Transcription of Roger Berle for the show Island Time #270
Lisa Belisle: Having grown up in Maine, and very close to the island where I now live, Little John Island, I’ve been a long fan of islands, although my island is connected by a bridge and a causeway. The individual that I have here with me today is also a big fan of islands and his island is not connected by any bridge or any causeway. This is Roger Burle, who is a long time resident of Cliff Island. He has been heavily involved in conservation and community nonprofits over the past few decades, including the Maine Island Coalition and the Maine Conservation Voters.
He also managed a construction business on Cliff Island until 2005. He also happens to be a graduate of my alma mater, Bowdoin College. Thanks so much for coming in.
Roger Burle: No, I’m very pleased to be here, Lisa. Thank you for inviting me.
Lisa Belisle: Absolutely. The reason that we became interested in you is, we were actually boating near your island. I believe we saw a boat that belongs to you, which was moored off of the island that you live on. Then, we started to learn more about your boat and we started to learn more about you. You have a very interesting story. You have a long history with Cliff Island.
Roger Burle: I do. It started when I was six months old. Like my dad before me, a January baby, we came here when each of us were six months old. I can still hear … I don’t know when you first start remembering things, but about five years old, I can still remember the bell boy of Hope Island and the seagulls that I first heard when we arrived on the first of August for our month on Cliff Island. It sticks in my mind today. It’s really affected me and infected me, as my life in Massachusetts for eleven months of the year revolved around school and family and that community.
I always felt that my paradise was Cliff Island. I never have gone a year without being on Cliff Island for at least a month. I went to Bowdoin probably because of that attraction. Everything in me, all the molecules in me, led in this direction. After getting a graduate degree in Boston, I decided to spend one last summer on Cliff Island before I went to work in some horrible corporation, and lo and behold, I’m still here. That was about 48 years ago. I have no regrets whatsoever about that.
I have smaller regrets, but boy, the big one, it’s all good. This is a wonderful place to live. I’ve lived through good economic times and really down economic times and all kinds of statewide and citywide and island wide controversies. It’s all been a wonderful challenge to make something of whatever was going on.
Lisa Belisle: Do you know what drew your family to Cliff Island in the first place?
Roger Burle: I do, I easily do. My paternal grandparents were Norwegian. My grandfather was an immigrant in the 1890’s, he and my grandmother moved here. He was a highly educated engineer in Norway, and Norway was a desperately poor country at that time, having no agriculture and not really much industry beyond fishing. This was long before oil was discovered in the North Sea. He and his eight brothers all emigrated to other countries and he emigrated to the US and went to work in New York City.
Eventually became involved with the structural engineering of all the largest buildings in the world, including the Woolworth building and the Chrysler building and numerous others. After a while he was temporarily stationed in Washington DC, to work on the Supreme Court building. While he was down there, the summertime came and as an asthmatic, he was miserable. He asked around, doesn’t anyone know any place I can go that’s more like Norway?
One of the people he talked to happened to summer on Cliff Island. He also turned out to be a business partner shortly on in his life. That was 1904 or so and in 1905 we spent our first few weeks on Cliff Island, my father being just a baby, and so that hit the right note for him and my grandmother. We still own that property that we bought in 1929 and consider ourselves Cliff Islanders ever since.
We were summer people until about 1968 or 69, when I started living on Cliff Island, a very different life than I ever expected to live. You can only really do one thing at a time in the maine and a small “m”, and I say I have no regrets about being here, and I’ll do whatever I can for the state of Maine, for my island, for the environment, that is where I really learned that … much more so than growing up in a somewhat wealthier suburb of Boston, that, in a tiny place like an island, rocks surrounded by water, whatever anyone does is far more measurable than anywhere else. Whatever anyone does something good, or something bad, something doesn’t get done, something should be done, it’s a whole lot easier to get one’s head around it and see what one should really do about it.
Lisa Belisle: When I was doing a story about the Sunbeam, we went up to Isle au Haut and we were talking to some people who live there year round and the joke was that, your neighbor always knew when you went out to the outhouse. Sometimes that was a problem. Then the other side of it is, they always knew when you didn’t come back, so that was a good thing.
Roger Burle: That’s a great story. I’ve heard that one before.
Lisa Belisle: I’m sure it’s very common.
Roger Burle: Not that specific one, but the same idea.
Lisa Belisle: It is something that’s maybe unique in this day and age, that people know their neighbors so well, and the interconnection is so tight. There is an ecology that also happens on the mainland. I think … I’m always struck by when you go to an island, whatever trash you bring out, you have to bring back again with you.
Roger Burle: Indeed, or you get trashed.
Lisa Belisle: Yes.
Roger Burle: One way I put the same concept is that we all get our mail from the same little tiny post office. It’s best to go in and get it, no matter who’s there, because it could bring to the surface something good or something bad that can be addressed or start to be addressed at that moment. Again, there’s no way that everyone is going to love who you are, and in this political environment, I should say that hopefully not everyone is going to dislike or hate you. You’re part of a community, a diverse community. It’s a very diverse community.
