Transcription of Nina “Cookie” Horner for the show Acadia Centennial #240
Lisa: Today it is my great pleasure to speak with Bill and Cookie Horner. Actually we were going to speak just with Cookie and she brought her husband with her and I said, “Hey, I would really like to talk to Bill too,” so she agreed. Cookie moved to Mount Desert Island in 1975. She is the co-chair of The Acadia Centennial Task Force and she is also in the Acadia National Park’s volunteer trail crew. I happen to know that she was the school nurse at MDI High School for 17 years. Thanks for coming in.
Cookie: Thanks for having us.
Lisa: Thank you for bringing of course your husband Bill who is the president of the MDI Historical Society, is a native of Bar Harbor, and author of several articles in their journal which is called Chebacco. Thanks for coming in.
Bill: Pleasure to meet you.
Lisa: I know we kind of roped you in to being actually on the radio, so I appreciate you’re having that kind of willingness.
Bill: Well, thank you. I will limit my remarks.
Lisa: I’m excited to have you here because it is 100 years now that we’ve had the Acadia National Park in our fair state recognized as a national park. It’s a very exciting time for us. Both of you have felt passionately about Acadia National Park for a long time. How did you get involved in this?
Cookie: With the park?
Lisa: Yeah, with the park.
Cookie: I always wanted to work on the volunteer trail crew so when I retired from my nursing job, that was the first thing I did, was sign up for trail crew which goes out 3 times a week, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. It’s just a great group of people. There’s kind of a steady year round group. Then we get lots of summer visitors who give time when they’re here, when they’re in Acadia on vacation. The trail crew snips and clips and cuts vistas and breaks ditches and makes trails. It’s just really fun to help keep the park beautiful.
Lisa: Cookie, you’ve been coming to Maine as a summer resident before moving here in 1972, but since 1946?
Cookie: When I was 1-year-old.
Lisa: Well that’s impressive because not that many people have that sort of longevity as far as being a visitor to Mount Desert Island.
Cookie: Yeah, it just gets in your soul. I used to … I couldn’t sleep for weeks before we would come and I used to cry halfway home when I left. I always knew that I would live in Maine, I’d figure out how to get there and really, especially to Mount Desert Island.
Lisa: You’re originally from Philadelphia?
Cookie: Right.
Lisa: How did your family start coming to Maine in the first place?
Cookie: My grandparents did. They knew other people. I mean there were a lot of people from Philadelphia, New York, and Boston who came in the summers, and they were one of them.
Lisa: You were telling me that the place that you stayed in on West Street was one of the few houses that did not get burned down in the great fire.
Cookie: Right. I don’t know exactly what year I bought it, but it’s being renovated right now. We sold it in the early 80s. Another family had it until just last year. Now I’m really glad to see it restored.
Lisa: Bill you have a very different connection to MDI and Acadia. In fact, your connection is, well, it’s impressive in that there probably aren’t that many people who can say that they were actually born there.
Bill: Natives.
Lisa: Natives, yes.
Bill: Yeah, I was born there in September of 1941 and went to public schools whilst growing up there. As I said before, I think to grow up in an environment like that with a national park there and also knowing so many people who worked at the national park, one of my parents’ best friends was a fellow named Paul Favour who was the park naturalist. So that’s what got me oriented toward thinking about maybe I’ll be a park ranger someday.
Lisa: Which I love and is also interesting because instead of being a park ranger at first you had a very different job.
Bill: Yes. Yeah, we make decisions, we sort of climb the tree, we come to a branch. I knew I was interested in biology, loved biology, loved natural history. As I went college and got into that became increasingly clear that I wanted to try to be a doctor. So got a little further out on the branch and you know how it goes. But the love of home never left. In fact, Bar Harbor was my first practice location when I finished my training in 1972. I was there for about 10 years. It’s really firmly rooted I think in both of us. Cookie almost can claim a birth right at this this point.
Lisa: Pretty close if you are one. They’ve got at least give you honoraries-
Cookie: Never, never. You’re just always a year round summer person.
