Who’s behind Bangor? Civic leaders labor behind the scenes in search of solutions to the region’s challenges

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Civic leaders are the volunteers who guide the fortunes of the countless nonprofit organizations – from hospitals to soup kitchens – that make a better society. The Bangor Daily News identified the most active civic leaders in the Bangor area. We interviewed 20. The result is this six-part series summing up the characteristics these leaders hold in common and profiling five of them.

The names are synonymous with Bangor:

Webber. Hutchins. Eames. Eaton. Bragg.

While those names and others rarely make the headlines, behind the scenes they are helping to shape the city’s and the region’s future. And in many cases, their families have been doing so for generations.

Although municipal governments and their elected officials wield much of the power in the cities and towns in southern Penobscot County, those who quietly serve in the boardrooms of the largest nonprofit and for-profit institutions also have considerable – and usually invisible – influence in charting the region’s course.

“It’s a job, … a responsibility and a fairly big one,” said Clif Eames, the 74-year-old former president of N.H. Bragg & Sons, a Bangor-based industrial supplier. “Fortunately, a lot of people around here step up to the plate.”

Eames, who serves on several boards of directors, including Eastern Maine Healthcare and the Bangor Savings Bank Foundation, was one of 20 leaders interviewed for this story, the first installment of a series on civic leadership in the Bangor metropolitan area. Five of those interviewed were chosen for profiles that will appear in the days ahead.

The 20 civic leaders were chosen based on the number of boards on which they served at the time of a 2001 Bangor Daily News study, funded in part by a grant from the Pew Center for Civic Journalism in Washington, D.C.

They are local bank presidents, executives, publishers, attorneys, stockbrokers and hospital officials. Overwhelmingly white, male, wealthy, middle-aged and Republican, only a couple of them had ever run for elected office and all professed to vote for the person and not the party.

“I’ve voted for more Baldaccis than I can count,” quipped corporate lawyer George Eaton, referring to the city’s Democratic dynasty that includes U.S. Rep. John Baldacci.

Eaton, at 43, was far and away the youngest of the group, most of whom were born here and most of whom – 12 to be exact – earned their undergraduate degrees in Maine, with five attending Bowdoin College, four the University of Maine System, two Husson College and one Colby College.

For the most part, those interviewed worked, or still work, in the city’s shrinking pool of locally owned businesses – those homegrown enterprises where leaders have traditionally been bred, but that have mostly been swallowed up by out-of-state corporations in the past few decades.

Nearly all of those surveyed have, or had, some affiliation with one of the several boards of Eastern Maine Healthcare – by far the region’s largest employer – and its subsidiaries. EMH’s prominence as the locus of leadership is symbolic of the increasing dominance of nonprofits in the area’s economy.

The pervasiveness of the health care giant here clearly demonstrates the gradual economic transformation of Greater Bangor, where even as recently as the early 1980s, local shoe and textile factories – many of which were then among the region’s top 20 employers – had more than 2,000 workers, according to figures from the Maine Department of Labor. With Ansewn Shoe’s unexpected closure in February, that number became zero.

While Bangor was far less dependent on the shoe and textile industries than Lewiston, that rapid decline has still left a mark on the Queen City, where locally owned department stores and banks either have closed or made way for larger corporate chains with out-of-state headquarters.

Meanwhile, employment in public sector and nonprofit agencies has grown at a steady clip. For example, EMH has doubled to approximately 4,400 workers since its formation in 1983.

Similar attitudes

By and large, the leaders’ concerns were the same, with many citing as the region’s most pressing problem the exodus of the best and brightest young people in search of higher-paying jobs and a more exciting life in Boston, New York or Portland.

The civic leaders also had common hopes for Bangor, which has yet to see the level of economic rebound experienced 130 miles south in Portland, a city occupying the edge of the Boston hub.

The Bangor Daily News study was based on a database detailing the corporate affiliations of hundreds of southern Penobscot County residents in 21 communities that belong to the Bangor Region Chamber of Commerce. It included elected officials and the directors and top officers of the area’s 100 largest nonprofit agencies, 50 largest locally owned companies and 30 largest nonlocally owned companies.

Managers of nonlocally owned businesses such as Wal-Mart and General Electric, elected officials and hired municipal managers, and University of Maine administrators and professors had a low profile in the survey.

The 20 leaders interviewed for this series served on five or more boards.

While they might not make headlines, they are well-known for having the ear of city and state lawmakers, as well as possessing the institutional knowledge and influence to swing decisions and raise money for the organizations they represent.

For many on the list, their paths to service were based not only on their long history in the community, but on the reputations of their families and their longstanding ties to the organizations that help drive the region’s economic engines.

All in the family

For Charles Bragg, the Bangor family’s 91-year-old patriarch, leadership has been a way of life, and the Bangor Pubic Library has been the place of business.

When his grandfather died, Bragg’s father took his place on the library’s board of directors.

