: One American’s Mission to Rescue Victims of the 20th Century’s First Genocide.
Lou’s brother Paul moved to Maine in the 1970s when he was asked to help build a post and beam home on land that Lou bought in New Gloucester. The home took three years worth of Sunday work to build. After that, Paul got involved in construction and eventually moved into a construction management position at the Boulos Company where has been part of many notable projects such as Pineland redevelopment, the Winslow Homer home restoration for the Portland Museum of Art, Allagash Brewery’s evolving development and expansion, Backyard Farms research and development center in Madison, and the current Thompson’s Point redevelopment. Thank you so much for coming in.
Lou: Thank you for having us.
Paul: Great to be here, thank you.
Lisa: These were smaller versions of much more work that you both have done. I could’ve actually spent the entire show just talking about the stuff that you each have done for the Portland area and the world at large, I guess let’s just say. We’re very privileged to have you here today.
Lou: Thank you.
Lisa: I really enjoyed reading the book Cabin and in no small part it was because of the brother aspect of all of this. Now Lou, you were going through some significant transitions in your life when you decided to build this cabin and it was an interesting and sometimes difficult book to read from that standpoint. Talk to me a little bit about what was happening in your life.
Lou: I undertook the cabin project really as a healing project. As you say transitions, I had lost a job, I had some years earlier gone through a divorce and was still reverberating in my life and our mother had died some years earlier so there was a lot of tumult and turmoil in my life so I was looking for something that I could take on that would engage the better part of me, something positive to do and I had always loved the outdoors, it’s part of what brought me to Maine many years ago and has been an important part of my life so I played with several different ideas about traveling to somewhere or doing something else and I decided the thing I really wanted to do was build a cabin. It was a fantasy in a way, really, and I’m not really capable of building a cabin by myself so fortunately, I have a brother who is.
I had this idea, this dream, and I loved that part of Maine, Western Maine, so I bought the land, Paul and I went up together and looked at it and Paul concluded that it was a good place to put a cabin. I got a good deal on it and we started building later that year. It would’ve been 2008. That’s how it began.
Lisa: It’s interesting to me Paul because you didn’t start the book, in the story, you didn’t start as having been going through transitions yourself necessarily but by the end of the book, you were going through your own set of transitions.
Paul: Correct, correct.
Lisa: This seemed like an important thing for you both to be doing at this period of time.
Paul: I guess life is really just a series of transitions when you look at it. The cabin was a project where the two of us could be together, could work together, we could bring other family members involved, mainly my children who all live locally and they all love working with their hands, et cetera. What do you do when you have transition in your life? You know, I think you revert back to family and to those things that are anchors in your life and you bring them together and those are your rudder.
Lou: Absolutely and it was a great salve, solace to me to be with Paul through this and his sons who would come out and lend a hand. One of the boys in particular, Kevin, turned out to be hugely important to the project. He worked with me on the frame of the cabin through the winter. Absolutely insane that we were building this thing through the winter but that’s the way it happened and I was too eager to delay despite Paul’s advice. We went ahead, we began the project in November, can you believe that?
We were putting up the frame in the winter in the teeth of a Maine winter, it’s snowing, each weekend I’d go back up there with Kevin and Paul and we’d have another six or twelve inches of snow on the deck and we’d have to shovel it off and broom off the beams and so forth and get to work, but actually it turned out to be a lot of fun. Winter is a great time to be outdoors, the air is crisp and clear, the sky was blue and we’d build a fire, we’d cook some lunch, hot dogs or whatever. Even though it was a little nutty, it turned out to be a lot of fun and it sure was a great joy, comfort to me to be with Paul and Kevin and his other son Paulie and occasionally Andrew, a third son, a very capable young man would come along. We were having sort of our own work party.
Paul: I had teased Lou during that part of the project because concurrent with us building it, he was also writing a blog for the New York Times on the building of the cabin and I had said to him, “This is the first time a schedule of a construction project for me has been driven by the need for you to write something to get into your weekly blog.”
Lou: Exactly.
Paul: That is what’s kept us on schedule is needing to keep the blog updated for the Times.
Lou: That’s right, we were dealing with the cabin and we were also dealing with my need to file two or three times to the New York Times. I described the ascent of the cabin for the New York Times over the course of the year and that turned out to be fun too and we had pictures of all of this as part of that but you’re right, that was pretty funny. People all over the world actually, I had forgotten about that. People all over the world were experiencing this cabin going up and it was not without disasters. We screwed things up, things fell down, at one point I hadn’t sufficiently I guess braced the roof trusses and it’s a very windy place, we’re up on a hill and the roof trusses blew down. It was a complete disaster. I just wanted to walk away from the whole project when I saw that one spring day, spring of 2009 I guess.
