The death a few days ago of Waldoboro’s Ella Payne, widow of a former Maine governor and U.S. Senator, is an occasion to remember the largely forgotten imprint on Maine of Mrs. Payne’s husband, Frederick G. Payne.

Though Payne’s achievements are understandably overshadowed by the greater national prominence of such contemporaries as Margaret Chase Smith and Edmund Muskie, his legacy to the state continues to this day.

To begin with, it was Payne who in 1951 freed our state government from its 130-year reliance on the property tax as a primary revenue source for state government, substituting instead the sales tax. Complain as we will today about the burden of property taxes, they were until Payne’s time the primary source of not only local but also state revenues. Had it not been for Payne, Carol Palesky and Phil Harriman would have coasted to an effortless and probably well-deserved victory in this month’s tax-cap referendum.

Like all state-wide office holders of his era, Payne was a Republican, though he was a native of our most Democratic city, Lewiston, where the ground felt the pounding of his teenage feet both as a newspaper carrier and theater usher.

After Lewiston High and a stint at a Boston business school, Payne was off to Augusta where he put in time at car and farm machinery dealerships, helped audit the books of a chain of movie theaters and wound up as part of a Central Maine Power-backed effort to lure business and industry to the state. He also won acclaim as the city’s part-time mayor, followed by a brief appointment in the early 1940s as Maine’s finance commissioner. It was in 1944, while a lieutenant colonel in the Air Corps, that Payne married Ella Hodgdon, owner of a beauty parlor in Waldoboro, to where he relocated at that time.

Payne had been out of the limelight for a number of years when, as the business manager of a Waldoboro car dealership, he made a run for governor in 1948. The party establishment favored Senate President George Varney and Portland’s Robinson Verrill, head of one of the state’s most influential law firms. The crowded GOP primary also saw bids by Neil Bishop and Roy Fernald, both four-term legislators. Fernald was also a Bangor attorney whose resume was polished off by nine earned college and graduate school degrees, winning him featured status at least twice in “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.” Payne was the only member of the field without a college degree.

Payne’s shot at the governorship that year was burdened not only with the need to contend with four heavy-weight opponents but also by baggage from his personal life. His wedding to Ella was his third trip down the aisle, a marriage that came after his two prior marriages had ended in divorce.

But Payne was tall, personable and a riveting orator. He expressed the common touch by campaigning in a secondhand jalopy, and GOP voters in the primary that spring gave him a comfortable plurality over his nearest opponent, Sen. Varney, with Verrill finishing a weak third. Fernald, probably the most academically accomplished candidate in any election in American history, finished fourth at 12 percent. Neil Bishop was last at 10.

That voters were in a populist mood that spring and also strikingly brought home by the landslide upset of upstate Congresswoman Margaret Smith over Gov. Hildreth and former Gov. Sewall in the U.S. Senate primary. Smith’s own grassroots origins were spotlighted at that time in a Saturday Evening Post feature, “Senator from the Five and Ten,” an allusion to her childhood job as a Skowhegan store clerk. The Maine Republican electorate was thus not only setting up Payne, a small town businessman, to be governor but was also nominating an establishment-defying woman to the U.S. Senate.

Though the GOP nomination was tantamount to election, the 66 percent vote Payne won over Democrat Louis Lausier in the general election is a percentage that was one of the highest in any Maine governor’s race up to that point and has not been matched in any of the 17 gubernatorial races in Maine since that time.

Payne spent his election mandate as governor on tax reform, a cause that most of our state leaders have pursued but few have achieved. Payne’s initial prescription for the state’s fiscal ills was an income tax. He retreated from the proposal when it became apparent that an increasing federal take on incomes occasioned by the Korean War would force the state to look elsewhere. Payne then successfully put forward a plan that placed the sales tax on the books, thus taking the property tax out of the picture as a revenue source for state government.

Even after our state income tax was added in 1969, the sales tax remains a mainstay of Maine government revenues. If Gov. Baldacci and the newly elected Maine legislature that convenes next month fashion another transformation in our property tax, it may be taking a page from Gov. Payne’s book.

Payne also realized that tax eggs could not be hatched without a hen to lay them. Here, Payne put Maine in the forefront as one of the first states to establish an agency to provide government loans to developing businesses and otherwise made economic development a top priority.

New bridges connecting Bangor with Brewer and Portland with South Portland were also approved. A third one joining Lewiston with Auburn was not, though the turnpike was steered on a northerly course headed in Auburn’s direction. Payne’s political compass meanwhile was set to the south, to Washington and a U.S. Senate seat. More on that, Payne’s eventual decline, his fall and his resurrection in a future column.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of Maine’s political scene. He can be reached by e-mail at pmills@midmaine.com.

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