The June issue of Down East magazine includes an interview with Sam Hayward about his first cooking job at the Shoals Marine Laboratory on Appledore Island in the summer of 1974.
How did you first wind up at the Shoals lab?
I was living in Ithaca, New York, and working as a musician. I had studied classical music, on double bass. But like a lot of members of my generation, I was seduced by all the cultural effects of the war, the counterculture, rock ’n’ roll. I ended up playing sort of American roots-based rock in some bands that were pretty successful. It was a good time, but it wasn’t a way to plan a life, and I wanted to make a change. Then, one morning in February of ’74, a Cornell hotel-school student who’d taken a few music lessons with me asked me, “You like to cook for a hobby, don’t you?” And I did. So he said, “Why don’t you chuck all this and come spend a summer on an island off the coast of Maine?”