TAP DANCING AND TRUE CONFESSIONS, by Karlene K. Hale, published by Karlene Hale, 1999, 117 pages, $15.

The author of this book came of age in the Down East community of Machias in the 1950s and early 1960s, a time, she writes, when “Main Street, neighborliness and rural values still stood for something.”

In a collection of 25 columns she’s written over the past eight or nine years, journalist Karlene K. Hale quickly draws the reader into a forthright, appealing chronology of her youth spent in a seemingly mundane fishing town where not-so-mundane relatives shaped her values and forged an independent spirit.

It was a time when people flocked to The Curb carhop just outside town on summer nights to eat hot dogs in their roadsters and socialize as they breathed in the sweet sea air.

Movies cost 10 cents for a matinee at the Colonial Theater on Main Street, and weekly dances were held at the Marshfield Grange Hall, not far from Machias.

Once a year, young people in the area were bused to Bangor in midwinter to watch a nonstop week of basketball tournaments.

I know Karlene Hale. We both were education reporters in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Same beat, different newspapers. She worked for the Augusta-based Kennebec Journal at the time. I worked then, and still do today, at the Bangor Daily News.

As a reporter, Hale was quick on her feet and competitive. I came to respect her ability to zing bureaucrats with a string of pertinent questions on any given topic.

As time went on, we became friends, sometimes sharing a smoke in her car during a break at a state Board of Education meeting. Once we traveled together to New Hampshire for a conference.

Karlene told me about her engagement to John Hale, who headed the NEWS’ State House bureau for many years. John became her second husband, and the decision to marry him “was one of the two or three best decisions I’ve ever made,” she writes.

Karlene told me about her daughter, Elizabeth, and her struggle in adolescence to overcome a mental illness which plagued her for many years. I was happy to read in this book that Elizabeth has turned into a young woman with big ambitions. She is thriving in Boston and — surprise — the medical world she knew seems to think her problems were not as severe as once suspected.

Karlene crocheted an afghan for my new baby daughter when she was born in 1990. It was a thoughtful gesture, given her frenetic schedule, and one I never quite understood — until I read this book.

In one chapter, titled “Human Decency and the Bottom Line,” Hale writes about her father, Karl Kelley, who owned a hardware store. He had a keen interest in politics, later serving in the Legislature.

As a businessman, however, he was the type of guy who hated to bill customers who owed him money, willing to trust they would pay when they had enough.

He was the type of boss who helped with the medical bills for a longtime employee who could no longer work after being struck with a serious illness.

By Karl Kelley’s example, “He told me things: `Don’t cheat people. Be loyal to old friends, and the ones who have been good to you; do your best in whatever job you settle on in life; and above all, be honest in your dealings with others,” Hale writes.

The book’s title refers to Hale’s admiration for a string of high-spirited relatives, role models all, who refused to buckle under advancing age. There was the grandmother who took tap dancing lessons in her 50s and “two weeks before she died was sitting up in bed tinting the roots of her hair.”

There was her father’s mother who became a writer of children’s stories at 65 and wrote for the steamy romance magazine True Confessions under a pen name.

There was Aunt Alice, a likely mechanical genius, who taught at a private school in New York, then designed her own cabin cruiser and sailed it from New York Harbor to Machias.

There was her beloved mother, Dorothy Kelley, the product of a small-town line of aristocrats, Hale said. Kelley hated calling attention to herself but basked in her first limousine ride on Mother’s Day 1989.

Hale’s parents long since have died. Much of the Down East lifestyle, and the humanity sketched into the characters of her columns, have disappeared.

But Karlene K. Hale remembers. And while she lives fully in the present, authoring two other books, titled “Profiles of Mental Illness” and “Hometown Champs: The Jonesport-Beals Basketball Legacy,” she clearly respects her past.

In the book’s foreword Hale writes about the appeal of her columns.

“For reasons I don’t quite understand, the pieces about dances, family, an old movie theater and high school became instant hits with readers on the cusp of middle age,” she writes.

“You’ll learn something about my life but more importantly you’ll learn something about your own.”

Copies of “Tap Dancing and True Confessions” cost $15 and are sold in paperback form. They may be obtained by writing to Karlene K. Hale, P.O. Box 195, North Monouth 04265, or by calling 933-4024.