BREWER – Leah Susie of Greenfield recalled the first time her young son said, “I love you.” It was a few weeks after Wade Saucier, then 21/2, began working with a speech therapist at the Warren Center for Communication and Learning, a Bangor-based organization that has helped thousands of people with hearing and speech problems.

“It was thrilling. I can’t describe what it meant to me,” said Susie, who with her son attended a special 40th anniversary party for the Warren Center Wednesday night. The event was held at Jeff’s Catering in Brewer and featured center staff, alumni and friends who gathered in a room festooned with blue and white balloons to honor a facility that operates in a quiet manner yet provides a great array of services to improve the lives of people with speech and hearing problems.

Wade, who is overcoming a developmental delay, was unable to speak before he came to the Warren Center in January. Now a winsome, blue-eyed 3-year-old, the brown-haired boy tells his mother stories, chats with friends from a special play group at the center and, hopefully, will enter a Head Start preschool class soon.

At Wednesday’s party, he chose to speak and play with a balloon as Program Director MaryBeth Richards told the audience of the center’s recent activities.

“It’s my turn to talk,” Richards told the preschooler.

Wade ‘the verbal one’ is another Warren Center success story.

Clients as young as 1 and as old as adults gathered at the festive celebration. There was 5-year-old Jenna Procise of Bangor, an independent, outgoing kindergartner who wears a cochlear implant, which is a device that is surgically implanted and helps the profoundly deaf child to actually hear and respond to sounds. Jenna is doing well in school.

Another client, a teenaged boy, is on the starting roster of the Brewer High School football team.

The largest speech and hearing center in Maine, the Warren Center, as it is more commonly known, employs nine speech pathologists, a speech pathology assistant and has 41/2 staff support positions.

The nonprofit organization has an annual operating budget of about $750,000 and is facing increased financial pressures from Medicaid, which reimburses services at only 51 percent, and other insurances that are reducing payments. Still, the organization sends speech therapists to schools, daycare programs, hospitals and nursing homes to diagnose and aid people who can’t hear or talk well.

Initially called the Bangor Regional Speech and Hearing program, the center first helped primarily young children like Wade. Now its youngest client is 3 months old and its oldest is 99 years of age.

Speech delay, stuttering and swallowing difficulties are among a range of problems treated. The center assists about five clients who have cochlear implants.

The program was started in September 1961.

Program administrator Mary Poulin traced the center’s early history to a group called the Eastern Maine Parents of Hearing Impaired Children. Headed by O.J. Logue Sr., the group approached the Junior League of Bangor about opening a center for the hearing impaired. The center opened on the heels of a measles epidemic that hit central Maine hard in the 1950s, leaving many children deaf or with significant hearing and speech impairments.

The Warren Center once ran special education programs for Bangor schools. But federal law in the mid-1970s mandated such programs be located in the schools.

The Warren Center is located in a refurbished building near the center of the city, the successful result of a capital campaign in 1996.

Bangor Daily News Publisher Richard J. Warren and local businesswoman Jean Deighan co-chaired the capital campaign that featured the theme “The Little Center That Could,” adapted from the title of a famous children’s book, “The Little Engine That Could.”

Warren’s mother, Joanne J. VanNamee, as former Junior League president, played a key role in the center’s formation. In 1998, the center was renamed for the Warren family in recognition of a three-generation commitment to the continuation of its services.