Walter Foster: A Career Preserving Friendship

John Foster FRIENDSHIP – Walter Foster smiles gently, then laughs when he hears a lament about how poor the road signs are, leading to this small fishing town that sits on a peninsula 20 miles southeast of Rockland.

“That’s the way we like it,” Foster said, smiling broadly and unabashedly protective of the history, culture and endearing charm of the town he’s called home for 40-plus years.

“Friendship is 10 miles from Route 1 and is not on the road to anywhere else,” he said. “We don’t get transient traffic. There is nothing for a transient to see or do.”

What is in Friendship are innovative hard-working families, Foster said, people who make a living fishing or digging for clams and who have labored to preserve their way of life over many decades.

Foster has been at the center of that effort, having spent the past 40 years drafting, writing and urging voters to approve rules and limitations on shoreland use that will protect both the fishing industry and the land, as well as the town’s limited natural resources.

HOME, SWEET HOME

Foster adopted Maine as so many others have – by spending summers at his family’s home in Friendship. There are still many seasonal residents, whose families’ histories go back many generations in this town of 1,200.

Overall, Friendship remains much as it has for two centuries: A quintessential coastal Maine community where townsfolk trap lobsters, work hard and keep mostly to themselves.

“I lived in the house my great-grandfather built, where my grandfather was born and where I spent my summers until I went on active duty in the Air Force,” Foster said. “Both my grandfathers were Maine people who went out of state to work.”

When he was a teenager, Foster’s father retired from post-World War II relief work and had a choice of where to move his family. They had lived in Tennessee, North Carolina and California and now had a chance to settle somewhere permanently.

“He asked us where we wanted to live and we said, ‘Well, we want to live right here,’ ” Foster remembered his family deciding immediately. “There wasn’t any question about it.”

Foster, a retired career marine biologist, has served the town in many roles. He retired in January as code enforcement officer after eight years, but remains on the planning board, on which he’s served since its inception in the early 1970s.

“I was lucky enough to have gone to sixth and seventh grade here and then to Orono in the winters through high school,” Foster said. “That left me summers to do some sailing and get involved in gathering, or raking, marine algae known as Irish moss. It was a good experience.”

Irish moss contains carrageenan, a gelatin-like substance used in food and other products such as ice cream, medicine, shampoo and lotion.

So good was Foster’s research that one summer the state asked him to take his experience to Washington County, where he was engaged to assess the Irish moss resource and employment potential for harvesters. He was still in college.

YOUTHFUL DAYS

Foster remembers a lot about the Friendship of his youth. He remembers when there were multiple stores and a tiny town office ill-equipped to accommodate residents and their elected and appointed staffs.

“The town clerk, tax collector and road commissioner used to work from their homes and were extremely devoted to their responsibilities,” Foster said, “but when the first municipal or community building was opened (in 1972), it was a major step forward in service for town residents.”

After graduating from Colby College in Waterville and earning a master’s degree in zoology from the University of Maine, Foster served three years in the military. He and his wife, Carolyn, who have two children, came to live in Friendship in 1967 as 30-somethings. Foster began working for the Maine Department of Marine Resources in 1977. He retired in 2000.

Foster described the loss of most retail businesses from the town as “worrisome.” In 1970, he said, Friendship offered two small grocery stores which also sold gas and had a “vigorous, marine-oriented” hardware and general store.

“Now we have one market selling gasoline and a part-time second-hand store,” he said. “The population had grown over those years but so has competition with ‘big box’ stores out of town.

“Friendship has experienced the well-documented loss of small stores because of this competition,” he continued. “People speak more these days about local sustainability. It has a real face in Friendship.”

Town leaders in 2007 dedicated Friendship’s Bicentennial Annual Report to Foster for his long and outstanding public service to the community.

In the dedication at the front of the report, officials wrote: “When deciding on the person to dedicate this town report to, a selectman touched on one much appreciated aspect of the attitude of Walter Foster. He stated simply that, ‘He had never heard Walter complain.’ ”

Other officials agreed, according to the report’s dedication, and wrote, “In the midst of an ever demanding and complex job, Walter never complains!”

LOOKING AHEAD

Foster has been a strong and patient advocate of good planning, particularly in protecting the shoreline, which is rocky ledge that has limited capacity for water supply and wastewater treatment. Portions of the town also are challenged by lack of healthy drinking water because of high amounts of iron in the water from the ledge, Foster said. Private wells can be contaminated by seawater.

The geology of the peninsula has effectively helped preserve its fishing culture, small-town life and historical charm.

Foster became interested in the topic of planning after the state began “instructing” municipalities to create shoreland-use ordinances, followed in later years by zoning, land-use, subdivision and other planning laws.

Foster, who had started a small oyster hatchery on his part of Friendship’s shore, wondered how the state directive might affect his business and livelihood.

He attended so many meetings on the new Shoreland Act that the Eastern Midcoast Regional Planning Commission named him to its board of directors and elected him chairman.

Foster said fishermen had a major influence on the town’s planning efforts from the start. He added proudly that they still do.

“As it turned out, the Shoreland Zoning Act was the right thing at the right time for a community that depended on a working waterfront as the basis of its economy,” he said.

“Perhaps a high point in my planning experience was when people who had known me from our youth, or when residents of an established neighborhood felt threatened, they asked me to help them,” he said.

Foster said one of the challenges of serving as a town planner is encouraging residents to be involved in planning and other town affairs at a time when so many people seem busy, stressed and distracted.

“Getting people to think long-term and getting people to carve out time from their busy lives to commit to serving on something like a comprehensive plan committee” is challenging, he said.

“Friendship is fortunate to have many residents with deep roots here who care very much about their town. And we are fortunate to have many here who have chosen to be here, who also care deeply,” Foster said.

“Anyone active in municipal affairs has to be very grateful for these people. I certainly am.”

Liz Chapman Mockler is a freelance writer and editor from Augusta, lizmockler@hotmail.com