Bragg later replaced his father. And after sitting on the board for 45 years until he “became more nuisance than [he] was worth,” he stepped down, leaving his seat for his son Frank, who now serves on the same board on which his great grandfather served decades ago.

“Braggs have been on that board for nearly 100 years. I’m very proud of that,” Charles Bragg recently said from his home on Cortland Circle.

Just as the Braggs have helped guide the library through the past century – during which time the holdings have grown from 12,000 to 450,000 volumes – others on the list of civic leaders have had similar ties with the city.

Clif Eames’ father, Donald J. Eames, was a city councilor and president of the Bangor Region Chamber of Commerce. His grandfather Franklin E. Bragg, who was Charles Bragg’s father, was instrumental in starting the Community Chest, now the United Way.

“It could be looked at as kind of a nepotism,” Eames said. “But I don’t feel guilty. It’s not like people are beating down the doors to serve on these boards.”

On the contrary, many organizations compete for already established board members for a number of reasons.

“A number of the boards I’m on want your advice, but equally they want your contacts to help them successfully complete their annual fund drive,” said 56-year-old Bangor Daily News editor and publisher Richard J. Warren, who serves on several boards, including those of Eastern Maine Medical Center and the Forest Society of Maine. “They want your ideas, but they also want your ability to contribute or attract people who have the ability to contribute.”

And many have contributed over the years, like G. Peirce Webber and Curtis Hutchins, who gave millions of dollars to local organizations before their deaths.

While that generation of philanthropists is gone, a new one is emerging, with Hutchins’ son, Christopher, recently pledging $3 million for a new amphitheater on Bangor’s developing waterfront.

Without that level of private investment, a number of the region’s most successful projects – including the recent $8.5 million addition to the city’s library – would not have been so successful.

“We knew we needed to do something, but it was such a massive project that we really couldn’t get our arms around it,” Charles Bragg said of the library expansion, completed in 1998 with the help of a $2.5 million gift from the city’s most famous couple. Stephen and Tabitha King “came along and gave us a kick in the pants.”

The challenges

Nonphilanthropic solutions to the problems that face the region are less clear, our leaders agreed.

Many of those surveyed predictably counted economic development as the region’s top priority, as well as the urgent need to slow the migration of young people to points south in search of both higher education and high-paying jobs.

The “brain drain” phenomenon worried many of the leaders, most of whom wondered whether their own children would return after college.

“In time I could see them coming back here if there was something for them to do,” said 63-year-old David Carlisle, three of whose sons now live and work in the Boston area.

But Carlisle, president of the Bangor-based timber management company Prentiss and Carlisle, isn’t confident he’ll see his sons return to the family business. “I don’t see something for them to do. That’s troubling.”

Old Town transportation magnate Joseph Cyr already has plans for his 3-year-old grandson, whose picture hangs in Cyr’s small, windowless office in his lucrative bus company on the Gilman Falls Road.

“He already likes his buses,” said the 60-year-old Cyr, whose family name adorns the bustling $1 million field house at the Old Town YMCA.

The loss of young people can be attributed, at least in part, to the decline of locally owned businesses in the region. And more trouble is on the horizon.

The devastating loss of Dow Air Force Base in 1968 shrank the city’s population by nearly 8,000 people almost overnight and put a substantial dent in its economic base.

That was the last time Bangor lost population until the U.S. Census Bureau released its numbers for the year 2000.

From 1990 to 2000, Bangor’s population fell 5.1 percent to 31,643, while its suburbs swelled with families looking for bigger yards and lower taxes. Perhaps most troubling to the community leaders interviewed, however, was the loss of those younger than 18. That population dropped 7 percent in Penobscot County compared with an 8 percent jump in southern Maine’s Cumberland County.

Meanwhile, the population drain, with an attendant growth of older people as a percentage, is even more pronounced to the north and east in Piscataquis, Aroostook and Washington counties, whose residents help fuel the Bangor area economy.

When Lloyd Willey, the 67-year-old president of the Bangor Canteen Service, looks around the city, he sees the lifeblood of his business evaporating.

There are no more large shoe or textile factories where workers fed dimes into machines to buy candy bars on their lunch breaks.

“That’s what we need because that’s what we’ve lost,” Willey said. “We lost the shoe business, and the woolen mills are all gone except for Guilford. The GE plant and Lemforder are great for the area, but that’s about it.”

Willey, a former Bangor mayor who sits on the boards of EMMC and Husson College among other institutions, said that without strong political leadership, the region’s ability to overcome its troubles will be hampered.

“I’ll tell you what we don’t have in this part of the state. We don’t have a champion,” Willey said. “We don’t have anybody from Waterville north that can be a champion with power and political clout and economic strength to make things happen. We used to have people like that. There’s no question we’ve lost all clout.”

On the issues

The leaders’ views were, again, remarkably alike on the issues that come up again and again at public gatherings in eastern Maine.

