PARIS – A 62-year-old man wearing only long johns and socks escaped his burning bedroom alive but with third degree burns after a portable space heater accidentally ignited his mattress early Monday morning.

Ralph Stone, owner and second-floor resident of the former Minnie’s Restaurant at 29 Market Square, was listed in satisfactory condition Monday night at Maine Medical Center in Portland, according to a nursing supervisor.

Stone suffered burns to his feet and legs, according to Steve McCausland, spokesman for the Maine Department of Public Safety.

The building was declared a total loss.

Volunteer firefighters from the Paris and Norway departments were called to the scene shortly after 4 a.m. when fire erupted in the second-floor bedroom of the two-story building. A space heater, placed only two or three inches from Stone’s bed, caught the mattress on fire, according to Chris Stanford of the State Fire Marshal’s Office. Stanford said Stone had no source of heat to warm his house except several space heaters.

Joe Bonney, who has lived in an apartment behind Minnie’s Restaurant for the past 12 years, said he awoke to his alarm at 3:30 a.m. as he does each day to get ready for work when he found a badly-burned Stone pounding on his door crying for help.

“He was yelling and pounding on my door. He was in bad shape,” said Bonney, who described Stone’s socks as being filled with what appeared to be burn holes.

Bonney said Stone turned and ran back to a small, first-floor entrance in the back of the burning building where police found him trying to get through a window to get back in and try to put out the flames.

“He tried to gain access. They stopped him from going back in,” said police Chief David Verrier, who credited police officer Raymond Paar with stopping Stone from re-entering the house and convincing him to get into the ambulance for medical treatment.

Stone was taken by PACE ambulance to Stephens Memorial Hospital in Norway where he was treated before being taken by ambulance to Maine Medical Center.

Stanford, the chief of four state investigators at Monday’s fire, said it appears there were at least two or three other space heaters that Stone had “tinkered” with in an attempt to get them working. The heater that ignited was placed only two to three inches from his bed, not the several feet or more that fire officials recommend for safety.

“The heater was placed too close to the combustible materials,” said Stanford, who theorized that a comforter might have fallen over the space heater and caught fire.

It was the second fire to damage the white vinyl-sided building that sits in the heart of the downtown business district next to the Paris Municipal Building and a vacant former antiques business. In September 1988, the building was extensively damaged while Stone’s mother, the late Minnie Stone, was serving customers in the first-floor restaurant. No one was injured in that fire but the second-floor apartment where Minnie Stone lived since the 1930s was destroyed. The restaurant has not operated since Minnie’s death several years ago.

Central Maine Power Co. shut down electrical service to the area for several hours while fire crews doused the blaze. Power was restored to the area by 9 a.m.