Educator’s commitment remembered

BANGOR – Educator Wendell G. Eaton was remembered as a tireless advocate for learning who loved his community and was committed to making it better. Eaton, 86, died Thursday at the Maine Medical Center in Portland.

He was associated with Bangor schools for three decades, having served as a school principal and as superintendent of schools for 16 years until his retirement in 1977. He taught at the University of Maine and also served many years as a trustee for the Bangor Public Library.

“He was a wonderful individual,” retired librarian Robert Woodward recalled Sunday. “He was one of the most active and involved trustees we ever had.”

Woodward said it was Eaton who pressed the trustees to consider building an addition to the library many years before it became a reality. He said Eaton also was instrumental in expanding library services into the city’s elementary schools. He said Eaton’s knowledge about school construction served the library well when it came time to finance and build the new addition.

“He really was a driving force and was wonderful to work with,” said Woodward. “He was a strong advocate for buildings but wasn’t hard-nosed about it, he was just persistent. He really had an excellent manner. He could be assertive and aggressive without being adversarial.”

Eaton was known as a staunch defender of his school budgets who would not give up without a fight when confronted with budget-cutting attempts from the Bangor City Council.

Former Secretary of Defense and U.S. Sen. William S. Cohen began his political career on the council. Retired Bangor Daily News columnist John Day recalled in a 1997 article that Cohen often remarked how Eaton was famous for “digging his heels” when asked to cut the budget.

Day went on to note that Cohen once grumbled that Eaton would threaten to “terminate the Bangor High School Band and football team rather than run up the white flag in a budget battle with the City Council.”

Eaton was raised on a farm on Wassookeag Lake in Dexter. He was a graduate of the University of Maine with a master’s degree from Harvard University. He was an Army veteran and also attended Columbia University and the University of Florida. He taught in Union, South Paris and Mars Hill before accepting a position at the Abraham Lincoln School in Bangor in 1948. He was stricken with polio a year later.

After his retirement in 1977, Eaton became director of the Penquis Inservice Project in the Department of Education at the University of Maine. He was a co-founder of the Maine School Management Association, president of both the Maine and New England Association of School Superintendents, and a member of the State Board of Education. Eaton was an active member in the First Methodist Church for more than 50 years.

Eaton is survived by his wife of 63 years, the former Doris Fowler of Fort Fairfield, two daughters, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. A celebration of his life will be held at First United Methodist Church in Bangor at 11 a.m. Saturday, March 12.