Everyone who knew him has a Nate Cohen story. Here’s mine. I first met Nate in August 1987. It was the first Tuesday of the month, or the second Monday, or whatever night the Eastport Port Authority meets.

I was a reporter new to the Down East region and the state. That afternoon my bureau chief asked if I wanted to add Eastport to my Calais-to-Princeton beat, starting with the Port Authority meeting that night. Since it was the glorious summer before spent vacationing around Cobscook Bay – Eastport and Lubec – that caused us to move to Maine in the first place, I jumped. The chief had two bits of advice: Beware of Eastport politics – it can get a bit spleeny; the first person to get to know is Nate Cohen – he’s on the Port Authority, the City Council and every other board, commission and committee going between Eastport and Augusta. He’s involved in everything worthwhile and knows everybody worth knowing.

I spent the rest of the afternoon reading up on the spleeniest issue around Eastport at the time, the argument over which Head should be the site for a new cargo terminal – Estes or Kendall – an argument in which such factors as weather exposure, water depth, current and tides were complicated by the fact that one headland was owned by a family with strong Democratic connections, the other was under Republican control.

The issue hardly came up at the meeting, though; some crucial study or another wasn’t quite finished. Instead, the Port Authority, with Nate Cohen at the controls, spent a good hour talking, in the most urgent and dismayed tones, about badges.

It seemed trouble with badges was a dire threat to Eastport’s resurgent cargo activity. The badges were being damaged, the insurance carriers that covered the badges wanted big premium increases, the shipping line that owned the badges was quite unhappy. Despite all the reading I’d done that afternoon, plus a little previous work experience that gave me some knowledge of the shipping business, I found myself furiously taking notes about badges, a subject about which I had not a clue.

The meeting ended and, as the early deadlines we had back then gave me little more than a half hour to get home and dash off a story, I quickly introduced myself to Nate, made arrangements to get together the next day for a briefing on port matters – including these baffling badges – and bolted for the door. Would my first story out of Eastport be restricted to what I knew, even if it was a dry, uneventful account of how nothing was popping on the Estes-Kendall front? Or would I, in haste and panic and wanting to make a splash, venture into the unknown and toss off a few gripping ‘graphs on the great badge calamity?

We’ll never know, because (I swear this is absolutely true) just as I stepped outside, someone called to me. It was Nate. In the most diplomatic way possible, he intimated that my strong Midwestern accent might prevent me from fully understanding English as it was meant to be spoken; that is, the local dialect. He wanted to be sure I knew that the badges under so much discussion were, of course, those large, flat-bottomed cargo containers you always see tugboats shoving about rivers and harbors.

Nate Cohen passed away last Saturday morning at age 88. A lot of nice things are being said about him, and I gladly join the chorus. As a public servant, he was energetic, devoted, inspiring – no one ever loved a city, a county, a state the way Nate Cohen loved Eastport, Washington County, Maine. To that, I add this personal note: A lot of reporters on a new assignment write about something about which they know nothing and really step in it; Nate Cohen, though his kindness and perception, saved this reporter from badging into it head first.

He was a fiercely partisan Democrat, but cheerfully and with generosity. Republicans, in his view, were not bad people, they were merely confused. He probably told one of his favorite stories – his honored place during President Kennedy’s visit to Maine in 1963 – a thousand times and he probably never did it once without tears.

I saw him cry one other time. Several years ago, a couple of local kids broke into the home of a wonderfully generous Eastport couple and utterly demolished it, I ran into him on the street shortly afterwards. He simply could not believe such a thing could happen to such nice people in the city he loved so much. He truly was in mourning.

Here’s another Nate Cohen story. One of his proudest accomplishments was helping Eastport establish a sister-city relationship with Oigawa, Japan, and the first visit to Eastport by Oigawan dignitaries in 1990 was one of Nate’s proudest moments.

At one point during the first festive day of the visit, the Japanese were walking down Water Street and stopped to ask a guy for directions to a particular art gallery. They asked the wrong guy – one of Eastport’s more prominent louts told the Japanese they bleeping found Pearl Harbor, they could bleeping find the art gallery.

The perplexed visitors moved on, hopefully shielded from the full force of this stupidity by the language barrier. Nate Cohen doubled back and those who had not followed the Japanese into the gallery saw him, half the height of the lout but a million times bigger in the ways that count, ripping the guy a new orifice. In the most diplomatic way possible, of course.

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.