Look back in fondness New Harbor author Fran Pelletier collects stories from his Franco-American childhood

Fran Pelletier is an extraordinary storyteller. He’s good at spinning yarns in person, and fabulous at whirling them out in print. His book, “Little Pine to King Spruce, A Franco-American Childhood,” published in 2003 by Tilbury House of Gardiner, is the quintessential tale of growing up in rural Maine, complete with dramatic escapades of pigs running wild through a Fourth of July picnic, boys puffing on homemade cigars and a hay truck set on fire by the volatile combination of the gaseous emissions of its horse and the cigarette of its driver.

Pelletier, who was born on Nov. 23, 1925, in Old Town, but grew up across the river in a Franco-American family in Milford, recalls the kind of Maine childhood many of us have heard of, but few really experienced. “Little Pine to King Spruce” comes from a time when children wandered the streets and fields of a rural town with pals of their own age, sometimes getting into deep mischief in their quest for adventure, such as the morning Fran and his buddy Tommy sought to use the wheels of the morning train to flatten 16-penny nails into daggers. The train did the work quite nicely, they knew from experience, with only a little filing to sharpen the edges. Early one summer morning, the boys left the nails on the track ready for the midmorning freight train.

Only, writes Pelletier, “I had forgotten about Lewis Longtree, the section chief track inspector,” and his daily inspection of the regional track. “He did this inspection on his handcar, an Irish Mail-like vehicle operated with a set of handlebars that were pulled forward and backward to supply power to the gears and wheels.”

“On this particular morning,” he continues, “Lewis was early, since he had business at the Old Town Depot. He crested the grade and pumped vigorously, so that he was soon flying down the tracks at a good speed … Handcars do not have very effective brakes. Lewis did his best, but he hit those nails hard. They bunched under the wheels and as the handcar rode over them, it derailed. It careened off the tracks and went flying along the embankment before sailing out into the pond in a magnificent spray of water. The handcar came to rest in the very center of the pond, sinking into thirty inches of mush and blue-green algae.”

Pelletier waxes thick on the details, writing about the green slime covering Lewis’ striped overalls, the engineer’s cap dangling from a cattail, and the string of curses that caused Pelletier’s mother to rush his younger siblings inside their house with particular relish. In a recent phone conversation, I asked Pelletier whether these stories were embellished, expecting him to deny altering even a shade of color. But Pelletier was quite frank. “Of course they are,” he answered, without hesitation. “That’s what a writer does. But they’re all based on true characters and events,” he insisted. “If you just put down the data, what you have is a newspaper item. It doesn’t really tell you very much. But if you give your reader a description of some of the people who attended and the manner in which he shot off fireworks,” then you have a story.

What emerges is the chronicle of a richly textured life that’s not only about the freedom of children to roam their woods and streams and town, but also about the kind of engagement they had with their community. Pelletier had his best buddies, of course, and his larger gang of children, but he was as knowledgeable of the world of adults as he was of his pals. It is the full integration of small-town life that is so engaging, here, besides the powerful writing, which can be laugh-out-loud funny in one chapter, desperately tragic in another.

“Little Pine to King Spruce” came about as a way of preserving his history for children and grandchildren.

“We have six children and their childhood is entirely different from mine,” says Pelletier, who had a full career as an industrial chemist creating high-tech finishes in Connecticut before he began writing creatively, at a senior citizen’s writing group about 15 years ago. “I’d tell my children the stories of my childhood, and most of the time they disbelieved me. I finally realized that when I started to tell my son, Noel, a story and he said, ‘Yeah, I know, Dad, you walked 2 miles to school and it was uphill both directions.’ They didn’t have the greatest respect, but as they got older, they started to ask me to tell the same stories again. I knew they were interested.”

Pelletier and his wife moved back to Maine from Connecticut in 1997, but to New Harbor, not Milford. Though Pelletier returns to Milford to see his brother, it saddens him. The town he knew, with its stores, unique Greek revival town hall, the school he loved, was razed during the 1960s, replaced, says Pelletier, with “one of these total nonentities, with no more life than a tin toolshed.”

Listen to Pelletier talk some more and you realize he’s not just talking about adventures, but attitudes, a world of real community.

“Pearl Libby, Gertrude Wheats, Roy Billings, you couldn’t have asked for more dedicated teachers,” he muses. “They weren’t only dedicated but they raised the aspirations of every kid that they taught. Everybody in town was poorer than hills’ turkey, but it didn’t matter, they inspired children. I got a great education in the town of Milford.”

In fact, continues Pelletier, just about everyone did, despite the Depression.

“I know of one family that lived 3 or 4 miles from town, and they had a dirt floor. A dirt floor! Their father was a World War I veteran and most of the time he was at Togus, because he had been gassed. Sometimes they took turns coming to school because there weren’t enough shoes to go around, or jackets. There were kids who came to school with lunch boxes with nothing in them. They’d go outside, if it was a cold day, they’d still go outside, because they didn’t want anyone to see.” Eventually, he says, the teacher, along with Pelletier’s uncle, who ran the local store, and some other members of town, arranged for its own school lunch program, cooking soup on a two-burner hot plate in the classroom.

“I was very young, but that wasn’t lost on me,” he said. And the humanity it taught him is not lost on Pelletier’s writing.

Donna Gold can be reached at carpenter@acadia.net.