List of people from Bangor, Maine

The following list includes notable people who were born or have lived in Bangor, Maine.

Architects and engineers

• Charles G. Bryant (1803–1858), Maine's first architect, lived and practiced in Bangor in the 1830s and designed Mt. Hope Cemetery, the second garden cemetery in the United States. Bryant later moved to Texas (Galveston) and became the first architect in that state, where, joining the Texas Rangers, he was eventually killed and scalped by Apache Indians.^[1] Other prominent Bangor architects, many of whose buildings survive in the city and nearby towns, included Calvin Ryder, Benjamin S. Deane, George W. Orff, C. Parker Crowell, and Wilfred E. Mansur.^[2]
• Edward Austin Kent (1854–1912) became a leading architect in Buffalo, New York and three-time president of the American Institute of Architects. He perished aboard the RMS Titanic when the ship struck an iceberg and sank on April 15, 1912.^[3]
• Charles Davis Jameson, was an engineer who taught at MIT. He subsequently went to China and became Chief Consulting Engineer and Architect to the Imperial Chinese Government (1895–1918). He planned important hydraulics projects and witnessed the Boxer Rebellion
• Francis Clergue, born in neighboring Brewer, was a lawyer. He oversaw one of the most ambitious engineering projects in North America, the development of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan and Ontario as a major hydropower and industrial center in the 1890s–1900s. Before that Clergue had organized the Bangor Street Railway (the first electric railway in Maine) and the Bangor Waterworks, and had tried and failed to build a railroad across Persia and a waterworks in its capital, Tehran.^[4]

Artists

Artist Waldo Peirce (left), with brother and art-historian Hayford Peirce (right) and wives, before a night at the Bangor Opera in the 1930s

• Waldo Peirce was a painter and bohemian. He was a confidante of Ernest Hemingway and was from a prominent Bangor family.
• Jeremiah Pearson Hardy (1800–1887) was a portrait painter. He apprenticed under Samuel F.B. Morse, lived and worked in Bangor for most of his career, sustained largely by the patronage of lumber barons.^[5] His children Anna Eliza Hardy and Francis Willard Hardy, and sister Mary Ann Hardy, were also part of a 19th-century circle of Bangor painters. Other members of this circle included Florence Whitney Jennison and Isabel Graham Eaton, who was also an author.^[6]
• Walter Franklin Lansil studied first under Hardy, and then at the Académie Julian in Paris. He established a studio in Boston and became a celebrated landscape and marine artist.
• Frederic Porter Vinton (1846–1911) left Bangor at age 14 for Boston, where he became that city's most sought-after portrait painter—producing over 300 canvases—and one of the original members of the Boston School. He studied in Munich and with Leon Bonnat in Paris, as well as with William Morris Hunt.
• Helena Wood Smith (1865–1914), a member of the artists' colony at Carmel-by-the-Sea, California was murdered there by her lover, Japanese photographer George Kodani. She was the sister of novelist Ruel Perley Smith^[7]
• Echo Eggebrecht, a painter from New York, is also a Bangor native.

