LEWISTON – What started as a two-year project and grew to 10 – interviewing friends, colleagues and hundreds of people about Edmund S. Muskie – has earned Bates College a national award from the Oral History Association.

The association’s Elizabeth B. Mason Major Project Award is handed out every two years and last went to The Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project by the National Park Service. It will be presented to Bates on Saturday night in Pittsburgh, Pa.

Andrea L’Hommedieu, who conducted 136 of the 400-plus interviews in the Edmund S. Muskie Oral History Project, will pick it up.

Muskie was a Rumford native, governor, U.S. senator, author of the Clean Air and Clean Water acts in the 1970s and a class of 1936 Bates graduate. When finding people to talk about Muskie, L’Hommedieu said they began by finding the guest list to his 1954 gubernatorial inauguration.

The project, originally headed by Don Nicoll, who had worked with Muskie, took off from there. Funding came from the Edmund S. Muskie Foundation in Washington, D.C. It wrapped, with interviews and transcripts going online, in 2007.

“We went to Rumford many, many times and sought out childhood friends,” said L’Hommedieu, an oral historian.

People talked about Muskie’s father, a tailor. About how Ed Muskie really thought out his words. About driving him to campaign events around the state so he could prep for the next stop.

“There are so many funny stories about driving Ed Muskie,” she said. “He wanted to go a certain way, or if you got lost, what happened.”

Kat Stefko, director of archives and special collections at Bates, said one of the interviews that stood out for her was with Joan Arnold, a retired legislative staffer, remembering Muskie’s secretary, Margery Hutchinson:

“… Before that door was finally opened for the photographers to come in, Marge was in there. And she was in there with a little hairbrush, calming the curls down. He had very curly hair, and she would be in there taking a hairbrush and getting the hair just so, so he wouldn’t have curls flying all over his head.”

“It puts a very human face on Muskie. I never met him, but he is so often described as intimidating or larger-than-life,” Stefko said. “His secretary, who in actuality wasn’t much older than him, being motherly to him is so endearing.”

In citing reasons for the award, the Oral History Association praised the work as a “model for other congressional collections and centers to emulate.”

That’s what makes the honor particularly sweet.

“Most institutions that collect and house the papers of such important political figures tend to be large research institutions,” Stefko said. “The fact that the archives at Bates, with limited funding and resources, has been able to complete an oral history project of this scale and magnitude … is pretty extraordinary and exciting.”

Nicoll said the award validates what they set out to do and that the project gives a sense of the times and the man.