None favored a North Woods national park, which most said would cripple northern Maine’s already struggling forest industry.

There was a pervasive contempt for the Legislature.

As a Republican, John Bragg, president of N.H. Bragg, isn’t very high on the city’s legislative delegation, which includes four Democratic representatives and one Republican senator.

“Bangor loves to send Democrats down to Augusta,” said Bragg, who complained that lawmakers have not been as mindful of business as they should be. “The people we send to Augusta disappoint me in general terms. If we don’t have a business climate in this state that is healthy, everybody suffers. We can’t just put everybody on welfare.”

Nevertheless, all the leaders were indecisive about term limits, including Rep. Mary Ellen Ledwin, a Holden Republican serving her first term in Augusta.

Ledwin, 59, said – like many others interviewed – that she had yet to reconcile the benefits of fresh ideas with the harms of frequent turnover and increased reliance on State House staff.

Ledwin and her husband, Eastern Maine Healthcare President and Chief Executive Officer Norman Ledwin, were the only married couple to make the list of 20 civic leaders.

That distinction put the mother of three in a number of minorities. Besides being one of two elected officials on the list, she’s one of the few leaders who wasn’t born and raised in Maine, and she’s only one of two women.

The only other, financial consultant Sandra Blake-Leonard, said that although she often finds herself the lone female serving on a particular board, she’s never felt powerless.

“I’ve always thought boys’ games were more fun,” said the 58-year-old University of Maine graduate, who was a driving force behind the recent effort to locate the UM art museum in Bangor’s downtown Norumbega Hall.

Like Blake-Leonard, all of those interviewed also supported some form of East-West highway, a critical transportation route whose $1 billion price tag deterred few as long as the federal government would foot the bill.

“We sit in the saddle of the Maritimes and we have not taken advantage of” the North American Free Trade Agreement, said Norman Ledwin, who in addition to being the hospital corporation’s chief executive is chairman of many of its subsidiary boards. “We have 3 million people surrounding us and we haven’t maximized the ability to interface with them.”

Ledwin, although commending the governor for attracting some industry to Maine during his tenure, counted among his regrets the failure to provide rail service to Maine’s deepest port after area leaders were approached by an interested Fortune 500 company.

The company, which he declined to name, wanted to expand to Eastport – the third-deepest port on the East Coast – but needed rail service as an alternative to running 150 trucks a day through Ellsworth.

“Still, it wasn’t enough to revive that line,” lamented the 60-year-old hospital executive, who made contact with the company while serving on a local economic development board. “It was a disappointment. It would have been a major economic boost.”

Another economic boost could come in the form of a new Bangor Auditorium, all agreed. Most were comfortable with a controversial local option sales tax as a means of paying for the $30 million project at Bass Park. The tax idea died -again – in the Legislature last session.

What’s next?

Looking to build on recent success stories, such as the $4.5 million Maine Discovery Museum and this summer’s arrival of the National Folk Festival, city leaders are pinning their hopes for a downtown revival on the development of the nearby waterfront and its connection to an improved Bass Park.

But whatever comes next for Bangor, those both behind the scenes and in the limelight can’t afford to rest on their laurels.

“I’d rather sit down and have a man-to-man talk with you about something you did as opposed to something you didn’t do,” Bangor Savings Bank President Jim Dowe said, recalling the advice of a former bank president who mentored him. “In a word, do something.”

Dowe, like others who were asked about their heroes or greatest influences, cited the last generation of local leaders.

There was a pervasive feeling that the pool from which leaders are drawn is drying up with the locally based economy.

“Where are our leaders coming from?” asked Ken Hewes, who has served on boards at Husson College, Bangor Savings Bank and John Bapst Memorial High School, besides being executive vice president of EMH.

“Every generation thinks the next generation isn’t up to their forebears in terms of reputation and service to the community,” said Clif Eames, who, among his other responsibilities, sits on the board of the Bangor Region Leadership Institute.

The institute, which partners participants with community leaders, has worked well thus far to prepare that next generation of young leaders, which most agreed have been in short supply with the demise of local business.

But many of those interviewed said they were just as confident that the next generation of civic leaders would show itself in time.

“I’m not at all discouraged about the leadership and the potential of the people in the Bangor area. I think we need to do a better job of cultivating bright people and getting them into the mix,” Richard Warren said. “There are plenty of bright people in the area.”

Mary Ellen Ledwin, who resigned from many of her boards upon her 2000 election to the Maine House of Representatives, said she, too, was confident that the sheer number and variety of civic boards would put the relatively small city in good hands.

“You’re always going to have your pockets of people who support certain things, who have their own sets of issues,” said Ledwin, who recently served on the boards of both the YWCA and the Bangor Symphony Orchestra. “If you have that, you can always get things done.”

NEWS staffers Mike Dowd, Ruth Ellen Cohen, A.J. Higgins, Renee Ordway and Susan Young contributed to this report.

Monday: “If he speaks, what he says is worth listening to.”