Maine shines after Navy tour
From Mike Beane's Blog
Article in the Morning Sentinel
By Morning Sentinel staff
Living in Maine is costing Michael Beane money, and he knows it.
Just a couple of hundred miles south of his Newport home, Beane's friends in Boston earn almost twice the money in jobs similar to Beane's position as a systems analyst at Pittsfield's Sebasticook Valley Hospital.
Yet, when he and his wife, Fiona, reflect on what their two children are getting out of growing up in his home state of Maine, Beane knows his fortune is being invested in the future.
"Maine has a comfortable, constant speed to it," Beane said. "Some places just seem to be fast for the sake of being fast, and that doesn't sit well with me. It's not that I can't navigate the big city and stay there. It's just that I don't want to."
A Benton native, Beane, 33, graduated from Lawrence High School in Fairfield in 1992. He had the grades for college, but the idea held no appeal.
"I didn't really prepare myself in high school to go to college," Beane said. "I'm a path of least resistance kind of guy."
Beane looked to the Navy for direction. He headed to basic training in San Diego in 1993 believing he would never return to Maine for more than family visits.
"I left here February 21st of 1993," Beane recalled. "If you look at the weather that day we had the most snow we'd had in years. I was happy to be going."
The Navy allowed Beane to pick a school after he graduated from basic training in the top 5 percent of his class. The southern California life agreed with him, so Beane spent another year in San Diego learning to be a sonar technician.
"I picked night classes so I got to get up in the morning and go to the beach," Beane said. "Life was good."
Beane again graduated near the top of his class, and the Navy again allowed him to pick his assignment.
His superiors were stunned when Beane decided to return to Maine to serve at a duty station as the destroyer USS Laboon was being built at Bath Iron Works.
"The Navy brought me back to Maine," Beane said. "The other choice was Corpus Christi, Texas. I think 107 was the average temperature down there. For a lot of reasons it was a no-brainer for me to come home."
Beane spent a year living in a hotel in Brunswick. He drove to Benton to visit his family just about every weekend, but for the most part Beane was seeing Maine as an adult for the first time.
"When I came back with the Navy I saw Maine from a different perspective," Beane said.
Beane spent the last 18 months of his service in the Laboon's home port in Virginia and six months traveling the waters around Crete, Morocco and the Persian Gulf, where in September 1996, the Laboon launched its missiles in support of Operation Desert Strike.
Beane was ready to leave the Navy when his commitment was up in 1997.
"I didn't hate the Navy," he said. "I was just kind of done with it."
At 23, Beane decided to head home to Maine again.
He spent two-plus years at the University of Maine at Orono -- where he met Fiona -- studying computer science, before transferring to Eastern Maine Technical College in Bangor (now Eastern Maine Community College). He graduated with an associate's degree in computer networking in 2002.
Beane took a job as a service manager for a small Bangor company, Automated Business Concepts, just before graduation. The company sent Beane and his new wife, Fiona, to Manchester, N.H., where they stayed for almost a year.
As it had before, Maine beckoned. When Fiona became pregnant with the couple's first child Beane requested a transfer back to Bangor and, in 2003, the Beanes returned home for good.
"It was really the pull of family," Beane said. "That was the catalyst to come back."
Beane took a job at the hospital in 2004, the same year the baby was born, and they purchased their first home, in Newport.
Beane has no regrets about living in Maine, but he acknowledges it is not easy. Jobs do not pay as much and there is a dearth of industry to buoy the economy as a whole.
The Beanes were committed to Fiona staying home to care for their children but she has recently returned to work to help with the family's budget.
"We're seeing the cost of heating fuel and now gasoline (stressing) family budgets, and the effects on the local economies are noticeable," Beane said. "We've seen work that was done in the state for quite some time now go elsewhere, resulting in closures and job losses, which has put a strain on the state and the people who live here."
The same thing that makes Maine so appealing as a place to live could also save it, Beane believes.
"I wish the state could find a good way to attract business back into the state by exploiting what we're rich in: people who perform quality, hard work," Beane said.
Beane hopes his family will always be able to stay in Maine. With both his and Fiona's extended families so close it is nearly an ideal situation, he said.
"I can't come up with any good reasons to leave that are good life decisions," Beane said. "I'm in a fairly stable industry in a position that I am both happy and thankful for, working in a place with great people, living in an area with equally great people. I'm very go-with-the-flow about things and, well, the flow is good here."
Craig Crosby -- 487-3288