After 46 years living in the United States, Will Elcoate became a naturalized citizen Nov. 14, 2025 and voted for the first time at the 2026 Dublin town election.
He led Town Meeting’s Pledge of Allegiance to mark the occasion.
When he first moved to Dublin, Elcoate said he didn’t take part in community affairs. Once he retired, he realized how grateful he was for the opportunities he had in the United States, prompting him to get more involved.
As a voting citizen, he said he has an opportunity to make a difference. “I also didn’t have to ask permission to speak at the town meeting this time,” he noted.
Elcoate was born in Cornwall, England and grew up in the rural Hampshire village of Lyndhurst. He spent his youth riding horses and working on farms.
Elcoate said he was always interested in the sciences, so when accepted to Bath University, he studied chemistry. As part of the program, he took classes in chemical engineering and worked in a metallurgical lab researching copper and cobalt beneficiation, the process of removing waste materials and increasing the concentration of desired minerals.
“Once I graduated, I didn’t know what to do with myself,” he said. So, he accepted a friend’s invitation to work for an English rodeo show where he spent the summer of 1976 riding, training and caring for rodeo horses.
He met his first wife, Karen, while working there. “She came over from the U.S., hitchhiking and looking for work, so she joined the rodeo parking people’s cars.”
After the rodeo received a license from 21st Century Fox to use its ‘Planet of the Apes’ costumes in its shows, “I spent my summer riding on horseback dressed as an ape,” he recalled.
When the show ended, Elcoate visited his mother whom he said wasn’t pleased with his monkeying around.
“She says to me, ‘My son has this fancy degree from a prestigious university, yet here he is parading around as an ape.'”
Elcoate understood his mother’s point and found a job aligned with his interests.
He sent his resume to an English company, Charter Consolidated Services, operating mines in Zambia, where he was offered a two-year contract. Before starting his new job, Elcoate followed his partner to the U.S. and met her parents in Philadelphia. The two married and then left for Zambia.
“When I met my boss in Zambia he said, ‘Haven’t you read the newspapers?’ Of course, I hadn’t as I’d been too busy with the rodeo and getting married,” Elcoate said. “The country was in the middle of three different wars, so my boss advised me on where not to go and how to act if I wanted to leave the place alive.”
While in Zambia, his son James was born. “Zambia was a wonderful experience, but baby formula was difficult to come by, so Karen and I had to make a choice.”
The couple deliberated whether to return to England or start anew in the U.S.
“The economic conditions in England weren’t great and my mother had always encouraged her children to travel,” Elcoate said. “So when we contacted the U.S. Embassy in Zambia, they said they had 12 openings for U.S. Green Cards and rarely received applications.”
By 1980, Elcoate was on a plane to America, adding, “I was excited at the prospect of working in the U.S.”
As a Green Card holder with a chemistry degree, Elcoate found his way into industrial water treatment.
“I was interested in going back to a lab, so I found a job in Philadelphia working on HVAC systems doing water treatment,” he said.
Eventually, Elcoate’s first marriage ended in divorce, and in June 1981, he met Laura, with whom he has been married for 40 years.
Over the years, Elcoate moved from one company to another attaining knowledge and greater responsibility in water treatment as he went. He found work in New Jersey, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Massachusetts.
“I had been employed by numerous environmental entities and through those experiences, I became an expert in vapor intrusion,” he said. According to Elcoate, vapor intrusion is the migration of hazardous chemical vapors from contaminated soil or groundwater into occupied buildings.
Elcoate said the Environmental Protection Agency consulted him on making videos covering the matter.
His expertise netted him his final job at Alpha Analytical of Marlborough, Mass., in October 2011, where he became a national air sales manager, a position that entailed a lot of travel. He said Alpha Analytical provides air analysis for atmospheric gases and vapors.
“At Alpha, I’d travel all over the country to technical conferences with the sales team,” he said.
In 2013, he and Laura settled in Dublin to be closer to his workplace. Elcoate retired from the company in 2023.
“I went from a guy running tests in the field analyzing water treatment levels to a national air manager working on many projects,” he said. “I was very fortunate for the many opportunities I was given, and living in the U.S. made that possible.”
In retirement, Elcoate stays busy serving as Dublin’s superintendent for the cemetery and as the School House Museum’s curator.
“When you get to a certain age and reflect on all you’ve done in life, you have to ask the question, ‘who wrote this story?'”