Page 18 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 93, No. 2 Winter 2013

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bread made for the Union Army came from grain grown
in Maine. In early 2009, when the New England-based
dairy company H.P. Hood severed its contracts with a
group of Maine’s organic dairy farmers and reduced its
business with others, Eldridge recognized his opportunity.
At the time, Eldridge was working with Maine’s agri-
culture and farming leaders, which made it easier to
forge a coalition of the suddenly out-of-work farmers.
“Everybody decided we couldn’t let these farmers die,”
Eldridge recalls of the formation of Maine’s Own Organic
Milk Company (www.moomilk.com). “It was a decision
by Maine’s agricultural community leaders to stop any
further erosion, especially since the 2007 census showed
that the number of farms in Maine had increased for the
first time in over a century,” says Eldridge.
Today, the farmers sell in supermarkets throughout
Maine and as far south as Rhode Island and Connecticut.
They have big contracts with Whole Foods and Hannaford,
and Eldridge has a featured role in Betting the Farm, a
documentary about the farmers and MOO that debuted
at the Camden International Film Festival, where it won
the Audience Award.
As proud as Eldridge is of his work for MOO, he is
even more proud that on Anniversary Weekend 2009,
his form’s 50th, he was awarded his St. Paul’s diploma,
making him the School’s oldest recent graduate. The
presentation, which was the result of dogged lobbying
by his formmates, was made at the form dinner by a
former soccer teammate: the School’s Twelfth Rector,
Bill Matthews ’61.
“Even though the punishment was more severe than
the offense,” says Eldridge, “I accepted the blame for what
I had done,” adding that his faith in SPS never wavered.
Jason Angell ’95
THE JOYS OF HONEY-MOVING
ellow farmer Jason Angell wasn’t surprised by
Eldridge’s journey. “I’ve met a lot of farmers who
have searched for something that will make them happy,”
he says. “You get a lot of people with eclectic backgrounds.”
Angell lives on seven acres of farmland in Garrison, N.Y.,
just 50 miles from the city, where he once spent many
hours in an office behind a computer. Even though his
job entailed drafting progressive environmental laws, he
B
F
Bill Eldridge ’59
MAKING HIS MARK IN MAINE
ill Eldridge was two weeks shy of his SPS gradu-
ation when he and two formmates took the car they
had dismantled and reassembled for their Independent
Study Project out for a late-night spin.
After stopping to fill the car with gas, they were pulled
over by the New Hampshire State Police and cited for
driving without a registration. The School’s punishment
was swift and harsh: the boys were expelled and Eldridge’s
admission to Yale rescinded. Thus began a long journey
that would see Eldridge join the Navy, earn a scholarship,
reapply to Yale, be reaccepted, choose Rensselaer Poly-
technic Institute instead, and drop out after only a year-
and-a-half in favor of a nine-month stint on the road,
Jack Kerouac-style, abandoning his aspirations to be-
come a nuclear physicist.
The wanderer’s life eventually lost its appeal and,
through a family friend, Eldridge was hired by the United
Fruit Company, the multinational corporation most
famous for bringing the Chiquita banana onto the world
stage. Eldridge spent the next 20 years moving up the
ranks of corporate-agricultural America, most of them
at United Fruit. Whether behind a desk or out in the
jungles of Latin America, Eldridge developed a deep
love of the land.
“One mentor made me eat dirt,” says Eldridge, recalling
a southern foray to study banana plantations. “He told
me he could distinguish the different pH levels of the soil
through tasting. Me, I just had dirt in my mouth.”
PH levels notwithstanding, Eldridge developed a keen
understanding of the business of agriculture and farming
that would eventually and ironically lead him away from
its corporate side.
In 1982, ensconced as the head of marketing for the
United Fruit Company in New York’s Rockefeller Center,
a comfortable commute away from his home in West-
chester County, Eldridge stirred for something more. So
too did his family. Together they made the decision to
move to Maine, where the agriculture and food sector
has been in steady decline since World War II. Eldridge
took a series of consulting gigs, never losing a nagging
desire to help restore the state’s agriculture to the eco-
nomic engine it had been during the Civil War, when all
THEO ANGELL