Snowsled hall to welcome pilot from Millinocket

MILLINOCKET – To the makers of Polaris snowmobiles, the late E.B. (Earlan) Campbell probably seemed a bit of a crank, at least in the beginning.

It was 1957. The elder Campbell, a mechanic and bush pilot from Millinocket, kept calling the engineers at the Polaris headquarters in Minnesota – where winter is a 40-below-zero affair – and telling them that their snowmobiles just weren’t tough enough for Maine, his son Steve Campbell said Tuesday.

“Yeah, they have 40-below weather, but Minnesota is flat and cold, and their machines would go out there because their snow is all powder all the time,” Campbell, who lives in Millinocket, said Tuesday. “Here we have slush, we have snow.”

The earliest Polaris model, Earlan Campbell complained, got chewed up by Maine’s uneven terrain and snow conditions. He cajoled Po-laris’ engineers to come to Millinocket to test their product. They did so in 1958, discovered he was right and did the sensible thing – they put him on their team.

Campbell helped Polaris design and test their snowsleds and snowmobile equipment, bought one of the state’s first snowmobile dealerships and formed one of its first snowmobile clubs. He thus grew to become one of the fathers of Maine’s multibillion-dollar snowmobiling tourism and sports industry and, as of next month, will be Maine’s first entry into the Snowmobile Hall of Fame and Museum in Wisconsin.

Campbell helped Polaris, one of the nation’s largest snowmobile sellers, conquer the New England market. He “was a pioneer for the sport and led the way in many things,” said Loren Anderson, president of the Snowmobile Hall of Fame and Museum in St. Germain, Wis., in a telephone interview Tuesday.

“He did a lot of the factory testing and worked on local club issues, trail development. He was one of the founders of Maine’s early snowmobile clubs,” Anderson said.

Campbell became interested in snowmobiles after a bout with polio in the 1950s left him less capable of snowshoeing, according to family members. He remained an active outdoorsman despite his condition.

The hall will hold its 19th annual induction on Jan. 12 in Eagle River, Wis., inducting Campbell and three others from the sport who made contributions to snowmobiling. The SHOF operates a year-round museum in St. Germain in the heart of snow country in the busy tourism region of northern Wisconsin.

Campbell, who died of a malignant brain tumor at age 52 on Dec. 17, 1971, will be represented by his wife, Elizabeth, and three sons at the ceremony. He had been nominated to the hall eight years ago but didn’t make it in until this year, being the leading vote-getter, Steve Campbell said.

More than 200 people were on the ballot, and only two are selected from his category annually, making Campbell’s selection a rare honor, Steve Campbell said.

His sons Steve and Wayne describe Campbell as a taciturn man who loved and had a deep intuitive understanding of anything mechanical despite dropping out of school after eighth grade, although he eventually finished high school.

According to family lore, Campbell built a working Ferris wheel for his sisters when he was 14. Later, he liked to fashion large air-driven sleds from aircraft engines and fuselages and rebuilt and resold Piper Cub and Taylorcraft airplanes. He would challenge his young sons mechanically, getting them to build motorcycles, boats and automobiles, Wayne Campbell said.

“Dad was high school educated, but he could take something that he had never seen before and make it work,” Wayne Campbell said. “He could look at a problem and design a tool to fix it. The guy just had a thing for mechanics. He could look at a machine and figure out a solution.

“If he were around today he would be very humbled by this. He didn’t like being in the limelight,” Steve Campbell said. “He just wanted to be outdoors and to work on his engines.”