Anne and Dick Collins love their native Maine – she grew up in Farmington and he’s from Aroostook County – and that’s part of the reason they pledged $6 million to their alma mater at UMO this week.

“Maine grounds you. It grounds you for whatever you want to do with your life. It’s just stayed with us no matter where we’ve been in the world,” Anne said in a telephone interview from their summer home in the coastal community of Northport late Thursday night.

She and her husband had just returned there from the ceremony announcing the gift to create the Richard R. and Anne A. Collins Center for the Arts at the Orono campus.

Anne was born in Belfast, but most of her formal education was in Farmington.

“I went there in the fourth grade and left there in 1961,” she said, the year she graduated from the university with a degree in education.

She attended the W.G. Mallett School and Farmington High School, where she was a member of the All-New England Orchestra and Band. She also played in the marching band and orchestra in both schools.

“I was just back there for my 50th high school reunion about two weeks ago,” she said. It was the first she’s attended.

“It was so wonderful to do so. It was like I never left,” she said. “We’re all just exactly the same as we were then.”

Of her 72 classmates, 60 are still living, she said.

“We had a very close group that we did things with. We kept in touch over the years,” she added.

Although it was her first reunion in 50 years, it’s not the first time she’s been back to Farmington. She visits relatives who live in town several times a year, she explained.

Her sister-in-law, Peggy Johnson Adams, widow of Anne’s brother, James, resides in Farmington, she said, and “I still have cousins there as well.”

Her father, Frank Adams, was in charge of the Farmington water department for a number of years. The family lived on Orchard Street and Anne enjoyed life there.

“It was a college town, which made it very exciting. We had all these wonderful young people around us,” she said, referring to students at the former Farmington teachers college, the first public institution of higher education in the state, which became part of the state university system in 1968.

“It was a ski town,” Anne said, recalling memories of her adventures in the sport from the age of 10. “I believe we had the first night skiing.”

Her father died in 1965, and her mother, Lillian, moved to Belfast in 1967. She died in 1999.

Dick Collins, who grew up on a potato farm in St. Agatha in far northern Aroostook County, graduated from the university in 1959 with a degree in business economics. She met him there her freshman year, and they wed in 1961.

Early in their married lives they moved to Connecticut, where she taught school in Norwalk for three years.

In 1966, Dick joined American Life Insurance Co., a subsidiary of American International Group, which had offices in many countries but none in the United States at that time.

“We lived overseas for many, many years,” Anne said, and raised two daughters, Jennifer and Pamela.

Dick became president and chief executive officer of the company in 1980 and retired in 1992 after seeing annual revenue go from $200 million to $2.4 billion.

At Thursday’s ceremony he described his abiding affection for his home state and the allure of Maine summer vacations when the family lived in Iran, Lebanon, Japan and Bermuda.

In retirement, the couple had an opportunity “to re-establish our ties here in Maine and to become more involved in supporting the university we both love,” Dick said.

“I think it’s the type of education we got at the university,” his wife explained. It was smaller then, and “you had good interaction with your professors.”

The couple was particularly interested in the possibility of helping establish “a nationally recognized facility for the performing arts” at the university, Dick said. “As part of an educational curriculum,” he said, “the arts have always provided the foundation for young people to nurture their creativity, cultural understanding and self-expression. The opportunity for us to help expose young minds to the works of Shakespeare, the music of Mozart and the art of Picasso was just too compelling to pass up.”

The couple plan to enjoy the center themselves from their Northport home they built 10 years ago and when they return to the pine tree state full time from their home in Key Largo, Fla.

“We will eventually come back here, I’m sure, to be residents of Maine,” Anne said. “We both really enjoy the climate here. There’s a lot to do in Maine even in the winter.”