Sagebrush, songwriting and plastic guitars

BRIDGTON – Born in North Norway, Terry Swett has lived in the area most of his life. Now he works as a sign painter.

He recently took time to tell us about his life.

Q: When were you born and where were you brought up?

A: I was born in 1956 and I was brought up in North Norway. I never left North Norway except for once a week until I was in kindergarten.

Q: Did you have many siblings?

A: I have eight siblings. I'm the baby of nine. They're Bob, Laurel, Linda, Sally, Paul, Charlie, Wally and Sonny. My youngest sibling was five years older than me.

Q: What did your parents do?

A: My mother was a homemaker, a mother and a wife. My father was the greens-keeper at the Norway Country Club and in the winter he was a fetch-it man for Harold's Motors which is now Goodwin Motors.

Q: What was it like growing up?

A: I was kind of like the caboose child. My siblings are so much older than me, that I sent most of my childhood having the free run of the neighborhood. I came from a broken home and they took me in, the whole neighborhood. I rode bicycles and made little farms with clothespins and string. I played a lot by myself

Q: Was there anything you wanted to be when you grew up?

A: When I was a child the biggest thing I wanted was a horse or a pony and we couldn't have one and couldn't have one and finally when we got one – my stepfather bought it and planted it at my father's house, where I lived. Of course, my father, the biggest reason he didn't go out and get me one is because he thought he'd get stuck taking care of it.

If he hadn't waited so long, that might not have been the case but I got the pony about a year and a half before the height of puberty and my interests were changing. I rode the pony with the other kids in the neighborhood. But that's what I wanted, I wanted to be a farmer when I was a young child. But as I got older I got into rock and roll.

Q: Where did you go to school?

A: I went to kindergarten at the little red school house on Norway Lake. I went to first grade at the Matolcsy Art Center, with Mrs. McAllister. I clearly remember her bringing a postcard of a jumbo jet that she had ridden from Portland to Detroit, MI. We all got a copy of that postcard, the jet in air.

It was like another world. I went to second grade at the Guy E. Rowe school. I remember in the fourth grade, Russel Frost had a horse that got loose and kids were scurrying all over the playground because the horse was running around making the teachers nervous. Our teacher made note of what I did the next day, I climbed to the top of the swing set.

In the sixth grade I moved to Maryland, the suburbs of D.C. My sister lived there. It was a great experience. I started missing my friends, so I came back the summer before seventh grade.

Q: What have you had for jobs?

A: I mowed lawns. When I was a kid living in North Norway, I used to go door-to-door selling all-occasion cards and seeds. For selling those you'd get a catalog and you could pick something out of there. Depending on how many cards and seeds you sold you could win something.

I remember getting a .22 pistol and a plastic folk guitar, once, and a tape recorder. After that, while in Maryland, I started mowing lawns for the whole neighborhood. I was getting between $1.25 and $2.50 per lawn, once a week. Sometimes they'd let me rake it, too.

I'd spend my money on plastic model cars, that was my hobby. My first real job was in Maryland, when I was 14, because I bounced back and forth to Maryland. I worked in a restaurant as a prep-cook. When I came back to Maine the next time, I worked at the Norway Country Club in the pro shop. I was working 60 hours a week and getting paid $70; it was awful, but I had no time to spend it.

I washed golf clubs and shoes and gassed up golf carts. It was also the start of my sign business. I hand painted these awful name tag signs for the parking spots. I always liked letter form and ribbons and scrolls and doodling. I did a sign for my father's fish house and I did a sign for a hang-out in Market Square for 4-H kids. It was a natural attraction. By the time I was 18 and in Georgia, I got a job with a sign painter.

After he saw how well I could letter, he made me dig post holes and paint moldings and paint backgrounds. He wouldn't let me letter. Merle Glines was my mentor but he never gave me a job but I had a hunger to learn the craft so I became a sign painter on my own. My first sign shop was in Market Square, upstairs from Dick's Barber Shop. The building is no longer there.

We lived in an apartment. I roomed with one of my musician friends. It was a two-bedroom apartment with a big closet. I took the bedroom with the big closet, made the closet my bedroom and made the bedroom my first sign shop.

Q: When and how did you meet your spouse?

A: Sandy and I were living in some cabins that belonged to a mutual friend on Brandy Pond in Naples. We were both either recently divorced or going through a divorce. We were just great friends, spending time together and one thing led to another and over time we just never left. We just kept hanging out and that was 21 years ago. We got married in 1992.

Q: What did you do after you got married for work?

A: I was a sign painter and Sandy got involved in the business with me, keeping me organized. I really admired her for being kind of quiet. Eccentric artists are weird about somebody else telling them how to do what they do and that's how I was.

She would start telling me that she didn't like the way something looked and as time went on I started listening to her objective viewpoint and we both gained from it. She started designing things when the computer came on the scene. She would watch closely what I was doing and replicating it and then she became confident enough to do her own thing.

Q: Did you do much traveling?

A: For about four years after high school, I went all over the country. I traveled through about 40 states. That's how I really became who I am. I painted signs, freelance, for just enough to get by, to get to the next place I was going. I'd become more of a folk musician at the time, I had transitioned from rock and roll, and I would sign for my supper.

