John Otterbein holds up an artist’s biography he composed and used during a solo show at MaineHealth Lincoln Hospital’s Miles Campus in Damariscotta in December 2024. Otterbein, of Bremen, is currently preparing for a solo show at River Arts in Damariscotta that will open later this month. (Sherwood Olin photo)
John Otterbein was ready for retirement when he decided to embrace his next career. In 2022, he had sold his Waldoboro business, Wooden Screen Door Co., and found himself at loose ends, not used to having time on his hands.
“I was wondering what I was going to do with my life, and I just started drawing,” he said. “The first painting I did was that bug painting over there, and I had a lot of reaction from it and I said, ‘Well, OK, I can do some more of these things’ so I just started making more and more. I’m just still trying to find myself as far as what I want to do.”
Coming to his art career late in life, Otterbein is currently preparing for his first solo exhibition at River Arts in Damariscotta. His show is scheduled to open Thursday, April 24 and continue for three weeks.
Although he is focused on producing art for art’s sake now, design and graphics were a major of Otterbein’s career. Born in Essex County, N.J., just outside New York City, Otterbein was the son of a printer who passed away when Otterbein was 16, but not before teaching him how to use almost every machine in the print shop. After high school, he matriculated to Arizona State University in 1968, originally with plans of becoming an architect. Three years in, he changed his major to graphic design.
“I think wine, women, and song got a hold of me,” he said.
Graduating in 1973, Otterbein returned home to New Jersey where he took a job first with Mathews International and later Container Graphics Corp. For both companies he served as an art director and package designer, specializing in flexographic printing for the corrugated industry.
College was also the place where Otterbein picked up one of the passions of his younger life. He was a soccer player who had never heard of rugby before one of his teammates invited him to a practice.
“They were practicing in a parking lot, somewhere because they didn’t have a field,” he said. “We got out there, and I got the job of kicking the ball. I said, ‘Hey, I like this.’ So I basically quit the soccer team and went on to the rugby team, and from there it was all history.”
It was the beginning of a long, athletic love affair. Otterbein would go on to play rugby seriously for the next 18 years, making Arizona State’s rugby team. After college, back home in New Jersey, he continued to play at a semiprofessional level until his self-imposed retirement from the sport at age 36.
For Otterbein, rugby’s controlled violence offered the perfect antidote for a creative thinker whose day job involved deadlines, sales calls, and strategy meetings. Otterbein said the camaraderie off the field was as much a part of his love for the sport as the play on the field.
Bremen artist John Otterbein got the idea for this portrait at an optometrist appointment. “I asked the eye doctor if you could take my picture, and that’s it,” he said, adding it is not a self-portrait. “That’s not me. I was just going to put a goofy face in there.” (Sherwood Olin photo)
“That was my life, and a big part of it,” Otterbein said. “It was a good balance from a high pressure job … That’s why I’m still friends with a lot of these doctor guys; the three dentists that I’m in touch with all the time. It’s intense. It’s intense. When they went out there, they let it all out. You’re studying all week and it just explodes.”
A notoriously rough, demanding sport, rugby teams frequently compete ferociously on the field of play, and then compete just as ferociously in the post-game festivities. By the time Otterbein retired from playing, he was already moving out of the phase of his life where the culture around the game was still attractive.
“At the same time I quit drinking, because half of rugby is drinking,” Otterbein said. “There’s the game, and you have got to win the party too. The crazier you are the better, you know?”
The competition and chaos and the sacrifice the game requires sets up rugby players as members of a global fraternity, Otterbein said. To this day, Otterbein remains friends with some of his rugby teammates he played with more than 30 years ago.
“I can go anywhere and mention rugby, and you’re on the same level,” he said. “You just know how crazy it is and everything, so they know where you’re coming from.”
Around the same time he ended his rugby career, Otterbein moved on his professional life, Tired of the corporate world, he resigned and went to work framing houses, enjoying the labor of it. At the same time he began working as freelance design consultant essentially doing his old job for his former company as independent contractor.
Otterbein arrived in Maine indirectly as his mother and stepfather had a vacation home where he had enjoyed summer vacations. Not long after Otterbein told his mother to keep her eyes peeled for a property he might want to buy, she spotted a “For Sale” sign for a lot on Fogler Road in Bremen, next door to Otterbein’s current home.
Otterbein immediately called the Realtor and the following day to close the deal.
“I picked up that property, and then the next year I started building on it,” Otterbein said. “I cleared it; did the whole thing. I’m still living in New Jersey at the time, but in the meanwhile, I was coming up here maybe once or twice a month to work on the place.”
By the early 1990s, Otterbein was ready to leave New Jersey behind and moved to Maine full time where he continued to work odd jobs. In 1993, Otterbein went to work for the New England Screen Door Co. in Bristol Mills. Otterbein said he lasted maybe a month before it became obvious he and the company owners had different approaches to the same kinds of problems.
One of John Otterbein’s screen doors welcomes visitors to his Bremen home. Having founded the Wooden Screen Door Co. in 1994, Otterbein estimates he made and sold about 17,000 screen doors during his career. (Sherwood Olin photo)
Taking the concept of custom made wooden screen door with him, Otterbein spent late 1993 and early 1994 developing his own prototypes in his Bremen workshop. In 1994, he found the location he wanted and opened Wooden Screen Door Co. at 3542 Atlantic Highway (Route 1) in Waldoboro.
“My first year, I sold 79 doors,” Otterbein said. “The second year was double, and then the third year it just blew up. … It really, really took off.
All told, he was in the wooden screen door business for 27 years Otterbein said, estimating he made about 17,000 doors. In 2022 feeling the weight of years, Otterbein sold the business to Neil and Jennifer Gutekunst. Otterbein spoke fondly of the couple, saying they were the right people to buy the business.
“They are really good people,” Otterbein said. “I lucked out getting some good people to take it over and they took it to the next level. I couldn’t have done that. I don’t think I could have worked another day down there.”
Now 75, Otterbein said he plans to continue creating as much as he can as long as he can even as he determines his next step. He is planning to sell his Bremen home and he is currently weighing what his next chapter is going to look like. His daughter and ex-wife now live in Arkansas, and he has friends in North Carolina.
However, Otterbein still loves his adopted home. He has a Realtor actively looking at properties for him. He has plenty of wood set aside for the home workshop he would like to set up, and he has immersed himself in his art, spending a portion of every day devoted to creativity.
“As far as the future, I’m just looking to just keep creating,” he said. “Day by day, just keep creating. That’s my lifesaver. I know a lot of people in retirement probably don’t know what to do with their lives sometimes, but this is my next paradigm. I’m not really sure where it’s going or how it’s going, but I’m going to just keep going.”
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