Sam Smith - When I was a kid, Bustins Island in had only dirt roads and no electricity for its several hundred summer residents. The residents considered the question of electric power in the 1960s and voted it down. So Archie Ross, the ferryboat skipper who ran between Bustins and South Freeport for 50 years, carried scores of propane gas tanks atop the Marie for use in the island stoves and to light the lamps along the roads. He also carried mail by water longer than anyone in the country.
Archie, a diminutive and perpetually shoeless man, drove a car with the vanity plate J PRIEST (for his frequent exclamation "Judas Priest!"), waved with big sweeps of his arm to every boat that passed and had a high-pitched voice that rose like the tide above the chatter on the dock.
His casual cheer, however, belied his seamanship. When Hurricane Carol hit in the late fifties, Archie figured the best place to be was on his boat. He rode out the storm at anchor with his engine running, keeping the vessel headed into the wind. Meanwhile, a few miles away, the Portland Yacht Club lost a couple of hundred boats.