Historian Howard Whitcomb on Percival Baxter

Your hosts for Baxter and Friends are Jensen Bissell, former Park Director, and Maine's own Bill Green, both are members of the board of directors of Friends of Baxter State Park. In this first episode, they interview Friends historian and Baxter expert Howard Whitcomb, author of the definitive guides to Governor Baxter and the creation of Baxter State Park, Governor Baxter's Magnificent Obsession: A Documentary History of Baxter State Park 1931 - 2006, and Percival P. Baxter's Vision for Baxter State Park.

Howard Whitcomb first visited Katahdin in 1950 as a camp counselor at Camp Damariscotta. He has a Ph.D. in political science and had a 35-year professorial career, first at Colgate in Hamilton, New York, and then at Lehigh University in his hometown of Bethlehem, PA.

In 1972 he took a year's sabbatical from his academic appointment to work as a Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he worked with the Chief Justice Warren Burger, and was a first-hand observer for US v. Nixon, the Watergate tapes case.

Howard and his wife Annie Merrill came to Maine after his retirement and became the 101st member of Friends in 2001. Not long after he was asked by Friends to write what was then called The Baxter Paper Project, but became a four-volume set of works pertaining to Baxter's life and his gift to the people of Maine.