Aside from serving 41 years on one of the nation’s highest courts with his chambers in Portland, Judge Frank M. Coffin was an eloquent orator, mentor to generations of lawyers and jurists, diplomat, author, Democratic political strategist and accomplished sculptor. His death on Monday leaves an unfillable hole in the legal community in Maine and throughout the nation.
Stories of his many achievements — as well as quirky remarks — will be recounted when his family, former clerks and other friends gather on Jan. 2 in Portland to share their memories at a celebration of his life.
One story likely to be retold is his account of a speech he gave in 1982 as president of the Examiner Club, a 120-year-old group of professional men. He arrived late, dressed in a frock coat and top hat, wearing false whiskers and pretending to be Edward Everett Hale, the 19th-century Massachusetts clergyman, writer and orator, bemused by Boston’s slow-moving traffic of horseless carriages but pressing his advocacy of a world court and world disarmament. When he concluded, left the room and returned as Frank Coffin in modern dress, fellow club members told him about witnessing the mysterious figure from the past.
His own life, like Edward Everett Hale’s, was devoted to public service — as a lawyer practicing in Lewiston; as a politician who worked with Sen. Edmund M. Muskie in the 1950s to revitalize Maine’s Democratic Party after 100 years of Republican domination; as a two-term congressman representing Maine’s 2nd District; as an unsuccessful nominee for governor; as a federal foreign aid administrator in Washington and Paris and finally as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st District. Sen. Muskie nominated him and President Lyndon Johnson appointed him in 1965. He was chief judge from 1972 to 1983, assumed senior status in 1989 and retired in 2006.
Throughout his long career, Judge Coffin worked to increase access to legal services by poor families. He developed the Frank M. Coffin Fellows Project administered by the Maine Bar Foundation, which has given young lawyers a two-year opportunity to represent low-income families.
For the past 17 years, he presided at a lecture series underwritten in his honor by his law clerks. Speakers have included U.S. Supreme court Justices William Brennan and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, with whom he carried on a frequent e-mail correspondence.
He recently finished writing a lengthy three-volume private memoir for his family about his life and many-faceted career. Ruth Coffin, his wife of 67 years, served as his editor.
He will be greatly missed by the many whose lives he touched.