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| Affiliation | Independent |
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| Name | Nancy Oden |
| Address |
Jonesboro, Maine , United States |
| Email | None |
| Website | [Link] |
| Born |
Unknown
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| Contributor | User 13 |
| Last Modifed | User 13
Feb 04, 2006 12:55pm |
| Tags |
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| Info | 1979 to Present — Nancy Oden has lived in several towns in Washington County, Maine, including Princeton, Woodland, Charlotte, Machias, and for the past 12 years, Jonesboro.
She had a small farm in Charlotte for seven years, raising organic produce as well as sheep, geese, ducks, rabbits, and chickens.
In 1987 a proposal came into Washington County from New Jersey developers who wanted to site a toxic ash dump in Township 30, up on Route 9, at the headwaters of our Atlantic Salmon rivers.
Some people got together and fought it. Nancy Oden was the volunteer, full-time staff person for the Clean Water Coalition. Hundreds of Washington County people got involved in the struggle to keep the toxic materials out of Washington County, and Nancy Oden says she spent "24 hours a day for three years" fighting the toxic dump.
The people of Washington County prevailed, with the Board of Environmental Protection and the Land Use Regulation Commission finally voting against the dump, and the would-be dumpers left.
She has also been involved in posing alternatives to pesticides and trying to limit these poisons' use since the early 70's, even before she arrived in Maine. This has continued throughout the years, and she hopes to make more gains in promoting clean (organic) farming by being in the Blaine House instead of continually begging the pesticide-crops dominated Pesticide Control Board for relief from the annual poisoning of the populace and Maine's wildlife.
Before moving to Maine, Ms. Oden was a teacher of database management systems for a think tank in Princeton, NJ. She traveled around the country teaching customers to use the system, and managed the company's educational work, including writing teaching materials and programming in Fortran and Cobol.
Ms. Oden was married for about 7 years, but they parted amicably when her husband — a college professor — wanted to move back into the city and Nancy Oden wanted to stay in the cottage in the New Jersey woods.
Prior to this period, Ms. Oden worked in Washington, D.C. for the federal government. Then she moved to Minneapolis where she drove a taxicab and worked as an office temporary while active in the anti-Vietnam-War movement and the women's liberation movement and the nascent environmental movement.
Before her movement activism began, Nancy Oden worked for the local and national anti-poverty programs in Washington, D.C.
Before that time, after she graduated from high school in Northwestern Michigan (upper part of the lower peninsula), she worked for 8 years for the telegraph company, traveling around the Midwest as a relief operator and then relief manager. This was in the days where every town had a telegraph office and telegrams were delivered by hand.
This — traveling to new towns every few days or weeks and often being the only one responsible for all telegraph and money order business for 30-50 miles around — helped give Nancy Oden her independence and sense of responsibility.
Before leaving home to go to work and help support the family at age 18, Nancy Oden graduated from high school in Michigan, after graduating from grade school in New Jersey.
Born in early 1939 in Jersey City, just across the Hudson River from New York City, Nancy Oden's parents moved soon after to a small town in New Jersey where she grew up. Her childhood was spent playing in woods and fields until it all got built up. Her parents then moved her and her siblings to rural Michigan, where she began to learn about rural life.
Having been born nearly three years before World War II, Nancy Oden remembers the war years and the rationing and the public campaigns against waste and war-profiteering. Thus, she is astonished and outraged that today these are accepted by many politicians as the order of the day.
Nancy Oden is the oldest of nine children, and was constantly admonished by her parents to set a good example for the younger ones, as well as help take care of them and the household.
Not that she was or is perfect, Nancy Oden admits, but the sense of responsibility to make right things that are wrong never left her. She feels that so long as she is able, she needs to help save what's left of Nature, and get decision-making power into the hands of the people, rather than the corporations which are ruining all of life on Earth for their next quarter's profits.
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