Freese’s a jewel in city’s crown For children, store was filled with wonder

The grand opening of the Maine Discovery Museum will be held in downtown Bangor on Feb. 10 at the site of a former department store, and a new era will begin in the Queen City.

Before the museum, there was Freese’s department store.

In the 1950s, a trip to Bangor from Southwest Harbor was the equivalent of visiting the Emerald City, and Freese’s was the Wizard’s castle, filled with all manner of wonder.

In those days, downtown Bangor was the hub of the universe for all of northern and eastern Maine. There were three mandatory trips a year to Bangor – to shop for school clothes, to do Christmas shopping, and to attend and participate in, however vicariously, the annual Eastern Maine Basketball Tournament in February.

There were no malls in the Bangor area, just downtown, with Woolworth’s, Newberry’s, Grant’s and Freese’s department stores, four movie theaters, numerous restaurants, clothing stores, the Boston shoe store (where you could stick your shoe into an X-ray machine and see green foot bones), specialty shops of all kinds and hotels.

Bangor historian Dick Shaw, who has studied that era extensively, said that in those days, Maine’s cities were defined by their anchor stores: Porteous, and Mitchell and Braun, in Portland; Peck’s in Lewiston; Stearns in Waterville; and in Bangor, the six- storied Freese’s department store.

My grandmother on my father’s side, Betty Walsh, worked in Freese’s notions department, and my mother’s sister, my aunt Eileen LaFlamme, worked in the credit department, with Ida Salisbury.

I remember visiting my grandmother and seeing a sea of gray-, white- and blue-haired ladies sitting behind the counters on tall stools, or stocking counters with buttons, bows, buckles and sewing goods, better known as notions.

My grandmother, during the advent of the miniskirt in the early ’60s, told of one young woman who worked the elevators and came to work in one of the shortest miniskirts around. A number of the men who worked in the store always chose to ride her elevator and appeared to be all thumbs during the ride, dropping coins from their change purses or pockets. The young girl would quickly bend over and retrieve the coins, usually to be told she could keep the change. My grandmother pulled her aside and told her she thought they were deliberately dropping the coins just to get her to bend over in her mini-skirt. The young lady’s reply was “Why do you think I wear the miniskirt?”

Later in the 1960s, my cousin Angela LaFlamme, fresh out of high school in 1963, would join the Freese’s team in the accounting department. Another cousin, Paul Connor, went to work at Freese’s when he graduated from high school in the early ’60s. They wanted to train him for a managerial position, but he followed the love of his life to Oklahoma, got married and later joined the service.

My first impression of the store, as it was with most children, was the amazing, supercolossal escalators, from the first to second floor and second to third. It only went up. It was better than a carnival ride. The thrill of riding that escalator made the long trip to Bangor worth it for my brothers and sisters, all six of us. It was, we were told, the only escalator north of Boston, which made it all the more special.

The city sophisticates would walk up the escalator while it was moving, but that never made sense to me. If you were going to walk up stairs, then use the ornately hand-carved wooden-railing staircases at each end of the building and walk to your heart’s content. But on the escalator, every step taken diminished the ride. We’d ride to the first, then to the second floors, by escalator, and then take the elevators back to the first floor. You could usually get away with three rides down on the elevator before the operators would put a stop to it and send us to the staircases.

In those days, the elevator operators announced every floor, “Basement: paints, hardware, housewares …” First floor: notions, men’s clothes, coffee shop … ; second floor: women’s dresses, millinery … ; third floor: women’s corsets … ; fourth floor: gifts … ; fifth floor: furniture, toys, credit.” The sixth floor was used for storage.

If you entered the store from Main Street, through the middle door, you passed the women’s gloves, pocketbooks and leather goods. The air was filled with the rich aroma of coffee from the coffee shop and the fresh smells of new leather.

According to my cousin Angela, Freese’s was more than just things, it was people. (We’re playing with time and memories here, so maybe a name will be misspelled.) For one, there was Mid Cunningham, short for Midge, who ran the coffee shop for years. The store did not smell like a restaurant, however, because most of the food was prepared somewhere in the basement and brought to the restaurant by dumbwaiter. The restaurant, ringed with a rail and furnished with small ice cream parlor tables and chairs and a long counter, overlooked the men’s department. Because the building was put together over the years in three sections, there were ramps connecting one department to another on various floors.

When my cousin worked the store, Charlotte Brophy was the manger of the gift department and brought back from New York City the finest in crystal and quality gifts.

There was Clair Overlook, the window and display designer, and the feared floorwalkers such as Arlene Burrell, who would dismiss an employee on the spot if that employee was discourteous to a customer.

Running the men’s department, during my cousin’s tenure was Louis Langtang.

“There was also Pat McLeod, who was the switchboard operator and had the most wonderful voice over the intercom,” said Angela.

Freese’s in those days was a class act, and the name of the store was synonymous with quality. “If you could go to school with a new sweater from Freese’s,” said Angela, “you had arrived.”