As proud as Smiley was of his accomplishment, however, the perks he expected from the library never came to pass. A year came and went, and no professional catalog for the collection ever emerged. No sale of duplicates was authorized. And no new book about the collection ever appeared. It was with some chagrin, then, that he heard about the publication of a new book based on the other collection he had helped put together—the one for Norman Leventhal.
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NOW IN HIS EIGHTIES, Leventhal had begun to seriously think about his legacy, contemplating the best way to preserve the knowledge embedded in his growing collection of maps of Boston and New England. Back in 1990, a conference in Boston organized by John Carter Brown Library head Norman Fiering examined the mapping of New England for the first time. During the event, Fiering proposed a definitive carto-bibliography listing all the known maps of the region and tapped Yale map collection head curator Barbara McCorkle to write it.
Leventhal, however, had a different vision—he was less interested in a scholarly work than he was in a popular book that would appeal to a wide audience interested in Boston’s history. The idea was galvanized by the arrival in 1992 of a new map curator at Harvard University named David Cobb. Cobb had come from Chicago, which had an active map society sponsoring cartographic lectures and events, and was struck by the lack of a similar organization in Boston. “What this town needs is a map society!” he told colleagues over a few glasses of wine one day, and they immediately nominated him to start one.
The Boston Map Society began meeting soon afterward, with its official headquarters at Harvard and Leventhal as an enthusiastic patron. By this time, Smiley had stopped working on Leventhal’s collection, so Cobb had few dealings with him. In fact, he met Smiley only twice—in the 1980s at B. Altman and years later when he briefly visited the Harvard collection. He did, however, get to know Norman Leventhal and his curator, Alex Krieger. At the time, Cobb knew as much about the early mapping of America as anyone in the city, and Leventhal and Krieger began relying on him for advice on buying new maps for their collection.
Eventually, they asked him if he’d like to cowrite a book with Krieger using the collection as the basis to look at the mapping of Boston and New England. Over a series of meetings at Leventhal’s office at the Boston Harbor Hotel, they fleshed out a work that would straddle the line between generalist and specialist, providing scholarly information about the maps interspersed with stories, anecdotes, and photos that would appeal to a coffee table audience.
MIT Press, the university press at Leventhal’s alma mater, agreed to publish the book, Mapping Boston, which appeared in August 1999. According to Cobb’s later recollection, the publisher originally set a print run of several thousand copies. Cobb urged more. “This is Boston,” he told them, a city obsessed with its own history. “This is going to fly off the shelves.” He was right. The publisher upped the run to ten thousand, all of which sold out within a few months of the book’s appearance. The publisher hastily printed another ten thousand. Eventually, the book sold well over twenty-five thousand copies, making it one of the most popular cartography books ever written.
That October, Krieger and Leventhal commissioned a multivenue exhibition based on the book at the Boston Public Library, the New England Aquarium, and the Boston Harbor Hotel. The exhibit was the most popular in the library’s history, drawing two hundred thousand visitors in six months. Smiley brought his friends Scott Slater, Bob von Elgg, and Scott Haas through the exhibit, explaining each map in detail. At one point, Haas remembers Smiley proudly telling hotel staff he was the one who helped “Mr. Leventhal” put the collection together. Apart from a thank-you by Leventhal in the foreword of the book, Smiley received no credit for his contribution.
In fact, over the course of a year, Smiley had seen back-to-back exhibitions of much of his life’s work—and yet he’d received little recognition, and no money, for all of his contributions. At the same time, another event later that fall put even more pressure on his career. On November 28, 1999, Smiley’s wife, Lisa, gave birth to their son, Edward Forbes Smiley IV—Ned for short. Smiley called his friend Slater to brag about how “big, robust, and strapping” a child he was. He’d always been good with kids—he doted on his friends’ children when they came up to Maine, and now he became determined to give Ned as idyllic a childhood as his own. Their home base would be on Martha’s Vineyard, but they’d spend every summer at the house in Sebec, which Smiley now set about turning into even more of a refuge for his family—even to the point of transforming the town itself.
