BAR HARBOR – Longtime educator Richard E. McFalls was remembered Friday as a strong supporter of education, an old-time ski bum, and a leader in the 1970s fight to repeal Maine’s uniform property tax.

McFalls died Wednesday after a long illness. He was 70.

“He was a real hero of the repeal of the uniform property tax,” said Mary Adams of Garland, the leader of the petition drive that helped bring an end to the tax.

As Chairman of Maine Towns for Fair Taxation, McFalls was at the forefront of the opposition to the tax. While Adams focused on the public petition drive, McFalls organized the municipal end of the opposition. The movement relied on him for the technical part of the opposition and to explain what would happen if the tax was repealed, according to Adams.

“Dick understood it all down to his toes,” Adams said Friday. “He certainly led that municipal opposition in such a wonderful way.”

That leadership was not without fallout, Adams recalled. McFalls was ostracized by other educational administrators, she said.

“They treated him like a pariah,” Adams said.

McFalls’ motivation, she said, was a strong belief in local control of educational decision-making for local schools. He was concerned that if the state was raising the funds, it also would be making the educational decisions, she said.

“If the state continued to raise the funds, it would have one hundred percent control of the revenues, and one hundred percent of the decision-making,” Adams said. “He believed that those decisions should be made by the parents and the elected school boards.”

A native of Lancaster, Pa., McFalls spent his career as an educator in Presque Isle, Lincoln, and Bangor before moving to Mount Desert Island, where he spent 20 years and retired as the superintendent of schools for School Union 98.

In a family of fiscal conservatives, McFalls often was teased as being the frugal one, according to Ellsworth Superintendent Jack Turcotte, who served a neighboring union when McFalls was in Bar Harbor. Frugality was a characteristic he brought to his career as superintendent.

“Any money that Bar Harbor has is because Dick McFalls squeezed every nickel as tight as he could squeeze it,” Turcotte said Friday. “He was a strong supporter of education, but he was tough when it came to finances. He taught me a lot about the business, and how to tend to details, and I’ve always appreciated the fact that he did that.”

McFalls loved to ski and worked on the ski patrol at Squaw Mountain in Greenville, where he also briefly worked as manager.

“He was one of the few ski bums of the old vintage,” Turcotte said.

While in Greenville, McFalls also worked as a white-water rafting guide and as captain-engineer of the Katahdin, the former log drive boat turned floating museum and tour boat.