Part 3 of a 6-part series

Sprinting to the 6:05 train that takes him from Quincy to Boston’s South Station every weekday morning, Michael Faloon was running a little late.

But a little late for the 27-year-old municipal bond analyst is still hours earlier than most of his colleagues go to work at Standish Mellon Asset Management, which occupies three floors of One Financial Center, a five-sided, 46-story glass and concrete skyscraper in the heart of Boston’s financial district.

“It allows me to do more work,” the Medway native said of his pre-dawn start, during which he opted to stand rather than take one of the few empty seats on the morning train, where bleary-eyed commuters quietly scanned their newspapers, neatly folded so as not to

encroach on nearby passengers.

Indeed, Faloon credits his mill town work ethic for helping him advance in his career in New England’s largest city, where Maine-educated workers like him flocked in the 1990s to stake their claims in the city’s high-paying financial and high-tech sectors.

The 11-county Boston metropolitan statistical area ranks a close second behind the Portland area among the top destinations for those leaving Maine’s northern eight counties, according to a Bangor Daily News analysis of Internal Revenue Service records of county-to-county moves.

Between 1995 and 2000, nearly 7,000 northern Mainers moved to the Boston metropolitan area, which includes parts of southern New Hampshire and some of York County. During that same period, about 4,800 people left the Boston area for northern Maine.

Faloon, a 1998 University of Maine graduate in finance, didn’t pick Boston out of a hat.

Some of his fraternity brothers who had already relocated to the city after graduation had clued him in to the economic boom at the time, and invited him to stay on the couch in their Allston apartment until he inevitably landed one of the thousands of entry-level jobs.

Two weeks and one interview later, the newly hired Faloon was off the couch and on his own.

“At that level and at that time, you had your choice of what you wanted to do,” Faloon said of his initial foray into the Boston job market, which has since employed several of his Phi Gamma Delta brothers. “They were the best times you could imagine, and that just wasn’t the case in Maine.”

Boston brotherhood

In the past five years, Faloon hasn’t been the only one to crash on Bangor native Patrick Master’s lumpy sofa on the unheated sun porch attached to his apartment.

“It was basically a half-way house … a Fiji hotel,” said Masters, a 28-year-old engineer with Boston-based Fidelity Investments, using the nickname for his Phi Gamma Delta fraternity brothers. A group of them recently met after work at The Times, an Irish pub, for a beer and an interview.

“I’d move back in a heartbeat, but it all depends on work,” said longtime Bangor resident Scott Butterfield, 28, a business analyst for computer giant Hewlett Packard. “Bangor is the perfect city … but you can’t find a professional job.”

Although more than 5,000 mostly service sector jobs were created in the Bangor market between 1995 and 2000, according to U.S. Department of Labor statistics, the Boston area added about 20 times that amount, mainly in higher paying high-tech industries.

While Bangor was subsequently unaffected by the demise of the dot-com economy, Boston’s once humming economy slowed, and unemployment there jumped from a low of 2.2 percent in 2000 to 4.4 percent last year.

“I’ve seen people laid off to the left and right of me, but that’s what you would expect in [information technology],” said Butterfield, adding that Massachusetts’ favorable unemployment insurance was another reason to stay put in the event of future job cuts.

Massachusetts pays a maximum weekly unemployment benefit of $507 compared with Maine’s $283, according to the Web site for each state’s labor department. The highest in the nation unemployment benefits are a reflection of the high pay they earn. Now that they’re past their entry-level positions, which generally start at about $30,000 a year, they’ve moved to the next step at which their annual salaries jump to around $50,000.

Like his former fraternity brothers Faloon, Masters and Jeff Carson, who grew up in Hampden, Butterfield said he isn’t worried about losing his job in the near future.

But 40 miles north of Boston, Tony Martin, a software developer from Fort Kent, isn’t so sure.

‘Where technology is’

For now, the small startup technology firm where he works has survived thanks

to a wealthy backer of the company’s fraud prevention software.

With the backer set to retire, and take his investments with him, Martin, a 29-year-old father, said he was weighing several other job prospects and even considering a move back to Maine – preferably to the Bangor area – if the right opportunity presents itself.

During a recent conversation at his townhouse near Nashua, N.H. where he works, Martin’s mention of a move north brought a doubtful look to the face of his wife, Robin, a 27-year-old nurse.

Like her husband, she has become accustomed to their way of life in New Hampshire, which does not have a broad-based personal income tax.

“No income tax, no sales tax. That’s a very nice change,” Tony Martin said while the couple’s 3-year-old son, Elias, proudly showed visitors the new wooden train set he received for Christmas. Martin was quick to add, however, that southern New Hampshire’s daunting housing costs have kept Maine on his short list of potential destinations for his young family.