Athletes

• Bangor is the home of Philadelphia Phillies hitter Matt Stairs (though Stairs is a native of New Brunswick, Canada). Major League baseball player Matt Kinney of the Minnesota Twins, Milwaukee Brewers, Kansas City Royals and now Japan's Seibu Lions is also a native, as is Jon DiSalvatore, of the National Hockey League (now with the Minnesota Wild). Fictional character Julie "The Cat" Gaffney (played by actress Colombe Jacobsen) from the Mighty Ducks movies, grew up in Bangor, according to a voice-over biography in D2: The Mighty Ducks.
• Former Major League baseball players born in Bangor include Bobby Messenger (1901–1964) of the Chicago White Sox and St. Louis Browns; Jack Sharrott (1869–1927) of the New York Giants and Philadelphia Phillies; and Pat O'Connell (1861–1943) of the Baltimore Orioles.
• Former National Basketball Association player Jeff Turner of the New Jersey Nets and Orlando Magic was born in Bangor. He also won a gold medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games as a member of the U.S. Basketball Team.
• Former National Football League player Al Harris (b. 1956) of the Chicago Bears and Philadelphia Eagles comes from Bangor. Matthew Mulligan of the New England Patriots was also born there.
• Toronto Blue Jays third base coach Brian Butterfield was born in Bangor, as was Clemson University baseball coach Jack Leggett and Ohio Wesleyan University football coach Mike Hollway.
• Professional mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter Marcus Davis and his Team Irish currently call Bangor their home.
• Kevin Mahaney of Bangor won a silver medal in sailing at the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games, and went on to reach the finals of the America's Cup trials with his Bangor-based PACT-95 team.^[8]
• Cross-country biking champion Adam Craig was born in Bangor and grew up in nearby Corinth, Maine. He was a member of the U.S. Biking Team at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games
• Jack McAuliffe, World Lightweight Boxing Champion in the 1880s-90s and known as "The Napoleon of the Ring", learned to fight growing up as a child in a tough Bangor neighborhood. He retired with an unbeaten record. Another local boxer, Michael Daley, became Lightweight Boxing Champion of New England, but was arrested in Bangor in 1903 for robbing a man at a local hotel.
• In the 1890s, Harry Orman Robinson of Bangor was Head Coach of the University of Texas football team, the Texas Longhorns, and before that the University of Missouri team, the Missouri Tigers. In the same decade, Bangor-born Frank Barbour was Head Coach of the University of Michigan team, the Michigan Wolverines, after playing as quarterback of the national champion Yale University team of 1891.
• Norman Cahners of Bangor qualified for the 1936 Olympic Team trials in track & field, but boycotted the event with Harvard track team-mate Milton Green, because the games were to take place in Nazi Germany. Cahners and Green were Jewish. Cahners is a member of the Harvard Varsity Athletic Club Hall of Fame.^[9] He went on to build one of the largest publishing empires in America.^[10]
• Bangor-born swimmer Mary Freeman competed in the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki, Finland. She later became the sister-in-law of Grace Kelly

Authors

Stephen King's house

• The most famous Bangor resident is undoubtedly Stephen King, the author best known for his horror-themed stories, novels, and movies. His wife, Tabitha Spruce-King, is also a writer, as are sons Joseph Hillstrom King (aka Joe Hill) and Owen King. The family donates a substantial amount of money to local libraries and hospitals and has funded a baseball stadium, Mansfield Stadium (home to the Senior League World Series), and the Beth Pancoe Aquatic Center, both on the grounds of Hayford Park, for the citizens (especially the children) of the city. King's fictional town, Derry, Maine, shares many points of correspondence with Bangor—the rivers, the Paul Bunyan Statue, the Thomas Hill Standpipe, the hospital—but is always referred to as separate from Bangor. King also features Bangor in many of his stories, such as The Langoliers and Storm of the Century. King owns radio stations WKIT, WZON, and WZLO.
• Hayford Peirce, the science-fiction writer and nephew of Waldo Peirce, is likewise a Bangor native, as is sci-fi author and cartoonist Alexis A. Gilliland. Other contemporary authors from Bangor include novelists Mameve Medwed, Tim Sullivan, Don J. Snyder, Christina Baker Kline, Christopher Willard; poet David Baker, and children's book authors Susan Lubner and Bruce McMillan.
• Bangor had strong links to Transcendentalism through Frederic Henry Hedge, minister of the Congregational Church there in the 1830s. His circle, which included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, met as "Hedge's Club" or the Transcendental Club whenever Hedge returned to his native Cambridge, Massachusetts. Emerson had previously lectured in Bangor and Hedge took the position here on his advice.^[11] Thoreau visited Bangor a number of times (his aunt and cousins also lived here) and describes the city in his book The Maine Woods.
• Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Owen Davis (1874–1956) lived in Bangor until he was 15, and his prize-winning play Icebound (1923) is set in neighboring Veazie. Davis wrote between 200 and 300 plays, as well as radio and film scripts, and two autobiographies. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was president of the Author's League of America and the American Dramatist's Guild.^[12]
• Christine Goutiere Weston (1904–1989), author of ten novels, more than thirty short stories, and two non-fiction books (about Ceylon and Afghanistan), lived the latter part of her life in Bangor. She had been born in India and much of her fiction was set there.^[13]
• Katya Alpert Gilden (1919–1991) of Bangor co-authored with her husband Bert Gilden the best-selling 1965 novel Hurry Sundown, which became an Otto Preminger film in 1967.
• Blanche Willis Howard, a best-selling late 19th-century novelist, was born and raised in Bangor. She eventually moved to Stuttgart, Germany, and married the court physician to King Charles I of Württemberg, thus becoming the Baroness von Teuffel.
• Eugene T. Sawyer, the "Prince of Dime Novelists", was born and raised in Bangor. In a 1902 interview, he claimed to have authored 75 examples of that genre, mostly for the Nick Carter series, once producing a 60,000 word novel in two days. His major innovation was to "begin the plot with the first word", i.e. "We will have the money, or she shall die!"^[14]
• Laura Curtis Bullard, whose family started a successful patent medicine business in Bangor in the 1830s, eventually moved to Brooklyn and became a proto-feminist novelist and editor. She was a patron and confidante of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and took over editorship of their newspaper The Revolution when it experienced financial difficulties.
• Bangor-born Henry Payson Dowst (1872–1921) was a novelist and short-story writer, and saw a number of his stories made into silent films. One was The Dancin' Fool (1920) starring Wallace Reid. He spent his later life in a New York advertising agency, but was buried in Bangor.
• Ruel Perley Smith (1869–1937), born in Bangor, was the author of the Rival Campers series of boy's book in the early 20th century. His regular job was as Night and Sunday Editor of the New York World newspaper.^[15]
• Like Smith, Frederick H. Costello (1851–1921) was a nationally-successful writer of adventure novels for young adults, who for 30 years held a day-job as local (Bangor) manager of the R.G. Dunn credit reporting company.
• Clarine Coffin Grenfell (1910–2004), a poet and author, was born and raised in Bangor.
• Mabel Fuller Blodgett wrote the novel At the Queen's Mercy when she was 19 years old.^[16]
• George Savary Wasson, a painter and author of four novels, lived and worked in Bangor in the early 20th century.
• Tim Sullivan, a science fiction author, was born and raised in Bangor.

