The artist who brought Paul Bunyan to Bangor’s Main Street is determined to end the 31-foot tall lumberjack’s 56-year bout with loneliness.
J. Normand Martin, who designed the bearded, plaid-donning statue in the 1950s while a partner at Tom Cain Advertising in Hampden, is proposing to add Babe the Blue Ox alongside the Bunyan statue. He has remade an earlier Babe rendering to appear more friendly, but the city’s Commission on Cultural Development earlier this month denied a funding request from Martin to cover design expenses.
Still, Martin plans to forge ahead, and he’s hoping Babe the Blue Ox will occupy his perch next to his lumberjack friend by July 2016.
But in the interim, perhaps it’s time for the residents of Bangor to have a discussion that’s bigger than Babe — even bigger than Paul Bunyan. What icon do residents want to represent their city? In other words, what is Bangor to its residents and the residents of the Greater Bangor region, and what do they want Bangor to be?
In a July 2014 BDN OpEd, Bangor writer Hunter Smith eloquently summed up Bangor’s identity crisis: the challenge to live up to an extraordinary past, a love-hate relationship with the city among those who depend on it but prefer to keep to the countryside and the simultaneously conflicting and complementary development of big-box retail in one part of the city and the downtown and riverfront resurgence in another.
“Where the Penobscot River and the Kenduskeag Stream meet, they mix together and become indistinguishable, Maine’s largest estuary,” Smith writes. “At times it may look peaceful, but below the surface powerful forces are in a constant battle.”
Overlooking the river stands Paul Bunyan, an icon that sets Bangor apart and links it with a number of other cities. At least a half-dozen towns across the U.S. claim Paul Bunyan as their own, whether they actively claim Bunyan was born there — as Bangor does — or simply made his mark there — as is the case in Westwood, California.
Should Paul Bunyan be Bangor’s most recognizable icon?
The lumberjack statue is a powerful reminder of Bangor’s lumbering past. Today, though, there are only 120 logging equipment operators in Greater Bangor, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That doesn’t mean, however, that Paul Bunyan is obsolete and should no longer represent Bangor. If the city wanted its icon to reflect the most common profession of its residents, Bangor’s icon today would be some representation of “office and administrative support occupations,” the most common job category in the region, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
For some reason, that option, while reflective of what the Bangor area’s economy has become, doesn’t seem quite as inspiring as what Bangor already has — a display of sheer size, brute strength and self-sufficiency. The self-sufficient, homesteading spirit, indeed, is one of Maine’s — and Bangor’s — calling cards, then and now.
Paul Bunyan is a reminder of Bangor’s past, relevant to the present and an embodiment of the values Bangor will carry into the future. As the city changes, Bangor can keep Paul Bunyan relevant.
As Bangor considers whether Babe the Blue Ox should join Paul Bunyan, the debate should be about more than a statue; it should be a debate about how to bring the best features of the past forward to what Bangor wants to and should be.
