William L. ‘Chick’ Ciciotte of Topsham, a steadfast advocate for veterans and past commander of the American Legion Department of Maine, died Sunday.
Ciciotte was well-known throughout the midcoast region, and the state, for his work improving health care and other benefits for veterans.
Ciciotte joined the U.S. Air Force shortly after turning 17, and in 1957 moved briefly to Brunswick to work at the Air Force radar site at Brunswick Naval Air Station, the Times Record reported.
He served 32 years in the Air Force.
When he retired in 1970, he began working with and on behalf of veterans. He spent a significant amount of time lobbying for veterans at the Legislature’s Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee.
Rep. Louis Luchini, D-Ellsworth and co-chairman of the Legislature’s Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee, knew Ciciotte very well, and thought of him as a friend. Luchini said Tuesday that Ciciotte would joke with him about them both being of Italian heritage.
But when it came to veterans issues, he was “a passionate and tireless advocate” who “would make himself heard and get very worked up about something if he believed in it,” Lucchini said. During a 2012 hearing, Ciciotte said he had organized recognition ceremonies for more than 500 Maine veterans.
“He really was a fixture at the statehouse and especially in our committee room,” Luchini said, even as Ciciotte’s health began to fail.
When Adria Horn took over as director of the Bureau of Maine Veterans’ Affairs more than three years ago, she remembers feeling like the statehouse was unfamiliar territory, but then watching “this incredibly passionate person … doing circles around us.”
“It was heartwarming to see him, at a time when so few women served … he was really proud of me, and he didn’t even know me,” she said.
Aaron Chadbourne, a former senior policy advisor to Gov. Paul LePage, said than when he took the job in early 2015, he asked who he should speak to.
“They all told me to talk to Chick,” he said. “I said, ‘Who’s Chick?’ He’s like the mayor of the veterans community.”
Chadbourne said Ciciotte went out of his way to work with newly returning veterans during their transition back to this country — “vets that are hurt, angry, broken in some way, or need space or time. Chick would get very involved in helping them channel that energy.”
In 2015, when a Lewiston lawmaker proposed building cabins for homeless veterans on the grounds of the Veterans Affairs Administration’s medical campus at Togus, Ciciotte testified that many homeless veterans were not being counted, and that he believed there might be as many as 1,000 in Maine, the Sun Journal reported.
“Many of them are suffering from [post-traumatic stress disorder] and you will hear the public say, ‘They are a bunch of drunks and they are a bunch of druggies.’ Not so!” Ciciotte said, banging his fist on the podium. “They fought in a different kind of war than we other veterans did.”
In 2016, Ciciotte served as grand marshal of the Brunswick-Topsham Memorial Day parade.
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