Civil servants

• William Hammatt Davis of Bangor, brother of playwright Owen Davis, served as Chairman of the War Labor Board under Franklin Roosevelt, where his job was keeping industrial peace between management and labor. He was appointed US Economic Stabilizer at the end of the war. He also helped draft the National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act) of 1935, which gave labor unions the right to organize.
• Artemus E. Weatherbee (d. 1995) of Bangor was an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury (1959–70) and thereafter U.S. Director of the Asian Development Bank with the rank of Ambassador.
• Jay Stone of Bangor was Chief Clerk of the War Department in the 1920s.

Clergymen and missionaries

Rev. Jehudi Ashmun, a founder of Liberia

• The Bangor Theological Seminary produced a number of influential ministers, missionaries, and scholars in the 19th century. The seminary's first professor and director, Jehudi Ashmun later led a group of 32 freed slaves to the American Colonization Society's African colony in Liberia in 1822, and is considered one of the founders of that nation.^[17] Cyrus Hamlin, who graduated from the seminary in 1837, was the founder and first president of Robert College in Istanbul, Turkey, and later president of Middlebury College (1880–85) in Vermont.^[18] Seminarian Daniel Dole (1808–78) left Bangor in 1839 to establish one of the earliest Protestant missions in Hawaii, and ended up founding a local dynasty. His son Sanford B. Dole led the successful coup d'état against the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1893, becoming the first and only President of the Republic of Hawaii and, later, the first American territorial governor. Daniel's nephew James Drummond Dole became the "Pineapple King"^[19]
• Father John Bapst (1815–1887) a Swiss-born member of the Jesuit order, was sent to Old Town, Maine in the late 1840s to minister to the Catholic Penobscot tribe. Soon he was conducting a roving ministry to 33 Maine towns, largely as a result of Irish-Catholic immigration. In 1851 he was embroiled in a religious controversy over grammar school education in Ellsworth, Maine, and was brutalized, robbed, and tarred and feathered by a Protestant mob, inspired by the Know-Nothing Party, which was popular in coastal Maine. He fled to Bangor, where a large Irish-Catholic community was gathering, and where members of the local elite presented him with a new watch, his previous one having been stolen in Ellsworth. Bapst stayed in Bangor until 1859, overseeing the construction of the large brick St. John's Catholic Church in 1855.^[20] He left in 1860 to become the first rector of Boston College. Later he became superintendent of the Jesuit order in New York and Canada, and died in Baltimore, Maryland. The present John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor, formerly Catholic but now non-sectarian, is named for him.^[21]
• Bangor Methodist Minister Benjamin Franklin Tefft became president of Genesee College in New York (the nucleus of the later Syracuse University), and, in 1862, U.S. Consul in Stockholm and acting Minister (Ambassador) to Sweden^[22] Congregational minister and Bangor Theological Seminary professor John Russell Herrick later became president of Pacific University in Oregon (1880–83), and the University of South Dakota (1885–87). Rev. Charles Carroll Everett, pastor of the Bangor Unitarian Church 1859-69,Tlater became a noted philosopher of religion and dean of the Harvard Divinity School.
• Rev. Dana W. Bartlett of Bangor moved to Los Angeles in 1896, founded a settlement house (the Bethlehem Institute) and became a major figure in the local progressive and City Beautiful movements. He is an honoree in the California Social Work Hall of Distinction.
• Bangor-born Edward C. O'Leary was Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Maine in the 1970s-80s.
• Joseph Osgood Barrett (1823–1898), born in Bangor, was a Universalist minister who became a prominent spiritualist and spirit medium in Illinois and Wisconsin. He was also a lecturer and author of books on spiritualism, and editor of the Chicago-based newspaper The Spiritual Republic. He became known as an advocate of women's rights with the publication of his book Social Freedom; Marriage: As It Is and As It Should Be in 1873.^[23]
• Elisabeth Anthony Dexter was European director of the Unitarian Service Committee during World War II, running a programme in neutral Lisbon, Portugal to assist Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe.

