Bangor Roofing’s history can be traced to Lewiston

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America had not yet entered the Great War (later renamed World War I) when Oscar R. Hahnel, his brother Frederick, and August Tilch purchased a Lewiston company from Fritz Korneffel on March 8, 1916. Known as F. Korneffel & Son or Lewiston Metal, Cornice, and Skylight Works, the company was located at 56 Main St. in Lewiston, just a stone’s throw from the Androscoggin River.

The Hahnel brothers brought with them to the business a background roofing that had been learned in Bangor. A local businessman, Arthur N. Merriman, had established a roofing business at 104 Hammond St. after the 1911 Bangor Fire. He hired Oscar and Fred Hahnel, who worked for him a few years before returning home to Lewiston.

In April 1918, the Hahnel Bros. Co. hired Emil Schott, a young man who worked 1 1/2 days a week as a bookkeeper and the remaining 3 1/2 days “doing whatever was needed,” he recalled. Grateful for a job “when any job was mighty hard to come by,” Schott worked hard to help make the company successful.

The Hahnels dissolved their partnership with Tilch on Jan. 20, 1919; Oscar Hahnel then incorporated the business on May 15, 1924, with two new partners: his brother, Emil Hahnel, and Henry Hoffmann. Less than two years later, on Jan. 1, 1926, Lewiston resident Leo P. Cormier also became a partner.

During the 1920s, Hahnel Bros. competed on roofing jobs in central Maine with the A.N. Merryman Co. By 1929, business had substantially increased, and “we were looking for a place to expand,” recalled Cormier.

“Oscar and I had gone to Portland to look things over, but the competition was really fierce down there,” he said. When Arthur Merryman called, announced that he wanted to retire, and asked if Hahnel Bros. might be interested in his business, “we decided to take a look at it,” Cormier said.

Oscar Hahnel and Cormier drove to Bangor, a journey marking Cormier’s first trip to the Queen City. After touring the A.N. Merryman Company (now a parking lot next to the former Bangor Furniture Co.), the two men headed home.

“On our way back, we decided we ought to try it,” Cormier said.

Hahnel asked Cormier, by then a vice president at Hahnel Bros., to manage the Merryman company. Cormier returned to Bangor on March 17, 1929. “That was the second time I was in Bangor. Believe me, I was a Frenchman in a Yankee town, and that wasn’t easy.”

On Jan. 30, 1930, Oscar and Emil Hahnel and Leo Cormier incorporated the Merryman company as the Bangor Roofing & Sheet Metal Co. “I chose the name,” Cormier proudly recalled. “We wanted an identity separate from Hahnel Bros., something that would associate the company with Bangor.”

Cormier found himself wearing several hats, including those belonging to the general manager, vice president, and treasurer. “Since we had only a few people, we all did more than one job,” he said. “It was that way for years.”

Both Hahnel Bros. and Bangor Roofing & Sheet Metal struggled to survive the Depression. Cormier traveled far and wide to find business. “We didn’t see much of him then,” recalled his wife, Laura, “but we knew that he was working hard to feed us and keep a roof over our heads. Those were tough times for everybody, not just us.”

Hahnel Bros., too, felt the economic pinch in the 1930s. Emil Schott, who had become a full-time office employee by 1930, remembered the difficulty in finding enough work to keep the company’s employees busy. “Looking back, I sometimes wonder how we made it,” he said. “We looked everywhere for work; nothing was too small for us to do, nothing was too big.”

In the summer of 1938, Oscar Hahnel hired his son, Oscar R. Hahnel Jr., as a part-time employee. A junior at Lewiston High School, Hahnel worked as a roofing helper and a sheet-metal helper, “doing whatever the old man told me to do.” He paid attention to his work and learned his job well.

By the late 1930s, international events spurred business for Bangor Roofing & Sheet Metal and Hahnel Bros. As Hitler flexed his military muscles in Europe, the United States slowly rearmed its own military. The Army Air Corps started building air bases in Bangor, Houlton, and Presque Isle, and coastal artillery batteries appeared on the Casco Bay islands.

“We had a lot of war work,” Cormier said. “I was able to keep my crew, because our work was related to the war effort. If it hadn’t been, some of them would have gone to war.”

Bangor Roofing & Sheet Metal installed roofs at the new air bases in Maine. As business increased, Cormier sought new quarters for the firm. In the early 1940s, Cormier purchased the Spring Service Co. on Harlow Street, near Bangor High School. “They had a large building, spread, oh, at least a hundred feet or more between two courts,” he said. “We’d roofed three sections of their building before we moved there.”

