A Little Backstory: Ideas that have shaped me
Before we get started with this memoir, a little backstory might help you understand whose telling the story.
There are specific years in our lives, at least in mine, when things happen; outside influences, converge, opportunities present themselves and events all conspiring to shape the future of our lives.
One such year, for me, was 1963. That winter, I’d just dropped out of BU’s School of Journalism, a year before finishing. I was working three jobs: in Boston: a weekday shift at a television station (WHDH); weekends hosting music shows on a Boston FM station (WBNC); and evenings managing The Unicorn, a folk music coffee house in Boston’s Back Bay. With no college deferment, I joined the US Naval Reserve to stay out of the draft. Vietnam was heating up.
That winter, an idea came my way. Ginney Blackmar, a college co-ed who hung out at the Unicorn, told me a folk music club like this would go over very well on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, where she and her family summered. The idea of a coffee house on the Vineyard wouldn’t leave me alone. But how could I do it? All of March, I talked up the idea at the Unicorn. Two electronic engineers, Fritz and Dick, bought in and bankrolled me. We found a recently vacated supermarket on Circuit Avenue in the village of Oak Bluffs on the island. It was the right size, so we rented it. In May, with a crew of young kids, I turn the place into The Moon Cusser Coffee House. With old, weathered barn board and burlap fabric, we created a rustic, barn-like atmosphere. We installed a modest kitchen, bathrooms, and a stage with theatrical lighting and a sound system. I advertised for an assistant manager and hired a Princeton junior, Philip Metcalf, whose wealthy family had been summering on the island for generations. Philip's presence, standing at the entrance in his Princeton blazer, collecting the $2 cover charge, added a degree of respectability to our otherwise hippie enterprise. Since no alcohol was served, parents found dropping off their kids at the Moon Cusser, with a few bucks for dessert and cover charge, was cheaper than a babysitter—while they spent the evening at the yacht club.
At the age of 15, James Taylor made his stage debut at The Moon Cusser. Summer residents Carley Simon and her sister Lucy sang on Sunday evenings. The rest of the week, folk music’s leading bands, performers, and singer-songwriters were in residence. The Moon Cusser was an instant success. We packed the place every night, with more people sitting on the curb outside listening to the music through the open door. People on the island still talk about the Moon Cusser today.
That was a summer to remember.
Within two years I was in Vietnam, on active duty in the Navy. Rated as a third-class Navy photojournalist, I was shipped off to Vietnam with a SeaBee outfit, a Naval Mobile Contraction Company, to be the editor of the unit's monthly newspaper. It was while there, writing stories and photographing the project the men were building, I realized I was a newspaperman, a photojournalist. I could write a story, make photographs to illustrate those stories, and I could lay out the pages of a newspaper.
Following my hutch in Vietnam and release from the Navy, I landed a series of jobs as the editor of weekly newspapers in Vermont: The Mount Snow Valley News, The Goose City Gazette, then editor of a national skiing magazine.
Then 1973 comes along—another one of those pivotal years. Another idea grabs me. The previous summer, 1972, I’d enrolled in a ten-day workshop at a summer school in Aspen, Colorado. It was for photojournalists, led by none other than Bob Gilka, Director of Photography at the National Geographic Magazine. Half of my reason for going was to show him my work and land an assignment; maybe be hired on staff. That didn’t happen. He gave my portfolio a cursory look, halfway through, closed my portfolio, and pushed it back across the table, asking, “Do you earn a living with this?” I was stuck dumb. It's called "ego death."
While Gilka did not give me the assignment I’d hoped for, his few words sent me down another path—one that would consume me for the next 35 years of my life.
That next summer, June of 1973, I opened the Maine Photographic Workshops, a summer school for photographers. I’d found a vacant basement in the old town hall in the small harbor village of Rockport on the Maine Coast. It wasn’t that I had anything to teach; it was precisely because I knew I had a lot to still learn, and one-week workshops and master classes seemed the best way. Besides, I thought, I’d get to enroll in these workshops for free.
That never happened; I was too busy just keeping the place going. Within three years, that summer school grew into a year-round conservatory. We added more and more one-week workshops each summer. There were now master classes for writers, journalists and filmmakers—all of us storytellers. We established satellite workshop programs in the South of France and Tuscany to give our more advanced students real-world experiences.
This brings us to this pivotal year of 1996.
The Workshops had been partnering with the University of Maine since 1979 conducting an Associate of Arts degree program in media. The spring of 1996, The Workshops was certified by the Maine Department of Education, as authorized by the Maine Legislature, to award both Associates and Masters of Fine Arts degrees—Rockport College was born.
As the founder and now creative director of The Workshops, as well as the new president of Rockport College (myself never having graduated from college), my role included researching new horizons for my institutions.
The summer of 1996, I met an English lass, Julie. She came over from the UK to attend a few of my workshops. With a two years, she and I would become parents—to a daughter, Renaissance, then our son, Havana.
But I’m getting ahead of the story.
Now to this memoir of my adventure in Cuba.