Defendants and detainees

• Prescott Freese Dennett of Bangor was one of 30 people indicted for sedition and tried in Washington in 1944. Dennett stood accused of helping a German agent, George Sylvester Viereck distribute propaganda designed to keep the U.S. out of the war in Europe. The case ended in a mistrial.
• Howard E. Penley of Bangor and Dorchester, Massachusetts was arrested and arraigned in Bangor on Dec. 23, 1943 for refusing to register for the draft. He was the New England District Secretary of the Socialist Party of America and was opposed to war on political and religious grounds.

Diplomats

Congressman, diplomat, and Hawaiian government official Elisha Hunt Allen with wife Mary

• Patrick Duddy of Bangor was the U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela in the Bush administration. He was temporarily expelled from the country in 2008 by President Hugo Chávez in a dispute over an alleged American coup plot.
• Other diplomats who were born or lived in Bangor include Robert Newbegin II, U.S. Ambassador to Honduras (1958) and Haiti (1960–61); Charles Stetson Wilson, U.S. Ambassador to Bulgaria (1921–28); Romania (1928), and Yugoslavia (1933); William P. Snow, U.S. Ambassador to Burma (1959–61) and Paraguay (1961–67); Chester E. Norris, U.S. Ambassador to Equatorial Guinea (1988–91); Albert G. Jewett, U.S. Chargé d'affaires to Peru (1845–47);Gorham Parks, U.S. Consul in Rio de Janeiro (1845–49); Wyman Bradbury Seavy Moor, U.S. Consul-General to Canada (1857–61); and Aaron Young, Jr., U.S. Consul in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil (1863–73), who was formerly Maine's State Botanist and Secretary of the Bangor Natural History Society. Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln's Vice President and Bangor politician, served as U.S. Ambassador to Spain later in his career.
• While former Maine Governor Edward Kent was U.S. Consul in Rio de Janeiro 1849–53, he lost two of his three children to yellow fever. His wife died the year they returned to Bangor, and his surviving child soon after.
• Bangor politician Elisha Hunt Allen served as U.S. Consul to the Kingdom of Hawaii 1850–56, and then joined the Hawaiian government as Chancellor and Chief Justice 1857–76. In that capacity he accompanied King Kalakaua on his first and only trip to the United States in 1874. Allen returned to Washington as Ambassador of the Kingdom of Hawaii to the United States, and died on the job during a White House diplomatic reception in 1883. Allen's son, William Fessenden Allen, who was born in Bangor, also served in the government of Hawaii, both before and after the Kingdom became an American territory.

Inventors

John B. Curtis, the inventor of chewing gum

• Commercial Chewing gum was invented in Bangor in 1848 by John B. Curtis, who marketed his product as "State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum".^[24] He later opened a successful gum factory in Portland, Maine. Coincidentally, Bangor-born Frank Barbour, who became a director (and later Chairman of the Board) of the Beech-Nut Packing Company, would launch that company's famous chewing gum line in 1910.

