Word: ackermans
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...easiest, and most welcome where there has never really been a wholehearted step forward. So it was that on a bright, late-summer day, farmers, fishermen and their families-6,000 of them in all-flocked to the ramshackle Wallace Shipyards in Thomaston (pop. 2,500) to cheer "that Ackerman boy" as his new two-masted, gaff-rigged schooner slid down the ways and eased majestically into the clean waters of the St. George River, exactly as hundreds of schooners used to do before steamboats, trucks and trains put most of them out of business more than half a century...
...launching of the schooner John F. Leavitt was not a sentimental return to the past. It was an experiment to see if perchance the past has a future-and will work. In a sense "that Ackerman boy," who turns out to be Edward Arthur ("Ned") Ackerman, a bearded, moderately grouchy 36, is simply doing what most pragmatic Maine-landers are also doing these days: turning away from expensive fossil fuels as fast as they can. Wood is already stacked high against nearly every house, ready to be fed to wood-burning stoves and fireplaces this winter, when the temperature...
...three years Ackerman has worked in the Wallace Shipyards, helping build his 97-ft.-long schooner. Her hold can accommodate 150 tons of freight and haul it cheaply and cleanly along the New England coast, or south to Haiti, into the Caribbean, and back. As recently as the early 1900s, schooners carried most of New England's southbound ice, fish, lumber and granite, returning with molasses and coal. But not for 40 years has such a commercial vessel been built, and Ackerman intends to turn a profit with this one. "It better," he proclaims, "and it will." Like...
...John F, Leavitt, red and white, constructed from the oak and pine of the Maine forest, is the fulfillment of Ackerman's dream, but he resents that description. The very word suggests impracticality, something Ackerman wants no part of. "Would it seem like a dream to you if you bought a new truck?" he asks. Is he the forerunner, the leader in something new, something that could become a trend? "Nah," he sneers in a New Hampshire twang. "If a lot more schooners are built, it will be because a lot of people independently came by the same conclusion...
...head tutors do insist that professors participate actively in tutorials, the legislation will provide them with that Ackerman termed its most valuable quality: arm twisting power...