The current edition of Echoes magazine is a blend of past and present, with life stories recalling the 1950s and 1960s and feature stories focused on the present. With bold cover photos of a camp fireplace and a river in winter by Ashland photographer Mike McNally, Echoes No. 87 was released last month.
Feature stories in the new edition include a tribute to Jan and Evelyn Kok who were honored in November for their musical contributions to the University of Maine at Presque Isle and the surrounding community, a profile of poet Ethel Pochocki of Brooks, and an interview with Fort Fairfield natives David and Karen Estey, who learned after they were married that they both have ancestors who were victims of the Salem witch trials in the 1600s.
Momentum Aroostook, a network of young professionals that promotes Aroostook County, is the topic of another Echoes feature story. Organized in 2007, the group was honored by the Maine Development Foundation last September for “working to shape the economic, social and recreational future of the area.”
A young professional who has found success as an actor and playwright in New York and California returned to Aroostook to deliver the commencement address at his alma mater last June. The current Echoes contains excerpts from his speech. Presque Isle High School alum John Cariani (Class of 1987), who wrote the popular play “Almost Maine,” gave the Class of 2009 six ideas to ponder, extolling the virtues of Aroostook County and reminding the graduates that the life ahead of them holds more than their imaginations can conceive.
One of Cariani’s teachers, Echoes columnist Glenna Johnson Smith, has received phone calls and personal comments about her humorous essay “The Telephone Man” in Echoes 87. A true account of the effects of her hasty decision to change phone service, the piece has generated more than just chuckles in readers.
Houlton native John Dombek affirms of the value of craftsmanship in his column, “Beyond Washburn Street.” In a time when many people work only for profit, Dombek pays tribute to cabinetmaker Tom Vose, whose finest reward was the pleasure of doing his best.
“From Maine to Thailand” is one of three life stories in Echoes No. 87. In a coming-of-age story, Lille, Maine, native Roger Parent traces the significance of his Franco-American childhood and his personal development from birth to the end of his service as one of the first Peace Corps volunteers sent toThailand.
In the first of a series of excerpts from Parent’s book, “The Making of a Peace Corps Volunteer”, the current issue of Echoes presents Parent’s accounts of the illness that nearly took his life in infancy and the miraculous recovery that his father attributed to the prayers of the Daughters of Wisdom.
Other life stories in Echoes 87 are “Coal Smoke in the Blood: A love affair with trains,” by Bangor native David Parker of Rochester, N.Y., and “Woods Details” by Mark Nehring of Damascus, Md., who recounts the life of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Fort Fairfield in the 1950s.
Published quarterly from offices in Caribou and printed at Northeast Publishing in Presque Isle, Echoes is dedicated to rediscovering community by celebrating qualities of life at risk in today’s society, but alive and well in places like Aroostook County, Maine. The magazine will complete 22 years’ of continuous publication in 2010. For more information, contact editor Kathryn Olmstead at 207-498-8564 or e-mail her at kathryn.olmstead@umit.maine.edu.
