“I believe the greatest Tragedy in human nature is when a person tries to distance Themself from everyone else in the world. If they could only see and feel how we are all connected to the rain, wind, light, thunder, water, and fire.” 

-Chuck Berry on Facebook, Sept. 7, 2024

I always hoped to do a full blown interview with Millville resident and dump salvager extraordinaire, Chuck Berry, but time passed too quickly and I missed my chance. Still, he left plenty of material. 

Chuck recently passed on to his next adventure after a period of declining health, but not before enjoying a few of the best weeks and most profound happiness he had experienced in a long time. At least that’s what he wrote on Facebook about the outstanding care he received at Pen Bay Medical Center and then Cedar Rest nursing facility in Skowhegan. 

“If someone would, please pass along my compliments to the Chefs and kitchen staff at the Pen Bay Medical Center for all the wonderful meals they have been providing for me!” (August 25, on Facebook)

“Well hello again to all you wonderful and special people that have come into my life! Some of you may be wondering why I am not doing my usual ranting and raving about all the current political issues. To tell you the truth, I love this new way of feeling upbeat and positive and don't want to screw it up.“ (Sept. 4, on Facebook)

Thanks to Facebook and his trusty electric scooter, Chuck was not distanced from everyone else in the final years of his life. He was fiercely independent, living in a camper on his Sand Street property, and many times refusing transport to the hospital, but he’d share the blow by blow and all the details with Facebook audience. The kind of details some people wouldn’t even share with their family.

While Chuck and I were on opposite ends of the national political spectrum, our friendship is proof of his larger point. In a small community, and probably in the larger world, too, we are all part of something like a patchwork quilt, connected by long threads and overlapping pieces that we sometimes aren’t even aware of. 

Neither of us could tolerate watching useful or valuable items bulldozed into the landfill or burned in municipal waste incinerators. Of course, everyone will tell you that they feel the same way, but not many are obsessed with doing something about it. 

While I have chosen the bureaucratic “long game” of incremental change, Chuck opted to color way outside of the lines, taking multiple trips a day to the dump to haul away everything from scrap metal to lumber to baseball cards. 

Eventually, Chuck was cited as a reason for the total ban on dump salvaging in roughly 2006. I’ve been working on changing that since about 2014, and while I don’t agree with all of the tactics Chuck is rumored to have employed, he did take on a kind of Zorro like status for me.

A December 13, 2001 article on the front page of the Camden Herald, written by Carol Lambert, is titled “Chuck Berry finds treasures in trash” and describes Chuck as “a freelance entrepreneur and co-manager of the Camden Area Christian Food Pantry who has been salvaging refuse from the local dump for as long as he can remember.”

The article describes some of Chuck’s ideas about radical recycling, his partnerships with volunteers at the Swap Shop, and some of his memorable finds: 

“I find thousands of unbelievable things that people toss on the demolition pile, such as five Life magazines from its first year of publication. Once, along with some other regular pickers, I discovered several thousand old, collectible comic books. Superman, Spiderman, all the good stuff… stained-glass windows, vintage nickel-plated bathroom fixtures, claw-foot bathtubs, glass door knobs with brass fittings, iron beds…”

The article goes on: 

"Among his friends and business associates, Berry knows many who have built garages, sheds and decks out of dump’s salvaged timber. 

“I know a man who built a very fine house in Camden from much of the material he gathered at the dump.” 

The article mentions how he knew people that have set up retirement funds with their dump earnings and many other stories before asking for the dump-picking connoisseur's best find.

“Once I found 35 or 40 vintage Wyandotte and Marx toy metal cars,” said Chuck. “These weren’t in the Swap Shop either— I found them on the demolition pile.”

I didn’t remember Chuck from my trips to the transfer station as a kid, but I remembered that he and I were both featured in Patrisha McLean’s Camden Herald Column “Patrisha’s People” in the early 2000s. A collection of those columns was published in a book titled “Maine Street: Faces and Stories from a Small Town”. 

Patrisha’s book features a “favorite childhood memory” of Chuck’s that made me laugh: 

“Millville used to be home to tens of thousands of chickens that were raised in what's now the powder mill trailer park. After watching the TV show Rawhide, "We opened the door and let a few thousand out so we could do round-ups."

