When my sister Irene and me were kids, we had these little wooden snow scoops with our names painted on them that were made special just for us by our uncle, Octave Pease. They were just like our Dad’s, only a third the size, and we used to help him shovel the driveway. Which means we just got in the way, and made more of a mess for him to clean up!
Octave: now there was a character. He come from a big family, I don’t know how many brothers and sisters. Octave never set foot in a school room, but he was smart as a whip. The kind of fella that could do anything with wood. He had a workshop behind his house where he made canoes, sleds, snowshoes, you name it, and repaired stuff for people. In the winter, he’d fire up the old potbellied stove in that shop, and there’d always be a few old timers there, hanging around, shooting the breeze. My father told me he used to drop by, just to listen.
Now, Octave Pease invented one of the first snowmobiles, right here in Mahoosuc Mills, Maine. This was back in the ‘40s. Octave and his wife Lina, my grandmother’s sister, were caretakers for Henderson’s cabins, up on the far side of Moose Megantic Lake. Though it was only open in the summer, they looked after the property all year ‘round. In the winter, the road was closed, and it was a long snowshoe into the cabins. The quickest way was across the lake. So Octave decided that what he needed was a lightweight vehicle of some sort, and he set about to build one.
What he did was, he took a sled like you used back then to haul wood, the kind with them wide runners. Octave cut a hole in the bottom and dropped in a motorcycle with chains on the wheels, and hooked it all together somehow.
Now, the wind makes big snow drifts on the lake. So he added these small wings for stability, you know, to keep the thing from nose-diving. And it worked pretty good, too. But Octave being Octave, he kept wanting to go faster. And the faster he went, the more the thing would “catch air,” as my nephew Jimmy says.
So one day, Octave is ripping along the lake when he hits this snow drift, and the whole contraption goes airborne, way up, before flipping over and crashing back down on its side. First plane to land on Moose Megantic Lake!
Octave was stove up pretty bad, but God, he was tough! And stubborn. It wasn’t long before he’d built himself another snowmobile. He kept tinkering with it, making improvements. You can see two of his later versions up to the Mahoosuc Mills Historical Society, dings and all.
‘Course, Octave never applied for a patent or anything. Didn’t occur to him. He had a problem, and he figured out a way to solve it. End of story.
That’s it for now. Catch you on the flip side!
Hear Ida Tell It: Octave Pease & the First Snowmobile