WILLOW CREEK — Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s landslide victory over President Herbert Hoover was greeted with cautious optimism in Willow Creek this week, as the town’s mill workers — many of whom have been unemployed or working reduced hours for nearly two years — expressed hope that the new administration’s promised “New Deal” would bring relief to rural Maine.
The election results, received by telephone from the county clerk’s office in Houlton, showed Roosevelt carrying Aroostook County by a margin of nearly two to one. In Willow Creek’s precinct, the vote was 187 for Roosevelt, 62 for Hoover, with 4 votes for Socialist candidate Norman Thomas.
“I never voted for a Democrat in my life,” said Harold Fisher, the mill foreman who has worked at the flooring mill since 1902. “But I voted for Roosevelt because Hoover has had his chance and the country is in ruins. I do not know if Roosevelt can fix it, but I know we cannot go on as we have been.”
The Gazette’s editor, Arthur Whitcomb, published the full text of Roosevelt’s first inaugural address — “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” — in a special supplement that was distributed free of charge to every household in town.
“Whether Roosevelt’s policies will succeed is a question that cannot be answered today,” Whitcomb writes in his editorial. “But the spirit of his address — the willingness to act, to experiment, to put people to work — is precisely what this country needs. We have been paralyzed by fear long enough.”
In a development unrelated to the election but notable for its connection to the town’s emerging Ice-Out tradition, Ezra Homan — the mill foreman who served as the unofficial observer for the first Ice-Out competition in 1927 — began a spiral notebook this week in which he intends to record daily observations of Homan’s Pond throughout the winter and spring.
The notebook, purchased at the General Store for ten cents, contains Homan’s first entry, dated November 3, 1932: “Election Day. Roosevelt wins. Pond temperature 42 degrees at the outlet. Barometric pressure 30.12 and rising. First skim of ice forming along the north shore.”
Homan told the Gazette that he intends to record the pond’s condition every day until the ice goes out. “I have been watching that pond for six years now,” he said. “I have a feeling for it. But I want to know if a feeling can be written down. If it can, then maybe anyone can learn to predict the ice.”
The notebook, which Homan will keep for the rest of his life — eventually filling it with 61 consecutive years of observations — is already being referred to by his friends as “Ezra’s book.” He keeps it in the breast pocket of his work coat, next to his pencil.
“I do not know if it will help me win the Ice-Out,” Homan said. “I have never won. But I believe that if you watch something long enough, it will tell you what it is going to do. That pond has things to say. I am just writing them down.”