Character of the County: Lisa Brackett

Brackett, who grew up in New Harbor, right across from Shaw’s Fish and Lobster Wharf, said growing up there was “incredible.”

“It was carefree, it was safe, you knew all your neighbors,” she said. “The summer kids would come, and so that gave you a whole bunch of new friends to play with, it just gave me a real secure feeling of home, of what home is.”

The lifelong worker and businesswoman got into the local economy early on. Her very first job was selling handmade candlestick holders decorated with sea glass found at the Rachel Carson Salt Pond Preserve from a stand at her grandfather’s dock in New Harbor next to Shaw’s Wharf.

“I was an entrepreneur from the get-go,” she said. “I’d get enough to buy an order of steamers. I’d do that, I’d have lunch, and then close up shop, and then I’d go back and sell some more so I could make enough to get a whoopie pie and a coke.”

Brackett attended Bristol Consolidated School and Lincoln Academy in Newcastle, where she graduated in 1979. Brackett said. She remembers a her time at LA was marked by friends, fun, and an appreciation for life when it was simpler.

“There was a group of us girls that hung out together all four years, and we had a lot of fun,” she said, laughing. “Some might say too much fun. We were the last, it seems, of a generation of kids that grew up with the innocence around us … when life seemed so much simpler even though you had the complications of being a teenager and hormones and the confusion around growing up in a small town and ‘Where do I fit in?’”