Sharon Bray, a local journalist, poet and educator from Orland who had a wide-ranging impact on the Bucksport area, died in December on her 80th birthday.
Among other jobs and activities, Bray founded the Bucksport Enterprise newspaper and was a committed local journalist for decades. She helped form the H.O.M.E. cooperative, taught about maternal health and childbirth and became an active poet who used literature to document the history of where she was born and raised.
“She certainly was very smart and very independent-minded and committed to taking action in making the world a better place, however she could,” said her daughter, Julia Gray, who lives in Orland.
Bray could be forceful about that, according to Gray – she was sometimes described as a “force of nature” – but she got things done and stood up for what she wanted.
She grew up on family land in Orland, graduated from Bucksport High School and first aimed to be an actress.
By the early 1970s, she was active in community organizing to help establish the H.O.M.E. cooperative in Orland, which then focused on helping women create products at home that they could sell for additional income. Its title is an acronym for “Homeworkers Organized for More Employment.”
In that decade, Bray also organized childbirth education at what was then Blue Hill Memorial Hospital at a time when many women chose to give birth at home. In a 2009 Bangor Daily News opinion piece, before that hospital’s obstetrics unit closed, she wrote that enthusiasm took off around her classes, and the hospital built a reputation as a friendly place to give birth.
She also was active in maternal health education with other groups including the Bucksport Bay Healthy Communities Coalition, her daughter said.
Bray wasn’t far off from the poverty of those she worked with, Gray said – the family valued service over high-paying jobs, and both parents went on to pursue graduate degrees – but was always ready to commit her heart and energy. Bray had empathy and understanding, strong views on economic justice, and a commitment to limiting her environmental footprint.
In 1992, she founded the Bucksport Enterprise weekly newspaper after the abrupt closure of the Bucksport Free Press, the area’s weekly newspaper where she then worked.
Bray sprang into action to make sure the town didn’t miss a week of coverage, an example of her dogged commitment to the community, her daughter said. She put together a photocopied, stapled edition, and within weeks was back to printing a full paper – this time, her own.
Six years later, with a part-time staff of eight, Bray put the Enterprise up for sale, according to BDN archives. In 2001, the paper was purchased by Don Houghton, who edited and published it until it closed with his death in March.
Again, Bray did what she could to make sure the town had a paper. She supported the Penobscot Bay Press as it expanded and renamed its weekly Castine Patriot paper this fall into the River Observer, which now covers Bucksport, Orland and Verona Island.
Nat Barrows, publisher of those papers, met Bray in 1990 when he bought the Castine Patriot, where she then worked. Later in life, she freelanced there again.
“Whatever she did, she did with energy and focus and commitment,” he said.
She was committed to the community and its functioning, which includes the role of a weekly newspaper and the local information it provides, according to Barrows.
Barrows said Bray’s legacy includes her commitment to the best possible community journalism, and the area as a whole.
“She understood the necessity [of] people participating in community activities and institutions to help the communities function,” he said.
In later years, she became increasingly active as a poet and involved in poetry communities, activities her daughter characterized as documenting local history through literature.
Bray founded and published local literary storytelling journal The Narramissic Notebook in the early 2000s, helped assemble an oral history book for the town’s bicentennial, and was involved in the “Still Mill” oral history book assembled to remember the 2014 closure of the Verso Paper mill, among other projects.
“It’s a sad time when we lose a person like Sharon, because she was such a dynamo in so many ways,” Barrows said.
A celebration of life will be held in the spring, according to her obituary.
