MOSCOW -- Ronald W. Ingersoll probably has lived more of Maine's rural life than most people have forgotten.

He remembers Mercer before it had electricity, when he and his father ran a turbine sawmill powered by water from Mercer Mill Stream. He recalls when tree-length logs were $10 a thousand board feet and when Shaw Library was a coat factory. He has fond memories of the years his grandparents ran the Ingersoll Variety gas station on Mercer's Main Street and the summer he spent catching frogs for fishermen for a penny apiece.

He recalls cutting knife shanks at a mill in Bingham, where he ran the lathes upstairs for $1.10 an hour, shifting in the 1960s to the Quimby Veneer Mill when the knife mill moved to Phillips.

Ingersoll can tell you how to set a water trap to snare a fox, how to bait a muskrat using sweet apple and how to smoke up a trap with sweet fern to get rid of the human scent.

Drafted into the U.S. Army at 21, Ingersoll lived through four and a half years in the South Pacific, weathering tough battles in the Northern Solomon Islands, finally emerging as a staff sergeant.

Ingersoll, who turned 90 years old Sept. 15, still tells it all with remarkable clarity, pondering over photographs of an era gone by with piercing blue-gray eyes that still don't require eyeglasses except to read and a weathered, yet strong face that defies his years.

"I've had my fingers in a lot of things and I've led a long life, partly because I've had good humor," Ingersoll said from his living room in the Howard Road home in Moscow that he built himself more than 45 years ago.

"Heaven or hell is all according to you. I don't worry or fret, it doesn't pay."

An entertaining storyteller, Ingersoll said he came to Mercer with his parents, Ethel and Winfield, when he was 6 years old, before U.S. Route 2 sliced through the town's center.

They came from Bolster's Mills, five miles beyond Norway, Maine, where his father had a farm: "I was born there, in the town of Harrison."

Ingersoll attended Mercer Village School through the eighth grade, one of four schools in Mercer at the time. He remembers traveling in the rumble seat of a Model A coupe with the "Gray girls," Verna and Beatrice, to attend high school in neighboring Norridgewock. His grandfather supplied the car, his father bought the gas, he said.

"You could get six gallons of gas for a dollar then -- unless there was a gas war and then you could get more than that," he said. "It was the Red Flash in Norridgewock, where they would dump together a mixture of a half-dozen brands of gas."

He recalls when his father tended the corn mill in Mercer.

"We stayed in a tent by the corn shop until we got a rent. My father ran the corn mill for eight to 10 years. We lived at the old Mercer Hotel for awhile. It had a dance hall upstairs with all hardwood floors. We got milk with a lot of cream in it back then for 10 cents," he said.

Ingersoll has detailed memories of working the turbine sawmill they purchased, where a 10- to 12-foot high shaft connected to a 30-inch wheel with wooden gear teeth "so it wouldn't clank. We painted (the teeth) with graphite and grease to make it slide. It was all water pressure. The water shot right into the pockets -- it had pressure all the time, just like an electric motor. We got 80 horse power when we got a head of water on." Ingersoll doesn't dwell on the bad times, like the time he lost the sawmill he helped pay for during the war.

"For four months I sent home $21 a month. After that I sent a $50-a-month allotment to pay for the mill," he said. "I got only a handful of letters in those years. One Christmas I got a fruitcake. When I got home the sawmill was gone."

Ingersoll said his father never said what happened, but he assumes that he just let the loan go back for lack of payments. His father did come up with the money later, however, to help him buy a farm, Ingersoll said.

"I paid $950 for the farm and 85 acres of land," he said.

Almost as an afterthought, Ingersoll recalls spending three or four months at a hospital at Fort Devens in Massachusetts, recovering from hepatitis.

His photograph book is packed with photos of days gone by. Natives in the Solomon Islands, lines of animals caught in the woods, a picture of soldiers lined up for revelry: "We had 10 minutes to get up and get dressed."

He tells stories of Arthur Works, the mail carrier in Mercer, from whom he purchased a canoe for $2: "I patched it up with sheets and roofing tar to keep it from leaking; It was so much better than an old raft."

Ingersoll said he has been trapping for 75 years: "One year I trapped 93 animals." He remembers as a young man making money from pelts of various animals that sold for $1.25 to $1.50 each. When he was 13-years-old, he said, mink sold for $13 for a big one, $10 for an average -- good pay at the time.

When he returned from the war in 1945, he and a friend went to the Ripogenus Dam and Harrington Lake area, where they spent the winter in old lumber camps, trapping beaver for $1-an-inch of them. At the time a "beaver that measured 60 inches both ways went for $60," he said.

For the past 20 years, Ingersoll has been giving trapping demonstrations, he said, pointing to a 2006 Hall of Fame plaque from the Maine Trappers Association.

Fun in his early years, he said, was rolling a wheel down the road with a stick, spearing suckers or lifting the planks up on the dam to "watch the ice go crashing through." He said the stream was dammed to back it up about three miles.

In later years, Ingersoll and wife, Cora May, settled in Moscow, raising seven children: Carol, Ronald Jr., Kendall, Larry, Adam, Gerry and Penny. Ingersoll now lives with Penny and her husband, Jeffrey Spencer. Cora, his wife of 58 years, died in 2006, 20 days after her birthday. Ingersoll doesn't need much in the way of possessions, he said, and he doesn't throw much away. In his front yard is an old metal wheel barrow he admits is 60-years-old.

"It used to have wooden handles," he said. "When those went I replaced it with pipes ... I don't let things worry me like some people do, I kept away from the cigarettes and tobacco -- and I didn't chase the women."

Darla L. Pickett -- 474-9534, Ext. 341

dpickett@centralmaine.com