The Spring Service Co. made springs and repaired automobiles, activities not compatible with Bangor Roofing’s. Cormier dumped the springs and sold the automotive-repair equipment to the Brake Service Co. Bangor Roofing & Sheet Metal quickly moved into the building.

The war also came home to Hahnel Bros. in Lewiston. Oscar Hahnel Jr. had gone to the University of Maine at Orono to study agriculture. A member of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) while in college, Hahnel decided to join the Army at the end of his junior year in 1943. He served in the Philippines before returning to the university in the fall of 1946.

“I was too young for World War I, and too old for World War II, since I was 38, married, and had a few children by Pearl Harbor,” Emil Schott said. He became a partner in Hahnel Bros. on May 16, 1942; Oscar Hahnel Sr. appointed him corporate treasurer in 1944. Schott held that position until retiring in 1988.

Before graduating from the university in 1947 with a degree in agriculture, Oscar Hahnel Jr. had considered becoming “an apple orchardist. I never did, of course,” he remembered. “I came right to work for Hahnel Bros.”

Both Hahnel Bros. and Bangor Roofing & Sheet Metal benefited from the post-war economic surge that the United States — and Maine — enjoyed. Cormier sent his crews everywhere as new businesses opened in central Maine and as military expansion occurred at Dow Air Force Base in Bangor and Loring Air Force Base in Limestone.

“We roofed every building they built at Loring in the 1950s,” Cormier said. “Actually, we roofed every flat building you could put your hands on around here at the time.”

In those days, Cormier often spent time on the job with his crews. He can recall repairing the slate roof at Nelson D. Rockefeller’s summer cottage in Northeast Harbor, roofing the State Office Building in Augusta, and installing “the roofs on every post office from Skowhegan to Fort Kent.”

Under Cormier’s guidance, Bangor Roofing & Sheet Metal placed a copper roof on Ellsworth City Hall, installed roofs and ductwork in a Bucksport paper mill, and roofed buildings at paper mills scattered from Millinocket to Madawaska to Woodland.

“I put the roof on Freese’s (department store) every time they went up another story,” Cormier said. “I roofed all those buildings up and down Main Street (in Bangor).”

Bangor Roofing & Sheet Metal remained on Harlow Street until 1963. Cormier recalled the day that a representative of the General Services Administration “walked in the door and told me that the government wanted to buy my building, tear it down, and build a post office.

“I figured, why not? We were $15,000 apart after that first meeting, so the government man left after telling me that I’d have to go to court to get that additional $15,000,” Cormier said.

“I told him I would,” he recalled.

Cormier daily stopped by St. Mary’s Catholic Church on Cedar Street “to pray about everything that happened that day.” When he entered the church that afternoon, “I saw the government man up front on his knees, praying. I prayed, then left before he saw me.”

The next morning, the government employee returned and agreed to Cormier’s price. In May 1964, Bangor Roofing & Sheet Metal moved to a new building at 116 Parkway South in Brewer.

Cormier subsequently retired in 1972. Looking back on his long affiliation with Bangor Roofing & Sheet Metal, he proudly said, “When they had one of our roofs, they had a good roof. We put ’em up to stay.”

Cormier and his wife, who have been married for 69 years, raised five sons and four daughters in Bangor. Very pleased with their family, the Cormiers said that they had 32 grandchildren, 21 great-grandchildren, and five great-great-grandchildren.

Even after Cormier retired, the federal government did not leave Bangor Roofing alone. In 1981, the government informed the company that Interstate 395 would run right through its Brewer office. In May 1982, the company moved to 219 Perry Road in Bangor.

As the years passed, changes also took place at the corporate level. Hahnel Bros. moved into a new building on Strawberry Avenue in Lewiston in May 1966, just days before Oscar Hahnel Sr. died. Oscar Hahnel Jr. became the company’s president, a position that he also holds with Bangor Roofing & Sheet Metal.

Henry Hoffmann retired from Hahnel Bros. in April 1969, and other people gradually became partners in either that company, Bangor Roofing, or both.

Today, the owners of Hahnel Bros. are Oscar Hahnel Jr., Emil Schott, Erna Hahnel Schutt and Gladyse Hahnel Donsbach, Eleanor Schutt Sassano, Peter Sassano (also the treasurer), William Hunter, Alan Hahnel, and Lauriston Day.

The owners of Bangor Roofing & Sheet Metal are Oscar Hahnel Jr., Erna Hahnel Schutt, Gladyse Hahnel Donsbach, Emil Schott, Noel Sirabella, Hal Knowles, and Elda Blaylock.