One of my readers recently gave me a challenge. Most schools in the Twin Cities bear names meant to honor significant figures of the communities’ past. Who were they and what did they do?

Well, as usual, I learned that research is a slippery slope. It can take unexpected detours and what you find at the end is always interesting but often nothing like what you expected.

Of the several names I investigated, I chose one because it’s mentioned often in Lewiston historical material. That is William P. Frye, for whom Frye Grammar School was named. The large brick building at 140 Ash St. is no longer a school; it was converted to serve as low-income and elderly housing.

The facts of Frye’s life are recorded in many books about Maine, but I found one account that shows how there can be some decidedly different views of a major historical figure. In this political season, there’s no shortage of pointed barbs and acidic criticism of any of the candidates. For Frye, an extremely powerful Republican in the late 1800s, there was a witty and acerbic writer and prominent Democrat named William R. Pattangall who used effective satire to present the other side of the coin in regard to Frye’s notable achievements.

Although Pattangall’s jibes at Frye were tongue-in-cheek, the writer’s columns in Maine newspapers during the first decade of the 1900s have been called important factors in breaking the GOP’s longtime strong majority in Maine and paving the way for Democrats to rebound.

First of all, Frye’s accomplishments were indisputably solid and significant. He was born in Lewiston in 1830. He played a role in founding Bates College. He was mayor of Lewiston in 1865-66 and he served in both houses of the Maine Legislature before election to the U.S. Senate, where he served for 30 years until his death in 1911.

During his tenure in the Senate, Frye became known nationally as one of the Republican Party’s leading figures.

Frye served as Senate president pro-tempore. On two occasions, he was next in line for succession to the presidency when the office of vice president was vacant.

He was one of the founder’s of Lewiston’s Riverside Cemetery, where he is buried.

Well, that’s the basic biographical sketch on William P. Frye, but thanks to the satirical pen of Pattangall almost 100 years ago, the man’s life and times are seen in a more human and humorous light.

Frye was a noted orator, and Pattangall loved to poke fun at the politician’s style. In “Great Maine Men,” which includes columns written in 1909-10, Pattangall said, “In the days when he was in the spell-binding business, his specialties were eloquence and statistics.” He joked that Frye “never talked in anything smaller than trillions, excepting when he was estimating the Democratic vote or speaking of the public debt.”

Those statistics attributed to Frye were rattled off in impressive cadence, Pattangall said, and he said they were never the same in any two speeches.

The writer quipped that Sen. Frye never took part in congressional debates because there were short-hand reporters there to take down what speakers said.

“Some of those fancy mathematics of his would have looked funny in cold type,” Pattangall wrote.

Frye’s later political career also came under Pattangall’s withering criticism for his part as a member of the Peace Commission in Paris at the end of the Spanish-American War. He noted Frye’s support of a $20 million payment to Spain for the Philippine Islands “just after we had taken them from her, and at a time when, if we had let go of them, they would have achieved their independence.”

Pattangall said, “It was the first instance in recorded history of one nation paying another indemnity for having won a war. Probably the incident will never be repeated.”

William P. Frye has a solid place in history, notwithstanding the satirist’s good-natured attacks.

When dry facts and figures cause details of history to fade, it helps to have a bit of humor to bring things back into focus and the little twists on history help us remember it happened in a vibrant, interesting and very real world much like we know today.