Characters of the County: Char Corbett Chases Rainbows

It was 1975 in drought-ridden Albuquerque, N.M. and 5-year-old Char Curtiss wanted to see a rainbow.

“My dad was like ‘You know, if you want to see a rainbow, you need to pray for one,’” Char Corbett nee Curtiss said. “So my sister and I feverishly prayed for a rainbow. And then one day we’re watching ‘Sesame Street’ and my mom comes racing into the house with groceries, drops everything. ‘Girls! Girls! You need to come outside!’ So we go running outside and it’s raining out and she runs us across the street and turns us around. And there is a double rainbow over our house.”

Corbett’s parents weren’t particularly religious. She and her three siblings weren’t raised attending church every Sunday. But seeing that rainbow still feels spiritual to her.

“That experience has instilled in me ever since the power of prayer and the presence of God,” she said.

The person Corbett became was in many ways shaped by her childhood. Born in Los Angeles, she was only 4 when her family moved to Albuquerque. For a time her father was a traveling salesman and Corbett said he often took his family on the road with him.

“We would go to the Native American reservations and the lumberjack camps that were out in Colorado and my dad would pull us out of school and throw us in the van and take us on these trips,” Corbett said. “He said ‘You’ll get to know more about the world this way than you will in school.’”

When Corbett was 7, the family moved back east to be closer to her grandparents. Both her mother and father were from Connecticut. Her father took a job as the property manager for a Jewish summer camp in Windsor.

Camp Shalom was located on the Farmington River. According to Corbett, she and her younger sister Sioux roamed the 395 wooded acres and “owned that campground.”

She remembers the baseball fields, the archery range, the boat house, the Olympic-size pool, and practicing Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest that starts Friday evening and runs through nightfall Saturday.

“We got to be participants and observers of all of that,” she said. “It was a whole new world to us.”

At the same time Corbett’s grandparents were active in the Methodist Church. She was baptized and between church and camp, religion began to play more of a role in her life.

In elementary school Corbett was “very, very, very shy,” she said. Until she got to seventh grade and realized the classrooms at the middle school didn’t have left-handed desks.

“I thought that was pretty unrighteous,” she said.

So she started a movement – Equal Education for Left-handed Students – and lobbied school and district administrators to install left-handed desks and to provide left-handed scissors and protractors, too.

“That was my first social justice issue,” she said.

Corbett met her husband Jim while still in high school. She was a sophomore and he had just graduated. At first the relationship was casual. She was determined to be the first of her family to attend college and wanted no distractions.

“Don’t get too serious,” she told him.

But two years before she graduated from Central Connecticut State University with a degree in accounting, the couple married.

While in school, Corbett joined the campus ministry where she met the Rev. Rich Simpson, who would become a pivotal figure in her life. Simpson encouraged her to join a ministry service trip to West Virginia, where she was introduced to rural Appalachian culture. Following the trip, the two discussed the experience at a popular pizzeria near campus.

“As I took this bite of pizza, he goes, ‘So Char, have you ever considered going into ministry?’ And I started laughing so hard … I ended up choking on my pizza,” she said. “I was just like, no, you know, I’m supposed to be an accountant.”

But her accountant days were numbered. Corbett tailored her business major to focus on nonprofit management and helped start a campus service organization called HOT: Helping Others Today.

“It was my baby. I loved that work so much,” she said. “I was working full time, going to school full time and then doing this because I was just so passionate about it.”

She may not have known it then, but Corbett had found a calling.

“Building community, you know, that was just so core to what I was,” she said.

The next few years cemented her shift into the nonprofit world, including a stint with Habitat for Humanity and a number of positions in church settings.

She attended South Congregational First Baptist Church in New Britain, Conn. and started driving a van for the church on Friday and Saturday nights. She would bring kids from the projects for pizza and a safe place to do homework or Bible study, away from the pervasive gang violence in their neighborhoods.