The fishermen were someone that my dad always gravitated to, and I used to love it when they would come over. I knew we were summer people. I knew that the fishermen lived a different kind of life. I was fascinated when they would come by and knock down some rum together and talk about what was going on out in the water and on the island. It was romantic to me. I integrated that somehow, and I never thought I’d wanted to come here and be a fishermen.
My father really did. A very educated man and accomplished in many ways, he was in the faculty at MIT and yet, the message I got from him, because he died when I was 17, and at that point in time, of course, father and son aren’t exactly in sync, but I always thought that he wanted to move to Maine and become either a tug boat captain or a fisherman. It never happened. He died. I don’t know how sincere that was, or if it was just his romance, but somehow I took it more seriously.
I’ve done lobstering. I’ve fished. I’ve worked with my hands. One thing we did more on Cliff Island than we did in Massachusetts was to build things together. He was an engineer. I was uneducated in that area. I stopped taking math as soon as I could. I loved to build things and I still love to build things, and that’s why I got into a construction business for 35 years, and now I’m doing the same work for fun. I’m building things for my son and my daughter and my grandson.
I learned all that on Cliff Island. A lot of it from him and a lot of it from working with the Cliff Islanders, one of whom I feel I am sincerely.
Lisa Belisle: You told me that, when you finished your graduate degree or MBA, that your mother was asking, when are you going to get a “real job.” One of the jobs that you took on was becoming a stern man for a lobster boat on Cliff Island.
Roger Burle: Correct. It was a little bit of a harsh reality for me, but I really found myself bending to it. I never had the inclination to become a full time fisherman. I again was really drawn to the community and to learning what needed to be done. From what I heard from other people and from what I discerned myself, building things both physically and in a community sense, organizationally, it just all seemed to fit.
A little later on, maybe eight or ten years, when I was married and my former wife felt constricted on the island with our two little kids, she convinced me to move our family off the island full time. We lived there for a long time as a family full time. We bought a house in Cumberland, and I proceeded to continue to go out to Cliff Island five, six days a week. Always spent two or three nights out there.
I remember her saying that her mother asked her, my mother in law asked her, “Aren’t you worried about him being out there alone without you so many nights and stuff?’ She said, “Yes, actually I am. I think he’ll probably start a whole bunch more nonprofits, and that’s not a good thing.” That was a telling story, and it’s probably been born out.
My mother was an ardent conservationist in her quiet way. My father in his off time from work was a community activist, very involved in the selectmen manager form of government in our town in Massachusetts and was also a fundraiser. When I was 12, 10, I said, “Those are for sure things that I will never do in my life because it just doesn’t look like any kind of fun.” Guess what? I am one of the very few people that I’ve ever met who actually loves to raise money, to do fundraising.
I’ve done it for multiple organizations, still doing it, and will probably be doing it until I’m either told not to do it anymore or can’t do it anymore effectively. The only organizations I will raise money for, or enterprises, are those that I’m totally passionate about. When I finish asking someone for a $1,000 or a $1,000,000, and it’s over and they say yes or no, or maybe some part of that, they’d say, “I got to tell you, your passion is incredible and it’s really going to affect what I decide to give to your request.”
I never thought about myself as a passionate person whatsoever. I’ll take the testimony of others. I will say this, that it’s changed me to a great extent in that I was very introverted growing up, and when I became involved not in my Cliff Island life, but eventually when I became involved with the Waynflete School and I was asked to chair a eight-and-a-half million dollar campaign and I fell right to it, that I found myself becoming an extrovert. I had gained confidence in my ability to get out in the world and do something that really not many other people want to do, and I succeeded at it to a great extent and it changed me.
I’m grateful for that. I don’t know that might have happened eventually, no matter where I went and what I did, but it happened here and I’m grateful for that.
Lisa Belisle: You actually went through a tough time at one point with your actual building company. Didn’t you have your establishment burn to the ground?
Roger Burle: Yes, it did in 1995. It burned to the ground. It was human error, but it doesn’t matter. Once it’s burnt it’s gone. I had been in my business at that time for 25, six years, and it was a moment that caused me to reassess what I really wanted to do. I had been already considering what was next in my life. Running a company of 15 to 20 people and being responsible for them year round, it was weighing on me, I must say. It was a set back, but it probably had as many pluses to negatives, the event.
I’m still planning to rebuild that building 20 years later, 21 years later, much smaller, because I had the dream facility that any person who loved tools and equipment and having a infrastructure within which to be effective would’ve loved to have had. The building was about 80% complete, and I’m paying less taxes because I don’t have that building, but I wish I had it still and I don’t, so that’s life and you got to move on.
I went through a really tough time, and it really was the beginning of winding down my business, but not my activity, in the community. All my customers were friends. All my employees were friends and fellow community members. I spent 10 years trying to create a soft landing for my customers and for my employees and for myself. I was morphing into putting the same sort of energy that I built up on Cliff Island, energized myself with, to work on the mainland. That’s when I became involved at Waynflete and that led to other organizations that asked me to be part of their work.
One of my frustrations, and this is somewhat self-serving, is that I hate … Early on, I hated to be at a poorly run meeting or a badly run meeting. I really went to my first meeting ever as a participant on Cliff Island. If someone … There was an agenda and someone came in and started rambling off in the meeting, just took off in another direction and was just not going anywhere, I found my frustration building up a lot.