Patrisha, at the time, described his property and the junk strewn across it as “otherworldly”; and it is. Perched at the top of Sand Street backed up to share a property line with the town’s Mountain View Cemetery, he liked to hang treasures that ranged from artistic to utilitarian to a little scary.

Chuck really liked to push the limits of what was politically correct or socially acceptable. A proud collector and dealer of all varieties of junk, his property was has been the subject of more than one complaint for more than one reason. He liked it that way, and I’ll confess that there’s a part of me that felt the same. 

When I was first elected to the Select Board in 2017, Patrisha held a little celebration gathering at her new home in downtown Camden, and encouraged me to invite Chuck, as well. After that, we stayed in touch on Facebook and he would occasionally chime in on things unrelated to the dump, such as saving the Mary E. Taylor school building (he was against it at first due to his dislike of certain former teachers, but ultimately voted for it) or alewives in Camden Harbor (which he tells me used to try and launch themselves up the falls in numbers great enough to string a net across the river and throw them into barrels to sell to the lobstermen). 

He was one of Camden’s most colorful characters and although some of what he posted on the internet would cause me to cringe and close my computer, he was still one of my favorite Facebook friends. 

If you knew Chuck, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about, but for those who didn’t, I won’t sugar-coat it. He could be vulgar, inflammatory, and occasionally mean. It was the kind of stuff that gets you suspended from social media platforms or kicked off school buses. But he wasn’t mean-spirited, at least not on purpose.

Blistering political memes were his specialty and he used the term “libturd” well, liberally. 

He would do things like take Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem 'Renascence' and spin it into something like, “all I could see from where I stood, were thousands of libturds in the hood.” The Millay family, by the way, were Millville residents just like Chuck, and Edna (who went by Vincent) certainly shared Chuck’s flair for the dramatic and tendency to ruffle feathers. 

But Chuck was also exceptionally smart, a very good writer, an animal lover (especially his dog Shep, who passed away last year), a pioneer in the recycling movement (before it was cool), a long time volunteer at the Camden Area Christian Food Pantry, and as he approached the end of his life, his writing was often quite spiritual, and to me, deeply moving. Even his comments on my Facebook posts were sometimes worth taking a screenshot, found them so touching. Here’s one: 

“Far left or Far right, the river is still wide, and we can all fish out of it from different sides of its banks. I enjoy reading your posts, Alison.”

On my birthday last year he wrote, “Happy Birthday, Alison. May the fish always swim in view of your camera.”

Chuck liked my fish videos and I liked the fact that he had no patience for certain illogical policies like the ban on salvaging material from dump. When he was too old to protest in the form of climbing into the landfill and pulling apart scrap metal with power tools, he would write messages like this one to the transfer station Facebook page after seeing a new sign go up that said, “no salvaging at Mid-Coast Solid Waste”. 

“The signage you recently placed at the metal container is pathetic and appalling. How you can malign the English language is beyond me. Don't you realize that the meaning of Salvage/ Salvaging is to rescue, retrieve o preserve something from potential loss or adverse circumstances? A great deal of what is discard as junk worth a few pennies a pound is of historical importance far more valuable than what you are gaining from hauling it to a junk yard. Perhaps you should consider changing No Salvaging to; No Dump Picking?”

I could not agree more. The signs had gone up in 2017 and they brought on a new level of indignation for both Chuck and me. Oddly, Chuck was more willing to compromise than I was on this one. He was resigned to swallow the idea that a “no dump picking” sign be placed there, but to prohibit “salvaging”, and to describe it like that, you might as well prohibit good deeds and the Golden Rule. 

His public post on Facebook read: Welcome to the Camden Dump in Rockport. Recycle, Reduce,Reuse, ReThink. No Salvaging or Covfefeing Though.

I created my own post about this sign a couple months after Chuck’s message and an unsuccessful round of trying to get the policy reversed. 

With so much posturing on an internet inundated with filtered images and taglines that betray reality, Chuck was authentic and self reflecting. Unlike the typical keyboard warrior who only knows how to attack and defend, Chuck would describe his own situation with self awareness and vulnerability. 