I left here with my friend in a little Ford Pinto and we go to Colorado where I met up with someone and hung back, and he kept on going. He sent me a postcard, and I thought, he's there, and the girl I was with was going to start her first year of college in Boulder and I didn't want to interrupt her so I thought I'd go see him.

This was before we had cell phones. I went to reconnect with him out west. He had sent me a postcard from Oregon, but he had gone back to Maine by the time I got there, so I went back to Boulder. I went to Florida, Georgia. I stayed in Reno, Nevada and Ohio. It's part of what made me who I am.

Q: Which place was the most fascinating and why?

A: That's so hard because I found beauty in every place I was. Everybody loves Colorado, including me, and I haven't been there in years and I yearn to go back. I love sagebrush in Nevada, not a lot of people say that. But when you're in a place you try and see the best of it. Mount Rainier was special because the mountains at sea level look a lot more impressive. I would say probably Boulder, CO.

Q: Did anyone influence you to the point of changing your direction in life?

A: Merle Glines was one of them. Doug Ryan because he was always a mover and shaker, always doing stuff. That's the one thing that I'm so thankful to have been around, a lot of entrepreneurs in my life. So many artists are eccentric and very talented but don't have very good marketing skills. I was never a big book-learner. I still to this day do not read a lot, but I read people. I learn by example and by doing.

Q: Do you collect anything or have a hobby?

A: Not so much collections, but hobbies that became a passion, writing. I'm a songwriter. I play guitar and harmonica and drums; I still play a little bit. More hand drums today than anything. Songwriting I've been doing since I was about 17. I wrote my first song about a guitar player from North Norway that used to gather with his friends at our house or at his folks' house Saturday nights and play old country songs, when I was 17. It's still one of my most requested songs today. It's called “Chester.”

Q: Organizations?

A: I'm part of the Maine Songwriters Association. They have a venue in the Portland area where, once a week, different songwriters get up and perform. They have a songwriters workshop a couple times a month. People go around a circle and play a song they're working on and others critique it and make suggestions.

I'm part of the Waterford Fair, I'm on the board of directors and I'm their music and vendor coordinator. I'm in charge of arranging entertainment during the fair and attracting different types of vendors and positioning them on the grounds and doing whatever I can throughout the rest of the year with fundraisers.

Q: What subject do you wish you knew more about?

A: Technology. Because I think I'm from the artistic side of the brain and not the technological side. I know I embrace technology kicking and screaming. Whenever I upgrade my software it's after it's been time-tested. With the signs and the music, getting it out there is so important. The tools of the trade have changed so much.

When I became a sign painter I painted with a brush. I had paint brushes, pencils, markers, paper and a tracing wheel. The same with songwriting, I had a tape recorder, a guitar, some words and a pencil. Both of those have gone so high-tech. I never asked for that, but I have to embrace it. So I just have to adjust my way of learning and accept it.

Q: What is the one thing you could not give up?

A: My freedom to be creative. I always feel so blessed, when some people in this world are bored, or when things get difficult and they struggle – I can always let it go, because I have some creative endeavor. Something creative that takes my mind off the now.

Usually that gets me through it, so the next day, I know I didn't spend a lot of time on worry because I put my energy into something creative, even it was just creative thinking.

Q: What is the one thing you would happily do over again?

A: Travel. I never regretted that and I encourage people to do the same. Sometimes it's scary but it's so rewarding for the most part, and meeting and marrying my wife.

Q: Do you have any children?

A: I have eight children. Starting with the youngest, John, Erin, Megan, Jesse, Dylan, Colleen, Jenn, and Sherry. And I have eight grandchildren with another one on the way.

Q: What was the best memory that this interview brought back?

A: I think when I was in junior high in a rock n roll band. I was with them for a couple of years. The Blue Flame. I remember how exciting it was to be in junior high and to see our name written on all the blackboards in the rooms that we would be playing at the junior high dance. The members of the Blue Flame were myself, I was the drummer.

David Giasson, was the bass player. Steve Hunt was the rhythm guitar player. Matt Robertson, was the lead player. Louis Jones was the lead singer and chauffeur. When I was in junior high, we used to have dances. We'd host our own dances. The oldest member of our band was the only one with a car; he was in high school. He'd get stuck with driving us all over the place.

We played at such places as the Haywood Club on the Crockett Ridge road. The Norway VFW hall, which no longer exists. My older brother would sell potato chips and sodas. We'd have a donation pot for 50 cents or so to get in. We'd have to spend 10 or 15 bucks to pay a chaperone, because we were all junior high-aged and early high school. Several weeks a year, we did that.

Q: What would you like people to know about you?

A: That I'm honest, hardworking, a good friend and good at the things I do in my life. I take it pretty seriously. I'm not serious all the time, but I take the skills that I've been given pretty seriously. Songwriting is probably the most important part of my life and I'm not able to visit it all the time. It's either a poor man's sport or a rich man's sport; it's not in between.

Q: Last day on earth; what would you do and who with?

A: I would play music. It would have to be a little bit of rock and roll and a little bit of bluegrass because I'm not very narrowly focused on one direction but I have a passion for bluesy rock and roll and fast country. The people I would do it with? I know that I would like my wife to be in the room smiling. I would want to play with Donnie Katlin Debbie Stanford.