RSS
Home
Eye patches rule
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Maine has not one, not two, but three famous people who are associated with eye patches. That's got to be a record for an area that has next to nothing to do with pirates.
The director John Ford (from Cape Elizabeth, as you know) had bandages removed too soon after eye surgery and had to wear an eyepatch. Considering that his next movie was the greatest Western ever, The Searchers, featuring John Wayne's greatest performance, that wasn't necessarily a bad thing.
Dick Curless from Fort Fairfield, a.k.a. the Baron of Country Music, had an eye problem from birth that necessitated an eyepatch. He went top ten on the Billboard country charts with "A Tombstone Every Mile," the story of Route 2A, a.k.a. the Haynesville Road connecting Houlton and Bangor.
And then there's Baron George Wrangell, a Russian aristocrat with 20/20 vision in both eyes. So what's he doing here? He's the model for the man in the Hathaway shirt, the famous ad campaign for the shirt manufacturing company based in Waterville. Since (a) this was a print ad, and (b) Hathaway shut down in 2002 (the last American shirt company to produce shirts within the US), there's not much on YouTube beyond this tongue-in-cheek piece that parodies the show Behind the Music.
And just because it would be illegal to do an entry on eye patches without a reference to Snake Plissken....
