PARIS — Pat Stanley-Beals became an electrician in 1978, working with her late husband, Harry Moore.

In less than three years, she was the state’s first female licensed master electrician, and by 1986, they started their own business, Anytime Electric.

Now she is making her retirement from the trades official.

“Lots of times people ask me how I ended up in the electrical trade,” Stanley-Beals said during an interview at her home in South Paris. “Basically, I went into it to be with my husband. But before that, I had my elementary teaching degree. I worked in the public school system just long enough to realize that I just didn’t love it.

“My next step, I was drawn to the medical field, as my father was a doctor,” she added. “I became a CNA and worked at a nursing home for a year and a half. Then my mother got sick with cancer and my sisters and I spent her last days with her. When she died, I couldn’t go back to the nursing home. It was just too much. That was in the mid-1970s, when women were burning their bras. I decided, this was a new age for women. What was I doing all these traditional female things for? Women teach and they nurse, without breaking a sweat.”

Determined to go in her own direction, she considered either carpentry or electrical work. Not being fond of heights and roofs, that left electrical as the vocation to pursue.

Little did she know then that, as an electrician, she would one day find herself outside the ninth floor of a Portland bank building, hanging from ropes and drilling through cement to install a condenser.

“So I had to break myself of my fear of heights, which I did,” Stanley-Beals said. “But I still get tensed up over them.”

Her husband took her on a weekend job to wire a cellar. Not knowing much about it, Moore drew out what he needed her to do and what steps to take. It made perfect sense to Stanley-Beals – she had no questions about the process. At the end of the day, she wondered aloud if that was what it was like being an electrician’s helper.

“‘Anyone can do it,’ I told him. To which he said, ‘oh yeah?’ And the way he said it, I decided I’d show him,” she recalled.

She wrote herself a letter of recommendation in Moore’s name, had him sign it, took it to the employment office in Lewiston and told the rep she wanted a job as an electrician’s helper. She was hired on the spot and assigned to Pinetree Electric. That fall, she began taking night courses at Central Maine Vocational Technical Institute in Auburn. Soon she was confident enough in her own skills to defend her methods against the more experienced men she worked with as well as the business owner, even earning applause when she proved herself right.

Later, after her boss berated her over a mistake he thought she’d made and told her she would never make master electrician, Stanley-Beals walked out and got a job with another electrical company. She never forgot his insults and when she ran into him some 10 years later, she pulled her electrician’s license out of her wallet to show him his mistake.

When Moore passed away in 1991, many people assumed that Stanley-Beals would have to close down their business.

“It did take me about five years after getting my license to grow into the job,” she conceded. But the couple had worked together and she felt perfectly capable of continuing on on her own. Eventually their daughter, Emma Rose Moore, joined her in the business and the two worked side-by-side for years.

When Stanley-Beals concluded that 82 was a reasonable age for retirement, Emma Rose went to work driving trucks for a paving company.

Anytime Electric officially will close on Sept. 19, although Stanley-Beals and Emma Rose will continue serving longtime customers in the interim. She is hopeful that her daughter will earn her own master electrician’s license and continue with it.

“She is a very good troubleshooter,” Stanley-Beals said.

Stanley-Beals’ future includes lots of gardening, and perhaps adding a few goats to her brood of laying hens.

“I will miss the work,” she admitted. “I can use retirement as a reason to not take a job, I already do. But if I like the job and I can figure it out quickly, I will take it.”

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