The MOS 6502 Microprocessor, designed by Chuck Peddle in 1975

• Col. Paul E. Watson of Bangor, chief engineer of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, headed the team that built the army's first long-range radar in 1936–37. This was the radar deployed in Hawaii at the time of the Pearl Harbor Attack. The Army's radar laboratory was named "Watson Laboratories" after his death, and became the kernal of the present USAF Rome Laboratory.^[25]
• Chuck Peddle, who developed the MOS 6502 microprocessor in 1975, was born in Bangor in 1937.
• Bangor-born Melville Sewell Bagley invented an aperitif named Hesperidina, using the peels of bitter oranges, which became the national liquor of Argentina. It is still produced, with his image on every bottle.

Journalists

• Margherita Arlina Hamm, who spent part of her childhood in Bangor, was a pioneering female journalist who covered the Sino-Japanese War and Spanish–American War for New York newspapers, sometimes from the front lines. She was also a prolific author of popular non-fiction books. A suffragette, she was nonetheless a defender of American imperialism, chairing the pro-war "Woman's Congress of Patriotism and Independence" and writing an heroic biography of Admiral George Dewey.^[26]
• Ralph W. 'Bud' Leavitt Jr. was a longtime columnist and editor for The Bangor Daily News. Born in Old Town, Maine, Leavitt became a cub reporter at The Bangor Daily Commercial at age 17 in 1934. Following the Second World War, Leavitt signed on with The News, where he filed, during the course of his career, 13,104 columns devoted to the outdoors, and where he served for many years as executive sports editor. Leavitt also hosted two long-running TV shows about the outdoors on Maine television.
• Kate Snow, Born in Banger on June 10, 1969.

Judges

• Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Melville Weston Fuller (who served 1888–1910) read law in Bangor with his two uncles after graduating from Bowdoin College in 1853. He was admitted to the bar in Bangor in 1855.
• Edward Kent, Jr., son of Bangor Mayor, Maine Governor, and Maine Supreme Judicial Court Justice Edward Kent, was appointed by his Harvard classmate Theodore Roosevelt as Chief Justice of the Arizona Territory Supreme Court, 1902–1912. He delivered a landmark ruling on water rights (the Kent Decree of 1910)
• Edward Matthew Curran, who served as Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia (1966–1971) was born in Bangor. As a Federal judge in 1949 he presided over the treason trial of Mildred Gillars (aka Axis Sally), who was coincidentally born in Portland.
• Robert Murray served as First District Judge and state legislator

Physicians and nurses

• Elliott Carr Cutler (1888–1947), son of a Bangor lumber merchant,^[27] became Chairman of the Dept. of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and a pioneer in cardiac surgery, inventing a number of important techniques and publishing over 200 papers. He was elected President of the American Surgical Association, and later became surgeon-in-chief at Brigham Hospital in Boston. During the Second World War he was Chief Surgical Consultant in the European Theatre of Operations with the rank of Brigadier General. Another Bangor-born Harvard Medical School professor, Frederick T. Lord, was a pioneer in the use of serum to treat pneumonia, and was elected President of the American Association of Thoracic Surgery.
• Charlotte Blake Brown (1846–1904) of Bangor was a pioneering female physician who co-founded what became Children's Hospital of San Francisco in 1878, with an all-female staff and board of directors. In 1880 she also founded the first nursing school in the American West. Children's Hospital merged with another institution to become California Pacific Medical Center in 1991.
• Harrison J. Hunt of Bangor was surgeon on the Crocker Land Expedition to the Arctic in 1913–1917, and the first to return to civilization with news of his fellow explorers, who had been trapped in the ice for four years. Hunt escaped after a grueling four-month dog-sled journey accompanied by six Inuit. He spent the rest of his career working at the Eastern Maine Hospital in Bangor, and authored the book North to the Horizon: Arctic Doctor and Hunter, 1913–1917 (Camden, Me: 1930). He is credited with finding the major biological specimens returned by the expedition—eggs of the red knot, which established its migration pattern between Europe and northern Greenland.^[28]
• Mabel Sine Wadsworth (1910-2006), birth control activist^[29]

Politicos

• Bangor-born Joseph Homan Manley, a protege and close associate of presidential candidate James G. Blaine, was Chairman of the National Executive Committee of the Republican Party in the 1890s, and Maine's "political boss".

