Be warned: this is the first post of what is likely to be a deluge concerning my childhood. I hope it will get more interesting once I’ve cleared the chronology out of the way.
I sometimes tell people that I had a Stephen King childhood. By this I mean that his picture of small-town life in Maine deeply resonates in me.
But our biographies don’t match all that closely, it turns out. King is older than I am by a year and six weeks. Although he was born in Maine, his Wikipedia biography says that his father abandoned the family when King was two, and he lived with his single mother and his brother in various places outside Maine, including Illinois, Wisconsin, New York State, Massachusetts and Connecticut, from the ages of two to eleven. At that point his mother moved them to Durham, Maine, where he finished school. He attended the University of Maine from 1966 to 1970, graduating with a B.A. in English.
I was born (November 5, 1948) in Quincy, Massachusetts, and though we were a standard nuclear family (not a “broken home”, as it used to be called) we were also peripatetic. We lived with relatives in Massachusetts for most of my first few years, it seems, with a single unsuccessful foray to the Chicago area. The family story is that my father worked in a ukulele factory during that period. Why they left Massachusetts, how long they were in Illinois, and why they came back is something that I’ll probably never really understand. I’ve asked, but the stories I’ve gotten are vague, and the people who remember that time are mostly gone.
My father went to college on the G.I. Bill and got his degree soon after I was born. His first real job appears to have been as a schoolteacher in Vanceboro, Maine, a godforsaken place on the Canadian border, whose population in 1950 was 497. (That population had declined from a high of 870 in 1890, and has now declined to 102 as of 2020).
In the course of my childhood, we lived in the following places in Maine. (I’m using school years, since school records constitute most of my evidence.)
1952-1953: Vanceboro
1953-1955: Portland
1955-1958: Berwick
1958-1961: Newport
1961-1962: Limestone
(We left Maine for Lawrence, Massachusetts in December 1962. That starts an entirely new chapter in all of our lives, which I’m sure I’ll get to eventually.)
This list of where we lived has two striking features.
1) In the space of ten years, we lived in five communities. My father couldn’t keep a job.
2) These communities are all over the map of Maine, from Berwick in the far southwest to Limestone in the far northeast. Berwick and Limestone are 350 miles apart. (Maine is big.)
The point I want to make is that in 1958 or 1959, Stephen King moved to Durham, Maine, after living out of state for most of his eleven years. In 1958, I moved to Newport, Maine (about 80 miles from Durham) after living in Maine for most of my (almost) ten years. Who has the better claim to having had a Maine childhood?
Phil’s Blog 