I was born in Portland, Maine, in February, 1935, the winter after the Maine apple industry was crippled forever by the coldest temperatures in the memories of the oldest men.
My life, for nearly twenty years, was spent in the village of Blue Point, high on a hill overlooking the sea in the immensely historic Town of Scarborough, Maine, where I was educated through the eighth grade in a one-room school, eventually graduating from Scarborough High School in 1953.
Many people have asked me the origin of my extreme interest in heirloom apples. Upon giving this question to my thoughts, I have concluded that a variety of factors were contributors. The house in which I grew up sat on less than an acre of land yet, there were some twenty apple trees, about fifty years old, on this lot. Moreover, I recall vividly that each of those trees bore a different variety of apple. There were red apples, yellow apples, green apples, striped apples, spotted apples, large apples, small apples and so on. I realize now that someone, about the turn of the century, had planted a preservation orchard, a collection of living trees, on that small plot. Indeed, there was, literally, no empty piece of ground or possible site that did not support its apple tree.
As the years sped by and the world across the sea changed catastrophically forever, I spent many a carefree hour with these trees as my only companions. I played under them, slept in the crotches of their branches, ate their fruits and threw apples at passing cars! I didn't know it then, but those old trees, growing on land and in a village where every footstep trod on a tangible and poignant moment of the earliest American history, the trees and the land and the idyll were altering the very core of my deepest being forever!
Then, one day, they told me I was a man and the idyll must be gone, but no! Idylls are immortal and just don't die and their memories are permanently implanted and will not be exorcised by any subsequent experience of life.
I married the perfect wife, created, with her, several perfect children, pursued a number of creative interests, at one time apprenticing myself to one Frank Hubbard of Waltham, Massachusetts, under whose apt tutelage, I became a maker of classic harpsichords.
Eventually, my love for early music led me to the University of New Hampshire where I began to focus my interests in history. Starting with the history of early music, I continued to expand in all directions, eating history as my food and drink! Here, I discovered my idyll was still ever so much at my side. History and ever more history! Upon graduation, I moved back to Maine, into the foothills of the western mountains, the northern tail-end of the great Appalachian chain, where I enrolled in graduate studies at the University of Southern Maine. Here I majored in the lore of the State where my ancestors first settled nearly three centuries ago. And here my idyll showed itself in a desire to seek out, if possible, the more than two hundred cultivars of apples that owe their provenance to the State of Maine. And the desire grew to have my own preservation orchard composed of these many varieties.
Alas, I learned that the frailty of human experience precludes ever achieving the culmination of this plan but, what to do with the immense body of information discovered and collected into one place in my attempts? As an alternative, I offer to my posterity the book herein advertised.
And my God has told me the idyll goes on forever!!!
