A few years ago, I was doing a regular web search for Patten Maine and came upon a site by a Patten guy who had been a Green Beret in Vietnam. He had some great Vietnam stories on the web. He also told about his mother finding a package in her Patten home's attic that her Green Beret son had sent home from Nam, and she sent it to him in California, around the year 2000.
That got me to thinking.
Kids from Patten often leave town after high school and go all around the world to live and work. This happens more in a place like Patten than in larger towns because there are so few job opportunities in and around Patten -- for anyone. And Patten grows some healthy and hard working folks. Very good people to have gone and wanna work at places out there past the boundaries of Patten's beloved section of wild and wonderful Northern Maine.
I am "from the outside" -- I have lived most of my life elseware besides Patten and grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore, so I can tell you from that point of view that Patten natives are a very special breed of Americans. It takes a lot to survive and thrive in Northern Maine as their ancestors and they themselves did. People from there are often a cut above the rest in many ways. And I believe that a collection of their personal short stories about their lives out in the rest of the world would be quite interesting and one day be of substantial importance to American history.
So the idea has been rattlin round in my head for a few years that it would be cool if some Internet savvy person from Patten would start something on the World Wide Web where former Patten area folks tell about what their lives are like since the left P-town.
To Patten Mainers: think about this idea of mine and pass it around amongst your family and friends. One day you and your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren may be very glad you did.