Delivered by Dr. Liliane Willens at the Quimby Family Foundation grant giving luncheon and ceremony at Freeport, Maine on August 31, 2007


Thank you, Roxanne, for introducing the Board members of the Quimby Family Foundation and for explaining their interest and work in the areas of conservancy and the arts. Also, thank you for your kind introduction of Tante Lily, which you should have pronounced with a French accent, “Leelee” and not the American pronunciation “Lily.”

I am honored to be invited for the third consecutive year to be the keynote speaker for the Quimby Family Foundation grant giving event.

All of us here know that our responsibility as global citizens is to support conservation for the well being of our planet, and also that nature is a true inspiration for art. Your nonprofit organizations truly represent the realization of these two goals that are clearly spelled out in the Quimby Family Foundation’s mission which, I quote “is to advance wilderness values and to increase access to the arts throughout Maine.”

Let me point out that neither Roxanne nor the Board members know in advance what I will speak about today since I am the one who chooses the theme and never discuss it with them!

My theme today is how and when did Roxanne develop such strong interest for conservancy and the arts which she later combined into successful business enterprises? This made possible the establishment of the Quimby Family Foundation, in addition to a foundation strictly devoted to the protection of forest conservancy in Maine, the Elliotsville Plantation, Inc.

Allow me to delve into Roxanne’s early years which, as her aunt, I know well. Her flair for business started when she was about six years old, a semi-literate age although she was able to count her pennies, dimes and quarters. She baked cookies and muffins and sold them with her 5-year old sister Renée to overfed children in their upper middle-class neighborhood in Lexington, MA. I must admit I did not buy any of these cookies for they looked rather like mud pies.

Roxanne’s business incentive was propelled by the fact that her father told her and Renée that he would match every penny they saved to pay for their potential college education. So more coins needed to be earned. Before the age of 12 Roxanne was making handcrafted soap and handmade stuffed animals that her mother, my sister Rebecca, taught her how to do. Later, when two more siblings arrived in the Quimby family, her sister Rachelle and her brother Rogers, Roxanne as a newly minted CEO, recruited them, when they learned to walk, to sell her wares! They were so thrilled to be useful to their older sister, they never asked for any commission!

Big time arrived when at 12 Roxanne had her own mail-order gift catalogue. By 15, she went off to nearby Howard Johnson’s to serve ice-cream cones and earn dollar bills after school. All these business enterprises did pay for Roxanne’s college tuition since her father remained true to his word.

Now that we have established Roxanne’s early business success, let’s see how and when her interest and later passion for the arts and nature developed. Let us fast forward to the West Coast where Roxanne attended the San Francisco Art Institute from which she received a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts. I did see her portfolio - yes, they were attractive works but alas, she did not sell any of them.

It is in San Francisco where Roxanne got interested in conservancy when she joined a special tropical plants organization, the Bromeliad Society. This was the late 60s, a time of societal upheaval in the United States, especially in the San Francisco area where Roxanne and her then-husband lived. The couple, like many other young people, turned their backs on money and the gadget-filled world, and decided to live off the land. They moved East.

They bought land in Guilford, Maine, 30-acres in the middle of the forest, and built by themselves a very primitive log cabin — without electricity or running water — which meant that an outhouse needed to be put together rapidly! All meals were cooked on a potbellied stove which had to be fed with wood cut from trees but in a very sustainable and forest-friendly manner. There was a spring on the property so the couple dug it out and rocked it in to get fresh water.

When their twins, Lucas and Hannah were born, Roxanne would not use under any circumstances those disposable diapers which, in her eyes were harmful to the environment. So the diapers were washed in many pots of boiling water on the sturdy stove, and then dried outside in the summer sun, while during those long and cold winter months which you know so well, they were hung like decorations in the kitchen. I am sure Roxanne studied Shakespeare at Lexington High School, and I would not be surprised as she gazed at the boiling pots on the stove that she thought of the famous lines in Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble.” Roxanne, you truly deserve an award and I am sure the audience agrees with me.

Thus in the Maine woods, Roxanne was living a life of conservancy, as an anti-capitalist, with her nose in the air and nothing in her pocket.

When she divorced, money was practically non-existent for either parent, and the twins needed to be fed. Roxanne moved into a one-room cabin in Dexter, Maine. Fortunately Roxanne’s training in the arts and her early business experience came in handy. How? On Fridays and Saturdays, she bought used clothing at rummage and yard sales and on Sundays she sold them with good mark-ups at the parking lot of the North Dexter Grange which is presently the Wayside Theater. In addition, she ordered rough-hewn birdhouses from a local carpenter, painted them and sold them, and quickly discovered that she could earn money to fill the icebox with food.

Soon after, Burt, the bearded beekeeper, came along. Roxanne suggested to him that the honey he was selling needed be placed in decorative jars with attractive labels, and that the beeswax should be transformed into teddy-bear-shaped candles – all of which she would design. They sold these products at roadside stands and at country fairs, and suddenly, to their amazement, profits were being made!

The rest is history since you, as Mainers, surely know about the phenomenal success of Burt’s Bees — thanks to Roxanne’s insights in business, her artistic flair, and her respect for the environment, by using natural ingredients for all her products. Even in those early years she would not purchase from vendors in China the cheaper products which perhaps contained questionable toxic chemicals. As we can see, Roxanne was ahead of her time.

On the matter of conservation, I believe you also know about her land preservation philanthropy in the North Woods of Maine where her foundation, The Elliotsville Plantation Inc, has acquired 90,000 acres of forest to protect wilderness values and enhance the habitat for native plants and animals. This will not be destroyed by man, that is by developers intent on commercializing this great expanse of forest in Maine.

Roxanne also is the co-founder of the Thoreau-Wabnaki water trail, from Bangor through the North Woods of Maine, which Henry David Thoreau and his Native Indian guides traversed by canoe and bateau in the mid-1880s. Today this Trail exists in a largely wilderness area but where maps are now provided to enable the public to follow the water route taken by Thoreau, one of the founding fathers of environmentalism.

You all know of course that Roxanne believes strongly that Maine’s unique nature needs to be saved from developers (hiss, hiss!) who are waiting to pounce on lush vegetation and pristine land to build those ghastly McMansions and football field size malls. This of course means that roads would be needed for those gas-guzzling gigantic Hummers that are just as destructive to nature as the small snowmobiles.

I have thus given you in a nutshell, the true story of Roxanne’s beginnings in business, art and conservancy which she is continuing to implement with passion. Thank you.

Now let’s turn to you and your organizations. Let me explain how we will proceed. I will describe very briefly, in alphabetical order, each of the 22 organizations and explain how you intend to use your award from the Quimby Family Foundation. So when the name of your organization is called, would your representative please come to the podium to receive the award from the Board member, Lucas St. Clair.

By the way, we will continue with a tradition I started last year when male representatives were hugged by me, and the ladies were hugged by Lucas before receiving their awards – Blackmail, you say, but a pleasant one! Lucas, watch out for those bear hugs since your fiancée whom you will be marrying in a week’s time, will be watching you closely!

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The Board members congratulate each and every one of you for the awards provided by the Quimby Family Foundation because your nonprofit organizations represent the best in conservation and the promotion of the arts in Maine. The Board members wish to thank you for the work you are doing, and of course they would like to hear about your organizations’ achievements under these grants.

Finally, I am sure you will agree with me that Roxanne is a dedicated environmentalist, a person eager to bring more of the art world to the people of Maine, a philanthropist, and a business woman who has made possible these awards from the Quimby Family Foundation

Now, how about loud and clear hurrahs for Roxanne.

Copyright © Quimby Family Foundation – August 2007