Angela White stands next to a stash of Girl Scout cookies at Homeport Supply in Newcastle. White first got involved with the Girl Scouts when her daughter Lucy took an interest. Fourteen years later, mother and daughter are both Lifetime Girl Scouts and Angela White said she has no plans to stop working with the organization. (Sherwood Olin photo)
Good luck getting Angela White to sit still for long. The Newcastle businesswoman, mother, housewife, and community volunteer seemingly lives in perpetual motion.
“I like to be busy; better busy than bored,” she said.
Currently, the dedicated Girl Scout leader is neck deep in cookie sales. The annual fundraiser comes even as White and her husband, Jason White, dedicate nights and weekends to building their new home in Newcastle on a plot of land made available to them by Angela’s parents, Steve and Eva Frey.
Last year, the Whites decided to sell the Nobleboro home they lived in for 23 years. To facilitate the sale, the family moved into temporary quarters over Homeport Supply, at 597 Route 1 in Newcastle, while they prepared to put their house on the market.
From the outside, the new house looks great, Angela White said. However, a lot of work remains to be done. To save money, the Whites are doing almost all of the work themselves, working nights and weekends.
“We hired Kensell Krah, out of North Newcastle, to help build our house,” Angela White said. “He and his son, Logan, built the whole shell so when you drive in, it looks done. It looks great, but it’s not even close. We are doing all the plumbing and electrical. We’ll move in long before it’s ready. We’ll just kind of camp.”
Born Angela Frey, White grew up in Nobleboro and later Damariscotta. After graduating from Lincoln Academy in 1997, White took a gap year before going off to Bennington College in Vermont. She completed her first year and might have gone back, but she returned to Newcastle and the family business, where she really wanted to be.
During that school year, however, she had the good fortune to meet a charming young Englishman in an early internet chatroom. White and her future husband were computer programming majors and they got to know each other well via long telephone conversations, online text exchanges, and some limited, international travel.
“We actually met on a text-based chat room called Lambdamoo, which still exists, believe it or not,” White said. “Actually, I met somebody else who was in a class with my husband. I became friends with him. He got some of his friends on, and then we just kind of chatted.”
They had not known each other long before the future Angela White bought a plane ticket to England and scheduled a weeklong visit to see the friend she hadn’t met in person yet. Her parents were less than thrilled and her friends thought she had lost her mind, but White said she never had doubts.
“I had backup plans, and I had done research about where I could go if I needed to, but I went over there for a week and stayed with my soon-to-be-husband in his apartment with three other guys,” White said. “It was a little crazy. Now, you just wouldn’t do that. It’s such a different world. Probably shouldn’t have done it then, but it worked out just fine.”
The couple married June 10, 2000, just over two years after they met and about nine months after they first talked about marriage. Twenty-six years and two children later, life is still good, White said.
“He was the guy,” she said.
Looking back, White suspects learning about each other long distance helped the couple build lasting bonds early in their relationship. There was nothing to do but talk and learn about each other, she said.
“Just typing back and forth,” White said. “Texts and phone calls, lots of phone calls. It was expensive. I would drive home on weekends just to work Saturdays to make enough money to cover my phone.”
Steve and Eva Frey opened Homeport Supply in 1992. Today, while they are enjoying retirement, they still own the business with two of their four children, White and Ben Frey. The business employs four family members full time: Angela and her sister-in-law Dancer Starr handle the retail side. Jason White and Ben Frey handle installations.
“Dancer and I do the inside,” Angela White said. “We’re sales, and Ben crosses over some. Jason not so much. Ben and Jason do the installations and Jason is our main tile installer.”
White said she’s doing exactly what she wants to do professionally. She doesn’t see herself stopping anytime soon.
Another thing she is not planning to stop is her participation in Girl Scouts. White got involved with the Girl Scouts when her daughter Lucy wanted to get involved.
“Lucy was in the first grade, and she decided she wanted to be a Girl Scout, which meant I was going to be a Girl Scout,” White said. “That was 14 years ago. She’s now a lifetime Girl Scout. I’m now a lifetime Girl Scout.”
Just as Lucy White was finishing up, Angela White’s niece, Eleanor Frey, wanted to get involved.
“She obviously saw Lucy being a Girl Scout growing up, so as soon as she could, she was 4, and she did early registration, and she’s been Girl Scouts,” White said. “I said, ‘Well, I guess I have got to do a troop for her too.’”
That decision led the formation of Newcastle Girl Scout Troop 1145. The troop meets weekly at the Homeport location in Newcastle. White said not having the group meet outside of a school setting has seemingly made the troop a welcome destination for girls from all over the county.
“That troop is pretty cool,” White said. “You actually have girls from eight different schools in the area. I love the fact that all these girls go to different schools, but they can come to Girl Scouts and are still great friends and have fun relationships.”
One of the greatest aspects of Girl Scouts is that it promotes teamwork and community and it builds relationships through face-to-face interactions. White said meetings are all about putting smartphones away and participating with each other in the present.
“We try and go hiking multiple times a year,” White said. “Just various things to get outside, to get away. When we do trips and stuff, it’s technology free. Meetings are technology free unless we need it … For the most part, we try to be as technology free as possible and when we can’t, we do have all of the hard discussions about being safe online and all of that.”
Maybe in a few years, after Eleanor Frey stops being involved, White said she will probably take a step back from direct troop activities. She still plans to serve on a regional planning committee and she is currently the “cookie cupboard” for local Girl Scout troops. In other words, White maintains the store of cookies for the duration of the sale. When local troops run out of cookies, they come to her for resupply.
“We’re still in the middle of cookie season, which is a very long season this year but I do love doing it,” White said.
White’s latest endeavor is running to represent Newcastle on the Great Salt Bay Sanitary District Board of Trustees. The previous seat-holder moved to South Bristol earlier this year, creating an opening on the board. White, who said she was recruited fill out the remainder of the term, is always interested in taking on a new project.
If reelected this would be White’s second stint in public office. Previously she served six years on the Nobleboro School Committee. White said she can’t wait to learn more about the sanitary district. She loves learning and teaching she said, things she practices both in her business and her personal life.
“We look at ourselves as educators,” she said. “With any product that we sell, we are here to teach people and help people through a new tool, project, whatever. Same with Girl Scouts; I’m looking to help these girls become leaders. Learn anything and everything.”
Homeport Supply is located at 597 Route 1 in Newcastle. The business is open from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday. For more information, go to homeportsupply.com or call 563-3770.
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