News of The Rotary Club of Portland, Maine
May 11, 2021
 
Glenn Cummings to Speak
 
Dr. Glenn Cummings, President of the University of Southern Maine, will speak Friday, May 14.  Prior to his current role, Dr. Cummings served as Interim President of the University of Maine at Augusta.
 
Cummings served in the Obama administration as a Deputy Assistant Secretary in the U.S. Department of Education where he focused on improving access to adult education and literacy training, career and technical education, and community colleges. 
 
Previously, Cummings served as President and Executive Director of Good Will-Hinckley, an historic 121-year-old school for high school youth located in Hinckley, Maine. With help from the Harold Alfond Foundation, he established the Maine Academy of Natural Sciences, a state-wide, residential school focused on environmental education, agriculture and forestry.
 
Cummings is a former Speaker of the House in the Maine House of Representatives.
 
Cummings obtained his Doctorate in Higher Education Management from the University of Pennsylvania. He previously earned a Masters of Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, an MA from Brown University, and a BA from Ohio Wesleyan University.
Passage | by Bob Martin
 
We lost Dave Smith this week. His wife, Anne Dalton, shared with Larry Gross that a funeral is planned for this coming weekend, but the details are not yet available.
 
Dave graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a journalism degree and earned his law degree from Fordham University. He spent his career in New York City where he worked as associate counsel for the New York State Department of Health. He was active in a variety of community service organizations in New York, keenly focused on helping those with disabilities and mental health issues.
 
Dave was born without a right arm. He once said, “having a disability can make you more sensitive to what’s going on around you.”
 
Dave and his wife moved to Maine after his retirement and he became involved with a wide variety of community organizations, continuing his interest in helping those with physical and mental disabilities. He volunteered with the Community Counseling Center and the Southern Maine Agency on Aging, where he taught seminars and served on its board, along with a number of other organizations.
 
Dave joined Portland Rotary in 2010, sponsored by Larry Gross.  He was quietly active with the Windjammer, and served on the Community Service and Fundraising committees. He was a Paul Harris Fellow.
 
We will miss his wit, his service, and his presence.
 
 
Bits and Pieces | by Juliana L'Heureux
 
President Ellen Niewoehner convened the May 7, 2021 meeting of 41 members and guests. Charlie Frair shared his visit to Rotary Grove, reporting that about a dozen of the crocus bulbs planted last fall have bloomed, with many more expected to show their colors in the next week. Thanks to Paul Gore for the signage crediting the End Polio Now campaign. The “purple crocus” has been adopted by the End Polio Now campaign and Rotary International to energize and remind everyone about the global challenge of eradicating poliomyelitis. 
 
Charlie Friar provided the invocation with a quote from Lionel Ritchie: “The blessing of life is your spirit. If you lose your spirit, you lose everything.”
 
Guests included Sara Yeransian (Laura Young) and Nicholas Gagnon, who will soon join Portland Rotary.
 
Bruce Moore reported the Recovery Task Force approved a number of donations:
 
  • $1000 for the Jesse Harvey Memorial Scholarship at University of Southern Maine to be awarded to a student in recovery living in one of the Sober Houses Jesse founded;
  • $2000 for Milestone Foundation;
  • $1000 for the Maine Recovery Fund;
  • $500 for the Portland Recovery Community Center
 
Doreen Rockstrom will be helping with future Recovery Committee grants. Elise Hodgkin, honorary member and Club Administrator, donated a microwave to the Portland Recovery Center for the kitchen at their new facility. The committee is looking for a refrigerator to be donated. There may be a volunteer opportunity for Rotarians and volunteers to fill backpacks for people who are currently in recovery for the first time. The Center is led by our own Leslie ClarkMichelle DiSotto is working with Goodwill Industries to secure the backpacks. Donations are welcome. This will be an outdoor project. 
 
Charlie Frair, interim fundraising committee chair, reported fundraising energy will now focus on Flags for Heroes, scheduled to open at the Maine Mall in South Portland on September 11, 2021. More information to come.
 