Paul and Kevin, you guys, I was amazed. You guys went … It was like, “Hey, this is great. We can solve this problem.” I was ready to shoot myself and Paul and Kevin went to work and they untangled the rafters and pushed the walls back together and found a way to swing these very heavy trusses back up into position. Even that worked out but we shared that with the world via the New York Times, the catastrophe of the rafters.
Lisa: I would think that is something that’s not that foreign to you Paul, having something happen during construction that wasn’t what you expected and just having to deal with that.
Paul: That’s what construction is, and I’ve been involved in very, very simple projects to very complex, multimillion dollar projects and I don’t care what team of professionals you have, how much planning you do, there is something that’s going to go wrong. That’s just the way construction is. You try to limit those things as much as possible but in construction, they don’t call them problems, they call them opportunities.
Lou: We had a lot of opportunities, that’s for sure.
Paul: You figure it out but it’s good to get out from behind a computer, get out of the office and those things that you know, to use your hands and use your brains to solve something physically and hopefully physically with using your brain and not your back to correct the problem. It’s fun and it’s teamwork, it’s a collaborative thing and Lou is mentioning my son Kevin, he puts a tremendous amount of thought, he’ll look at a problem for five minutes and not say a word and then he’ll approach the solution to it. There’s some good interaction that goes on between, not everybody agrees on the best way to solve a problem but you work it out and say, “Okay. Let’s do this.”
Lou: Kevin has something that Paul has the same quality, I completely lack it and that’s this ability to understand space relationships. Some people can look at a box and turn it in their mind and say, “What would that look like if it were turned sideways?” Or unfold the box in their … It turns out that that is a good quality to have if you’re building something because you have to think, “Well, how would I fit that into that and so forth?” I don’t have it. Kevin in particular, he was great. He saved us a lot of time and effort by thinking these things through, turning the box in his mind as we build things. You’re right, there was disagreement along the way and we worked it out.
When I started the cabin, I had a pretty firm idea of how I wanted the interior space. I was going to have a writing room, which was a ridiculous idea, another fantasy, as if I were going to go up there and sit in a room inside a cabin and write, but anyway, this was part of the fantasy and my nephew Paulie, Paul’s son, said, “Uncle Louie, no way. This cabin has to be wide open. It has to be open space, it’s a family space. We’re all going to be together, nobody gets behind the door to write a book.” I said, “Paulie, I’m not sure. I think I could use a place where I could …” No, no, he insisted. He started citing cabins that we had been in in the past. There was a cabin in particular in Aroostook County, we used to take the boys to southern Aroostook County for three or four days every fall around Thanksgiving for a deer hunting trip. Nobody ever shot a deer I think but in any event, we used to stay in this cabin and Paulie was describing that cabin and so he made the argument and he was right.
The interior space of the cabin is fully open, it’s communal, family space. There are bunk beds against the back wall, if you’re sitting in the eating area you can see the bunk beds and if somebody’s playing poker at the table, it’s all wide open. We worked these things through as a group as it went up.
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Lisa: Today we have with us in the studio Kate McAleer who is the founder of Bixby & Co., a chocolate making company that uses organic wholesome ingredients like real fruits, nuts and cocoa. Kate’s chocolate factor is on the water in Rockland and she sells to national and local stores, including Whole Foods, Belfast Co-op, Rosemont Market, Aurora Provisions and Lois’ Natural Marketplace. Kate, what a great job you have.
Kate: It’s very exciting and chocolaty.
Lisa: Chocolaty. I think that’s the best thing is that you get to do things that make people happy. Unless something went wrong with a batch I guess, there’s really nothing that you could do that would present people with any problematic conundrum in their life.
Kate: Hopefully not, no.
Lisa: Hopefully not. I was interested to have you come in and talk to us today because you are in an article written by Sophie Nelson for Maine Magazine called “Maine Kind of Candy: Bixby and Co. Chocolate and Its Clever Creator, Kate McAleer”. She just writes this glowing article about you and your journey so I wanted our listeners to be able to experience that as well. You’re only 27 years old.
Kate: 27, yes.
Lisa: Yeah, that’s pretty young to be in charge of a good-sized company.
Kate: It’s really exciting, how I started this company when I was 23 turning 24 and my mom had always said, “You have a unique opportunity in your twenties to work really hard for yourself, try and launch something and build something, and if it doesn’t work out, you still have your thirties to rebound.” That was a really incredibly powerful thing that she had told me at a pretty young age and had encouraged me to go this completely non-corporate path and learn everything about starting a company and then everything about chocolate from the ground up, literally from scratch. It’s been an incredible learning experience and growing experience for myself and that was the point in a way that it was about taking just a giant leap and risk and work really hard and learn a lot about myself and about business and food and it’s been an incredible experience, challenging but exciting and fun and stressful all combined together.
