Scrappy Maine town manager was a breed unto himself

Fifty years ago, the freshman town manager of Old Orchard Beach angered a state official over the way he was managing a government handout of job-creation money.

When a reporter quizzed Jerome Plante about the controversy he wasn’t just mad.

He was hurt. How dare you?

“I thought you were on my side,” Plante said matter-of-factly.

That was Jerome G. Plante, a true Maine original who lived a hardscrabble life as a kid but never lost the twinkle in his eyes as a grown man.

Plante was bilingual. He was able to banter in French with not only the local Franco-Americans but with the Canadian tourists who would flood his beach town every summer.

He lived for 90 tough, exciting, challenging, humorous years. Plante died at his home, surrounded by his huge family.

Plante, a Waterville native, was only ten years old when he lost his father.

His mother remarried and moved the family to Biddeford, then to Old Orchard.

He graduated from Old Orchard High and was its senior class president.

Plante never really ever left the Biddeford/Saco area except when he went in the service and to college.

He became a savvy politician. He was a charmer. He knew how to connive.

Plante did all kinds of work in his life, including teaching at a school. He was a survivor and did what he had to do to support his family.

But it was his 15 tumultuous years managing the town with seedy bars, honky-tonk arcades, pizza by the slice and fried dough on the edge of endless miles of a breathtakingly white sandy beach that most will remember him for.

Running a town that sleeps in winter and in celebration breaks out of slumber in summer is a balancing act of proportion.

Much akin to the movie “Jaws,” a shark scare one summer many years ago meant Plante had to tamp down tourist fears with disdain for anyone sober enough to think there might actually be a great white lurking just off shore.

In a beach town with an economy that would shrivel up and die without tourist dollars, a shark sighting can be worse than a shark bite.

When Plante was asked what kind of shark it might be, he was and curt and unamused. “Let me check my book of fishies,” he said dismissively, trying to change the subject.

In the 1980s Plante somehow finagled the owner of a AAA minor-league baseball team to call Old Orchard Beach home. Plante convinced the town council and voters to build a baseball stadium for the Maine Guides.

But it didn’t take long for not only the players but also the public to realize there was a real problem with this baseball experiment. The fog.

Since Old Orchard sits on the coast it is often enveloped in fog, and rain, and cold, and you know what that all can do to a baseball game.

The bad weather was just one challenge to try to overcome.

There was also the problem of Jerome Plante the baseball fanatic.

No one was a bigger cheerleader for Old Orchard Beach’s professional baseball team than Jerry Plante.

But Plante may have become slightly overzealous in his efforts to try to preserve triple-A baseball in a fog-shrouded coastal Maine town.

He spent so much time at the ballpark he got suspended without pay for two weeks in 1984 by town councilors for allegedly not tending to municipal business.

“Baseball has gone to your head,” one councilor, Paul Ladakakos, told him at the time.

Plante denied attending any games on town time and said when he was not in his office, he was usually working on official town business elsewhere.

Plante argued he was going to the baseball games to support baseball and his town, not to try to escape the constant pressures of his office. In fact, he saw cheering on the Maine Guides from the bleachers as part of his job.

The pressures on a municipal manager never end, especially in a tough town like Old Orchard Beach, Maine, even while eating hot dogs at a ballgame.

Baseball eventually failed in Old Orchard Beach but you would never have caught Jerome Plante telling anyone he thought it had been a mistake to give it a try.

He would get personally involved in every grass fire in Town Hall. If a poor elderly woman called and said the town sidewalk in front of her bungalow needed fixing, he’d have a crew there. If an influential property owner complained about his tax bill, Plante would find a solution.

If the big picture occasionally suffered for the incidental, so be it.

When he was 15 years into the job as town manager a slate of three anti-Plante council candidates won election to the five-member board. They were tired of the drama. They accused Plante of financial mismanagement.

So after they fired Plante, what do you think he did? He refused to leave town hall. He holed himself up inside his office and dared the cops to come in after him. They charged him with trespassing, placed him in a squad car, and took him away.

And true to style, Jerry Plante had made it a media smorgasbord. A gaggle of reporters and photographers were gathered to chronicle the whole circus from beginning to end.

Plante was the best show on earth – in keeping with the rough-and-tumble, beer-drinking summer playground known as Old Orchard Beach where overweight grown men in thongs walk around with sunburned pot bellies.

That was the end of Jerome Plante as the scrappy, lovable, short-and-fat (by his-own description) town manager who laughed at sharks and derided anyone who disputed his brash style.

Before his Town Hall tenure, Plante was a real-life politician, becoming the youngest person, at the age of 21, to get elected to the Maine House. He spent several years in the statehouse, even getting elected to the leadership and to House clerk at different times. He also worked for a U.S. congressman from Maine for several years.

Plante, as well-educated as he was, could be a little rough around the edges for the faint at heart.

But away from the din and flash of public theater, his family life was as conventional and normal as could be.

He married his childhood sweetheart for life. They had four kids and tons of grandkids and great-grandkids. Throughout his adulthood, he volunteered for everything imaginable in the community.

He was all heart.

Jerry Plante was one of a kind.

Editor’s Note: Ted Cohen covered the Plante years in Old Orchard Beach for the Portland Press Herald.