Scholars

• The "Father of American Sociology", Albion Woodbury Small, attended grade-school in Bangor. He was the first American professor of sociology, founder of the first dept. of sociology (at the University of Chicago), edited the discipline's first American journal, and was President of the American Sociological Society (1912–13).^[30]
• Edith Lesley, founder of Lesley University in Massachusetts, grew up in Bangor.
• University of Maine psychologist Doris Twitchell Allen (1901–2002), who was born in nearby Old Town, and practiced at the Bangor Mental Health Institute in the 1970s, founded the Children's International Summer Villages. She was also President of the International Council of Psychologists.^[31]
• John Irwin Hutchinson (1867–1935) of Bangor became a noted Professor of Mathematics at Cornell University, and Vice President of the American Mathematical Society.
• Robert Winslow Gordon of Bangor became the first Director of the Archives of the American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. In the 1910s–1930s he was arguably the leading authority on this genre of music, personally recorded nearly a thousand folk songs and transcribing the lyrics of 10,000 more.
• William D. Williamson, a Brown University-educated Bangor lawyer who became the second Governor of Maine, was also the state's first historian, producing a two-volume History of the State of Maine as early as 1832. It remained the standard reference throughout the 19th century.^[32]
• Bangor-born Egyptologist Sarah Parcak of the University of Alabama uses satellite imaging. An earlier archaeologist from Bangor, Henry Williamson Haynes, also did field-work in Egypt.
• Winfield Scott Chaplin (b. 1847), who grew up in Bangor, became professor of civil engineering at the Imperial University (now Tokyo University) in Japan, and was awarded the Imperial Order of Meiji. He was later appointed Dean of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, and eventually Chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis^[33]
• Edwin Young, who graduated from Bangor High School in 1935, became Dean of the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin and President of the University of Maine. He was an economist and expert on international labor relations.^[34]
• Ella Boyce Kirk (d. 1930) became Superintendent of Schools in Pittsburgh, one of the first woman to hold that office in an American city.

Show business people

• Bangor is the birthplace of comedian/actor Charles Rocket (1949–2005), who was a cast member on Saturday Night Live, and appeared in more than eighty other television shows and films, including Touched by an Angel, Miami Vice, and Star Trek: Voyager.
• Sportscaster Gary Thorne was also born here and once served as an assistant district attorney in the city.
• Bangor-native Chris Greeley was featured in 1993 as Cosmopolitan magazine's Bachelor-of-the-Month. As a result, he appeared on multiple TV shows, including ones hosted by John Tesh and Leeza Gibbons, in addition to Carnie Wilson and Sally Jesse Raphael. Greeley also served four terms in the Maine Legislature.
• Actor Wayne Maunder, who played George Armstrong Custer in the series Custer on ABC in 1967, and co-starred with Andrew Duggan, James Stacy, and Paul Brinegar on CBS's Lancer western series, was reared in Bangor though born in New Brunswick, Canada.
• Actress Stephanie Niznik of the television series Everwood and the film Star Trek: Insurrection was also reared in Bangor.^[35]
• Character actor Everett Glass (1891–1966) was born in Bangor. He appeared in more than eighty films and television shows from the 1940s through the 1960s, including Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and episodes of Superman, Lassie, and Perry Mason.^[36]
• Bangorian Leonard Horn (1926–1975) directed episodes of 34 prime-time television series and a number of made-for-TV movies between 1959 and 1975, including Mission: Impossible, Mannix, It Takes a Thief, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Outer Limits, and Lost in Space.^[37]
• Ralph Sipperly (ca.1890–1928) appeared in ten films between 1923 and 1932, most of them silent, including the Academy Award winning Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans.^[38] He died in Bangor and is buried at Mount Hope Cemetery
• Comedian Ed Wynn once ran out of money in Bangor and took a job playing piano in a brothel.^[39]
• Actress Myrna Fahey (1933–1973), who was born in nearby Carmel, is buried at Mt. Pleasant Cemetery in Bangor. From the 1950s to the 1970s she appeared in more than forty films and television shows, including House of Usher (1960) where she co-starred with Vincent Price, and episodes of such series as Zorro, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Perry Mason, Batman, and The Time Tunnel. She dated Joe DiMaggio after his divorce from Marilyn Monroe.^[40]
• Comic stage actor Richard Golden (1854–1909), who was called by one turn-of-the-century theatre critic "the best character actor in America" is buried at Bangor's Mount Hope Cemetery^[41] His wife and partner Dora Wiley, "The Sweet Singer of Maine" was the original prima donna of the Boston Opera Company.
• Broadway actor Eugene A. Eberle (1840–1917) made his debut as Paris in a Bangor production of Romeo and Juliette.^[42] He played the gravedigger in Edwin Booth's Hamlet in 1864-65.^[43] By the early 1900s he was in the touring company of acclaimed actor Otis Skinner.^[44]
• Eric Saindon of Bangor was visual effects supervisor for the films King Kong and Night at the Museum, and a key member of the visual effects team of I, Robot and The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. He is a three-time winner of the Visual Effects Society Award.^[45] A second visual effects man from Bangor, Christopher Mills, has contributed to such films as Evan Almighty, The Golden Compass, and Night at the Museum^[46]
• Comedian Bob Marley, born and raised in Bangor, has appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien as well as Comedy Central and cult film "The Boondock Saints".

