Doug Hufnagel, a colorful Belfast local known as Coffeeman, died Tuesday at the age of 78, after a period of declining health.
A columnist, activist and coffee vendor, Hufnagel’s distinctive Coffeeman cart, with its hand-lettered signs and Grateful Dead stickers, was a familiar site in Maine for three decades.
In the years before coffee sales were allowed at the Common Ground Country Fair, Hufnagel set up shop just outside the south entrance. It was a basic operation — hand-cranked grinder, no decaf, no lids and no credit cards. Throngs lined up for strong cups of coffee before entering the fair.
“The Common Ground Fair got him through the winter every year,” said Kate McLeod, a friend for 30 years.
A ’60s-era progressive, Hufnagel was well-known for the Route 52 columns that he started writing in the 1980s for the Camden Herald, and later for Belfast’s Republican Journal.
In the early 1990s Tom Groening, then editor of the Republican Journal, invited Hufnagel to write his column for the paper. It was a time of great churn in Waldo and Knox counties, and the weekly papers published feisty debates on their editorial pages. As the credit card giant MBNA was expanding into the area, Hufnagel was an outspoken foe.
“He really was a progressive voice when most people were embracing the changes,” Groening said. “He was a progressive contrarian.”
A 1998 New York Times story about MBNA’s expansion into Belfast quoted Hufnagel as saying, “My beef is that they’re too big for this area, much too big.”
Hufnagel spent his early years in Maine before his family moved to Connecticut, where he graduated from Stamford Catholic High School. He attended the University of Maine and graduated from the University of Connecticut before migrating to the midcoast in 1979, with a crew of family and friends.
Ever non-traditional, Hufnagel built a unique house (perhaps inspired by one he’d seen in Sri Lanka), complete with a labyrinth, on a Route 52 lot that had been in his family. On one wall, he created a meticulous, hand-lettered timeline covering the seminal political events from 1954 to 1974. For years, he was active with Shebang Street Theater, known for staging protest performances. He also rallied against nuclear power in New Hampshire and New York.
With a deep well of stories from exotic adventures, Hufnagel’s understated manner drew listeners in. He’d seen Nelson Mandela speak, and Malcolm X, and was there when the Grateful Dead played in Golden Gate Park during the Summer of Love. He traveled extensively in Mexico and Central America. In Guatemala, he’d seen the devastation caused by a major earthquake. Groening said that experience led Hufnagel to refer to the 1998 ice storm as “the great inconvenience,” in a Route 52 column.
“He lived a very big life,” said his daughter Erin Grace Hufnagel, of Camden. “He did a ton of traveling, a ton of writing, a ton of learning. And he met the people along the way, and there were all these crazy connections, and the connections just intertwined into this big sort of ball of his life.”
Wherever Coffeeman set up shop, he put out some chairs and a table, and a sign reading European Lifestyle Cafe.
“He felt like people here don’t spend enough time talking,” said McLeod. “Coffeeman was all about ideas. Figuring out conversation, ideas, ways of being. That was his whole deal. And so the European Lifestyle Cafe, people would sit down, and there would be an exchange of ideas, banter.”
In recent years, Coffeeman did a steady business along Belfast’s Harbor Walk, but he was slowing down. In 2023, he said that he’d not be serving coffee at the Common Ground Fair, after a 34-year run. He’d often leave town in the fall in a rickety van, and spend his winters in an Airstream trailer in Arizona. But in September, he broke his hip, so he wintered on Route 52.
In March, Hufnagel announced that the cart was for sale. Coffeeman had brewed his last pot.
Erin Hufnagel said a memorial service will be held sometime this summer.