When I had a chance to run my first meeting in probably the 1970’s, I was still wet behind the ears to a great extent, a extremely great extent, I took what I had learned from schooling and watching my father, I guess, and my mother, said, “Meetings need to run better.” Somehow I’ve been asked to chair or be president of every organization I’ve been on. I feel I’ve run really good meetings. I’ve been told that a lot.
I’m sure I’ve frustrated a whole lot of people in that, but I’m still doing that. Again, I’m sorry, I’m rambling away. Just cutting to the chase and seeing what needs to be done, is where I keep wanting to go. I hope that gets closer to what you were asking.
Lisa Belisle: It is interesting because what you’re describing, being in meetings with people of different ways of processing information, different educational backgrounds, different economic backgrounds, all of this building that you described, it requires a coming together and a consensus.
Roger Burle: It does, absolutely.
Lisa Belisle: That is not easy, whether you’re on Cliff Island, doing it as an individual within the Cliff Island community, or whether you’re doing it in a larger way with some of these other organizations. I just want to mention that you’ve been on, in addition to the Maine Island’s Coalition and the Maine Conservation Voters, you’ve also been part of Sustainable Cliff Island, the Cliff Island Corporation for Athletic Conservation and Education, Friends of Fort Gorges, Ocean Side Conservation Trust of Casco Bay, Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative, Portland Trails, and also the Portland Land Bank Commission.
You know what you’re talking about when you say, “I have been out there. I’ve been raising money. I’ve been helping build things.” You’ve had a lot of varied experience.
Roger Burle: I have, and it was all from just basically deciding within myself what needs to be done. The fact that enough other people in each of those instances, each of those organizations, were willing to go forward with me, to one extent or another, those were their choices. Those were their basic motives and inclinations. I do believe it goes back to the building metaphor that I was talking about, to an ability I guess I gained, to get motion, to get ‘er done, that’s a Maine saying, get ‘er done.
Something needs to happen, go get it done, get ‘er done. One of things I learned early on, just came back to me this moment, was that the word “they”, which I began to hear, or I’m sure I heard it all my life, young life, but on Cliff Island, there were people who would say, “They ought to do this. They ought to do that.” I said, “Wait a minute, who’s they?” Quickly I went to, “There is no ‘they’, it’s ‘we’. There’s no one else but we.”
I guess I became rather adamant about that. I would get rather verbal about that at times, but then I decided, instead of badgering someone else about having such a passive and victim sort of complex, that I would just try to do something, rather than arguing with them. Let’s just do it and get ‘er done. I think that’s gone through my experience with all those organizations.
I can’t say there have been many difficulties in going through the course of life that I have in my organizational life. Raising money perhaps was the easiest part. Building consensus, as you mentioned a moment ago, I’m not an arm twister at all. I have certainly put pressure on many people in different ways to accomplish what I felt was the consensus need, but the asking of the money was the easy part. The holding people together to move a consensus forward, get an agreement that wasn’t going to splinter the organization….
I think perhaps and again this may sound self-serving, but that I did get seen as someone who could bring the money in, if you will, and many times, most times in a very small way, I say, “Wait a minute. This guy is showing us that there are, that this can get done, and that the money is not so much of an obstacle as we thought. It removes roadblocks in people’s minds, that if I’m seen as a can do person, some people call me a rain maker. I think that’s a crazy description.
If it comes from people who are afraid of trying to raise money or feeling like it’s hopeless if we can’t get the money, and I’m out there … I have failed a great amount of time in asking for money. If people say yes immediately when you ask them for $500 or $5,000 or $50,000, then you know one thing, you didn’t ask them for enough.
I’m a Republican, at least in name, and you mentioned Maine Conservation
Voters. I happen to be president of that organization, and it is what it sounds like. We work with voters and legislators to educate them on conservation and environmental needs for the state of Maine. I think I’m president of this organization because they asked me to be, because I’m Republican. In my discussions with naysayers about Republicans in the state of Maine, I remind them that 40 something years ago, all the good environmental and conservation laws in Maine were passed by Republicans, not Democrats.
One of the contentious discussions that we have at our board meetings and other gatherings is that we’re not a Democrat organization, we’re a Maine organization, we’re environmental organization, and let’s get the party tags removed from this.
Lisa Belisle: It’s been a pleasure to have this conversation with you.
Roger Burle: Thank you, Lisa.
Lisa Belisle: It’s been interesting to hear about the experiences that you’ve had over the past few decades anyway, trying to make things change on Cliff Island, or help be a part of important things on Cliff Island and also around the state of Maine. I hope people will take the time to learn more about the Maine Conservation Voters. We’ve been speaking with Roger Burle, who is a long time resident of Cliff Island, who has been heavily involved in conservation and community nonprofits over the past few decades and also managed a conser … Sorry, Spencer, and who also managed a construction business on Cliff Island until 2005. Thanks so much for coming in.
Roger Burle: You’re welcome. It’s a delight to be here with you and talk about these things.