Things sure have changed around the Twin Cities. After an absence of about 18 years, a visitor discovered that things just aren’t what they used to be.

That’s no big surprise to those of us who have seen the face of L-A undergo some dramatic transformations, but the observations to which I refer were made some 85 years ago.

The comments were in a Lewiston Evening Journal of late 1920. An unidentified reporter was telling of his interview with a returning Lewistonian – also unidentified – who found it hard to believe what had happened in the old home town.

Just listen to some of his candid comments. We might give much of it a PI (politically incorrect) rating, although some of it echoes remarks we could overhear on the street and around the town today.

To the visitor, it was lamentable that Lewiston’s wild and woolly past had disappeared. It seems he longed for the excitement of the old days.

Talking of a time around 1902, the visitor said, “Take where the Salvation Army barracks are now on Middle Street near the Interurban waiting room. I can well remember the barroom that used to be there, the old Green Front.

There used to be a pigpen next door to the Dingley training school and several bars all about the school. Now they sell automobiles in the same places.”

He also recalled, “the Chinese restaurant just burned out the quarters of where, 20 years ago, a guy could lose his shirt in a game of no-limit stud or what he wanted.”

The DeWitt Hotel, which once stood across from today’s Kennedy Park on land where the Sun Journal expanded a few decades ago, also shared a part of his memory.

“I see the Rotary (Club) now rotates in a private dining room at the DeWitt Hotel where the boys used to rotate when the DeWitt was DeWet,” he said.

The newspaper reporter went on to write, “He was dumbfounded at the frequency with which he heard the French language spoken. He was told that there are more by a great number of people of Canadian extraction than any other kind in the two cities.”

The visitor knew of tough times in past years for the mills in Lewiston, “But, Bub,” he told the reporter, “this old town has never known any of the real grief that other textile and manufacturing centers have had, take it from me.”

He also expressed admiration for the then-new Clifton Daggett Gray Athletic Building on the Bates College campus.

It was some different, he declared, from the “splinter-infested wooden building that the old Bates athletes had to function in.”

While he bemoaned the fact that Bates football teams were not claiming many wins, he was delighted that “this little institution in the State of Maine is known the world over for its sensational debating record.”

He ended by saying, “I can remember when Lewiston was supposed to be a terrible place. It never really was quite so bad as it was painted and never so tough as Bangor and Portland, but it used to get a bad name.”

Was this visitor describing a real snapshot of old Lewiston, or was his memory colored by his particular brand of nostalgia?

Because neither writer nor the speaker were named, this old newspaper account may have been a literary device to get across some not-too-subtle editorial opinion. In any case, it casts some illumination on some of the attitudes of a different time, and makes us realize that we may still tend to see ourselves with some elements of distortion.

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