SOUTH PORTLAND – It started the end of summer in 1953 when Frank Coffin’s phone rang. Edmund Muskie was calling to invite Coffin and his wife, Ruth, to a cookout at his China Lake summer home.

Muskie had broken his back that spring. During a long and painful convalescence, he would crawl down to the waterfront for exercise. Months later, he was able finally to walk to the lake’s edge.

Muskie and Coffin had graduated from Bates College in Lewiston, four years apart. Both had been members of the school’s debating team.

But they shared a more important interest. At a time when Republicans ruled the state, both men were eager to transform the Democratic Party from an asterisk in Maine politics into a powerhouse.

What they talked about that evening over grilled steaks would change the course of history for Democrats in this state.

Coffin grew up in Lewiston with politics in his blood. His grandfather had been mayor of Lewiston and speaker of the Maine House. Coffin had been speaking out critically of his party at gatherings around the state. He delivered the keynote address to the state’s 1950 Democratic Convention in Lewiston. His message: the party needed to pull itself together, focus on economic issues and reach out to rural Mainers.

A Harvard Law School graduate, he had been working as a trial lawyer in Lewiston and Portland. Muskie had been serving as national committeeman for the state party while practicing law in Waterville.

That night, they formed a decades-long bond that would lead Coffin the following year to become chairman of the Maine Democratic State Committee. He went on to serve two terms as congressman and later was appointed, thanks to Muskie, to a seat on the bench of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit in Boston.

The revival of the Maine Democratic Party also would help launch Muskie on a political career spanning more than 20 years, including terms as Maine governor, U.S. senator, U.S. secretary of state, Democratic vice-presidential nominee and candidate for president.

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In 1960, Coffin lost a bid for governor. It was the first time Maine held elections for state office on the same day as the presidential elections. Maine picked Richard Nixon, a Republican over John F. Kennedy.

President-elect Kennedy called Coffin later at his Washington office to console him.

That loss marked Coffin’s departure from party politics into a world of non-partisan efforts to help underdeveloped countries improve the lives of their citizens through foreign aid. Coffin served in a leadership role, moving his family to Paris, France in the process.

In 1965, then-President Lyndon Johnson appointed Coffin to the 1st Circuit Court, at Muskie’s urging.

As a federal appeals judge in the 1960s and 70s, Coffin and his panel presided over cases that often hinged on individual rights.

Thinking back on his time on the bench, Coffin, now retired, sat recently in the living room of his waterfront home in South Portland overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. He remembered a case involving the burning of draft cards, at Arlington Church in Boston that featured renowned pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock and Rev. William Sloan Coffin Jr. (no relation.) The charge had been conspiracy to aid and abet the burning of draft cards. The court sent the case back to the lower court saying that judge had erred by asking a series of narrowing questions of the jury that boxed jurors into a corner on their verdict. Coffin took the judgment a step further, arguing in a partial dissent that the actions of Spock and Coffin did not rise to the level of conspiracy because the event was a public debate on the Vietnam War, he said.

Another memorable case highlighted the dangers of entanglement of state government with the affairs of the administration of parochial schools. A Rhode Island Legislature had allowed for state subsidies to pay for part of the salaries of teachers of secular classes. The statute offended the establishment clause separating church and state, he argued.

Many cases arrived at his bench triggered by the civil rights movement, including desegregation in public schools. “It was a slow, painful process,” he said. The cases touched on interschool busing, teacher ratios and timelines for desegregation plans, among other details.

In all, Coffin wrote roughly 2,500 opinions for that court between 1965 and his retirement in 2006.

Although the justice system in this country is the best in the world, Coffin said access to justice sometimes falls short, usually for the poor.

As with the Maine Democratic Party, Coffin isn’t shy about speaking out when he sees the need for improvement to something near and dear to him.

“We have not gotten to a point in this state where we can say there is equal justice for the indigent,” he said.

Maine judges are understaffed and don’t have the resources to attend the professional development conferences necessary to benefit from interaction with their peers, he said.

Gains have been made through various efforts, including those of the Maine State Bar Association and the Maine Bar Foundation, he said. But more money is needed at a time when state budgets are being cut.

“We face a hard time,” he said.