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SMILEY’S VISION FOR SEBEC went beyond his restored farmhouse. In fact, slowly but surely he began to construct the Small Hope of his college imagination, despite some objections from his neighbors. I arrived in Sebec in 2013 for the Fourth of July parade, the annual highlight of the town calendar. A hot July sun shone down on more than a hundred people lining both sides of the bridge crossing the narrow outlet where Sebec Lake turns into the Sebec River. They were all dressed in red, white, and blue, waving American flags as shiny muscle cars and fire engines drove past. Children scrambled for Blow Pops thrown from cars, while older folks in lawn chairs held their hands over their ears when a zealous logging-truck driver laid on the air horn.
Across the lake, Smiley’s old farmhouse sat at the top of the hill, the perfect backdrop for the occasion, complete with a red barn topped by a white cupola. When I mentioned Smiley’s name to the locals, however, it garnered an immediate negative reaction. “He came in here and divided the town,” said Louisa Finnemore, taking a pause from swinging a hammer on last-minute repairs. “He came in with all these rules. But they were all his rules.”
“Yeah, rules ‘from away,’” chimed in another woman sitting in a folding chair nearby. That phrase, “from away,” conveys special meaning to Mainers. On its face, it means anyone from out of state, but more broadly, it refers to anyone who doesn’t “get” the Maine way of life. Flatlanders from New York and Boston have been coming up here since the nineteenth century telling people what to do and putting strictures on traditional pursuits like hunting, fishing, and lumbering. Tensions continue between those trying to save the land and those trying to use it.
But northern Maine isn’t easy to stereotype. For every beer-drinking redneck, there’s a hippie back-to-the-lander. They might not agree on politics or land use, but generally they agree to stay out of each other’s way, united by the cardinal rule of “live and let live.” That’s the rule some locals accuse Smiley of breaking. “He just thought he was better than everyone else,” said one old-timer, sitting down to an after-parade chicken barbecue plate. “He had a lot of ideas, and some of them were good ideas,” said another, “but he went about them the wrong way.”
In October 1997, a gregarious computer programmer named Glen Fariel moved with his family into the house next door to the Smileys and soon became a frequent guest. Fariel wasted little time getting involved in town politics, soon being elected one of the town’s three selectmen as well as president of the Big Bear Snowmobile Club—an essential institution during the long Maine winters. Smiley donated money to the group and helped with trail maintenance, but Fariel urged him to do more for the town. Along with the local historical society president, David Mallett, he encouraged Smiley to buy a piece of land across the lake from his home and to help restore it. The land was then choked with smoke bush, a fast-growing shrub that grows a feathery top to give it a “smoky” appearance. Smiley purchased it in October 2001 and donated it to the historical society to be used as a park.
Mallett—a local folk singer nationally famous for writing “Garden Song” (“Inch by inch . . . ”)—spearheaded fund-raising to clear the property, build an octagonal gazebo, and plant rosebushes. Sebec Community Park opened in time for the July Fourth celebration the following year, with a ceremony dedicating it to the children of the village. Smiley paid to help sponsor kids’ craft
s in the park to coincide with the annual parade. But that was only a small part of the plans he and his friends had for the village.
Smiley also purchased land across from the park that was home to the old Sebec post office, now a rotted shell of a building with an old goat pen and chicken coop out back. Smiley announced plans to restore it as a new centerpiece of the village. Other crumbling mill towns throughout New England had leveraged their natural beauty and charm to become tourist meccas, sprouting artist studios and restaurants serving local food. Why couldn’t Sebec do the same? It was just the kind of grandiose plan that excited Smiley.
“Largely encouraged by many local residents of Sebec, I have taken on this project in the hope that its success will add in a small way to the health and prosperity of the town as a whole,” Smiley modestly told The Piscataquis Observer, detailing his plans to include a renovated post office and shops. “We’re trying to fish around and see what people need. The key is to listen and keep asking questions—and to meet local needs first.”
