PARIS – In the summer of 1986, Dana Hanley was a fresh Colby College grad saving up for Duke Law School. He got involved in hometown politics and suddenly found himself chairman of the Paris Republicans during an election year, with an empty local seat in need of a candidate.

Hanley pitched dozens of business people. Not one nibbled.

The 23-year-old decided to run himself, against a better-known Democrat.

He heard things like, “Hanley, he doesn’t have a chance. He’s wet behind the ears.”

Then he won, by a lot.

At a family celebration, his parents gave him his first elephant, a brass figure with a raised trunk.

There’s nearly 60 in the conference room of his law office, Hanley & Associates. They take up one row of a massive bookshelf that also holds a far older collection: Bound volumes with every Maine Supreme Court ruling since 1820.

He’s got even more elephants, but they have to stay home.

“I hit a point I couldn’t have any more and still have the law books,” said Hanley, who’s also probate judge for Oxford County.

Some of his elephants are regal; one pair, picked up by his parents in Sweden, are crystal and posed circus-silly.

One dark gray, stately looking elephant with missing tusks used to be a door stopper at a local funeral home. The owners gave it to Hanley on his 40th birthday.

Two small, carved statues were brought back from Egypt by his wife. Another, a yellow glass jar with an elephant’s outline on front and portraits of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew embossed on either side, had sat in a client’s attic for years.

Hanley says he’s never bought a single one. Half have come from family, half as gifts from clients.

One client gave a set: star-spangled, Beanie Baby cousins named “Lefty 2000” the donkey and “Righty 2000” the elephant: “They wanted to make sure it was totally bipartisan,” he said.

Then someone else gave him another Righty. Suddenly Lefty was outnumbered.

Hanley said he likes what elephants represent.

“There’s something … about the rugged individualism about the elephants in the jungle. Not your pushover,” he said.

After that win when he was 23, Hanley ended up serving in the State House for 10 years. For three of them, he made the regular commute from Paris to Augusta to Portland so he could get his law degree at the law school there.

“I was thinking it would be neat to be a sports attorney,” he said. “What a change in career path.”