ORONO — George Gonyar left Tough End circa 30 B.Y.

That’s Before Yuppie.

There was a time, after all, when Tough End earned its nickname.

The hustle-and-bustle area of Orono, roughly located down by the Stillwater River behind Fleet Bank, was once home to the blue-collar employees of Orono’s two paper mills and others who scraped through life during the Great Depression.

Legend has it that the few townies who went to the University of Maine had to fight their way to school, a story discounted by Gonyar, the Town Council chairman who points out that back in the 1920s and ’30s most university students lived on campus.

“This was really a blue-collar town, a mill town,” said Gonyar, who left the area for the Navy and then college in 1945.

Generations ago, Tough End competed with kids from other sections of town for bragging rights. Storefronts in town now occupied by realty offices and lawyers were once the homes of soda fountains and candy stores, and there was a hotel and pool room just up the road in Basin Mills.

In the 1920s, growing up there might have been rough, but a man could earn enough in the mills to provide fairly well for his family. Gonyar’s father brought in $85 a week, big money for back then, before the mill closed down and he took a Depression-era job at a grocery store for a fraction of his earlier wage.

“Once the mill went down, the neighborhood began to change,” Gonyar said.

This sort of transformation is not uncommon for many American towns, where the older families die off or move and are replaced with a younger crowd, which often tend to be of a more professional breed.

For Orono, the result has been the Tough End Association, a loose band of neighbors working to improve the area by lobbying for changes in water quality and land usage, by cleaning up the grounds, and by holding informal get-togethers with each other and whoever else wants to attend.

It is, said member Robert McIntire, simply a way of getting to know one’s neighbors in an age where television has replaced the village green.

“So far, it’s been a lot of fun,” he said.

Members of the Tough End Association include employees of the University of Maine and mill workers, as well as plenty of others, and keep in touch through frequent meetings and a newsletter, said McIntire, a Tough End resident for more than a dozen years.

So far, McIntire said, he has yet to encounter any of the skepticism of some of the older neighborhood types.

Which means he hasn’t met Walter Dall.

“Bunch a ….,” Dall said, catching himself. “I don’t care particularly for it.”

Dall, who moved to Tough End about the time Gonyar moved out, still lives on Cedar Street and doesn’t have much use for the leaflets passed out by the association or the proposal for a community tool shed.

“If I want a tool, I’ll go out and buy it,” he said.

Like Gonyar and others, Dall remembers Tough End as the center of Orono, with the cemetery, school, and a beer joint or two, all located within its unmarked borders.

“You had to fight your way in, fight your way out, I guess,” he quipped.

Still, Dall said he abides by a “live and let live” policy, even if he doesn’t plan on attending the ice cream social planned for later this summer.

“Maybe I’m too old,” he said as a way of explaining his skepticism.

Gonyar describes the association’s efforts as a renaissance of sorts while adding that Tough End has little resemblance to the neighborhood of his youth.

“They have a legitimate concern and a legitimate position in town,” he said of the association.

As far as change goes, McIntire said, the neighborhood has evolved. But then again, some things remain the same, and the area’s history will be the topic of another upcoming association meeting.

“As far as the real complexion, you’d have to go back to when the mills were here,” he said.