He spent tens of thousands of dollars over the winter renovating the post office, installing terrazzo floors and restoring rows of brass post office boxes. It officially opened in the spring of 2002, managed by Mallett’s wife, Jayne Lello. By late summer, Smiley had added a general store complete with candy counter and farmers’ market selling local produce. “Hey, neighbor! The old-fashioned general store of your childhood is alive and well—here in Sebec, Maine,” warmly greeted the Sebec Village Shops’ website. The store catered both to local needs and to the more upscale tastes of Sebec’s summer visitors, stocking gourmet Rao’s Coffee next to Maxwell House. The homewares section featured a $120 hand-carved children’s rocking horse, a $50 earthenware mixing bowl set, and a $35 beaded “wine skirt.”
The following year, in the fall of 2002, Smiley opened a restaurant with the same sensibility, hiring a local chef to make simple food with quality, organic ingredients. Affectionately dubbed the “chatterbox café,” it quickly became a neighborhood hub where locals sat in spindle-back chairs and gossiped about fishing, the logging business, the Red Sox, and their neighbors. In the morning, the café served home-baked bread and biscuits, truck-stop egg breakfasts, and stacks of pancakes with local maple syrup. For lunch, it offered sandwiches and hamburgers. And three nights a week, it opened for dinner with entrées of roast chicken and local trout.
The businesses were a godsend to the town economy, employing between fifteen and thirty people depending upon the season. Smiley ran the business as a nonprofit, paying above-prevailing wages for the area and earning a steady stream of supporters for his largesse. “He was Robin Hood,” Mallett later remembered. “He came up here with a vision to revitalize the town, and he employed practically everyone in it.”
From the beginning, the project bled money. By local estimates, Smiley spent $600,000 on the renovations alone, and thousands more every week on payroll during the summer. Now when Smiley’s friends came to Sebec for summer visits or Boys’ Weekends, they ate all of their meals there—leaving generous tips for the waitresses, but otherwise paying nothing. Smiley sat back proudly, reveling in how he had nearly single-handedly revitalized a town that badly needed it (Figure 12).
FIGURE 12 SMILEY’S SEBEC.
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NOT EVERYONE SHARED Smiley’s vision, however. As he went around trying to gain support to turn the village into a historic district, he met resistance from property owners who refused based on the cost it would take to restore their properties. “Sometimes he went by my house and I swear I caught him looking up at the molding on the porch like he owned it,” one of his neighbors later remembered.
Next door to Smiley’s shops was a community center called the Sebec Reading Room, a lending library that hosted events including the annual Fourth of July festivities. Smiley tried to convince them to restore the façade and increase the setbacks from the road. The association’s president at the time, Louisa Finnemore, flat-out refused. Smiley had broken Maine’s most important, if unstated rule—stay the hell out of your neighbors’ business. “Who is this flatlander who has come to town to tell everyone what to do?” some of his neighbors began to complain.
No one clashed with him more than Bill and Charlene Moriarty, who had moved to Sebec from Sanbornville in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, an hour and a half drive north of where Smiley grew up. There the couple had operated a boat repair and storage facility amid a family vacationland of speedboats, fried food, and video arcades. Bill Moriarty knew Sebec from hunting trips in Maine and was enamored of both its natural beauty and its unique educational system—which allowed students to attend nearby private prep school Foxcroft Academy free of charge.
The Moriartys purchased a home and general store in Sebec in January 2001, across the lake from Smiley’s house and directly across the street from the Sebec Village Shops. They planned to turn the property into a marina that would include an ice cream shop and docking for local boat owners. As they began construction in the spring of 2002, Smiley and his friends were dismayed. It was exactly the kind of business they didn’t want in the village; they could only imagine the loud and rowdy boaters it would attract.
Examining the permit the Moriartys had been issued the previous April, however, he and his friends thought they saw a way to stop it: The couple had never included the word “marina” in their application. In fact, the permit for the property specified “that it stays as it is, dry storage to sell,” and the chairman of the planning board had written the Moriartys a letter confirming the permit “pertains only to the use of the buildings, not to include an exterior marina.” She also said, however, that the planning board was “investigating further the proper procedures for issuing a permit for a marina” and would let them know if it needed any more information.
