Ed Bonney died in 2021
Sam Smith, 2019
The sign on the building next to the railroad station reads “Freeport Information Center.” But the real center of information is the guy inside: 86 year old Ed Boney who not only guides folks to LL Bean but can pass on pieces of Freeport facts and history based in part on some seven decades of experience.
One reason for this wealth of information is that he helped to create it. For example, he led efforts to convert Freeport’s government from one relying on an annual town meeting to the current one with a town council. He would go on to chair the council three times. He also chaired the town Budget Committee. School Committee, Planning Board and Design Review Committee and currently chairs the Train Committee. And yet he still had time to start the town’s Economic Development Corporation and help found the Freeport Merchants Association.
One amazing thing about Bonney is that he can work well at multiple levels. For example he helped to get train service into Freeport – now handling about 50,000 passengers a year here and in Brunswick – but he’s also right there for passengers wanting to know where a shoe shop is. Similarly, he was executive director of the Maine Democratic State Committee for eight years, worked for people like George Mitchell and Ed Muskie, yet can still be found at the town polling center as a Deputy Warden making sure the votes are counted right.
Perhaps it has something to do with his early job as a New York air controller – complex in specifics and critical in impact. Years later he found himself being interviewed for a job as executive director of the Maine State Bar Association, despite his own doubts about his qualifications. As he explained in an exchange for the George J. Mitchell Oral History Project:
And then his big tall guy, Charlie Smith from Biddeford and Saco, because I had told them I’d been in air traffic control, and Charlie looked at me and he said, “So where did you control traffic?” And I said, “At the New York Center.” And he said, “Oh, you’re high complexity [controller].” And I said, “Yes, I am.” He said, “Well I have my own plane and I fly out to Florida and I fly all around,” and he said, “you probably controlled me at some time.” And I said, “Maybe, but my expertise was European departures and arrivals, once they came into our air space, that was really what I did so I didn’t do some of the en route stuff.” So it goes on, and by that time I’ve been there an hour-and-a-half…. Finally Charlie Smith looked at everybody and said, “Look, if Ed can control air traffic, he sure as hell can deal with us lawyers and judges, so give him the job.”
He not only held that job for twenty-five years but he went on to be the president of the National Association of Bar Executives.
The Freeport that a teen Bonney moved to from Winthrop, Maine was not today’s town. It was driven in no small part by about a number of shoe factories, including one that employed 800 people. There was also the fact that Route One was the main north-south road and it went right through the town bringing not only visitors but traffic jams. Then things began to change. The new Interstate highway allowed cars to bypass Freeport and the shifting trade balance towards Mexico and China undermined the local shoe industry. Even the sidewalks began crumbling.
As the NY Times reported in 1984 “L. L. [Bean] died in 1967 and since then his grandson, Leon A. Gorman, has expanded the catalogue. But while the store grew, the town remained the same: the white clapboard buildings of Main Street, the green and gold fields of the farms nearby. All that began to change two years ago, on the night a teen-ager set fire to Leighton's Five and Dime on Main Street to disguise a burglary. Edgar Leighton's landlord sold the building to a Boston developer who remodeled it, raised the rent and leased it to Dansk.”
What happened next was, in Bonney’s words, simple: “We saw a need and we went out and did something….I’m just pleased to have been in the right place at the right time.”
Their strategy: “Sit down with people who can make things happen.” And that included getting outside help from consultants and other experts.
And, despite all this work, Bonney had time during the 1980s and 1990s to do some 90 local cable TV programs called “Freeport Perspectives” and write a book called Betty & Ed Bonney’s Great Australian Adventure describing their trip there.
Bonney just doesn’t give up easily. When he first ran for the school committee he was beaten badly, but the next year he said, “I’m going to campaign” and ended up winning against Molly White by one vote. His wife Betty, who died 13 years ago, was similarly determined and active in Democratic Party politics. As her obituary notes, “She was not hesitant to let folks know where she stood on an issue and to suggest that they might want to change their thinking.”
Among those she confronted was her own husband. As Bonney told the Mitchell Oral History Project about living in New York:
By this time my wife and I had had two children, and we were living in Queens, and my wife said, “You’ve got a nice job, and you keep it, but I’m going back to Maine, because I’m not going to bring the kids up in Queens.” . . . I’d been in the traffic control business for six or seven years and I said, “To hell with it, I’m going back to Maine with you.”
Among their new experiences was a speech by presidential candidate John F. Kennedy in Lisbon. “And, damn, we really got inspired.’ Before long they both were involved in politics in Freeport and Cumberland County, where among other things Ed Bonney met and began working with, George Mitchell and with Ken Curtis, whom he had known, and was soon running for governor.
Freeport is currently in search of another revival – given the departure of a number of key stores – an effort led by town figures in economic development, arts and culture, history and tourism, and Ed Bonney still has thoughts. Of his train passengers – who have doubled in size recently – he says “Fifty percent of my riders are coming here to shop. After a day they say, “What else can we do? – For example, “a lot of foreign tourists want to bike.”
“There’s a need for experience beyond shopping.” And Ed Bonney, after all these years, is still on the case.
