2 Maines? Generosity belies split

The two-Maine division has been around so long now that it’s probably naive to think that a single act of kindness could begin to fuse the state into one.

Yet the news that businesses, organizations and individuals throughout southern Maine will be gathering at the Portland Expo this weekend to raise money for the needy families of Millinocket, East Millinocket and other towns in the Katahdin region is as hopeful a gesture of unity as this economically and culturally fractured state has seen in a long time.

The three weeks of planning for Sunday’s “One Maine Community Party” fund-raiser has already generated $44,000 to help the hard-hit families living 200 miles away from Portland. The amount has so encouraged organizers that they now believe they can raise as much as $50,000 by the time the weekend is over.

The event came about when Karen Geraghty, a Portland city councilor and former mayor, began hearing the Katahdin area’s hardship stories from northern Maine legislators. She began talking to southern Maine businesses, including some of the region’s biggest employers, and found an abundant supply of good will just waiting to be tapped and shipped north.

While this well-coordinated outpouring of generosity may surprise some Mainers, especially those who perceive the north-south disparity as a contentious political division too great to bridge, Herschel Hafford has been watching the lines blur ever since Great Northern’s mills shut down.

“I was happy to hear about the event in Portland, but actually people from all over southern Maine have been helping us right from the start,” said Hafford, the pastor of the I Care Ministries in Millinocket.

His clothing bank and food-distribution service used to care for about 60 families a month, he said. Since the mills went bankrupt, putting nearly 1,200 people out of work, the number of families who come in for assistance has grown to more than 600.

And much of the food they’re getting, Hafford is happy to say, is coming in truckloads from that “Other Maine.”

“We got a substantial check from the Greater Portland Municipal Credit Union, for instance,” he said Friday, “and there’s a tractor-trailer coming in today that’s filled with food donated by people in the southern Maine area. Brunswick has been with us from the start, and some people from Wiscasset came up with $400 and gift certificates for groceries. The response has been awesome, and I’d like to think it could spark a sense of unity among all people in Maine.”

Gene Conlogue, the Millinocket town manager, said the statewide generosity is not much different from the kind of national response Americans witnessed after 9-11.

“People across the country back then responded by pouring out their money and support to completely nameless, faceless people and families who were affected by the tragedy,” Conlogue said. “No one died here, of course, but the response has been similar. The mill situation has galvanized people all over Maine who just feel the need to help in any way they can during this time of great difficulty.”

Conlogue said that the economic differences between southern Maine and the northern and eastern portions of the state are, of course, indisputably real.

But it would be a disservice to Maine as a whole, he said, to suggest that the essential character of its people could be so conveniently demarcated by income and opportunity, between the haves and the have-nots.

“There’s no doubt that the ‘two Maine’ concept has developed into a political wedge issue in this state,” Conlogue said. “But the people of southern Maine are not the sworn enemies of the people in the north. When you look at the economic problems facing Maine today, you realize that the only way to solve them is by coming together and addressing them as one state. What the people south of us are doing right now – what people all over the state are doing – is showing Maine’s true spirit. It’s an emotional boost for us and we’re eternally grateful for it.”

The widespread hardship in the Katahdin region, he said, is also beginning to erode some counterproductive local boundaries as well.

While the towns of Millinocket, East Millinocket, Medway and Woodville have been talking about consolidating services for more than a year now, the Great Northern bankruptcy has pushed the process into high gear.

“People here are finally understanding that our individual towns are part of a much bigger whole,” he said, “and that it’s time to put pettiness and rivalry aside and do what’s right for the region.”