Cecily pingree biography

American politician (born 1955)

Chellie MariePingree (SHELL-ee PING-gree; born Rochelle Marie Johnson; April 2, 1955) is an American politician serving as the U.S. representative for Maine's 1st congressional district since 2009. Her district includes most of the southern part of the state, centered around the Portland area.

A member of the Democratic Party, Pingree was a member of the Maine Senate from 1992 to 2000, serving as majority leader for her last four years. She ran for the United States Senate in 2002, losing to incumbent Republican Susan Collins. From 2003 until 2006, she was president and CEO of Common Cause. She is the first Democratic woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Maine.

Early life, education, and early career

Pingree was born Rochelle Marie Johnson, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the daughter of Harry and Dorothy Johnson. She moved to Maine as a teenager and had her first name legally changed to Chellie. She attended the University of Southern Maine and graduated from College of the Atlantic with a degree in human ecology. Since graduating from College of the Atlantic, she has resided on North Haven, a small island community off the coast of Rockland.

Pingree held various farming and care-taking jobs until 1981, when she started North Island Yarn, a cottage industry of hand knitters with a retail store on North Haven. Her business expanded and became North Island Designs, employing as many as ten workers. They began marketing knitting kits and pattern books nationwide through 1,200 retail stores and 100,000 mail-order catalogues. Through North Island Designs, Pingree authored and produced five knitting books between 1986 and 1992. Eisenhower Fellowships selected her as a USA Eisenhower Fellow in 1997.

Common Cause

As the leader of Common Cause, Pingree was active in the organization's programs in media reform, elections, ethics, and money in politics. She supp

When I moved to North Haven, I thought I was moving away from politics. In 1971, I was just out of high school, a veteran of protest marches in a country divided by disputes over the war in Vietnam. That summer, I went to visit a young man on a small island off the coast of Maine. We arrived armed with Helen and Scott Nearing’s The Good Life, that renowned ode to simplicity. We had a two-room cabin right on the beach at the end of a half-mile-long dirt road. There was no running water or electricity. No Walter Cronkite. No marches.

I found myself in a very small community—vastly different from my hometown of Minneapolis—with values and norms that would have been well known to my grandparents, but had skipped a generation and were not yet known to me. And there, my real political education began.

A whole winter passed on the island. To make some money and to pass the time, I made candles from wax melted in a pot on our woodstove. After a discussion or two with teachers in town, I offered to volunteer at the island’s K–12 school. I would share some craft skills, or just be an extra set of hands for the busiest teachers. I’d once worked in a Head Start program, got along well with kids, and knew I would enjoy my time with them.

One morning, I was home alone working on the candles when the school principal drove down our long driveway. I wasn’t accustomed to visitors. He couldn’t stay for coffee. He calmly explained that the school board had met the previous evening and had rejected the notion of my volunteering at the school. Perhaps I was still too much of a newcomer for them to accept. Perhaps I was just . . . not a good fit.

I had grown up in the Midwest. The buildings there were new, and everybody had come from somewhere else. My own grandfather had come to this country as a boy. I had no understanding of the concept of “people from away,” or worse, that if you weren’t born in a town you could be seen as an enemy. Tha

PROFILE-October 2013
By Susan Conely
Photographs by Patryce Bak

On North Haven Island: “There’s a truth meter out here.”

Have you found yourself shopping around for a new political hero lately?

Someone in the U.S. Congress who speaks her mind? Who breeds dairy cows and grows heirloom tomatoes and doesn’t bend in the fickle Washington wind? Chellie Pingree may be your person.

When she’s not in Washington D.C., she lives on North Haven, a tight-knit island off the coast of Maine where, she explains, “You can’t fake it. There’s a truth meter out here.” It’s ten o’clock in the morning, and my ferry’s landed at the North Haven dock after a crossing though the thickest primordial fog you can dream up.

Pingree meets me in the parking lot, one hand in her jeans pocket, the other holding a cup of coffee, her striking blonde hair cut to her jaw. I ask her if the hundreds of ferry crossings she’s made over the last forty-some years have helped her maintain her own truth meter down in Washington. She laughs, and it’s a warm, throaty laugh. Then she says the ferry makes everyone on the island honest: “You may disagree with a person at town meting, but then the boat going back to the mainland is almost full, and you have to sit next to that same person on the deck.”

She walks me up a hill past a small white house she used to live in with her three kids, then past the tiny lawnmower shed where she ran her first Maine Senate campaign, and on to a larger clapboard inn called Nebo Lodge, which Pingree bought on a wing and a prayer in 2004 when her neighbor said she was selling.

We sit in the fog on Nebo’s porch, and Pingree tells me that when she first landed on North Haven, she was only 16—a fledgling back-to-the-lander with a serious distaste for conventional schooling and a boyfriend named Charlie, who had roots on the island. She’d grown up in Minneapolis with her parents, who were of Scandinavian-farmer stock. Then she went to an inner-city high

Chellie Pingree never anticipated a life in politics. Living on the offshore island of North Haven, Maine, she raised her kids and ran a small business. She served on the school board and as the local tax assessor, a job no one else in town wanted. But in 1991, when she was approached about running for State Senate, she jumped at the chance.

She scored a remarkable upset, defeating a popular Republican, and went on to serve four terms in the Maine Senate. But throughout her political career, from Augusta to Washington and beyond, the lessons she learned on North Haven have always been her guide: Be accountable to your neighbors, and always use your common sense.

Chellie Johnson (she has legally changed her name from "Rochelle") was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1955, the youngest of four children. Her father, Harry, worked in advertising and her mother, Dorothy, was a nurse. Chellie moved to Maine as a teenager, attended the University of Southern Maine, and graduated from the College of the Atlantic, in Bar Harbor. After college, she moved to North Haven, an island town of 350 people twelve miles off the coast of Rockland, to raise her family and make a living.

Farmer & Small-Business Owner Turned State Senator

Chellie has worked hard throughout her life - as a mother, as a farmer, as a small business owner, and in politics. She knows how difficult it can be to meet payroll and run a business in a small, rural community. Right after college, Chellie and her husband, Charlie, spent several years running a small farm and selling produce locally. In 1981, she started North Island Yarn, a cottage industry of local knitters, with a retail store on the island. The business expanded quickly, becoming North Island Designs, and employed as many as ten local workers in peak seasons. The business sold knitting kits and pattern books nationwide through 500 retail stores and 100,000 mail order catalogues. She sold the business in 1993.Today, i