May birthdays include:
 
Bill Blount, May 7   
Mark Foster, May 12
Bill Ross, May 12     
Tom Saturley, May 13
Howie Herodes, May 17
Bob Martin, May 17            
Tom Sukley, May 17
Patty Erickson, May 18
Jon Young, May 22
Mike Harper, May 31
 
Rotary anniversaries include: 
 
Bill Blount
29 years
Tony Manhart
15 years
Laura Young
14 years
Tim Hooper
1 year
Joyce Kennedy
1 year
Asheesh Lanba
1 year 
 
 
President Ellen invited all Portland Rotarians and our guests to join in an outdoor June 18 meeting at Fort Williams ParkYou can arrive any time after 10:30 am to socialize. The meeting will begin at 11:30 am. The change in time is due to our reservation ending at 1pm. A sandwich lunch will be available for $20 and must be reserved in advance with Elise Hodgkin. The program will include participation in a cleanup project to rid the park of invasive plant species. Be sure to bring garden gloves, hand spades, or garden tools. 
North Spore Grows | by Erik Jorgensen
 
North Spore Mushroom Founder Eliah Thanhauser spoke at Portland Rotary this past Friday.  With a mission to make the world of mushrooms accessible to all, North Spore is a company that has seen rapid growth, especially after a major shift from cultivation to other product lines at the start of the pandemic.
 
North Spore is devoted to all aspects of mushroom growing. It started in 2014 with three friends from College of the Atlantic – a mushroom biologist, a wine sales person, and an organic agriculture expert. According to Thanhauser, “All of our skill sets overlapped in surprising ways, analytics, biology, and sales. We were a bunch of friends and just decided to do it.”
In the time since they started North Spore, mushrooms have exploded in popularity. In addition to the growing demand for non-meat sources of protein, Thanhauser noted that there “used to be 2 or 3 mushroom medicinals at Whole Foods, and now every CVS has 40!”
 
North Spore began in a Westbrook garage, raising mushrooms for sale to local farmers markets and restaurants. Thanhauser recalls walking into restaurants knowing nothing about how they made purchasing decisions. “Suddenly we went from starting a company to being a company.” Restaurants saw the quality of the mushrooms, and accounts soon followed. Initially the company produced only oyster mushrooms.
 
Farmers markets and delivery to restaurants were critical in those early days. While it is hard to brand a vegetable, they decided to go that route, wanting to be known for the quality of their product.  This strategy matured as restaurants were offered a discount if they had the company name on the menu.  The company was doubling in size every year for seven years and were about to take over a small mushroom distribution company in Boston when the pandemic hit.  Sales collapsed.  North Spore went overnight from 75 restaurants to about 3 restaurants.  As Thanhauser noted, “We were done with fresh mushrooms at that point”. 
 
During the time that the fresh mushroom business was growing, they had also found that there was real demand for growing supplies.  They had started selling to other mushroom farms, then branched out to offer home-grow kits and tinctures. Their e-commerce business started with a $25 listing on Amazon. Their first shipment cost $27 to pack and ship a $25 product. They made changes and now the business is about 95% e-commerce. Now they ship up to 500 packages – at least one full FedEx truck per day filled by North Spore. 
 
Since the pandemic hit, they have poured their focus into e-commerce and growing supplies, going from 12 employees in March 2020, to their current 35 employees.  They have “gone through major growing pains” but “mushroom excitement continues to build” and they expect to double in size again this year.
Moment of Reflection
 
The End
 
By Mark Strand
 
Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.
 
When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky
 
Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.
 
 “The End,” © 1990 by Mark Strand from The Continuous Life by Mark Strand. 
 
Speaker Schedule
 
May 14 | Glenn Cummings, University of Southern Maine
May 21 | Ian Dorsey, Mast Landing Brewery
May 28 | NO MEETING
June 4 | Tony Cameron, CEO, Maine Tourism Association
June 11 | Wade Merritt, Maine International Trade Center
June 18 | Picnic, Fort Williams Park, Cape Elizabeth
June 25 | Dory Waxman, Portland Charter
July 2 | NO MEETING
The Windjammer
is published online every week by
The Rotary Club of Portland, Maine.
 
Contributing Editors
Jake Bourdeau
Dick Hall
Erik Jorgensen
Julie L’Heureux
Ben Lowry
John Marr
Tom Talbott
 
Managing Editor
Bob Martin
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