MEET MR. MOULTON

BIG FISH, SMALL POND Meet Mr. Moulton

LOCAL HISTORIAN ERNIE NOVOSAD TALKS MOULTON HISTORY, WORLDLY TRAVELS, AND TALL TALES

by Michelle Banse Stokes, photos by Emily Henderson

Affectionately known as Mr. Moulton by the locals, Ernie Novosad is the de facto local historian in these parts. There are not too many people in the area that he doesn’t know and, similarly, there are not too many people in Moulton that don’t know this smiling man. You see, Ernie was a driving force behind documenting the history of the area for the benefit of many generations to come.

To properly tell this story, we have to go back in time for a bit. Ernie is happy to share with anyone with the time to listen and recounts his early life in Moulton with a smile.

“I think Moulton is interested in history and, years ago, I became the area’s historian,” Ernie said. “Back in the 1970s, I returned to Moulton after college and started teaching here. We’re a small school, so I taught chemistry and sometimes AP chemistry if there were enough students. I later taught science in upper middle school. I hold both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history and chemistry but, the funny thing is, I’ve never taught a history class in my life. History classes are usually the purview of coaches and not too many people can teach chemistry. So that’s how it happened.”

Ernie would soon come in contact with a lady that would put the history portion of his degree to good use.

“In the 70s, there was an elderly lady named Mrs. Anita Richter, who I consider to be my unofficial mentor,” Ernie shared. “She approached me about Old Moulton Cemetery and some of Moulton’s historical markers. One of our senior classes took on the project of writing down all the names of the people in the cemetery and creating a rough map of where each tombstone was. Believe it or not, that map is still the one they use today. That got me going in it and I always liked history. On top of that, I was kind of a military nut. In fact, military history is my specialty. Put all of these things together and I was hooked on it.”

Hooked he was. Soon Ernie was a part of a project that would prove to be bigger than he could have imagined.

“Moulton didn’t have anything officially on record,” Ernie added. “Together with other local historians, we scratched together a history of the community. We decided to start the project of putting together a book. We didn’t know what we were doing and we didn’t have a business model. We just said that we were going to write a history book and, if we had known how much work it was going to be, we probably never would have done it. But we got help from all kinds of

Above, Ernie Novosad poses with a copy of a book on Moulton’s history, of which he was the editor.

people. We asked for donations of photos and we tried to make the book not just a dry history of the city. We had so many great photos but we couldn’t put them all in. The book was printed in hardback and we sold 400 copies in advance, which we thought was pretty good. Then all of a sudden, when the book hit, there were hundreds of people who wanted copies. We completed a second printing a few years later. That’s how I became the local historian, more or less.”

Today, when Ernie isn’t answering phone calls from people wanting a historic tidbit on Moulton, he still keeps himself busy pursuing his passions.

“I don’t have a sitting-behind,” Ernie said with a laugh. “I had a medical scare back in 2008 and I decided that I had enough years in (teaching) and I wanted to travel. We got a group together and traveled all over Europe. We did a few river tours, went down to Egypt, Rome, and Jerusalem … all parts of Europe. I’ve also been to Alaska and Hawaii, both of which are fantastic. I encourage anyone that wants to see some beautiful scenery that those are the places to go. After I did my traveling, I took on more volunteer work locally.”

A storyteller by nature, Ernie is quick to share not only his historic tales of Moulton, but also of his escapades while traveling. “In Alaska, we took a cruise up the Inside Passage,” Ernie said. “I’ll never forget my roommate snoring so bad. I just couldn’t stand it anymore, so I went out on the veranda. I was just sitting there in a lounge chair when, all of a sudden, there was this pod of humpbacks. They were singing to each other at two o’clock in the morning. You could hear it all over.

“Then, in Hawaii, I got a little too close to a humpback. We were on a dinner cruise and not really anticipating anything. All of a sudden, there were these dolphins all over the place and people were running around taking pictures. As for me, I’d seen dolphins before so I wasn’t that interested. Then, on the left side of the boat, a baby humpback breached and everyone rushed to that side. I’m still standing on the right side of the boat and, just about the time I thought maybe I should go with the crowd, I suddenly hear a loud WHOOSH. I look down and saw its Mama. She breached and, when she did, she threw that spray down all over me. The captain yelled an obscenity that no passenger wants to hear and I could see why. She was so big! Her head was near the front of the boat and her tail was ten feet behind it. She was over 60 feet and she had a baby to worry about. If that baby squawked, she could flip us over. It was an adventure that I’ll never forget.”