Bangor’s Larry Mahaney, 76, dies after stroke in Florida

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WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – After suffering a massive stroke Wednesday, Bangor businessman and philanthropist Larry Mahaney, the former chairman of the board and CEO of Webber Energy Fuels, died Sunday evening.

At the time Mahaney was stricken, his family was with him in Florida to celebrate his 76th birthday, according to his cousin Sister Joyce Mahaney, who resides in the Portland area and works at Catherine McAuley High School, one of numerous schools that have been recipients of Larry Mahaney’s generosity.

Sons Lance Mahaney of Palm Beach and Kevin Mahaney of Bangor, Maine, and Greenwich, Conn., and Larry Mahaney’s brother Keith Mahaney, also of Bangor, were at his bedside in Florida. Mahaney had a home in Palm Beach.

Larry Mahaney was born in Easton, Maine, on Feb. 8, 1930, and worked as a farmer in the Aroostook County potato fields in his youth. During a gathering at the University of Maine at Presque Isle in 1999, he said his poor beginnings on County farms gave him aspirations to do more, and learning to play poker helped him succeed in the business world.

“I learned patience, learned to play the hand dealt to you,” he said. “I learned to bluff a little.”

A former standout athlete at Fort Fairfield High School, Mahaney earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in education at the University of Maine in the 1950s while also playing basketball. He served in the U.S. Air Force for two years from 1951 to 1953.

He started out as a teacher, and coached baseball at Fort Fairfield High and was a basketball and football coach at Brewer High School before becoming manager of Webber’s heating oil division as well as director of advertising and public relations in 1962.

At the time, he was married to Louise “Jackie” Frost, granddaughter of one of the company’s founders.

Husson College baseball coach John Winkin, who formerly coached at Colby College and the University of Maine and has been one of the primary benefactors of Mahaney’s philanthropic donations, said Mahaney took his “coaching into business from a motivational, organizational and competitive” standpoint.

“That’s why he has been so successful. He was a coach competing in a business world,” Winkin said.

When Mahaney coached in Brewer, there were numerous players who looked up to him, including Joseph Ferris, former mayor and now a city councilor who played for him for two years in the 1960s.

“He was the coach, and he was the big man around,” Ferris said. “He was a smart guy, a tough guy who was demanding and confident.

“I think my lousy playing forced him out of coaching” basketball and football at Brewer High, he joked.

Ferris said Mahaney was a mentor to him, and his support of sports around the state was inspiring.

“He really was the first one to put private money into the University of Maine,” Ferris said. “He built the baseball clubhouse single-handedly and helped fund that program.”

The clubhouse bears his name, and there are Mahaney Diamonds at the University of Maine and at St. Joseph’s College in Windham and a Larry K. Mahaney Gymnasium at Thomas College in Waterville.

More recently, he supplied $1 million last fall for a lighted, 38,000-square-foot dome practice facility at UM that is now complete and also bears his name.

He was inducted into the Maine Sports Hall of Fame in 1997; earned honorary doctorates from the University of Maine (1988) and Thomas College (1989) and was the recipient of the Harold Alfond Award for Athletic Philanthropy in 1995.

As a friend, Winkin said, Mahaney was always “very personable and very generous.”

“He loves life and he loves to help people,” Ray Cota, vice president of Webber Energy Fuels, said recently.

Mahaney, a progressive and innovative thinker and tireless worker, became Webber Oil’s third president in 1969 and diversified the family-run company into several other ventures.

Under Mahaney’s leadership, Webber’s oil business grew significantly. He was also active in real estate management and the hotel business.

Webber owns more than 40 gasoline stations and has more than 70,000 heating fuel customers.

Mahaney retired in 2001.

“The company exploded under his leadership,” Cota said. “He turned it into one of the most prominent companies in the state, if not New England. He had the foresight to broaden the base of business. He has unbelievable vision.”

Paul Graffam of Bangor worked with Mahaney at Webber Oil for three decades. Graffam said that when Mahaney became head of the company, he assembled four or five of the top executives and quickly told them that they knew more about the oil business than he did.

“He told us, ‘I’m going to be a coach and rely on you,'” Graffam said. “He was a great coach.

“Larry made everyone feel comfortable,” Graffam said. “At one time we had about 1,000 employees and he knew almost all of them and most of them called him by his first name,” Graffam recalled.

“He stuck to good business principles and didn’t want things to get too complicated,” Graffam said.

Mahaney loved the state of Maine, Graffam said. He promoted the state wherever he went.

Graffam remembered that when Mahaney took to the television airwaves to promote his Presidential Protection plan, it was a rather radical move in the industry. The plan guaranteed that the company would replace customers’ furnaces free of charge if they committed all of their business to the company.

Graffam remembers nervously waiting to gauge the response to the program.

“We didn’t need to worry, it was a huge success,” he said.

In Maine, Mahaney split his time between an apartment in the Main Street Holiday Inn in Bangor and a house in Northeast Harbor.

Sister Joyce Mahaney said all her cousin wanted was to give back to the system that supported him as a youth, and to aid the sports programs that gave him the opportunity to attend college.

“He was very grateful,” she said.

When Mahaney retired from Webber Energy, he told a Bangor Daily News reporter, “Business, like life, is a game of giving of oneself; and he who gives the most plays the game best.”

He was a good player.

BDN writers Larry Mahoney, Nok-Noi Hauger and Carroll Astbury contributed to this report.