Echoes pays tribute to fallen soldier

    Lt. Harold Hoskin was gone. The Army Air Forces reported him missing after the B-24 he was testing crashed in Alaska in 1944, but his family continued to hope he would walk through the door of their home in Houlton one day.
    More than 60 years later, the Rev. John Hoskin was asked to provide a DNA sample to help identify the remains of his brother Harold. In the new edition of Echoes magazine released Oct. 2, writer and historian David Bergquist of Hermon, chronicles Harold’s story, from his youth as an Eagle Scout and leader at Houlton High School, through his marriage and military service to his burial in 2007 in Arlington National Cemetery. In a tribute to members of what journalist Tom Brokaw called “the greatest generation,” Bergquist quotes those who knew Harold Hoskin and describes the dogged determination of the man who finally brought him home.
    Bergquist’s “My Brother’s Keeper” is one of several in-depth feature stories in the current Echoes. Others include a profile of an artist from Frenchville with a career in Portland, a visit to a community garden in Orono that helps feed senior citizens and a summary of some of the stories collected by interviewers with The Story Bank project of the Maine Folklife Center at the University of Maine.
    In the third of a series of life stories, former musher Lucy Leaf of Surry, Maine, continues documenting her 1990s sled dog expeditions in Labrador with her then husband Sam Woodward. Echoes 84 traced the couple’s 1,200-mile journey in Labrador and Quebec in 1990, which inspired the Labrador 400 Sled Dog race, featured in Echoes 85. “Journey on Sea Ice” in Issue 86 recounts their offshore adventures mushing among the caribou following trails of Inuit hunters along the rugged north coast. Leaf complements her Labrador story with a review of “Partridgeberry, Redberry, Lingonberry, Too”, by Maine children’s book author Ellen Bryan Obed who lived and taught in Labrador for 12 years.
    Writers of other life stories take readers into their childhoods for recollections of climbing pines, picnicking on the Maine coast and mocking Eleanor Roosevelt.
    Popular columnist Glenna Johnson Smith of Presque Isle exercises her imagination in “The Newlywed and the Hired Man.” She also reflects on the significance of ancient calendars that end in 2012 in an essay titled “Predictions,” inspired by the experiences of Echoes her son following an auto accident. Houlton native John Dombek probes the process of self discovery in an essay titled “Something Greater.”
    Presque Isle history is the topic of an essay by Melissa Crowe, inspired by the opening of the Wintergreen Arts Center in the former Wight Furniture building.
    Stunning photos of twin deer and a “country kitchen” on the front and back covers of 86 are the work of Ashland photographer Mike McNally.
    Published quarterly in Caribou and printed in Presque Isle by Printworks, Echoes is in its 22nd year of “rediscovering community” by celebrating qualities of life at risk in today’s world. The magazine is available by subscription and on newsstands throughout northern Maine.