AUBURN – Surrounded by his deputies, Sheriff Ron Gagnon raised a cup in the air and took a long pause.

He knew he was supposed to make a speech, something sentimental about his 21 years as Androscoggin County’s top cop. He couldn’t, though.

“I’m going to miss it,” Gagnon told the crowd. Then, he sat down.

“I just got choked up,” he explained later, still clutching a hand-carved county seal the group had given him.

“Hopefully, I’ve been a good sheriff,” he said. “I just hope I’ve done the best job I could.”

His tenure with the department, beginning in 1977 as a jail guard, marked radical changes. He saw budgets and staff expand, professionalism increase and a modern, $9 million jail open in 1990.

It was something he lobbied for the moment he was appointed sheriff in 1985 by Gov. Joseph Brennan.

“He could have sat back and acted political,” Jail Administrator John Lebel, then a guard, recalled of that period. Instead, he laid the responsibility for the jail at the feet of the county commissioners.

“He stood up and said, ‘You need to do something about this,'” Lebel said. “I admire him for that courage.”

The jail Gagnon worked in as a guard looked far different from the current one, with its electronic locks and plastic windows.

Jail problems

He was one of the brawny men who were being hired in those days. A former hockey player with the Lewiston-based Maine Nordiques, Gagnon had muscles that had muscles.

He needed them.

The jail was built on two floors and featured old-fashioned, floor-to-ceiling iron bars and locks that used metal keys instead of computer switches. The tank-style cells housed groups of people.

By the 1980s, they were too full. In one two-week period, the jail recorded three suicides.

In 1980, Gagnon experienced a near-riot inside. He was working as the chief deputy when the deputies walked off the job in a labor dispute.

They called it the “brown flu,” after their then-brown uniforms.

With 40 people locked inside the jail, Gagnon, the jail administrator at the time, and Sheriff Lionel Cote were left alone.

The inmates ran water until it flooded the cells. They started fires.

“We basically stayed here for the whole week,” Gagnon said. “We didn’t go home even to sleep.”

It became so bad that the Maine Department of Corrections sent its personnel to Auburn and began finding other jails to board the inmates.

Eventually, the dispute ended and the staff came back. But it never seemed enough. At any time of day, the jail had a sergeant, a dispatcher and two deputies.

“That was it,” Lebel said. “That’s who ran the whole jail.”

At its worst, the old 30-bed jail once housed 99 inmates.

“And if one person called in sick, you were there for the duration,” Gagnon said.

More changes

It needed changes. So did patrol.

In those days, the whole division had only three deputies, a detective and a captain, said Ray Lafrance, the current patrol division captain.

“We now have 56 people,” he said.

And they have a lot more direction.

Even before the state began mandating detailed manuals for police agencies, the county had one.

“Just coming out of academies is not enough,” Lafrance said. Manuals were created for both law enforcement and corrections.

“There was nothing before,” said Lafrance, who was promoted to captain about a year after Gagnon was first named sheriff.

“All we had were policies for the use of force and driving,” he said. “We set forth our goals and we followed them.”

Gagnon led, though he was quiet about it.

“He never micromanaged,” said Lebel, who was also promoted to captain during Gagnon’s first year.

“His philosophy was to let his captains run the jail and patrol,” he said. “He gave us broad authority.”

During his tenure, Gagnon helped create a canine unit and a dive team. At the employees’ suggestion, he changed the brown uniforms to blue and the brown cruisers to white.

And he provided political stability.

“What he brought was cooperation,” Lebel said. “He accepted the (county) commissioners’ role and he was not intimidated by them.”

A good leader

He won election after election.

Gagnon spent more years as sheriff here than anyone in recent years. County officials researched back to 1931 and found that his closest competition was Robert Bonenfant, who died in office in June 1972 after 13 years in office.

Politics eventually caught up to Gagnon, though.

His former chief deputy, Guy Desjardins, defeated him in his re-election bid this year. Desjardins is scheduled to be inaugurated on Thursday.

“It’s a sad day for all of us,” County Commissioner Elmer Berry said last week, as the deputies gathered to honor Gagnon. “I’m looking at 35 years of friendship.”

Lebel said he, too, is sad to say goodbye to Gagnon.

“He is my friend,” Lebel said.

Lafrance spoke highly of Gagnon’s leadership style.

“He allowed us to excel at our careers,” Lafrance said. “Over the last 21 years, I don’t have any complaints.”

Since the election, Gagnon has felt the loss every time he walked into work, past the entrance that led to the old jail.

“When you walk by that big, steel door, you automatically remember,” Gagnon said. “I will miss being the sheriff.”

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