In this time period, Moreau recalls Paul's father as "a lean, stooped-over kind of guy" who "always had that haggard look, like 'I have to put food in the mouths of these kids and whatever I can do I have to do.'" According to Paul, his father drank heavily on weekends, and was violent when he did so. He has said he faced beatings "every Friday afternoon starting at three until Monday morning at seven. I was the oldest boy and therefore the punching bag for many years." One Sunday when Paul was just shy of his 12th birthday — probably September 25 or October 2, 1960 — he has said his father beat him severely, breaking his nose and dislocating his jaw. His father visited him in the hospital, slipped him a fifty-cent piece, and told him to tell the doctors he had fallen down the stairs. "The physician was excellent; the nurse wanted to scratch my dad's eyes out. They were all angry, but back then the laws weren't as tough as they are now," Gov. LePage recalled at a public forum this summer. "They knew, they knew exactly [what had really happened]. I just never had a chance to talk to the doctor. The minute [my father] left, I left." LePage didn't go home, and has said that even when he visited his dying father a half-century later, he never again slept under his roof.
LePage has also said repeatedly that he keeps a fifty-cent piece in his pocket at all times, but not for the reason most would expect. "I carried my fifty-cent piece not so much to remind me of the beating," he told a Portland audience last summer, "but to remind me: you never hit kids and you never hit women."
After LePage left the home, Gerard turned on Maurice, then 7, who has said he remained at home to protect his younger brothers and sisters. Their mother, he told the Press Herald's Tom Bell, was a good woman, but not strong enough to stand up to her husband. Instead, she asked her children to kneel beside her and recite the rosary in French. Maurice said he would stay up until after his drunken father fell asleep because on several occasions, Gerard had rolled up newspapers, doused them with kerosene, stuffed them in a slipper stuck under the family television, lit them aflame, and walked out of the house. "My father," Maurice said, "was an evil, evil man." Another sister, Diane, who was five when Paul left, told Bell there was often not enough food in the house because their father had drunk his wages. A younger brother, Donald, was a toddler when LePage was sent to the hospital; he was struck by a car on Lincoln Street at age four, fracturing his skull, according to press reports at the time. Two others were hospitalized simultaneously a few months thereafter. LePage has said that the family did not have health insurance and that his father still owed Lewiston hospitals more than $100,000 in 2005, when he died.
