Writing Maine History: Every Day of the Year

by Joseph Owen

This enterprise is chock-full of dates.

Here’s one of them: November 25, 2019. That’s the day I realized I had been wearing my bathrobe for about forty straight hours, except for the time I spent sleeping. I get some of my best ideas while wearing my bathrobe. Come to think of it, I get some of my worst ones then, too.

Does This Day in Maine fall into either category? You be the judge. All I know is that on November 25, an effusively bathrobe-intensive day, my wife was out of town visiting her father, and I was trolling the internet with my feet surrounded by a dilapidated fortress of Maine-themed books as I tried to carry out a task that had seemed at first to be child’s play but turned out to be almost as hard as balancing the federal budget.

That task, one I made up for myself in consultation with Portland Press Herald metro editor John Richardson, a former colleague, was linked to Maine’s bicentennial celebration of having achieved statehood in 1820. I proposed to come up with at least one Maine-linked historical event for every day of the calendar in the year 2020, provide the Press Herald with a synopsis of that event for publication on the appropriate date online and in the newspaper, and make it available for use in the company’s other Maine daily newspapers—the Sun Journal, of Lewiston; the Kennebec Journal, of Augusta; the Morning Sentinel, of Waterville; and the Times Record, of Brunswick. What a perfect use, I thought, for the menagerie of random information about Maine that had been milling around in my brain for the past twenty years or so, much of it no more interrelated than an average group of passengers on the bus that my wife rides when she goes to see her father.

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