Lisa: I understand. Both sides by of my family are from Maine but I was born my father’s last year of medical school in Vermont, so I cannot claim to be a native, which is a little ironic. So you and I, we feel each other’s pain on this one. Fortunately, it’s a nice group that still lets us honorarily be here. Tell me about the Acadia Centennial Task Force.
Cookie: Well the Centennial Task Force was created from Friends of Acadia and Acadia National Park in figuring out how to put together a community group that would help Acadia to celebrate its centennial. We began actually in December of 2012 with our planning. Some of the people on the task force are from the park staff and the staff of Friends of Acadia and board members of Friends of Acadia and some community people. We’ve been working really, really hard for all this time and now it’s bearing fruit. It’s very exciting.
Lisa: What are some of your favorite things that are going to be happening this year that you’ve been working on?
Cookie: It’s hard to know where to begin, but we really wanted to reach out community wide from the whole of the park, not just Mount Desert Island, but all the way from Winter Harbor, the Schoodic Peninsula to Ilaho and actually throughout the state and all the communities in between the surrounding communities, and hope that they would partner with us. To our astonishment we now have more than 350 partners and it’s still growing. That’s just really exciting.
People can become partners with a financial donation or if they’re non-profits they can plan a program or an event, they can produce a product and sell it and give a percentage to Friends of Acadia for programs in the park, or they can buy one of the existing products and do the same. It’s just a huge variety of things.
We’ve started off in January with the kickoff event which was the Baked Bean Supper for more than 400 people and we aired for the first time a centennial film done by a young movie maker, Peter Logue, featuring among others Bill and me and quite many other people to as kind of an archival product of how the centennial was celebrated. Hopefully that will go into our time capsule at the end of the year.
All of the local libraries from throughout the surrounding communities celebrated with a big community read in February where they read 3 books, a young person’s book, “Spoonhandle” by Ruth Moore, and “The End of Night” about dark skies or not dark skies. Then there was also a winter festival held between Camp Beech Cliff and Schoodic for families, for children with all kinds of activities. It was supposed to be all snow related and there wasn’t any snow so they just came up with all sorts of great other things.
There’s so many things coming up by … give you a few other ideas. One of the family things that’s going to start in April is Acadia Quest: The Centennial Edition, which is youth and family centered challenges. You do it at your own pace. The Friends of Acadia and the interpretive rangers in Acadia National Park put it together. The idea is to get kids just out there and loving it. It’s sort of an experiential scavenger hunt. It goes on throughout the year.
There’s going to be the opening reception at the Abbe Museum for their new exhibit which is cataloging their time in Acadia from 12,000 years go. There are actually 6 musical courses and festivals each of whom have commissioned an original piece of music honoring Acadia. The first one is the Acadia Choral Society in early May and the Bagaduce Chorale. Later Bar Harbor Brass Week Faculty is giving a huge brass concert in June. Mount Dessert Summer Chorale, Bar Harbor Music Festival. It’s very exciting.
Park Science Day which is one of the evens that Acadia National Park is actually responsible for entirely. That’s going to be the reopening of their Nature Center at Sieur de Monts with an emphasis on climate change. That’s another family and child friendly event. That’s in June. Of course the 4th of July parade will be themed to the centennial with the park in full dress at the head of the line, and hopefully lots of floats about the Centennial.
There’s going to be an Open Garden Day where all the garden clubs on the island are planted together. There’ll be some old gardens, historic gardens, and some newer gardens for everybody to see. There the Maine Historical Society in Portland is going to have an exhibit that I think starts in June or May and goes through until December about the conception and design and layout of Acadia National Park. Those are a few.
Lisa: There’s a lot of things to choose from. So anybody, if you have an interest in history or gardens or if you have a child, you can just pick the thing that best celebrates 100 years of Acadia.
Bill, you’re the president of the MDI Historical Society. I know that you and I were talking before you came on about the fact that you were a trauma surgeon. You actually you did a very different thing and now you’ve gone back to these interests as a naturalist and a historian. What are some of the things about the history of MDI that particularly appeal to you?
