Matinicus resident Donna Rogers said MacLeod has made a good impression. “He is very quiet, very unassuming. He fits right into the island.” Eva Murray of Matinicus said MacLeod comes across as sincere and committed to the community. Whether it’s the volunteer fire department or launching a boat, “If you need help, he’ll go,” she says. Rogers remembers when Young’s Store, closed years ago, was a thriving business. “You could buy rope, buoys, a furnace.” She said the Young family worked with H.H. Crie Hardware in Rockland, and so could provide island customers with anything the mainland store had on short notice. The store used to carry a full line of groceries. Food is now flown to the island on the mail plane through a deal with Shaw’s supermarket in Rockland. Postmaster Wanda Philbrook can’t say enough good about MacLeod, who is now her landlord at the cozy post office, a place where islanders gather to chat. “He is a wonderful person to have here. I don’t think we could have done any better,” she said. Her husband, lobsterman Clayton Philbrook, hired MacLeod as his sternman, an arrangement that both men like. In fact, their friendship led MacLeod to take Philbrook on a visit to Australia, where MacLeod has relatives. They returned a few days ago. Clayton Philbrook said it was a great trip. He said when he first met MacLeod, he tried to discourage him from buying a property that needed so much work. But Philbrook is glad the family bought it anyway. MacLeod told Wanda and Clayton that he wants to rebuild the post office on the east side of the store, with a water view, designing it to Wanda’s specifications. As for the Centennial Building, “The first three weeks he did nothing but lug stuff out. The building had to have heaved a big sigh of relief,” Philbrook said. There is another connection: Clayton and Wanda’s son Nick gave the job of sternman to MacLeod’s son Billy, and the two of them formed a friendship working together.
Philbrook said he had worried someone would buy the Centennial Building and make the area private, although it’s been used freely by islanders for generations. With the MacLeods, his worries are put to rest. He and his girlfriend Lacey Leigh, who also has hauled traps, hope to build a house on Matinicus. Meanwhile, Craig MacLeod lets him stay in the apartment over the post office and store, and has told him he wants to restore that building too. Lobsterman Robert Young of Matinicus said that he worked in the store as a boy, helping his storekeeper father with chores. His dad, Clayton Young, also lobstered and later was postmaster, assessor, and school board member. “Dad cared about the island and the people,” Robert Young said. MacLeod may hold the record on how far he came to move to Matinicus, “which sort of reminded me of New Zealand,” he says. A former business owner and rugby coach, he moved to New Haven in 2000 from Australia, where he had lived and worked for 17 years. He took a job with a rugby team in New Haven and met his second wife, Loretta, an epidemiologist at Yale, at a rugby game where one of her two sons was playing. A couple of years ago they spotted some Matinicus property for sale on the internet, and after some negotiations, it was theirs. It’s a challenging property, a fixer-upper, but MacLeod could see the potential—both for a great facility and for building lasting friendships in the tight-knit island community. Craig and Loretta bought the property knowing he needed to put a whole lot of work into it. He works hard and has become a skilled sternman for Philbrook. “Clayton was the first person I met when I got off the ferry,” MacLeod said.
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