You can take the boy out of Lewiston, but you can't take Lewiston out of the boy

The author with Santa, Peck’s Department Store, Lewiston, Maine, early 1970s.

I was in bed reading when my best friend from college, now living in Chicago, texted me at 9:24 p.m. Oct. 25.

“Isn’t Lewiston near Lisbon, Me?” he wrote.

“Adjacent,” I replied, unaware of the breaking news.

“Wow. 16 dead, 60 shot,” Mike noted.

The initial reports were wrong, though it was a senseless massacre by any definition: A gunman killed 18 people and wounded 13 others between a bowling alley and a bar and grill in Lewiston. Two days later, the assailant was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Lisbon.

Mass shootings have become so common in America that it’s hard to catalog all of them. Which school? Which state? How many victims this time; how many shootings this year?

But sooner or later, it seems, for each of us one hits closer to home than the rest. For me, it was Lewiston.

That’s where I was born.

Paperboy and bag boy

I grew up in Lisbon and as a member of Lisbon High School’s Class of 1985 graduated at what was then the Central Maine Youth Center in Lewiston (where Muhammad Ali floored Sonny Liston in the first-round of their 1965 rematch). For two years during high school, I bagged groceries at Bonneau’s Supermarket (motto, “Never a Bum Steer”) at 1025 Lisbon St., Lewiston.

Just five weeks before the Lewiston shootings, my wife, Sara, and I drove from Hershey to Maine to join my siblings as we celebrated our mother’s 85th birthday. Some of that time was spent in Lewiston, where my parents and brother still live and where you can still get a delicious steamed redskin with mustard and onion and a cold Moxie at Simones’ Hot Dog Stand.

I have mostly lived outside of Maine for the past 40-plus years, but it’s still home and never far from my thoughts. Sara and I (and our children when they were younger) have made many memories in more than two decades of nearly annual visits to Maine, usually including at least a short visit to Lewiston.

An old mill town (shoes and textiles), Lewiston has endured its share of economic hardship. Truth be told, we usually spend most of our time in and around my sister’s home in southern Maine, about an hour from Lewiston and on the ocean.

Yet my most vivid memories of Maine are those from my youth and related to Lewiston.

Lewiston Strong

I will never love a hockey team as I did the original Maine Nordiques of the 1970s that played in the league that inspired the movie “Slap Shot.” Delivering the Lewiston newspapers for five years was the best job a kid could have; that is, until Bonneau’s saved me from the agony of high school.

Christmas always evokes the visit to the B. Peck Department Store (“The Great Department Store,” postcards hailed it) in downtown Lewiston to see the real Santa. I still treasure the photo of me with the Peck’s St. Nick, even if in retrospect his beard seems not quite white enough.

Lewiston had another tie to Christmas when I was a child: Paragon Glass Works manufactured glass Christmas ornaments just down the road from where I grew up.

As you can tell from the above links to blog posts I’ve written through the years, those Lewiston memories linger, lovingly.

On the same street where Paragon operated, within eyesight of it, is Rogue Wear, which makes our Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful Tote Bag.

The Lewiston company that makes our tote bags spearheaded a ‘Lewiston Strong’ fundraiser for the shooting victims’ families.

Yup, Pennsylvania by way of Maine, but the bags are just that good. And I felt even better about working with Rogue Wear in the aftermath of the Lewiston shootings as the company’s lifestyle brand, Rogue Life Maine, has spearheaded a fundraising campaign for the victims’ families ($180,000 and counting), offering tees, sweatshirts, ball caps and knit hats, and tote bags bearing a “Lewiston Strong” logo.

It’s heartbreaking that such a cap even came to be. But I’ll keep mine for the rest of my life, proudly and defiantly, because good is such a more powerful force than evil.

And Lewiston is a good place.