LEWISTON – At 86, David Pinette’s eyes still twinkle when he describes his mother’s flair for baking beans.

“When I was growing up,” he says, in a slight French accent, and then pauses – gallicly – “ahhhh.”

“My mother had a big pot, you know, for beans, and she would put a piece like that,” his hands form a rectangle of roughly the same shape and size of a deck of cards, “of fat, from the pig, so big, right in the beans.”

He smiles, looking around for a moment at the buzz of revelers lining up for beans inside the Androscoggin Bank Colisee. It’s Saturday night, the second day of the Festival of FrancoFun. Pinette, who lives in California now and comes to Maine every summer, is there for the first time with his wife, Thelma, Auburn-based nephew, Ronald Frechette, and wife, Samantha.

It’s nice to be back in Maine, to hear French again, nods Pinette.

“I try to read, in French, every once in a while, but I don’t have anyone to speak French with me,” he says.

Time to reminisce

Growing up in Brunswick with four brothers and 10 sisters, David Pinette didn’t speak a word of English until he was called into the Army at 23, during World War II. “He got helped a little bit, but he’s pretty much self-taught,” says Thelma. He did reconnaissance in France in Gen. George S. Patton’s 4th Armored Division, earning two purple hearts and serving from D-Day until the end of the war, she says.

“I had good times, I had bad times,” David says. His eyes twinkle again. “The bad times was to fight the war. The good times was the beautiful girls.”

“He’s a Frenchman,” says Thelma, patting his arm as she shakes her head. But he did manage to go to French bars and restaurants on occasion, she nods – and wherever he went, his English-speaking pals would follow.

On recon missions, he’d often get caught between the two sides during fighting.

“He had to just hunker down – in ditches, barns, farmhouses. Everything was going over his head and he said he felt safer,” Thelma says. Able to communicate with his French hosts, he drank wine with them, ate with them, slept in their homes.

Back with the Americans, he spent a lot of time practicing English. “I spent all of my free time learning English,” he says.

Back in the U.S. after the war, Pinette says, his family did well. Two of his brothers died millionaires, although neither could write his own name when they were booted out of the French school they attended in Brunswick. “You don’t need to go to college to get the skills to be successful,” he says, pointedly.

David moved to California. Married and had kids. Met Thelma when he went to help a friend move furniture. Thelma was the friend’s wife.

“He introduced me to his wife. She was a little, petite 95 pounds, you know. So I take hold of her hand, and looked at her in the eye, and I turned to her husband and said you lucky bastard.”

Years later, when he was divorced and she was widowed, he went over to visit her. “He came to see how things were going,” Thelma says, “and we just started going together, like two old shoes.”