Rosie and Paul Kelsey Sr. pose in front of photo array of family members in the living room of their Walpole home. The couple met as teenagers while roller skating in Pemaquid and married in 1967, just after Paul Kelsey returned from serving in the Army in Vietnam. (Sherwood Olin photo)
Paul Kelsey Sr. said he first noticed the problem when he began having trouble getting into his truck sometime around 2015. A strong, active man who liked to hunt and fish and drilled wells for living, the South Bristol native was surprised when his feet started ignoring the signals from his brain.
At first, he compensated by traveling with a small, portable step, attached to a rope. Once he climbed into his four-wheel drive GMC, he could pull the step up after him.
“That worked for a while and then my son had a two-wheel drive pickup, so I downsized with him to the smaller pickup,” Kelsey said. “That worked for a while, but then I got to a situation where I couldn’t get in and drive.”
At the same time his motor skills were deteriorating, Kelsey was traveling from one doctor to another trying to find a diagnosis. Ultimately, working together online two of his three children found an affliction online that perfectly described their father’s symptoms. Kelsey was ultimately diagnosed with chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, or CIPD, an autoimmune disease of the central nervous system.
“We knew something was wrong,” he said. “We started with Togus, and they started running tests. Then they sent me to Boston and different places, Brunswick and all around, and they had different ideas on what was happening.”
Today Kelsey still has strength in his upper body and he can stand with assistance, but he is largely confined to a motorized wheelchair and currently receives at-home care four to five days a week. For Kelsey, CIPD is just another challenge to be taken head-on. The only thing to do is to keep going, he said.
“They tested about everything, and it wasn’t something that was probably going to be fixed easy,” he said. “We tried all the easy stuff, taking different treatments and stuff, and then I just decided I could live with it.”
Raised in Walpole, the son of Albert and Alice (Thompson) Kelsey, Paul Kelsey Sr. has been going forward his entire life. As a kid, his first job involved working with livestock on a few of the small family farms in South Bristol. At the time it seemed nearly everyone kept some farm animals to tend.
Kelsey grew up fast when his father died in 1958. Kelsey was 15 years old at the time.
After graduating from Lincoln Academy in 1962, Kelsey went to work in construction, taking a job with O.W. Holmes Inc. Kelsey recalled company founder Wendell Holmes was a diminutive man with a peculiar manner of speech. Holmes could be charming and he was a whip-smart businessman, although his appearance was deceptive, Kelsey said.
“People meet him and they’d think, ‘Why, we’ll get this done for nothing,’” Kelsey said. “Well, he’d talk to you and charge you double what he’d charge me and you’d be tickled.”
While he was working for Holmes, Kelsey received his draft notice in 1964. He served just over two years with the 101st Airborne Division, including a tour of Vietnam, before mustering out in 1967. Vietnam boasted some beautiful country, Kelsey said, but he was more than happy to leave it behind.
“I was glad to get out of there,” he said. “One of the big things over there is the climate. Humid – you’d step off the plane and you could almost not breathe the air.”
As a trained paratrooper, Kelsey earned an extra $55 a month in addition to the $65 a month he was paid while serving in Vietnam. At the time it was good money, Kelsey said, especially because there was never an opportunity for a paratrooper to jump out of a plane. Instead, Kelsey spent the bulk of his time operating heavy equipment.
Once he mustered out, Kelsey returned to South Bristol to help care for his aging mother. Alice Kelsey served as South Bristol’s town clerk and tax collector for many years. When Paul Kelsey was growing up, a good deal of the regular town office business was conducted right in the family’s living room in Walpole.
Back in civilian life, Kelsey’s first order of business was to acquire a new car, which turned out to be a 1967 Ford Mustang, and then marry his high school sweetheart, Rosie Reilly.
The future Mr. and Mrs. Kelsey met while roller skating at the Lewis Pavilion, which was located at Pemaquid Beach Park until it was destroyed in a storm in 1963. At the time the couple attended different high schools. Kelsey attended Lincoln Academy in Newcastle and Reilly attended Bristol High School in Pemaquid. However, Kelsey had a license and a friend had a car.
“David Rice down here, my neighbor, he went out somewhere and bought a car,” Kelsey said. “He didn’t have a license, and I had my license. So I caught up with Rosie, and he picked up a girl from Round Pond. I’d go pick them both up and we would go roller skating.”
The Kelseys married in 1967. While Paul was in the service, Rosie studied nursing in Bangor. She worked outside the home as a nurse for few years before devoting herself to raising the couple’s three children.
Originally, Paul Kelsey had planned to return to work for O.W. Holmes, but he ended up taking a job on Rutherford Island with a company that specialized in servicing sonobuoys. Sonobouys are a portable sonar system that can be dropped from an aircraft or a ship and is used to detect submarines and conduct underwater research.
“It was fun to listen to them,” Kelsey said. “They’d pick up the noise of a submarine, which is what they were looking for, but you could hear whales talking on them.”
Kelsey might have remained with that business for much longer than he did, but his brother-in-law bought a well drilling rig in 1972. According to Kelsey, until John Reilly Jr. called with a job offer, he had no idea what drilling a well involved.
“He called me up and he said, ‘Hey, you want to go well drilling?’ I says, ‘I never seen a driller.’” Kelsey said. “He’s like, ‘No problem. I’ll show you.’ He said, ‘I’ll run the rig. You run your mouth. Try to go around and talk to people because you got to go to sell to the clients.’”
Reilly attached his name to the paperwork but several family members and Kelsey all bought in to get the business off the ground. The partnership worked well until Reilly had a fatal heart attack in 1990 at the age of 47.
Kelsey ultimately bought out his in-laws and took over the company himself. Today Reilly Well Drilling Inc. continues under Kelsey’s son, Paul Kelsey Jr.
When he started in the business in 1972, regulations weren’t quite as onerous as they are now, according to Paul Kelsey Sr. While his son is attentive to licensing and regulations, Kelsey said he was somewhat less diligent about filing his paperwork. Well drillers are supposed to report to the state where wells are located and that information is publicly available.
Knowing what is drilled where is good information to have, Kelsey said, but he didn’t want to let his competition know how much work he was doing.
“I was a little lax,” Kelsey said. “I didn’t do the paperwork that Paul sent to Augusta. Everybody fills them out now so you know where the wells are, and they haven’t got all of mine, I guarantee. I didn’t want the other guy to know what I’d done.”
Today, after a lifetime of hard work, Kelsey spends much of his time at the Walpole home he shares with his wife. He can look out over the sweeping fields of his 20-plus-acre estate with some satisfaction. Located off Route 129 in Walpole, the land rolls away from Kelsey’s house, down to the Damariscotta River less than a half-mile away.
It’s a view he treasures, Kelsey said. Trees are nice, but he likes to see the river.
“I don’t love trees,” he said.
Kelsey and his sister Sandra Burgoyne inherited the property from their parents. Over the years, Kelsey has peeled off a few acres here and there for his children, Paul Jr., Juliette Kelsey-Holmes, and Allison Kelsey Bryant, all three of whom live nearby, and more recently for his grandchildren.
Early on, when the children and the well drilling business were both young, there were a few lean years, but overall the well drilling business was good to him, Kelsey said.
“It’s been a good business to meet a lot of people,” he said. “I can strike up a conversation most anybody. It has got to now as the years went along, I recognize people, and everybody I see, I try to put you with a well. If I put a well in there, you needed a well or whatever; somewhere I drilled you a well and I try to place you with that well.”
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