“I feel like I am the luckiest guy in the world right at this moment! I have people seeing to all my needs and wishes! Having dignity and self-respect are 2 very important feelings for me and the folks at Pen Bay make that all possible for me. I am fully aware that there are many people in this world that don't have that type of help I receive available to them. I can't tell you how much I hope that changes soon. I have little idea where my future path will lead me, but the journey will be meaningful in more ways than one.

"I remember a line from the old Starman movie, when the alien stated: the remarkable thing about humans is that when they seem to be at their worst, they are often times at their best. I have been seeing this countless times at the hospital here. Many of the staff are tired, lame, frustrated and overworked, yet they will go the extra yard to make those they care for comfortable, Should I ever say something critical of them, please hit me beside the head with a bedpan.”

This longtime resident of the part of Camden known as Millville has left plenty of material for us. Chuck was a writer. Not a professional, to my knowledge, but he could have been. He once said that he had been working on his obituary for the past 25 years and that portions of it can be found all over the internet in the form of blogs, comment sections, Facebook posts, and many other websites where he posted  under different names. 

He did not use these aliases in order to hide his identity, but explained once that it was simply because each website required him to have a username and he would choose whatever came to mind. He would also want everyone to know that he had many well thought out comments removed by the “internet morality Gods” on Village Soup, Facebook, and elsewhere. 

Here’s one of his posts describing his participation in the early days of Village Soup, which was similar in many ways to a local version of Facebook:

“Years ago I had a blog in a now defunct local newspaper. It was titled; The Adventures of Emmawhitecrow. I use to enjoy cracking open a bottle of tequila and writing about things I had a passion for; i.e., online poker, dump picking, local politics and goofy cops. I also liked to present my history of Camden as I remembered it. The paper, while in existence, did 3 or 4 front page stories about me... None I am happy to say were crime related. All things must end though. Because of my language and the subject material I was reporting about, the powers to be gave me the boot. The paper folded soon after. It really didn't matter, Facebook had just started up and I took an immediate liking to it. But things haven't been smooth for me in Facebook land.”

That was in 2016 when he came back to Facebook after his previous account was permanently removed for the official crime of not using his real name. At that point he was going by “Bishop White Crow” which was a variation of his village soup handle “Emma White Crow”. He described “Emma” as a nod to his Maine accent when pronouncing “I’m a” and “white crow” was meant to mean rare bird. 

Chuck was indeed a rare bird. When he asked reporters why they wanted to write about him, he said they would simply respond by saying, “because you are interesting.” And he was. 

Another thing I shared with Chuck is a general view that the internet, social media, and the free and open sharing of ideas is a very good thing for many people. We both get and got a lot of joy out of reading, writing, and internet research. 

Because of this, I feel it is my duty to share a few more of Chuck Berry’s commentaries from his public postings. Even his non public posts often included an explanation for why he hadn’t made them public and an invitation for others to copy and paste. He loved spirited debate so much that he said he’d sometimes log in under other accounts just to get a debate going with himself. 

Since this isn’t going in the newspaper and I don’t have to be burdened by word count limits, I’ve copied and pasted a few of the posts that made me smile or gave me pause. 

I will miss you, Chuck. May you never stop salvaging. 

******

“I love sharing memories of my hometown of Millville as I grew up there. It was the poor section of Camden but it was full of action. There were some very nice homes in this section of town. Many had bathrooms with tubs and flush toilets that were connected to well-constructed and maintained septic systems. Many were not. They had toilets in the corner of a room with a curtain hung in front of them for privacy. A lot had toilets tucked away under stairways. These were flushed into open cesspools or nearby streams and brooks. Now most of the homes in Millville range in value from a quarter of a million up to a million dollars. As Dylan would say; Times are a Changin.”

“As most of you know, a rare Honus Wagner baseball card at last week at a private auction sold for 7.5 million dollars.  20 years ago, I sold on an Ebay auction many items I recovered from the Camden dump in Rockport that belonged to Edna St., her sister Katherine and Mom Millay.  Sadly, I didn't fetch as much because the girls didn't make their names in sports.”