Lisa: I love that idea that your twenties are this very … They’re a time that you can experiment and you can take risks and you can work hard and you have the energy to work hard but also it’s not like anything’s lost if you take a risk and it doesn’t pan out.
Kate: Right, and you don’t have as many commitments as people further down the road. One of these business classes I was in, one of these men asked a question, he was saying, “I’m in my mid forties, is it too late for me to become an entrepreneur?” That was a really interesting question to me. I’m not saying that you can’t be an entrepreneur at any age but there’s a particular time in my life right now where I’m not really committed to anything but Bixby & Co. So I can put 150% of all of my time and energy at 1 A.M. in the morning, I can be researching freight companies because I’m slightly sleep-deprived and obsessed with finding economic freight out of Maine which I think is unique to my own characteristic but also probably my age.
Lisa: You have a connection to Maine that is lifelong.
Kate: Yes.
Lisa: Although you’ve lived here for just the past two years.
Kate: Full-time, right, as a Mainer for the past two years.
Lisa: Tell me about what was that initial connection? Why did you start coming here?
Kate: Sure, so my mom’s family has roots in the Spruce Head-Rockland area and my parents had bought a second home in the Rockport area before I was really even born. We started coming here for not just the summer periods but for Thanksgivings and winters and year round second home vacation experiences and we’d always loved the foody scene, the beautiful scenery, the Breakwater is one of our favorite family walks with our dog and my parents had retired two years ago when I was starting up this business, they had said, “We want to move to Maine full time. We think you should come with us.” I said, “Okay, that wasn’t maybe necessarily what I was thinking,” but it’s an amazing place to live, amazing place to eat food and then as it turns out, an amazing place to have a business.
The way that the business community has embraced me and helped me grow my business here in Maine has been just fantastic and I think that the opportunities for small businesses and even startup businesses in Maine are huge, unlike other places where I think you would never have the access to the help, resources, networking in a way that you do in Maine and that’s something I think unique to Maine.
Lisa: You had the opportunity pretty early on to share some of your work, we’ll call it, with Cellardoor Winery.
Kate: Yes.
Lisa: That must have been pretty important.
Kate: Absolutely. Cellardoor Winery’s an example of a successful business but also a successful woman-owned business and a role model, quite frankly. When I moved to Maine, I don’t recall specifically but I believe Cellardoor Winery reached out to me before I even reached out to them and they said, “Can you drop us off samples of your product?” I ran over there and did a sampling and they opened up some wine and we were already pairing which bars go with which of their wines and then they invited me to come and do samplings which are incredible experiences at the winery in Lincolnville and so many fascinating people walk through that location in Lincolnville and some of my biggest networking for business opportunities actually occurred at Cellardoor Winery and again, you have to be open to doing these things but then things come together unexpectedly and in an exciting fashion.
Lisa: You originally weren’t going to focus on chocolate. You weren’t going to focus on really food at all, you traveled a lot, you spent time abroad in China and France where there was a candy focus of course, but originally you graduated from New York University with a degree in East Asian studies and minors in art history and French. Then you began graduate work at the New School, studying the history of decorative arts and design. There’s a lot of interesting things.
Kate: I like to call myself a fan of cultural history so be it through objects, art or history-history, and studying abroad … In high school I lived abroad as a high school student in China and in France living with host families, being immersed in those cultures. Those were incredible experiences that had major impacts on who I am and obviously what I’m now doing. For me, I was trying to figure out how to tie together all of these wide-spread interests. What could be this one thing that would tie together? I was pursuing an art history, decorative arts career and then decided to just take a total pivot and some of my friends called it a quarter-life crisis but I think it was just, you start going down something and you realize, “Okay, this is really interesting and it’s intellectually interesting, but it’s not going to be enough to fulfill everything that I’m looking for in terms of a full-time impassioned career effort.”
Thinking about how am I going to wake up every day and want to work incredibly hard at something and tie in so many of my interests, owning your own company was one medium through which you could do that but then in the mode of food, which is such an interesting medium through which so many things can be expressed and then chocolate as a lifelong chocolate lover and then having been exposed to chocolate in France, the French are very opinionated and they have a lot of opinions that Americans don’t know what real chocolate is or they don’t know how to even eat properly and all these stereotypes about Americans. I learned a lot about what it means to eat good food and appreciate good food in France and then translated into eventually the launching of Bixby & Co.
Lisa: You’ve been listening to Love Maine Radio, Show #223, Best Of 2015. Our guests have included Scott Nash, Dan Crewe, Paul and Lou Ureneck, and Kate McAleer. For more information on our guests, and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as Dr. Lisa and see my running travel, food and wellness photos as bountiful1 on Instagram. We’d love to hear from you so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also, let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, I hope that you have enjoyed our Best of 2015 show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day and of 2015. May you have a bountiful life and a happy new year.