She soon became the youth director at the church, then the Christian education director. Then she moved back to her old stomping grounds and took a job at First Church in Windsor, the oldest congregational church in Connecticut.

After struggling with infertility the Corbetts had decided to adopt and welcomed daughter Katie to the family in 2001. A second adoption fell through and Char Corbett, who had flown to Florida to be present at the birth, was devastated.

“I remember so clearly just sitting in that hotel room pretty upset and just saying I need to birth something of my own,” she said. “And in the middle of the night I applied to seminary.”

She was ordained in 2010.

In 2016 Char Corbett received a grant to explore the intersection of religion and environmentalism and the biblical mandate of creation care as it applied to national parks and Native American reservations. She took a sabbatical and followed the Trail of Tears, the route taken by the Native American tribes that were forcibly displaced from their territory in the 1830s.

“I came away from that experience with a completely different understanding of how colonization claimed land and property and people and the harm done to the Native American population,” she said. “And I learned a lot more than just how to care for our earth. It was about how do we care for all of creation.”

After such a deeply meaningful experience, she was primed for a new adventure. Jim Corbett was ready for a change of scenery too, as he’d spent his whole life in Connecticut. Char Corbett applied to churches in Florida, Maine, and South Dakota. When The Second Congregational Church of Newcastle called, the Corbett family came to Maine.

Char Corbett pastored in Newcastle for six years, seeing the church through the COVID-19 pandemic with remote services in which she often shared the antics of her small flock of chickens. The chickens were a pandemic hobby, and Corbett raised them in a small shed she refers to as her “chicken chapel.”

She named her first hens after female saints and martyrs but her second hatching all looked alike and she found herself at a loss when it came to what to call them. The solution was simple and elegant.

“There’s a lot of Marys in the Bible. I’m just going to name them all Mary,” she said.

Corbett stayed with the church until 2023 when, with the encouragement of her congregation, she accepted a position as executive director for Healthy Kids, an organization that provides support and education to families in Lincoln and Knox counties.

“I realized that as much as I loved congregational ministry I was really, really missing being with children,” she said.

Healthy Kids grew out of a 1985 legislative mandate that every county in Maine address child abuse and neglect. The organization serves 37 towns, nine school districts, and two jails, as well as every library and every school in its two-county area.

“We are a small and mighty team,” Corbett said of her four-person staff. “And driven by the purpose.”

Corbett gives new meaning to the concept of being active in the community. In addition to her work organizing field trips, parenting classes, and play groups for Healthy Kids, she can be found testifying before the Legislature in favor of more funding for family services or bestowing the blessing of the fleet during the Damariscotta Pumpkinfest Regatta or maneuvering a fire truck along the holiday parade route in Damariscotta.

Corbett also co-pastors the Sheepscott Community Church, serves as both chaplain and volunteer firefighter with the Bremen Fire Department, and is a volunteer chaplain at MaineHealth Lincoln Hospital’s Miles Campus in Damariscotta.

“How can I say no if I’m a part of this community and people are in need because of illness or death or pain?” she said.

In her limited down time, Corbett reads or kayaks or gardens. And on Saturday mornings she makes soup – “vats of it,” she said, – to freeze or share with neighbors.

“Insomnia helps,” she said of how she fits so much in her life. “I just have an awful lot of energy and I do things that I think have meaning, I don’t begrudge any of it. I love it.”

Still – no matter how busy she gets – she makes time for family and friends, especially 3-year-old granddaughter Lacey. She remembers how powerful early childhood experiences can be, one in particular.

“We’re rainbow chasers,” she said. “We can gauge the elements of storm and clouds and rain and sun. It’s just a family practice now. Everybody drops what they’re doing when we say, ‘There might be a rainbow.’”

(Bisi Cameron Yee is a freelance photojournalist and reporter based in Nobleboro. To contact her, email cameronyeephotography@gmail.com. Do you have a suggestion for a “Characters of the County” subject? Email info@lcnme.com with the subject line “Characters of the County” with the name and contact information of your nominee.)