President Jimmy Carter’s passing at age 100 invites taking time to also reflect on four remarkable Mainers who left us in 2024.

Joseph Brennan

Best known for his eight years as governor, this son of Irish-speaking Galway immigrants who rose from a working-class Munjoy Hill household to win high-ranking state and federal offices died in April at the age of 89.

The outset of his tenure as a Democratic governor in 1979 came in the aftermath of four of the more tumultuous years in modern Maine political history: the tenure of conservative independent Gov. James Longley. Brennan’s tenure was marked by a more even-keeled relationship between the Blaine House on the one hand and the media and the Legislature on the other. It also included restoration of a number of funding cuts in the University of Maine budget; increasing minimum teacher salaries; establishing the Finance Authority of Maine, or FAME; enactment of mandatory motor vehicle liability insurance; and sufficiently addressing issues at the Pineland Center for the disabled in Pownal so that it was removed from court oversight.

Being blessed with a more buoyant economy than in some of the Longley years also boosted Brennan’s ability to pursue a more financially beefed-up set of priorities, from highways to job creation programs. Brennan nevertheless struck a more ideologically centrist note than his previous legislative record might have suggested. In his previous service, he voted as a Portland legislator for minimum wage increases and enhanced workers compensation benefits. As governor, he gave a more narrowed interpretation to such policies.

When I once asked Brennan what his most difficult crisis as governor had been, he pointed to his ordering the three-month lockdown of the Maine State Prison in 1980. Though the warden had opposed it, Brennan’s position was that discipline could not be restored incrementally and needed more decisive action. (The control he and Safety Commissioner Arthur Stilphen had been attempting to restore through the lockdown had been attributed primarily to the prison’s corrupt novelty crafts program, where inmates were making goods to be sold in the prison showroom.)

As for the difference between serving in Maine and later in Congress, he once told me that, in Maine, “there were Republicans who were not averse to helping you.” In Washington, working across the aisle was less common.

A footnote not to be overlooked: Brennan’s appointment of his old political rival George Mitchell to the U.S. Senate in 1980. Mitchell went on to become the Senate majority leader from 1989 to 1995 and subsequently a major player in both Northern Ireland and Middle East peace negotiations.

Bruce Reeves

This vivid figure in Maine public policy and politics of the 1970s and ’80s also died in 2024 at the age of 89. As a maverick Democrat, he crashed the political party in Augusta in his 1974 upset victory over longtime Bath GOP legislator Rodney Ross Jr. From that point on, for much of the next dozen years, Reeves was front-page news.

This was first in the Maine Senate, where his activist and sometimes blunt approach nevertheless led to some of the state’s earliest lobbyist disclosure laws, then in 1976 as a 1st District congressional candidate whose intervention in public hearings to oppose a $20 million Central Maine Power increase landed his face on newspaper front pages.

Though Reeves tied for third in the seven-way congressional primary campaign, his loss there did not bring a halt to his civic-minded crusades. They included leadership of two citizen initiative campaigns against the state’s major public utilities. The first was a losing 1981 referendum to replace the appointed Public Utilities Commission with a popularly elected one. The second was the successful 1986 referendum to do away with a telephone company billing policy that was to impose extra charges for local phone calls.

Reeves’ publicity instincts were no doubt initially nurtured in his years at Harvard as editor of the Daily Crimson, one of the nation’s leading undergraduate newspapers.

Despite the grandstanding appearance of some of his crusades, Reeves — who, before making his mark in Maine, put in several years in the Peace Corps — had a methodical and thoughtful approach. I personally recall this side of him in a 1999 interview I did for an article I was writing on the proposed sale of CMP to Energy East, something he was questioning.

The decades since his departure as a public figure were spent in more low-profile but humanitarian pursuits, including many years as a grant writer for a neighborhood planning council in Portland and other nonprofits elsewhere in the country.

Louis Scolnik

Lewiston has laid claim to some of the more prominent appellate jurists in Maine. Among those in recent decades: Chief Armand Dufresne and Associate Supreme Court Justices Thomas Delahanty, Robert Clifford and U.S. Appeals Judge Frank Coffin.

Among them too is Louis Scolnik, who died in October at the age of 101. Scolnik was one of Maine’s pioneer civil libertarians, coming to the defense of activists at both ends of the ideological spectrum. The state’s chapter of the ACLU has for the last 30 years presented an annual award in his name to the person who has been a leader in efforts to promote respect for and protection for civil liberties and civil rights.

I personally recall appearing before him on many occasions in the early years of my practice as an attorney in the late 1970s and during the 1980s when he was still a trial judge, before his accession to the state’s Supreme Court. His was a firm, disciplined, no-nonsense hand in the courtroom. His appellate opinions demonstrated a thorough understanding of the law, familiarity with the fact and appreciation of the issues on which he had to rule.

Devoted not only to his profession but also to his faith, I will also remember his reciting prayers during the Torah reading at Temple Beth Abraham in Auburn, which I occasionally attended as a guest of one of his synagogue’s fellow members.

Ed Boucher

In a career that extended from the early 1960s until his death at 79 in May, few in music performance, promotion and production have been as enduring as Ed Boucher’s. The famous “I should have bought it at Marden’s” jingle is but one of hundreds of business and entertainment compositions for which he was responsible, not to mention the multitude of performers whose careers he either recorded or launched.

It was his role as a fervent believer in Lewiston-Auburn itself for which I’ll remember him best. When I first met Boucher — as an announcer myself for WGAN radio at an event broadcast from the Lewiston Fairgrounds in 1973 — Boucher’s infectious belief in his hometown culture is what came through most resoundingly.

He kept cheerfully proclaiming that Lewiston-Auburn would one day overtake Los Angeles as the “LA” with which the music entertainment world would most identify. He had me convinced that this would someday happen. Because of Boucher, to a limited extent, it already has. To the extent it has not done so already, I hope it will.

Paul Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his history and analyses on public affairs in Maine. He can be reached via pmills@myfairpoint.net.

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