Bill: Well, I think it goes back to my being a native son in the sense that I’m very fortunate to have family roots there. One of the things I wanted to do when I retired from surgery is to more intensively study some of my family history as it relates to the island history in general, and get involved with the history community and do some writing. My initial research focused on the group of men who came together initially in 1901, called themselves the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations. They were a combination of summer people and local people who build the foundations for the subsequent land acquisitions that in series ultimately became Acadia National Park.
My great grandfather as it turns out was one of those original founders along with president Eliot from Harvard and a number of other luminaries of the day who had great education and great wealth so that they could formulate this idea. That was an area in which I was very interested in what motivated these people, I got very interested in the history of conservation, going back to the early part of the 19th century and how it came to pass on Mount Desert Island.
Lisa: I know that both of you love the trails of Acadia. Do you have any favorites that you visit on a regular basis?
Bill: Absolutely.
Cookie: We do but actually we’re doing … We decided we’re going to do a personal centennial challenge and do the 26 major peaks which adds up to about 48 miles and then finish the rest on the trails and carriage roads to do 100 miles. But we decided we would do them in a different way because you sort of end up doing, going on the same trails in the same way. So we’re going to try to do them from some different directions, different trails.
Lisa: And when is this going to start for you?
Cookie: We already started.
Lisa: Excellent. So some of the trails are actually clear and available to walk on even now?
Cookie: Yeah. Well the carriage roads are closed still. Actually they may have opened them again because it froze up, but they usually close them to all traffic including foot traffic when the ground is soft. But they’ll open soon.
Lisa: Cookie I know that there are a few more important events that you want to make sure that we talk about.
Cookie: Yes. One of them, well, this is a very exciting one is the Maine Windjammer Association. They are going to bring 6, 7, or 8 windjammers up on the 2nd of August and they’re going to convene out in the Western Bay and then sail up Somes Sound. It’s just going to be a glorious sight. It will give people an idea of what it might have been like 100 years ago. One of them actually did ply the waters of Mount Desert 100 years ago. So that’s really going to be an exciting event.
Then in August there’s also going to be a re-enactment of the celebration of Acadia’s founding with the descendants of people who were originally involved, including Bill. I just wanted to mention also he mentioned Eliot. I’d like mention George B Dorr who’s known as the founding father of Acadia National Park. One of the events happening this week is the sort of formal launch of the first ever biography of George B Dorr by historian Ronald Epp. That’s happening this week. I know Bill has already-
Bill: I read the book. It’s phenomenal. It’s a monumental achievement.
Cookie: He read the whole thing yesterday.
Bill: Really did. I’m so envious.
Cookie: Yeah. Then the big event that Acadia National Park is doing is because this is of course the co-centennial with the National Park Service. August 27th will be a big event at Jordan Pond where there will be speakers. That’s the closest date to the actual date of the anniversary of the National Park Service. There will be 100 junior rangers sworn in on that day and we’re going to have a chorus of 100 singers to sing This Land is Your Land and America the Beautiful. It’s going to be a fabulous day. We will hope for good weather.
Lisa: Between the 2 of you, you have 6 children and 11 grandchildren, 7 of whom live on MDI. Will they be part of these festivities?
Bill: Well, we’re hoping we can get them out for at least some of the remaining 24 peaks.
Cookie: Yeah, yeah, sure.
Bill: Yeah, all of them are active people. Our oldest who’s a freshman in college can’t wait to get home for the summer. She’s got a summer job lined up already and she’s eager to get out there.
Cookie: Then another one is volunteering at Friends of Acadia, helping with the centennial duties.
Lisa: I think you said your youngest grandchild is 2?
Cookie: Yeah. They live in North Carolina sadly.
Lisa: So you might have to-
Cookie: They will be here for a week in the summer and we’ll have them out doing things in the park for sure.
Lisa: There you go.
Cookie: They’re old enough to go up a small mountain now.
Lisa: A lot has changed in the years since Bill you were born there and Cookie you started visiting when you were 1. What are some of the positive changes that you’ve seen with Acadia and MDI in general?
