A Little Nostalgia for Bygone Days in Maine

I grew up in a small town in Maine, about 2000 people. I consider myself fortunate that I was able to attend school right in my home town, all the way through high school, with no bus riding. (This was around the approximate end of the Dark Ages.) My class, the Class of '68, was the last to graduate from Mechanic Falls High School. The following year the high school population was swallowed up in a "School Administrative District" or SAD, which consisted of of the nearest city, Auburn, plus our town. Unlike some of the state SAD's, where numerous small and medium towns banded into one district and the students were all bussed in and all pretty much on an equal footing, the Mechanic Falls students were resented and/or ignored outsiders in a large, established school population. The kids who had been sophomores and juniors when I was a senior, and thus knew what attending a small-town high school was like, hated the move with a passion. Those who came after perhaps had a somewhat easier time, but not much, always treated as second-class citizens.

In the 50s and 60s, Mechanic Falls was in many ways, I now realize, an idyllic place to grow up. Most people didn't lock their doors (heck, some of my neighbors didn't even know where the key was) or their cars; most kids could walk or bike to school (and AFAIK no one owned a bicycle lock), and if you lived close enough you could even go home for lunch. Illegal drugs were essentially non-existent -- that was something in New York City -- as was crime in general. Oh, there were a few "bad kids" in town; everyone knew who they were, and the trouble they got into was pretty much limited to getting drunk and hotrodding. We still had an old-fashioned 5 & 10 cent store; several mom and pop grocery stores (I'm talking small convenience store size, but they weren't convenience stores, which I don't think had been invented yet), at least one of which had an honest-to-God butcher who would cut and grind your beef to order while you stood there and watched; and a drugstore that was really a drugstore (not a wannabe supermarket) with a pharmacist who knew everyone by name, including the kids.

I suppose from today's perspective I had a deprived childhood. Like I said, convenience stores hadn't been invented, shopping malls didn't exist, and -- I swear to God I'm not making this up -- I had never heard of McDonald's until I spent the summer when I was 16 in an NSF science program for high school juniors. (There may have been a McDonald's in Lewiston or Auburn 10 miles away, but if so it never impinged on my consciousness.) My high school didn't have a cafeteria, or teach calculus or any foreign languages except French. We got three TV stations when the weather was right, on a black-and-white TV with an antenna on the roof. But somehow, even now, I don't feel I was deprived at all.

OK, enough nostalgia for now. Except for this: a piece of a 1956 topo map that shows my home town. I was 4 years old, and I lived in the house that the red arrow is pointing to. About one inch to the right, you'll see a building with a little flag on top, down near the Little Androscoggin River. That's the high school from which my Class of '68 was the last to graduate. Last I knew (it's been 12 years since I've been back to Maine), the building was still there, but it's now the Town Hall, and seems strangely cramped and small.


Trivia time: The town of Mechanic Falls holds the perhaps dubious distinction of having been mentioned, in passing, in a national best-seller novel -- I believe it was called "The Stand" -- by one Stephen King. When I was a freshman at the University of Maine, Steve King was a senior, writing a column in the weekly student newspaper called "King's Garbage Truck." No, I never met him.