Black, white images heart of book on UM history

THE UNIVERSITY OF MAINE: THE COLLEGE HISTORY SERIES, compiled by Bob Briggs and Debra Wright, Arcadia Publishing, Charleston, S.C., 1999, 128 pages, paperback, $19.99.

With apologies to the NBC peacock and television tycoon Ted Turner, who once shamelessly colorized such Hollywood classics as “Casablanca” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” many of life’s defining moments are best viewed through black-and-white photography.

In compiling this informal pictorial history of the University of Maine, cousins Bob Briggs and Debra Wright eyeballed piles of black-and-white images at the university’s Fogler Library, and the Maine Historic Preservation Commission in Augusta. In a few months they completed this highly readable chronicle of the first 75 years of the Orono campus, stretching from 1865 to 1940.

For Briggs, a Gardiner bookstore owner, and Wright, who works for the UMaine Card Office, the real color is in their deft photo selection and snappy captions that resurrect campus activities, sporting events, building construction and the faces — young and old; male and female — of figures who made the state’s land-grant institution better than it might have been, considering its early struggles with low enrollment and paltry state funding.

The authors, university alumni, must have learned much in researching the more than 200 photo captions. (They credit former history professor David C. Smith’s fine UMaine history in their acknowledgments.) For instance, the board of trustees appointed by the Legislature in 1865 chose Orono for the campus of Maine State College, its original name, because it was located halfway between Kittery and Fort Kent. When the school opened its doors on Sept. 21, 1868, 12 male students were enrolled with two faculty members on duty. They were acting president and mathematics professor Merritt Caldwell Fernald, a towering figure in the school’s history, and Samuel Johnson, farm superintendent.

Other cutlines offer a delicious confection of hard fact and light trivia. Did you know, for example, that Elizabeth Abbott Balentine, one of many university women pictured in the book, could call every student by his or her first name from the mid-1880s, when she started her tenure as secretary to the president, until her death in 1913?

A photo, circa 1900, showing a chemical engineering student at work in the Holmes Laboratory is accompanied by the comment that another student perfected a hangover “cure” consisting of 5 grams of sulphate of iron, one peppermint, 11 drachmas of water, and one drachma of spirits of nutmeg to be taken twice daily. Some aspects of campus life never change.

Other highlights are the live mascot Bananas the Bear; the construction of the Memorial Gymnasium and Field House; the 35 well-dressed brothers of the Kappa Sigma fraternity, seen in 1913; a 1931 visit by one-time student Rudy Vallee (not Valley, as it’s spelled in the cutline); and “Foxy Fred” Brice, who took up football coaching on doctor’s orders after being gassed in World War I.

All 128 pages get UMaine’s past exactly right; from its agricultural origins to its fraternity life to its academic mission that survives to this day, making the book a fitting flagship of Arcadia Publishing’s new College History Series. The company has put out more than 800 titles in its Images of America Series. The books are only as good as the local authors who compile them; in this case, Briggs and Wright fit the bill with a commendable effort. It’s enough to make even a Bowdoin graduate want to fill the steins to dear old Maine.

Debra Wright will autograph copies of “The University of Maine” from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. today at Borders in Bangor.