Cookie: Well, the park trails and carriage roads are in much better shape. There was, I don’t know, 30 years ago they weren’t in such great shape. But there’s now an endowment to keep the trails going and the trail volunteers. There’s so many of them that help. So that’s a huge change.
Bill: Yeah, my window is about 55 years, and obviously I can see a lot of changes in the towns themselves. I think it’s particularly striking in Bar Harbor which is now entirely a tourist economy. Of course over the last decade or decade and a half we’ve seen that boom with the addition of cruise ships and so on and so forth. But we’ve also seen a wonderful influx of incredible retired people. There’s an entity called Acadia Senior College which goes on among other places on MDI. It’s really a pleasure to live there in our retirement now. That’s a demographic that’s very, very much changed since I was a kid.
I think the other thing is as part of this centennial it’s an opportunity for us to look back 100 years and look at some of the issues that were hot at that time and think about them now. One that immediately comes to mind is of course is the automobile, which between 1903 and 1913 there was a so called decade of these so called automobile wars, because automobiles were prohibited on Mount Desert Island for at least a decade beyond their arrival elsewhere in the state. There was a big kind of not necessarily so nice on occasion civic discourse between people representing both points of view.
It’s interesting to look back at that as for example the Seal Cove Auto Museum is doing with their exhibit and put that in the context of some of our present day concerns about automobiles and the issues raised for the park in terms of equality of the visitor experience because of the great number of vehicles that we have to deal with.
Cookie: The park and the Centennial Task Force have taken some really proactive steps to address the concerns about visitor spike and visitation. Of course we have the explorer bus system which is fantastic and has been there for about 16 years. We’re messaging to prospective visitors to plan their visits thinking about how they can have the best quality experience, and that includes leaving your car at your hotel and taking the bus and walking on the trails to get into the park, or taking a bike, and how to go to places maybe that are a little different than some of the most iconic ones, or go at different times when it’s not so busy. Also, to think about not just right there, but spreading out and seeing what other joining communities have to offer and exploring that, which is good for Acadia and good for those communities. Also, to realize that the centennial activities are yearlong and that they don’t have to come right in the middle 2 weeks of July and August. We’re trying to get that message out in all kinds of media.
Lisa: Cookie, how can people find out about the centennial activities on Acadia?
Cookie: Go to the Acadia website acadiacentennial2016.org. It’s a terrific website. There are at least 100 events posted on there. You can read about all the 350 partners. There are products that you can find out where to buy them or some that you can buy right online. There are so many products that are being produced for the centennial from jam to beer to coffee mugs, to all kinds of artwork, all kinds of crafts. Oh, and I thought of crafts. Reminded me that there’s going to be a fantastic quilt show and also a web cooking show that will be on in May and June and July. That’s an exciting thing.
Bill: Not to mention art, art, art, art.
Cookie: Yes, lots of art. Of course, all the … I mean, the artists were the first ones there after … and starting in 1800s. There’s just so much art and art galleries, everything is themed to Acadia. It’s going to be wonderful.
Lisa: So the Abbe Museum will be featuring people who were there probably before the artists I would guess.
Cookie: Oh way before.
Lisa: Native Americans.
Bill: Thousands of years.
Lisa: Thousands of years. That’s a nice …
Cookie: And before Champlain supposedly discovered it.
Lisa: There’s a lot of excitement going on up in Acadia so I appreciate you both coming down and having a chance to talk with you. We’ve been speaking with Cookie Horner who moved to MDI, Mount Desert Island in 1975. She’s the co-chair of the Acadia Centennial Task Force and also on the Acadia National Park’s volunteer trail crew. And as an added bonus we’ve been also speaking with her husband, Bill, Dr. Bill Horner who’s the president of the MDI Historical Society. He is a native of Bar Harbor and the author of several articles in their journal Chebacco. Thanks for coming in.
Cookie: Thank you for having us.
Bill: Thanks very much.
Lisa: You’ve been listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 240, Acadia Centennial. Our guests have included David MacDonald and Cookie and Bill Horner. For more information on our guests and extended interviews visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as Dr. Lisa and see my running, travel, food, and wellness photos as Bountiful1 on Instagram.
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