ORONO, Maine — Cavan Hagerty told his fellow Bangor High School graduates Sunday during commencement that having the ceremony outside the Queen City for the first time anyone can remember was a sign of how hip Bangor has become.
“In fact, Bangor’s gotten so cool that the Class of 2016 was bumped out of the Cross [Insurance] Center for Cirque du Soleil,” he said to his graduating class, which numbered 270, and family and friends at the Alfond Arena ceremony.
It was announced in March that graduation would be held at Alfond Arena at the University of Maine because the final performance of OVO would not end until 5 p.m. and graduation started at 4 p.m. The first event held at the Cross Insurance Center after it was completed in 2013 was Bangor High’s graduation ceremony.
Allie Higgins, 19, of Bangor was in Orono on Sunday to see her younger sister Isabelle Higgins, 18, of Bangor graduate. The elder sister said she felt the Cross Insurance Center was a better venue.
“It’s nicer and more local and easier to get to,” Allie Higgins said from the Alfond bleacher seats.
But the facility, where the University of Maine holds its commencement ceremonies each year is the only venue capable of seating the 3,500 to 5,000 expected to attend Bangor High’s ceremony, Superintendent Betsy Webb said in March. She said then that there will be no additional cost to the department because of the switch.
Seats, except for those at the top of bleacher sections and the area behind the stage that was close, were filled Sunday.
Hagerty, whose speech was selected by a committee to be given at graduation, spoke lovingly of Bangor.
“No matter where life takes us, we’ll always have Bangor,” the student council president said. “Never forget that amazing sense of community we’ve all been afforded by growing up here.”
As Class President Nick Danby also addressed his fellow seniors. He urged them to embrace the societal and political changes their generation is in the midst of, no matter how difficult.
“But, change is everywhere,” he said. “It has always existed, yet, for the thousands of years of civilization, while we have always recognized that change is a good thing — for some reason we still naturally recoil at the thought of it. It seems like it is human nature to revel in the status quo. We cannot.”
Graduate Danby, whose father is Bangor Daily News cartoonist George Danby, even mentioned a statement Maine’s governor made to him at Boys State last year.
“Gov. Lepage told me that he wanted my father, the political cartoonist for the Bangor Daily News, to be shot, erased from the panel. So, when I said thanks for being here dad earlier, I didn’t mean thanks for just showing up, I meant, thanks for ducking.”
The governor later apologized for the remark.
It was a special graduation for Bangor High Principal Paul Butler.
“This is the last class I will have any tether to from when I was an elementary school principal,” he said. “Fairmount graduates, you know who you are.”
Fairmount serves students in grades 4 and 5 on Bangor’s west side.
Hagerty will attend the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., in the fall. Nick Danby will attend Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Both plan to study political science.