Singers, musicians and songwriters

Singer-songwriter Howie Day

• Singer-songwriter Howie Day, who recorded the hit "Collide", was born in Bangor, and got his start playing local clubs.
• Country singer Dick Curless, who recorded the 1965 hit Tombstone Every Mile, also lived there.
• George Frederick Root (1820–95), a noted American Civil War era composer of songs such as The Battle Cry of Freedom, lived in Bangor before becoming a successful music publisher in Chicago.
• R. B. Hall, conductor of the Bangor Band, became an internationally-famous composer of marches. His 'Death or Glory' remains a march classic in the UK and Commonwealth counties.
• John Wheeler Tufts (1825–1906), a Leipzig-trained musician who early in his career was an organist and composer in Bangor, eventually co-authored the Normal Music Course (1883), which revolutionized music training in American public schools. John Edgar Gould (1820–75), and Daniel H. Mansfield (1810–1855), were two other local composers/arrangers whose songs were published nationally in the 19th century.^[47]
• The celebrated composer (and collector of folk songs) Norman Cazden, who was a victim of McCarthyism in the 1950s, taught at the nearby University of Maine from 1969 and died in Bangor in 1980
• Berlin-born Werner Torkanowsky, director of the New Orleans Symphony Orchestra, came to Bangor in 1981 to direct the Bangor Symphony and did so until his death in 1992.
• Kay Gardner (1941–2002), flutist and pioneering composer of 'healing music' lived and died in Bangor.

Soldiers and sailors

Charles Boutelle

• Maj. Gen. Joshua Chamberlain, a hero of the Battle of Gettysburg who also accepted the surrender of General Lee's Army at Appomattox, was born in the neighboring city of Brewer but studied at the Bangor Theological Seminary. The bridge connecting the two cities is named for him. Chamberlain, a professor at Bowdoin College when the war began, and later its president, could read seven foreign languages. He was also elected Governor of Maine, as was another Civil War general from Bangor, Harris Merrill Plaisted. Cyrus Hamlin, who commanded a regiment of African-American troops, and Charles Hamlin, both sons of Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, also became generals in the Civil War. Other Bangorians who achieved a general's rank in the same conflict included Edward Hatch, who commanded the cavalry division of Grant's Army of the Tennessee; Augustus B. Farnham, Chief of Staff of the Third Division, who was severely wounded; Charles W. Roberts; George Varney; John F. Appleton; Daniel White, and Cornelius G. Attwood. Col. Daniel Chaplin, who died in battle, was posthumously made a Maj. General. Brig. Gen. George Foster Shepley became the military governor of Louisiana, and later of Richmond, Virginia, the former Confederate capitol.
• Naval Lt. Charles A. Boutelle accepted the surrender of the Confederate fleet after the Battle of Mobile Bay, where he commanded an ironclad. Another Bangor sailor, Thomas Taylor received the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery in the same battle. Boutelle became a long-serving U.S. Congressman and proponent of American naval power. Boutelle Ave. in Bangor is named for him.
• Vice Adm. Carl Frederick Holden of Bangor began World War II as executive officer of the battleship USS Pennsylvania during the attack on Pearl Harbor. He became the first captain of the battleship USS New Jersey, and ended the war as a Rear Adm. commanding Cruiser Division Pacific. He was on the deck of the USS Missouri to witness the Japanese surrender in 1945.
• Lt. Gen. Donald Norton Yates of Bangor helped select June 6, 1944 as the date for D-Day, the Allied invasion of Europe, in his capacity as chief meteorologist on General Dwight D. Eisenhower's staff. He chose well—it turned out to be the only day that month the invasion could have been successfully launched—and was subsequently decorated by three governments. He went on to become the chief meteorologist of the U.S. Air Force, Commander of the Air Force Missile Test Center at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, and retired as Deputy Director of Defence Research and Engineering in the Pentagon.^[48]
• Maj. Gen. Elmer P. Yates, an early proponent of nuclear power in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Other Bangorians who have risen to flag rank in the armed services include Lt. Gen. Walter F. Ulmer, former Commandant of Cadets at West Point and commander of the III Corps and Fort Hood; Rear Adm. George Adams Bright, surgeon and Medical Director of the Naval Hospital in Washington, D.C.
• Molly Kool (1916–2009) the first registered female sea captain in North America, spent the last years of her life in Bangor.