“This will be my last post on Facebook for a while. I hope I don't come off as all doom and gloom. I have been giving some thought to my obituary. I don't know when, where, or how I will die. I have worked to put together a plan that will be used to take care of my final wishes. As for my obituary, I have been writing it for over 25 years ever since I got connected to the internet. It certainly isn't a brief biography of my life. I started out posting with the moniker, Nattydog. Soon after, I became Emmawhitecrow.

Other names that followed were Pat B. Ribbon, Circle 6, ChuckleBerry, and many others I can't remember. I made posts and comments on many sites, Maine high school basketball was one of my favorites. I have had great conversations with some of the best-known players and coaches in the entire state of Maine and throughout this country. If you ever wanted to see or read what I have said over the years, you can search the internet for those monikers I have listed. Some of the things I had written, I still hold as self truths, others I view now as a bit off the wall.”

“Well hello again to all you wonderful and special people that have come into my life! Some of you may be wondering why I am not doing my usual ranting and raving about all the current political issues. To tell you the truth, I love this new way of feeling upbeat and positive and don't want to screw it up. I want to help people that are struggling, with some financial support or any material items I can give them. I offer these things because the more I give away the more I seem to possess. One of the great mysteries of life I would say. Until we hook up later today, I wish you all peace and enjoyment!”

“It so easy for me to say this morning how grateful I am for all the help, care, and blessings you have given me. I get overwhelmed with incredible positive emotion. I have never in my life experienced such feelings of happiness. It gives me so much strength as I launch head first into my recovery from my ongoing medical issues. | was once a volunteer for 16 years at a local food pantry. I enjoyed helping people that need some assistance at times. Many would thank me and tell me that my actions made their days less stressful. I would hear what they were saying but I couldn't fully understand what they felt. Now, that I am on the receiving end of people's kindness and charity, I know what they were feeling. As I am getting ready to embark on this new day, I am carrying along all the hope and inspiration you have given me.”

“Well, it looks like I will be leaving Pen Bay to a rehab in Farmington for further therapy today. I must say I am looking forward to the hour and half ride. I have been pretty much confined to the Camden/Rockport area the past several years. A change of scenery is always good for me. Should this new place be just half as good as Pen Bay, I will be very pleased. Life has become a great adventure for me. I have a lot of well thought out ideas and plans, with a little luck and work they will come to fruition. I will continue to stay in touch by phone or Facebook. I have an attitude like Arnold Schwarzenegger the Terminator; I'II Be Back.”

“Some of you may be aware that I haven't been posting as much of my blistering political crap of late. I have had other things on my mind. Due to a life changing event for me, I have been doing a lot of reminiscing about nice memories of my past. I remember the sights, hearing sounds, and the feel of wind and rain. 

"What I seem to be drawn to is the smells I used to look forward to when they appeared during different seasons in Maine. These thoughts were no doubt triggered by the breathing therapy I am experiencing now at PenBay... Breathing in to smell the Flowers ,breathing out to put out the Birthday Candles.

"One of my earliest memories of smell was when I was 4 years old and a next door friend and I were smelling the exhaust from my uncle's car tailpipe that was running in the darkness of a winter morning as the family were piling into the car to head to work at the Woolen Mills in downtown Camden. 

"In the Springs of the mid 1950s I can sense that grain odor in the 100 lb burlap bags that were chicken feed delivered by Rankin's for my Grandfather's 90 or so laying hens. I remember going out to his 40 by 8 chicken coop (made with the finest used lumber) from the old ice harvesting houses on Megunticook River. I was shown how to lift eggs out from under nesting hens without getting pecked a lot. The small hen house had a bit of a stench to it, but I loved the work! In that tiny backyard there were 3 apple trees and 2 crabapple ones that added to the aroma mix. I tried to stay upwind from the solitary one-seater outhouse that served the needs of 4 family members.”

“Back in the early 2000s, before Facebook came into existence, I along with some of you use to have our internet 'chats' on the old Village Soup site. Some of us went so far as creating blogs on there. Mine was; The Adventures of Emmawhitecrow. It certainly helped me to get to know a lot of people. Some became friends‚ while others, well let's just leave it at that. The overseers of the site; "earlier day internet morality gods" would remove any comments or posts that they determined used naughty language. Posters had to resort to asterisks to temper their replies...”

Alison McKellar lives in Camden