Chipman Churchill Bull (1934-1996)

Bull during his 1984 congressional candidacy.

  We continue our stay in Maine to highlight the life and career of Chipman Churchill Bull, a longtime leader in Maine agriculture who had fleeting political notoriety in 1984 when he entered into the race for U.S. Representative from Maine, his opponent being then Congresswoman (and future U.S. Senator) Olympia Snowe. Nicknamed "Chip", Bull was for several years the executive director of the Maine Potato Council, a fact (given Bull's nickname) that gave this author a good laugh!

  Born in Washburn, Maine on September 5, 1934, Chipman Churchill Bull was the son of Ralph and Leilla Bull. A student in the public schools of that area, Bull graduated from the Washburn High School in 1952 and later attended Springfield College in Massachusetts and the University of Maine. For a period of two years, he served in the U.S. Army and in 1957 made his first foray into agricultural work, becoming a field reporter in Presque Isle for the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service (ASCS). He would quickly rise through the ranks of that organization, and by 1959 had been promoted to performance supervisor. 

  In June 1958 Chipman Bull married Ardis Carmichael (1938-2003), to whom he was wed for nearly 40 years. The couple would have four children, Mary Jo, Michael John, Matthew Joseph, and Melissa Jane.

  After three years as a performance supervisor with the ASCS Chip Bull advanced to a county office manager for the ASCS offices in Hillsboro and Coos County, New Hampshire. His time in that post would be brief and after a year returned to Maine, and following his return worked as an operations assistant and program specialist for the ASCS until 1968, when he was named as Maine state director for the ASCS. Bull's time in that post also proved to be short-lived, and upon Richard Nixon's presidential win in late 1968, he resigned.

   A few years following his departure from the ASCS, "Chip" Bull joined the Maine Potato Council, a body dedicated to overseeing the state's potato industry. By the following year, he had assumed the post of executive director of the Maine Potato Commission, and served in that capacity until his appointment in 1976 as Northeast area director of the ASCS in the administration of Jimmy Carter. This post would necessitate Bull's removal to Washington D.C. in 1977 and during his tenure oversaw "federal farm programs in 13 states."

Chipman C. Bull in 1984, from the Fort Fairfield Review.

  Through the remainder of the 1970s, Bull continued with the Department of Agriculture as a "senior executive" and briefly continued his work following Ronald Reagan's presidential win in 1980. Despite a long, successful career in agricultural work at both the state and national levels, Bull found himself in a quandary by the early 1980s, being referred to by the Washington Post as a denizen of the capital's "boneyard", or, to be more precise, a high paid Washington employee with few duties and plenty of free time. Bull would later remark that in his downtime he polished off several Robert Ludlam and Leon Uris novels and grew to be adept at finishing the New York Times and Washington Post crossword puzzles in short spans of time.

  This time period also saw Bull's government salary increase, an action that subsequently drew his ire. Acknowledging his own predicament and the government's touting of curbing wasteful spending, Bull remained on the job until resigning in March 1984, and in that year decided to return to Maine to launch his bid for the U.S. House of Representatives. Bull's candidacy would later receive support from Democratic Maine senators George Mitchell and Edmund Muskie, and the candidate himself later remarked:

"People asked why I would want a job that pays only $5,000 more than what I was making at USDA...Well, I feel things can be done in the legislative branch, and I think I know where the skeletons are at the USDA. I intend to be on the agricultural committee."

From the September 5, 1984 Old Town Orono Times.

    Bull's opponent in that year's congressional race was three-term incumbent Republican Olympia Snowe, who had earlier served several terms in the Maine state house and senate. When voters went to the polls that November it was an overwhelming win for the Republicans, with Snowe besting Bull by a wide margin, 192,166 votes to 57, 347. Following her win Olympia Snowe was elected to four more terms in the house of representatives and in 1994 won election to the U.S. Senate, where she would serve until her retirement in 2013.

  After his congressional defeat, Chipman Bull resided in both Maine and Florida, being a country club chef in the latter state. By 1991 he had returned to Washington D.C., and from 1991-1994 held the post of deputy postmaster and superintendent of mails for the U.S. Senate Post Office. He retired in 1994 and on January 29, 1996, died at a Virginia hospice of cancer at age 61. He was survived by his wife and children and a burial location for him remains unknown at this time.