The preservationists filed a complaint with the town, and on June 5, 2002, the town’s code enforcement officer, Bill Murphy, issued a “stop work” order to close down construction. Until now, most local disputes had been ironed out over coffee at the local diner or at town meetings, where members of the same families had filled the seats of the selectmen and planning board for generations. Now the marina issue became a lightning rod, dividing the town and raising the heat at town meetings.
Post office manager Jayne Lello remembered standing up to insist that the permit include the word “marina” and being told to “stick it up your ass.” Another burly man asked if she wanted to take it outside. She stopped going to meetings after that. The battle continued in letters and newspaper editorials. “I am ashamed that what should have been a simple permit request by a business entrepreneur was allowed to remain ‘unclear’ for over a year because the nature of the business wasn’t spelled out on the request,” selectman Susan Dow wrote to a local paper. “I, for one, don’t want more regulations telling me what to do with my property.”
A few days later, Mallett fired back in another editorial. “I am very concerned that local and state environmental laws have been publicly disregarded,” he wrote. “Indeed, I feel as if we do not have a town government at all, but have resorted to a more tribal approach.” While Mallett seemed to be leading the charge, however, it was Smiley who became the public target of the opposition. At the annual town meeting in August, residents approved every one of forty-two articles on the agenda, except one—a proposal by residents to pave Cove Road, the road where Smiley and Fariel had their homes. Soon after, Charlene Moriarty wrote a letter to the town enforcement officer with a list of alleged violations at Smiley’s shops, including the percentage of parking and vegetative growth, and permits to serve food.
Privately, she and her husband began bad-mouthing Smiley, saying he was spending money “like it wasn’t his own.” It was idle speculation on their part, since they had no evidence that he’d done anything wrong in the way he had acquired his money. At the same time they were spreading their rumors, however, a librarian at Yale University�
��s Sterling Memorial Library had begun to suspect the same thing. And she thought she had proof.
Chapter 9
MISSING MAPS, MISSING CARDS
FIGURE 13 ROBERT DUDLEY. “CARTA PARTICOLARE DELLA VIRGINIA VECCHIA E NUOUA.” FLORENCE, 1646.
2002–2004
YALE’S STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY looks more like a cathedral than a library. Two heavy wooden doors open onto a long aisle with a four-story vaulted ceiling lined with stained-glass depictions of thinkers, explorers, and saints. It takes a half minute to walk across the flagstones to the main desk at the end of the hall, where a row of elevators take visitors up to the Map Collection on the seventh floor.
Compared to the rest of the library—or for that matter, the state-of-the-art Beinecke a few blocks away—the map department is underwhelming. Cramped and cluttered, its three rooms are stuffed to capacity. On one side, giant flat files hold modern maps (that is, anything more recent than 1850). Past them, a locked door leads to a room where the old maps are stored. To the other side is the reading room, half of it occupied by a large wooden table, the rest with file cabinets and shelves filled with reference books and globes.
On a recent visit, I was greeted at the door by assistant librarian Margit Kaye, who is tall and blond and was wearing a light black sweater and slim gray slacks. “I’ve been working here twenty-plus years,” she told me in a German accent. Actually, the number is more like forty-five. She worked with the first curator of the map department, Alexander O. Vietor, and mentored generations of students. “You know Graham Arader? He calls me his mentor,” she continued. Few people know more about antiquarian maps than she does—and no one knows Yale’s collection better.
“We’ve got everything ready for you,” she said, leading me inside and opening the top of a metal storage box in the corner. Pulling out a plastic-encased map, she slid John Seller’s 1675 “Mapp of New England” onto the table. This was the same copy that Andy Antippas stole from Yale back in 1978, before Graham Arader bought it from him and alerted authorities. It was also the same map that, in another copy, Smiley advertised in one of his very first ads before selling it to Norman Leventhal in the mid-1980s.
The Map Thief Page 16