Statesmen

Cohen and President Clinton at The Pentagon, September 1997.

• Bangor is the hometown of Hannibal Hamlin, who served as Abraham Lincoln's first Vice President, and was a strong opponent of slavery. His statue stands in a downtown park, and his house is on the National Register of Historic Places. His daughter and son were present in Ford's Theatre the night Lincoln was shot. Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury, William P. Fessenden, practiced law in Bangor in the early 1830s.^[49]
• William Cohen, former U.S. Senator and United States Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton, is a Bangor native. A local middle school is named in his honor.
• Current U.S. Senator Susan Collins lives in Bangor, and current Maine Governor Paul LePage attended college there.
• Sixteen citizens of Bangor have served as U.S. Congressmen: Francis Carr (1812–13); James Carr (1815–17); William D. Williamson (1821–23); Gorham Parks (1833–37); Elisha Hunt Allen (1841–43); Charles Stetson (1849–51); John A. Peters (1822–1904); Samuel F. Hersey (1873–75); Harris M. Plaisted (1875–77); George W. Ladd (1879–1883); Charles A. Boutelle (1882–1901); Donald F. Snow (1929–1933); John G. Utterback (1933–35); Frank Fellows (1941–51); John R. McKernan (1983–87); and John Baldacci (1995–2003). Four of them (Williamson, Plaisted, McKernan, and Baldacci) became Governors of Maine. Boutelle was Chairman of the House Committee on Naval Affairs during the building of the Great White Fleet. Hersey willed his estate to the City of Bangor, which used it to found the Bangor Public Library in 1883. Snow was sentenced to two years in prison for embezzlement in 1935, but was pardoned a few months later.
• Five-term state legislator, author and attorney Sean Faircloth as of 2016 is serving as mayor of Bangor. Faircloth has represented the Richard Dawkins Foundation and has served as the Executive Director of the Secular Coalition for America from 2009-2011.
• Twelve U.S. Congressmen from other states were either born in Bangor or formerly lived there, namely Abner Taylor (Illinois), Orrin Larrabee Miller (Kansas), Donald C. McRuer (California), Mark Trafton (Massachusetts), Jack Backman (Massachusetts), Daniel T. Jewett (Missouri), David Augustus Boody (New York, and Mayor of Brooklyn), Alpheus Felch (Michigan), and Loren Fletcher, Solomon Comstock, William D. Washburn, and Frederick Stevens (all Minnesota). Dorilus Morrison, the first mayor of Minneapolis, was a Bangor lumber merchant in the 1840s.^[50] Amos Curry became the Reconstruction-era sheriff of Shelby County, Tennessee (Memphis).^[51]
• The vice presidential candidate of the Green Party in the 2004 election, Patricia LaMarche was raised in Bangor. The first African-American elected to the Maine State Legislature was Bangor-born Gerald E. Talbot, who served 1972–78.
• Bangor elected the only member of the Spiritualist religion known to have achieved statewide office in the United States: attorney Mark Alton Barwise, who served in the Maine House of Representatives, and then the Maine State Senate, in 1921–26. Barwise was a trustee (and senior counsel) of the National Spiritualist Association and Curator of its Bureau of Phenomenal Evidence. He also wrote prolifically on Spiritualism.^[52]

Other

• Bettina Brown Gorton, the wife of Australian Prime Minister Sir John Gorton (who served 1968–71) was from Bangor and graduated from Bangor High School. She was the only wife of an Australian Prime Minister to have been foreign-born until Annita van Iersel, wife of Paul Keating (who served 1991–96). She became Lady Gorton when her husband was knighted in 1977
• Beer baroness and conservative political donor Holland "Holly" Hanson Coors (1920–2009) was born in Bangor. The ex-wife of Joseph Coors, Colorado brewer and founder of the Heritage Foundation, Holly Coors sat on that organization's board of trustees.

References