When renowned Maine humorist Tim Sample was growing up in Boothbay Harbor, the Knights of Pythias owned what’s now the Boothbay Opera House, and it was host to the occasional blackface minstrel show.
“People used to roller-skate where the seats are now,” Sample said. “Everything’s changed.”
When Sample says that everything has changed, he’s making a statement about life, comedy and coastal Maine, more than a nostalgic rumination on a favorite venue.
Sample will bring his particular brand of Maine-centric standup comedy and storytelling to the Boothbay Opera House July 1. The show at the Opera House is a homecoming for Sample; it’s a return to both his hometown and to one of the first venues at which he ever performed.
The Opera House was the first venue with a real stage that Sample ever played, and from that point on, he’s worked hard to stay in the limelight.
To say that he never looked back would be only a partial truth.
Throughout most of his life, Sample was always hungry for the next project, the next challenge as an entertainer.
“When I turned 50, I realized that I had stopped asking, ‘What’s next?'” Sample said. “I’ve performed, recorded albums, illustrated books, made music – I’ve done everything I dreamed of doing as a kid.”
Sample considers himself lucky that people still want to pay to sit and watch him and remembers how exhausting it was to break into show business.
Sample was born in Fort Fairfield in 1951. After his parents divorced, his mother married a man named Sample and moved to Boothbay Harbor.
“Then I went from kindergarten to high school with the same 37 kids,” Sample said.
Boothbay Harbor was a different place in those days. The boatyards outnumbered the hotels and there were “maybe three or four gift shops.”
As a child in a small town with a big imagination, Sample was addicted to radio. He would sit up at night with a transistor radio and listen to Larry Glick from midnight to 4 a.m.
“He was this outrageous guy who made stuff up for four hours,” Sample said. “It was from far away exotic Boston, and I loved it.”
Glick held a regular contest in which he invited listeners to write jingles and call them in. Glick played the winners’ jingles on air.
“I’ve won every copywriting award there is to win in New England,” Sample said. “But there I was, 10 years old, and my jingle is playing on the radio. It was like I stepped through the matrix – I was on the other side.”
When he was in high school, Sample started to worry about what he was going to do with his life. “I didn’t see a lot of job descriptions that seemed like they fit,” he said.
Then he saw the Beatles on TV, playing music and making jokes. He and some friends started a band. They played dances and parties and occasionally battles of the bands at what is now the Boothbay Opera House.
At some point in college, he realized that he was the only one who was really serious about making a career out of performing. “I became a solo act,” he said.
In his early bands and as a solo musician, Sample was always the front man. He was the talker and the one who kept the audience entertained between songs and when someone in the band broke a string.
In 1976, Sample opened for, and became friends with, Paul Stookey (Paul, of Peter, Paul and Mary).
The two are still friends and try to perform together at least once a year, and it was Stookey who first told Sample the hard truth that playing music just wasn’t Sample’s thing.
“He told me, ‘I like your music okay, but few people can stand up in front of a crowd and make them laugh like you can,'” Sample said.
Stookey asked Sample to stop playing music and start emceeing the shows that the two were playing at the time, which he did. “I had two choices: get mad that he didn’t like my music, or take his advice.”
A year later, in 1980, Sample had written an hour-long monologue, which he had recorded for fun and left laying around the studio. Stookey came back from a tour in Australia and found it. After listening to it, Stookey personally helped finance the recording and initial distribution of Sample’s first comedy album.
A few years after that first album came out, Sample was on a promotional tour as the spokesperson for the Burton Shoe Company. He was in Boston, appearing as a guest on radio shows, when he got the news that he was to be a guest on the Larry Glick Show.
“It was like I was meeting God,” Sample said. He was supposed to be on for a 15-minute slot.
Sample and Glick hit it off “like you wouldn’t believe,” and Sample was on air for two-and-a-half hours. The pair became good friends, and Sample was invited to be the first guest on Glick’s new show when he moved to a new radio station years later.
Sample has a bottomless bag of stories about strange encounters with famous people and crucial moments in his career that have been driven by what he calls “just oddball things that happen.”
“There have been a lot of times that I stopped and thought, ‘What the hell? How come I get to do this?'” Sample said. “After all of that, after every place I’ve been and all I’ve done, I’m going back again to the little town where I grew up.”
Despite all the changes to his little town and to the world of show business, Sample said there’s a lot about him that’s stayed pretty much the same.
He still does a brand of comedy that, he said, was last popular in the 1950s and 1960s.
“Back then, you never heard anybody swearing the way they do now,” Sample said.
In those days, when people met the comedian during the cocktail hour at events, they got excited. “They told you, ‘Me and Mom are gonna sit right up front,'” Sample said. “Now, when they find out who you are, they run. They’re afraid they’re going to become part of the act in some really nasty ways.”
As he approaches his 60th birthday next January and the 30th anniversary of his first album soon after, Sample said he’s taken more time to reflect.
Although most of his mentors “got old and died,” he smiled comfortably as he added, “I guess that’s what happens; that’s where the story ends.”
For now, Sample is more than happy with the fact that he still gets to go out on stage.