In the end, Martin conceded that – for now, anyway – he likely would stay in the Granite State, which boasts the second highest number of technical workers per capita in the country, according to the New Hampshire Office of Business and Economic Development.

“This is where technology is,” said Martin, whose starting salary at the New Hampshire software firm – one of 1,000 in the state – was about 50 percent higher than the $24,000 he was offered at a Maine software firm upon his graduation from the University of Maine in 1997.

While the money might not be flowing in northern Maine, the couple still has ties there – but they are ties, they have found, that weaken with every passing year.

Robin Martin only recently dropped her subscription to the weekly St. John Valley Times after two years of reading her hometown paper while living and working more than 420 miles to the south.

“I didn’t know the people in there any more,” she explained.

While the names – at least the first names – have changed in the valley, the area still holds a certain allure for Tony Martin, although he’s become resigned to the fact that a homecoming is years away.

“Fort Kent will always be home, but it will probably be retirement,” he said.

Starting over

Ten years ago, Martin’s stepfather, Joe Cyr, thought he, too, would retire in Aroostook County after a career at the Fraser Papers mill in Madawaska, where he had earned a decent living for 15 years.

Instead, Cyr, now 45, took a different direction.

Arriving at his modest Nashua, N.H., home after working late at Schneider Electric in nearby North Andover, Mass., a tired but still neatly dressed Cyr plopped down next to the wood stove and wondered where to begin his story.

Quitting his high-paying job at Fraser to go to the University of Maine wasn’t easy for the longtime papermaker, who now works as a mechanical engineer.

“I had a lot of toys,” said Cyr, his Franco-American accent unaltered by his two years in Nashua. “But every time I go back up there I say I’ve made the right decision.”

The decision wasn’t his alone, and money wasn’t the only factor.

“He would be crawling up the stairs on all fours after his shift,” Cyr’s wife, Carolyn, said referring to her husband’s physically demanding former job at the mill. “It was just the kind of thing that took too much of a toll.”

With his new career on track, he and Carolyn, a respiratory therapist at Catholic Medical Center in Manchester, N.H., finally moved last year into a fixer-upper house on the west side of Nashua, where the average home sells for more than $150,000.

The one-story, 3-bedroom home, valued at $200,000, is virtually identical to the others on the quiet street save for the paint color.

The same house – “not much by Maine standards,” Cyr said – would sell for $50,000 in the St. John Valley, he guessed.

That kind of speculation is moot, however, as the Cyrs are unlikely to return to northern Maine, citing a reluctance to pick up their lives again as they did when Joe returned to college. Besides, Carolyn Cyr said, she also enjoys being closer to her son, Tony Martin, and his family, the newest addition to which is 8 lb., 4 oz., Mitchel, born Feb. 1.

“Family was number one. Economics was number two,” she said of the reasons for their move. “We want to settle down now.”

The price of success

Michael Faloon also wants to settle down. The question is where.

The son of a logging contractor and a nurse, he grew up next door to his grandparents and across the street from his aunt and uncle in Medway. He attended Schenck High School in neighboring East Millinocket, where he played on the baseball team.

Northern Maine educated him – save for his company footing the bill for his master’s degree at Northeastern University in Boston, yet another advantage of corporate life, he said.

Northern Maine would probably like to have him back, but luring an educated work force back to a rural area has been no easy task, any economic analyst will attest.

Maine’s new governor, John Baldacci, in his inaugural address, seemed to speak directly to Faloon and his former fraternity brothers.

“We need to send a clear message to the young people who have left: ‘Come home,'” Baldacci said before proposing a summit designed to increase the number of career opportunities for the state’s relocated work force. “Come home to the state where you were born. We need your energy, your talents and your skills to create opportunity and help move Maine into the 21st century.”

For now, the only move the newly promoted Faloon plans is from a cubicle at One Financial Center to an office of his own at One Boston Place, an equally towering complex in the financial district.

While his career is on track, the initial allure of Boston’s skyline, teeming sidewalks and boisterous nightlife has gradually given way to the drudgery of snarled traffic, crowded subways and seemingly unending road construction.

Now newly married to fellow UM graduate Stephanie Leigh King of Lisbon Falls, who recruits corporate executives from an office a few skyscrapers away, Faloon also has begun to turn his attention to family.

Looking two years down the road, he is faced with a choice between moving farther outside the ever-sprawling city to find an affordable home, or taking his chances back in his home state.

“I want to raise my children in Maine and we have this conversation all the time,” Faloon lamented while finishing his beer at the rapidly filling Boston pub. “It always ends the same way. What the hell are we going to do when we get there?”

Tomorrow: Southern comfort