In Maine: A Town and Its Paper

By TED GUP

Some years back, James Russell Wiggins, editor of the Ellsworth American in Maine, wanted to prove to readers how pitifully slow was the U.S. Postal Service. So he proposed a race: he sent letters to a nearby village, one through the Postal Service and others by oxcart, canoe and bicycle. At the pedals was a local celebrity, Writer E.B. White. The Postal Service lost every race, and Wiggins gloated on the front page.

That was big news. Big news elsewhere, though, often doesn't seem quite so pressing in Ellsworth. The October stock-market crash got one sentence last fall; the blueberry industry, a mainstay of the region, got a five-part series. But nothing is read more closely than the court page, a list of everyone caught speeding or driving tipsy or lobstering without a license. "I want to see if any of my buddies are in there," says Carmen Griffin, a waitress at the Pineland Diner on Main Street. It may be a yawn in Portland, Me., but in Ellsworth, it's front-page news when there's a bumper crop of scallops or the cops seize a pet snake (the headline: POLICE PUT PERMITLESS PET PYTHON IN PEN).

When Editor Wiggins, 84, wanted to tell his readers, many of whom live by and from the sea, what was happening in the America's Cup race, the weekly sent a reporter to Australia. The story was relayed by satellite to Washington, wired to an Ellsworth bank and then walked across Main Street by the bank's vice president.

! That's how things have always been done in Ellsworth, one neighbor counting on another. Ellsworth is the shire town of Hancock County, some two-thirds up the Maine coast, and gateway to the summer resorts of Bar Harbor. For more than 200 years, the town has hugged the Union River, which spills out into Union River Bay and eventually the bold Atlantic. The town was named for Oliver Ellsworth, an early Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Folks here are friendly. They can't help themselves. But Down Easters draw a line between outsiders -- "people from away" -- and locals. You can be born in Hancock County and still not be judged a local if your parents were "from away." They say, "A cat can have her kittens in the oven and call them biscuits. Doesn't make it so."

Ellsworth has reason to be wary of outsiders, who come here seeking tranquillity and disturb what tranquillity there is. They clog streets, drive up land prices and bring with them some anxieties they hoped to escape. And they talk funny. Not since the fire of 1933 swept down Main Street, consuming 130 buildings, has the character of the town and the region been so threatened. "We're getting a little class," says Victoria Smallidge, owner of the Pineland Diner, who moved here in 1970. Call it what you will, some locals are uneasy about a diner that offers a wine list and tenderloin with bearnaise sauce but holds mashed potatoes and meat loaf in contempt. American reporters discuss stories that straddle two worlds: a log-sawing contest in Brooklin, Me., and drug-awareness week at nearby Bucksport High. These days lawyers and real estate agents seem to outnumber clergymen and clam diggers. Even the lilting Down East accent, once spoken as if it were passing over a dip on a backwoods road, is losing its curls.

The American began publishing in 1850. There were 5,000 townspeople then, and the paper's slogan was "Americans can govern America without the help of foppish influence." There are now just over 5,000 souls in Ellsworth, and they still bristle at outsiders' arriving in Peugeots with ideas for their town. But change is certain. Some city officials say the population may double in five years. Many fear the region is losing its identity. It is the American that is helping to preserve that identity, holding itself up as a mirror of community interests, passions and humor in uncertain times. "It's the one continuity we have in our lives, besides the seasons," says Jack Raymond, a reader from Bar Harbor.

* Wiggins and the American seem an unlikely pair. He never went to college and didn't take over the American until late in life. Before that he was executive editor of the Washington Post, then U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. A great-grandfather, he holds eight honorary degrees, reads up to five books a week and recites Chaucer from memory. He belts out incendiary editorials, writes a sometimes syrupy nature poem and, until recently, had a paper route. He hasn't drawn a salary in two decades. The former Ambassador still holds public office -- of a sort. He's Brooklin's appointed fence viewer. He is supposed to settle boundary disputes, but none ever arise. Wiggins is a robust man with snow white hair, eyebrows that arch in incredulity and strong hands beginning to gnarl like briar. In his spare time, he strolls his saltwater farm on Carlton Cove or sails the Amity, his sloop. "I picked the name out of the air," he says. "I threatened to name it Lolita, an old man's darling, but my wife didn't care for that."

"J. Russell? He's an American original," says Ellsworth's city manager, Herbert Gilsdorf. "For this place and this time, it's probably the best fit between a newspaper and a community I've ever seen, and I don't have any reason to blow the guy's horn 'cause he's harpooned me a couple of times." Folks are proud of the American, and why not? It may be the finest -- albeit quirkiest -- weekly in the nation. "It's a real good pay-pa," says Don Walls as he lowers a 100-lb. crate of lobsters from a wharf in Southwest Harbor; the American ran a photograph of Walls' six-year-old son Travis, winner of the fishing derby. "Meant a lot to me and the boy," he says.

Some think Wiggins is a curmudgeon. He grabs onto every subject like a pit bull. He's been railing against the lottery for years. "It's a fraud on the public," he steams. Maybe, but he hasn't even won over his personal secretary, Rose Lee Carlisle, who buys five dollars' worth of lottery tickets every week. When the Maine legislature amended the state constitution, Wiggins wrote an editorial saying the change was "as clumsily executed as a double heart-bypass by a band of butchers wielding a chain saw."

"Like that one, did you?" he asks. Some folks say he's too liberal. Wiggins laughs: "My children and grandchildren are always telling me what a reactionary old bastard I am." He enjoys citing the saying that a newspaper should "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." But Wiggins can be a softy too. His reporters remember his weeping when a Christmas caroler from a home for wayward boys put his arms around him. Then there is the Wiggins who laughs until he tears. He passes on the latest story from his friend and sailing partner, Walter -- Cronkite, that is. Greeting visitors to his 1802 Federal house are life-size cutout figures of Frank and Ed, the yokels from the Bartles & Jaymes ad. "I want you to meet a couple of friends of mine -- Frank and Ed," he tells an unwary visitor. He admits to two vices, Scotch old-fashioneds and raspberry sherbet. After he wrote a column about the scarcity of the latter, merchants started stocking it.

On his farm, Wiggins walks among his mallard ducks, chickens, geese and a Norfolk terrier named Red that once belonged to the late White. The elders among the geese -- Arthur, the old gander, and Jezebel, the goose -- are often featured in Wiggin's Aesop-like bimonthly column. Once a "mover and a shaker," he steered the Washington Post's coverage of every crisis from the Berlin Wall to the Viet Nam War. No more. "You can't flatter yourself in the belief that you can leverage the world from the perimeter of Ellsworth, Me.," he says. "But I enjoy rural life a lot better than I do big cities. I'm at home in this environment." Happiness, he says, is an old age shared with Ben Franklin's three faithful friends: "an old wife, an old dog and ready money."