Chef Kim Mills and Steward Doug Harley, with the help of servers, Laura and Steve Francis, served hearty Irish dinners to many boisterous Rotarians and to our guests Zaid Osman and Helen Meserve, part of our family. 

Official Reader, Bob Pike, shared thank-yous from the Boothbay Region Student Aid Fund, LifeFlight, and the Boothbay Region Humane Society. President Jim Botti announced that most of the service positions for our upcoming Soup Dinner at the American Legion Hall on March 28 have already been filled, but there are more opportunities to bring soup and chowders, salads, and baked goods.

I.J. Pinkham thanked Mike Thompson for doing most of the organization for last weekend’s successful elementary school basketball tournaments that generate a little money for community causes but, more importantly, give a boost to young basketball players from all around western Maine to experience good sportsmanship, competition and cooperation.

Catherine Wygant Fossett, with the help of Zaid, handed out the winning five bucks to Doug Roberts and twenty bucks to Sue Duckworth. Sergeant-at-arms, Connie Jones, focused on I.J. trivia that was not trivial: Best Coach in the Western Division this year, basketball coach for the past 43 years, 558 wins in his 43 years, and a mere seven losing seasons with only three of those in Boothbay.

District Governor Marty Helman thanked the five of us who attended the President-Elect Training: Jen Page and Mo and Zaid Osman and Frank and Marty Helman. She also was thankful that our inbound Group Study Exchange team of Nigerians finally received their passports and will be with us in May. Our District Conference, here at our Spruce Point Inn this May, already has a record 92 early registrants and will feature Ann Matthews, the highest woman, ever, in Rotary, serving as Vice President. 

Judy deGraw, awestruck with the 1939 movies “Gone With the Wind” and “Wizard of Oz,” introduced our own Ham Meserve, named after his mother, Margaret Hamilton and his father Paul Meserve, to speak about his mother in her professional, personal, and Maine perspectives from her birth in 1902 until her passing in 1985. Ham regaled us with inspirational and reflective stories that will resonate with us for years to come. 

Margaret Hamilton, despite appearing in only 12 of the 103 minutes of “Wizard,” became the fourth most feared movie character and the most feared woman in movie history. “Wizard” never was profitable as a movie, and Margaret Hamilton only made $8,000 for her eight weeks of work, since movie residuals for actors did not then exist until after she, Ronald Reagan, and others were on the SAG board and succeeded in changing the rules decades later. MGM sold the “Wizard” rights to Turner, which has cashed in on the huge residuals that only accrued after “Wizard” hit the television screens, where little kids could cuddle up in their parents’ laps in a lighted living room rather than the terrifying blackness of movie theaters. Even Salman Rushdie, in India, was terrified of her, experienced nightmares of green-faced witches and shared this fright with one of Ham and Helen’s sons. 

Ham shared the story of how his mother was almost killed and suffered second degree and third degree burns to her face and arms during the “Wizard” scene where she tried to get her slippers and disappeared amongst smoke and how Ham later saw his mother’s eye surrounded by bandages after. She refused to risk a similarly dangerous stunt in a later movie resulting in her stand-in doing the role and being hospitalized for six months. 

Margaret Hamilton became very close to Judy Garland during the eight weeks of “Wizard,” and Judy Garland in real life despite the best of efforts could not return home, unlike her character Dorothy. Margaret Hamilton was in 77 movies before 1950, when she was 48, when she returned east to resume her career on Broadway as well as in regional theater and summer stock, including Maine venues such as the Lakewood Playhouse and the Brunswick Music Theater. Margaret Hamilton sold more coffee, through her Cora character for Maxwell House, than any other person. 

She was devoted to protecting Ham from the movie scene and would not let him sign any contract with the movies. She came from a proper family in Cleveland and was a proud member of the Junior League, yet she reveled more in her family and in her adopted Cape Island off Newagen. Coincidentally, Helen Meserve with her Texas family had visited Cape Island once as a kid, at 14 in 1954, and over a decade later came to Maine with her new husband, Ham, and his mother, Margaret, looking to buy a lighthouse. 

Instead, they rediscovered Cape Island, and Ham and his mother pooled resources, and Ham acquired the island from the outset, although it was always known as the Witch’s Island. Later, Ham would discover that his ancestor, Richard Pattishall, had owned Damariscove Island in the 1600s, until he was killed in 1689 by the Indians in his sloop at Pemaquid, where legend has it that Pattishall’s headless body floated to Damariscove and his ghost stalks Damariscove to the present day. 

Ham recounted how Margaret almost drowned at the Newagen pier one of the multitude of times she rowed back and forth from Cape Island, into her late seventies. Luckily, her New York cab driver peeked over the wharf and rescued her and her heavy coat, and she was revived with some stiff medicinal concoction and drove off to her gig in New York. Many folks, including Viv Daniels, remembered Margaret Hamilton very fondly, as Margaret reveled with locals, stopping by at places like Grover's Hardware.

We all gave two standing ovations for Hamilton Meserve’s fascinating stories, the first ever in my 33 years for a Boothbay Rotarian in our own clubhouse.