(Continued on page 94) Personalities 38 p o r t l a n d monthly magazine 40th year. I pledged I’d give up coffee, alco- hol, and doughnuts until I crossed various thresholds. I earned alcohol back. For 7,952 days, I’ve had no doughnuts. Everhavequestionsaboutcompetingpublicationsbeing printedunderthesameroof?Can’ttheylookateach other’sproofs—industrialespionage. I rolled my eyes while you were asking that, because somebody could just be assigned to walk with [the client] and keep [the client] always in sight. Anelegant,low-costsolution.‘Typical’ReadeBrower? Besides, it’s already printed, so how could it be espionage? AfteryoustartedTheFreePress,somemightsayyouwent dormantfor27yearscomparedtoyourfeverishrecent acquisitions.Whowereyouthen—notacquiringotherbusi- nessesfordecades—andwhoareyounow,whereyou’re expandingdramatically?Inthemovieofyourlife,there musthavebeenasingle,incitingincident. Ididn’texactlygodormant.Inthe1980s,Ihad manyjobs.IdidtheSunshineGuides.Eddie [Hemmingsen,whoenvisionedandranthe SunshineGuidesinthe1970s]hadaheartat- tack,andItookover.[BrowerownstheSun- shineGuidestothisday,retitledasthetrav- elMAINEguides].IstartedTheFreePressin 1985.Workedlikeadoguntil1989.WhenI hadtwoinfantsonsundertwo,Isoldittoa coupleofreallyaccomplishedpeople.Eighteen monthslater,Iboughtitback. “The arrangement was for them to pay Reade 25 percent of the purchase price and then $20,000 a year for 10 years. The deal provided some breathing room. And it allowed him to put a down payment on a house in Camden where [he and his wife] still live today.”–Pine Tree Watch Youhadtorepossessit? Yes. That was in 1991. Nine months later, The Free Press was back on its feet. I now had three children. I solved some distribu- tions problems, and then came the para- digm change: I began focusing on distribu- tion more. I mailed to residential addresses all over the state of Maine. I started Target Market- ing and the auto catalogs. At my peak I was doing 65 million auto catalogs all over the country until 2004, when autotrader.com bought both Target and the auto catalogs. Aterrificcoup!Youcouldhavedoneanythingyou wantedandneverworkedagain.What’sintriguingis, whydidn’tyoulivealifeofleisure?Whatdidyoudo immediatelyafterward? I went to Malawi to work with a friend in an orphanage and get my head where it needed to be. Just a few weeks. Then I came back to Maine. I was 48. I don’t like to sail. I’m a nine-hole golfer at best. I like to run, so I did some of that. I wanted to work, but I didn’t want to just walk back into The Free Press. I just didn’t want to ask for a job and take someone’s job. YoureallyloveTheFreePress,thepeoplethere.It’scoming tome.Allofthis,thisgiantswirlofpressesandnewspa- pers,isjustanextravagantwayofprotectingtheinterests ofyourcorepublication,theFreePress! That’s right. I began RFB [for Reade Francis Brower] print co-op. That brought togeth- er six presses, and I made a deal with our competition, the Courier Gazette. But yes, from 2004 to 2011, I had a pretty easy life for six or seven years. Present father, pres- ent husband. TheCourierGazettewasyourcompetitor,right?Though youwereprintingit. In 2010, the Courier Gazette had to shut down their press. All of a sudden, the lights went dark. I was watching a basket- ball game. It was a Friday night, March 11, my mum’s birthday. I knew that no one in the stands knew that their paper had gone dark, that it was lost to the community. I knew it because he owed money to me [a September 6, 2018 Columbia Journalism Review story, “The Man Behind the Un- paralleled Consolidation of Local News,” reports the debt to Brower at $75,000, for printing services]. At 5 p.m. there was an email. Then the website went dark. They’d lost their paper of record. I got a call from the bank. They were responsible [for the Courier Gazette’s financing], but they didn’t want to be known as the bank that shut it down. They asked me to work it out… Whatisthestrangest30secondsprofessionallyyou’ve hadinthelastfiveyears? I’mnotsureit’sthestrangest,butIwasdriving. Whatkindofcar? A Prius. I’ve had five in a row. We were try- ing to get the contract to print MaineTo- day Media (MTM). If they shuttered their presses like Bangor Daily News did, we wanted the business for our press, so my partner Chris Miles (CEO of Brower’s Alli- ance Press in Brunswick) had gone to Con- necticut to meet the front-line guy for Don- ald Sussman, Ophir [Barone], and he’d fi- nally gotten permission to talk to Ophir. Chris called me. “Are you sitting down?” “No, I’m driving. Did we get it?” “No.” He told me that Donald Sussman couldn’t really let us print the newspapers because there were union considerations with their printing work force. So [Suss- man] had a different idea. We weren’t there five minutes before Ophir said, ‘Why don’t you buy MaineToday Media?’ I thought, “Oh, no. What have I done?” Whatisityoudo? I find ways to keep presses sustainable. I don’t think of myself as artistic, but this is my paintbrush. Whatwouldittakeforyoutowakeupandsay,“It’sover. Idon’twanttoownaslewofMaineandVermontnews- papersanymore.They’renoisyandstress-ridden.”What wouldyoudo? I’d find a person who would care about them. Your hands-off approach to offer your [more than 30] newspapers their editorial autonomy is singular, noble. But every once in a while, do you get a phone call: “I just need you to tie-break on this one. This is an excep- tion. Just this time.” Never happened. The only time they’ll call me is to give me a heads-up [if they think we might get] sued. If you were forced to give someone a 15-minute tour of your business, where would you take him or her? If you were Guy Gannett, we probably wouldn’t be here at Moody’s Diner, even though he probably was a customer here. Where would you take me to say, “This is where I work”? I remember I went to [MTM] late at night. They wouldn’t let me in at first. It’sanurbanlegendthatyou’veonlyvisitedthePress Heraldonceafteryouboughtit.Sowherewouldyou takeme? Then the website went dark.