Short bio

I remember sitting with my Dad in the darkened bar of a restaurant on Cape Cod a few years before he died. Around Thanksgiving. Steamed clams. Beefeater martinis. Sharing our black sense of humor. Dad apologized for his generation's leaving the planet in such a mess. He apologized for what my generation would face. I think about that a lot. We had no clue.

Since then, I've married and divorced. Brought up two sons now teenagers at Lyman Moore school Portland. I think of how my son Max loves to snowboard, and how my Dad lived one winter at the Lake of the Clouds hut on Mt Washington - training for the ski troops. Dad would ski down the Shelburne trail to get a beer. On wooden skis and leather boots.

I graduated from MIT in 1979. Worked nights in a bank to pay the bills, worked in the college radio station, worked in the Cambridge food co-op. Studied political science, economics, civil engineering, film-making. Left school with an undergraduate Architecture degree during the energy crises of the late seventies.

I've worked as a general contractor and designer of solar homes - and when that dried up during the Reagan administration - on condo conversions in Boston and active and passive solar energy systems.

By the early 90s my knees could no longer take the construction work. In 1994 I started MaineStreet Communications and maine.com and helped bring the internet to Maine. We were Maine's first commercial internet provider - with a mission of helping the community publish. We've survived the wild west internet, ENRON, MCI/WorldCom, and every scam it brought with it whether under the name of copyright, national security or outright fraud. American business. Will we survive the airlines shutting down? Our ecommerce clients need to ship.

Nearly every month a new edition of my alumni magazine touts new ways to kill and profit from destruction. My children will probably not be able to work their way through MIT or any other fancy college.

I can look out my window and see the roadbed for the interurban. Sometimes the wild turkeys run along it. Sometimes the snowmobiles. We need the interurban. We need more turkeys. [Good eating] GM bought this particular section of the interurban and shut it down to sell more cars. GM owes reparations to Gray Maine. And to how many other communities in Maine?

The car I drive now, a Honda, still gets only 35mpg, the same as my 1972 Subaru. The difference is I can't fix the Honda, can't tune it, can't do body work on it, can't teach my boys how to fix it. I don't ever want to buy another car. How does one spell R I P O F F?

My mom is Swiss; she and Dad met skiing near the Matterhorn. That makes me literally a product of the American Experience and the Greatest Generation. I have been very, very, very privileged to have grown up at the end of the 20th Century here in the United States. It's going to be much more difficult for our children. And we owe them more than apologies, because we know better now.