Machias’ town manager, Bill Kitchen, died unexpectedly on Sunday, according to town officials.
“He passed away on September 9th, and will be deeply missed by all who knew and worked with him,” officials wrote on the town’s Facebook page.
Additional details about Kitchen’s death were not immediately available Tuesday morning.
Kitchen was a former Machias selectman and marketing manager with an eclectic background who became the town manager in the fall of 2021, after the resignation of Christine Therrien that spring. Kitchen served as interim town manager before being hired to fill the position long term in October of that year.
Will Tuell, a former longtime state representative from East Machias and reporter for the Machias Valley News Observer, posted on Facebook that Kitchen was well-known and liked in Washington County.
“Zany, offbeat, given to go in 1,000 directions that never quite made sense unless you were him or had the patience to wait it out, but you really wouldn’t want him any other way because he was a deeply caring, hardworking person who gave his all to Machias,” Tuell wrote. “He loved the town, loved the people of Downeast Maine, and couldn’t be a more genuine ambassador for our region if he’d tried.”
Kitchen was on the Machias Select Board from June 2017 through September 2020. He also worked as a reporter and photographer for the weekly Machias Valley News Observer from 2014 through 2019, according to his bio on LinkedIn.
Kitchen also has experience in reality television. He was featured in 2015 on a National Geographic show called “The Watch,” in which he lived alone for eight weeks at an abandoned amusement park in Princeton, West Virginia. Kitchen was not allowed to contact the outside world while he stayed in a motorhome on the property — which had closed in 1966 and was rumored to be haunted — and was tasked with mowing, fixing fences and keeping out trespassers who might be looking to connect with the resident spirits.
Kitchen got the TV gig after living alone for 16 months, from the summer of 2011 to the fall of 2012, in the Little River Lighthouse on an island off the village of Cutler. Before that, the Connecticut native worked as an investment banker, owned a nightclub and restaurant in Virginia, worked as a music promoter in Washington D.C. and New York, and got to know Bill and Hilary Clinton when he produced Bill Clinton’s inaugural balls after he was elected president in 1992 and 1996.
Kitchen moved to Maine in the early 2000s and, since 2002, had been owner and operator of KitchenSync Consulting in Machias, offering marketing and public relations to national and Maine businesses and organizations.
