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The Making of Paul LePage, Part 1

Lewiston's informal social infrastructure supported LePage in ways that would be remarkable today. At some point, Myrick realized LePage wasn't really living at his parents' home. (He told a reporter that he dropped off LePage one day to find his parents had moved without leaving a forwarding address, but Gerard and Teresa remained at 215 ½ Lincoln until LePage was in high school.) He and his wife took Paul into their own home across the river in Auburn three days a week. Eddie and Pauline Collins — who had an apartment in Little Canada — took him in during the midweek. Moreau recalls Paul slept on their couch and got up at 4:30 in the morning to help Collins with the café's baking before going to school. "We treated him like a son," Collins told the Associated Press in 2010, "and we still do." Collins later introduced LePage to Thomas J. Anthoine, owner of Anthoine Rubber Company, who also gave LePage employment and would later help pay his college tuition. Myrick brought LePage to the attention of his close friend, Peter Snowe, a young Auburn businessman and aspiring politician, who would help LePage get into and pay for college.

LePage credits Myrick and Collins for saving him not just from poverty, but from the malevolent influence of the Maine Department of Human Services, which had apparently taken an interest in his situation. "Welfare and dependency it spawns got its hooks into [my younger siblings] early, and they never escaped," LePage told writer and Tea Party activist Robert Shaffer in 2009. "The system is designed to breed dependency — once you've become skilled at milking he system, breaking free is almost impossible. To this day, I have no idea what people mean when they say...that cutting welfare will 'hurt' people."

He has since argued that mentoring — not welfare resources — is key to helping children escape generational poverty. "In life you are going to hit a lot of Ys in the road, and without the right mentoring you're likely to slip and take the wrong road, and too many in our society today have done that," he told a Portland audience last year. With generational poverty, he added, mentors have to intervene before children reach adolescence to have the best chance of success. "When I got out of college, I was going to become the knight in shining armor and I was going to help my entire family," he said, by way of an example. "I had one brother who robbed my wife. I had another who stole from our home. If you don't get them early and they become teenagers, it's more difficult." LePage has said many of his siblings wound up in prison or as welfare dependents. He has also said he regrets not having intervened to remove his much younger siblings from the home. "The big difference between myself and some of my siblings who were closer to my age is that I was more of a sponge for learning things," he told a Portland audience last year, "and some of my brothers were more of a sponge for taking things, which got them in trouble."