{"id":544,"date":"2016-08-01T20:25:10","date_gmt":"2016-08-02T00:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thegoodlife\/?page_id=544"},"modified":"2016-08-03T11:29:15","modified_gmt":"2016-08-03T15:29:15","slug":"httpcolbysites-orgmarkohmsviewer-phpcachefilegregoire-xml","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thegoodlife\/listen\/httpcolbysites-orgmarkohmsviewer-phpcachefilegregoire-xml\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Gregoire"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Gregoire grew up in Maine. As a young adult, he motorcycled across the country and eventually circled his way back over Canadian territory and to a homestead just a few miles from the Maine town he grew up in. The following link provides an indexed, segmented, and transcribed version of Paul Gregoire’s Oral History:\u00a0Paul Gregoire’s Interview<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

The Story<\/strong><\/p>\n

Back-to-the-lander Paul Gregoire grew up in a small french-speaking community in Augusta, Maine. After graduating from Coney High School, he matriculated to Colby College.<\/span><\/p>\n

After Colby, to pay off his college loans, he packed up his bags and headed down to New Jersey, where he worked as a milk-truck driver. The hiatus from Maine didn\u2019t last long. \u201cAfter awhile — before the loans were paid, that was for sure — I looked at Joyce [my girlfriend] and said, \u201cDo you like it here in New Jersey?\u201dPaul says, remembering his return to the state of his childhood.\u00a0\u201cNo, I don\u2019t,” she replied. \u00a0Two weeks later, they were back in Maine.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Upon returning to Maine, Paul bought a small hunting cabin in West Athens, Maine. The hunting cabin had no heat. \u201cWe didn\u2019t know anything,\u201d Paul recalled. \u201cOh my God we were so cold. We didn\u2019t know that wood had to be seasoned.\u201d To stave off the freezing temperatures, they learned how to build a house and how to heat their home using solely a wood stove. An old Mainer gave Paul his tools, and they taught themselves the practice of chopping, drying, and burning wood. and Paul began to learn about agriculture.<\/span><\/p>\n

Each week, they would drive to their friends\u2019 apartment in Augusta so they could shower. Eventually, these same friends from Augusta moved to the hunting cabin, kicking off a few decades of what Paul terms \u201ccommunal type living.\u201d Eventually, Paul and several other homesteaders founded a land trust called Creep City. Creep City became a haven for counter-cultural values. \u201cThere was a lot of sex,\u201d Paul says, recalling the influence of the era\u2019s sexual revolution on the culture of Creep City. He also offered some insights on his take on drugs: \u201cPot was ubiquitious. We grew our own, until the helicopters came. Then we kind of had to back off on that.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Paul was also the first man at Skowhegan Hospital to be in the hospital room during a birth.<\/span><\/p>\n

Eventually, Paul moved to Waterville, Maine, where he worked in The Last Unicorn restaurant. With a friend, he began to work with video and recording technology. His experience with tech landed him a job at Colby College. In the mid 2000s, Paul moved with his partner, Tamar, to Cambridge, MA, where he works at the Harvard Law School.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

\n <\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Gregoire grew up in Maine. As a young adult, he motorcycled across the country and eventually circled his way back over Canadian territory and to a homestead just a few miles from the Maine town he grew up in. The following link provides an indexed, segmented, and transcribed version of Paul Gregoire’s Oral History:\u00a0Paul […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7397,"featured_media":0,"parent":30,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thegoodlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/544"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thegoodlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thegoodlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thegoodlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7397"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thegoodlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thegoodlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/544\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":682,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thegoodlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/544\/revisions\/682"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thegoodlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thegoodlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}