"You could go to a fire station around dinner time and those guys knew the neighborhoods and knew you were the youngest of sixteen kids — as I was — or could tell by your clothes. 'Sit down and have supper with us, they'd say,'" recalls Alice Bisson-Barnes, who was born in Lewiston two years before LePage, and had to travel on crutches after a crippling accident at age four. "If you were walking down the street and it was twenty below zero — which Paul and I both did — the guard at the mill would insist you warm up in his guardhouse. You could knock on the parish door and you could tell the priest you didn't have money to buy milk for the kid and they would give it to you. Generosity was a lot easier to find in those days. People cared. That's the community we lived in, that Paul grew up in."
Paul and his siblings needed lots of help. When Paul was five, his father lost his job at the Androscoggin Mill — it would close down entirely four years later — and was thereafter listed in the Lewiston Directory as being a house painter and, later, simply a laborer. Meanwhile, Paul's mother birthed children on a nearly annual basis — seventeen in total — crowding their apartment on the third floor of 215 ½ Lincoln Street. At night, the parents bedded down on living room couches, while the children slept in the two bedrooms, four or five to a bed, Paul's younger brother, Maurice, told the Portland Press Herald. Most of the eleven other families that lived in their four-story wood-frame building were equally large. LePage has said that by the time he was ten there were 83 children living in the structure, which has since been demolished. Moreau, whose father owned the building and operated a grocery store on its ground floor, recalls mothers doing their washing by hand and hanging it on the back porches to dry. Children carried firewood from the basement to fuel wood-fired kitchen stoves, which were the only means of heating water. There were two to three apartments per floor, whose many occupants shared a single toilet. There were no showers.
Early on the morning of August 21, 1957, Paul's four-year old brother, Norman, died of acute gastroenteritis after two days of suffering. Neighborhood children, attracted by the emergency vehicles, gathered outside and watched the child's body being carried out to the ambulance. "It stuck in my mind because it was my first — and I think Paul's first — exposure to death," recalls Moreau. "Everybody had that somber look — and Paul too — and you connect with the eye, but nobody ever spoke about it after that. That was the mindset." Shortly thereafter, police called the ambulance back from the funeral home, according to the account in that day's Lewiston Evening Journal. Paul's 9-year-old brother Emile was also seriously dehydrated from the same infection and was rushed to hospital and saved.
