RECORD KEEPERS (conintued)

Since joining MHS in middle school, Barker’s been busy. He published a newsletter on Portland’s Irish and several articles on local and national history, contributed to anthologies about Portland’s Irish, and consulted on the decoration inside Bull Feeney’s pub on Fore Street. Even before snagging a part time gig as the Saturday research assistant at the MHS library two years ago, Barker regularly could be found here digging into some aspect of Portland’s Irish in his hours away from jobs at the Calvary Cemetery in South Portland or Olympia Sports in Portland.

When he had a really big project on his hands, he would come here Tuesday through Saturday, to plug away for hours on end. Sometimes he’d receive a nominal fee for his writing, sometimes not. Like most of the historians here, including Barry, Barker hasn’t been able to make a living off the past.

Doesn’t matter, though. Barker believes he was destined to continue a legacy that started way before him.

"I was put here to tell the story of my family and the Portland Irish, these stories that have been forgotten," he says one recent Saturday, sitting on a bench outside the library. It is sunny and warm and Barker stretchwa his skinny legs and stares at the ground. "If you want to get into the metaphysical, that’s my fate."

"During my one year in college, I took a class about forerunners. I picked my great-grandfather. He was a researcher and a writer who worked out of this library. He had to support a wife and 10 kids. He worked on the railroad and he never had anything published. There’s a genetic proponent for it, in some way. He didn’t make it and wasn’t profitable. In some way, I was meant to carry it and take it on. He was a forerunner for me."

Barker has compiled more than 20 boxes worth of genealogical information from both sides of his family tree, but doesn’t worry much about what place he’ll take in the legacy. He just hopes someone down the line will carry on the tradition.

"A lot of people in my family are interested to some extent," he says. "But anything I ever tell them, they never remember it. In every few generations, there should be someone to preserve the family history. The more generations go by and there’s no one to do it, the oral histories, the family histories, they’re lost forever."

"Most of us are rather colorless," Barker’s colleague Bill Barry explains. "Most historians spend their time writing history, they’re not out there shaping history so much as recording and trying to make sense of it. Ask somebody to name a famous historian. They might know politicians, military figures, educators, but historians? I don’t think so."

Greater Portland Landmarks’ Bill Hall has helped train dozens of Portland’s history hobbyists. Hall coordinates the Portland History Docent training program, a free 11-week course which meets three hours a week starting in February. Since the first course in 1994, more than 350 graduates of the program have gone on to be volunteer tour guides in places like the Wadsworth-Longfellow House, the Portland Harbor Museum, and the Tate House. Hall says most of the participants are retirees looking to give back and to "know more."

Hall compares their desire to understand the past with a crossroads in the Middle East:

"I remember standing on a mountaintop in Turkey once and looking at the roads that linked to China, to Palestine, the Balkans. I can still see myself standing on that mountaintop and thinking about all the people and all the history and all the things that had traveled over those roads for thousands of years and I was part of that. You’re not an individual, you’re part of a complex web of things, events, and places that have all gone before and there’s a continuity that puts you in there. It’s almost spiritual in a way, but that’s kind of how I feel about history. There’s a spiritual connection we all share with what’s happened before."

At the top of Munjoy Hill, in the red Portland Observatory which in 2000 underwent a million-dollar renovation, Brad Blake and Bill LaLiberte lead guided tours every Friday from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Both men are graduates of Hall’s docents program. Blake, a 55-year-old self-employed insurance specialist, and LaLiberte, an 81-year-old retiree, have struck up a friendship based on love of the tower. Neither is originally from Portland — LaLiberte is a Massachusetts native, Blake hails from Lincoln, further north — but both gravitated to the Observatory shortly after moving to town years ago.

Blake remembers hours in the cupola at the top "lingering" before guided tours became the norm in 2000. LaLiberte used to work at the Nissan bakery when it was located at the base of the hill. Shortly after moving here in 1966, he trekked to the tower on his lunch break to check out the Observatory. He plodded up the 103 steps, past the hundreds of initials visitors have etched into the wooden walls, to the top, where the Observatory’s original owner, Captain Lemeul Moody, scanned the horizon for incoming ships in the early 19th century.

"You can see [the Observatory] when you come into the city," LaLiberte says. "If you’ve got an impression of the city, it has to be part of that impression."

The view from the top one recent afternoon is clear, though a bit too hazy to spot Mount Washington 100 miles west. The water in Casco Bay shimmers. Blake and LaLiberte lean comfortably against the lookout railing and point out each of the Casco Bay Islands by name. They say they chose to be docents at the Observatory in part because its maritime history.

"There are so many things you can tour about," says Blake. "You can get off into side tangents on shipbuilding for example. And the culmination is always up at the top because it’s a forever changing view."

Blake says its important to understand where he came from. LaLiberte talks about adventure.

"I often think if they discovered gold in California, would I have been brave enough or fool hardy enough — would I have gone?," he says. "Would I have gone to Alaska? Would I have followed the Oregon Trail? I don’t know, but it’s interesting to think about."

LaLiberte, who’s considered the expert docent on the Observatory, props his hands against the railing and looks at the bay. Blake chats about old captain Moody, who every day would come to the top of the tower and stare out at the horizon watching for returning adventurers. LaLiberte, meanwhile, keeps his eyes on the horizon.

Robert Quatrano and his wife live in the past. In 1999, Quatrano was hired to be the caretaker of the house by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, whose offices are on the second floor and who own the property. The deal between the Quatranos and the WCTU could possibly be one of the peninsula’s sweetest — they conduct free tours to anyone who happens by during the week, keep the place safe and clean and up to par, and, in exchange, they get to live there for free. The Quatranos’ personal rooms are on the second floor, they sleep where Dow’s children slept, and hang out where Dow’s maids once cooked dinner. They are allowed to lounge on his furniture, to read his letters, and to generally poke around and find out as much about the famous Dow as they can.

Quatrano, who grew up on India Street and was a "D–student" at Portland High School who didn’t like history, had never been inside the house before the winter of 1989 even though he had lived next door for years. That winter, he offered to help the aging then-caretaker, Ed Oliver, shovel snow out of the driveway. When he crossed the threshold into the house to introduce himself to Oliver, Quatrano says he was struck with an uncanny sense of belonging.

"It was so strong a feeling I almost can’t put it into words to this day," he says of that moment. "I’m home. I felt utterly at home."

Years later, the house under Quatrano’s eye is tidy and pristine, but the caretaker has no qualms sitting on a couch when he wants to.

"I heard on TV in four billion years the earth isn’t going to be here anymore," he says. "Will it kill things to touch them? No."

It was this line of reasoning that led Quatrano to one of the most exciting moments of his life.

He doesn’t remember much about the particulars of the day he wore the brigadier general hat, except that it was summertime and he thinks it was sunny outside. Sometime before the tours arrived, Quatrano and his wife went into the tiny Civil War Room where Dow’s leather holsters, cherry-red regulation military shirt, and worn blue hat were kept.

Neal Dow’s hat was too big for Robert Quatrano. When he put it on, it slumped down low on his forehead. But it was the hat that Neal Dow had worn while he fought for what he believed in — Neal Dow, the two-time mayor of Portland, the "Father of Prohibition," the man Quatrano felt he was destined to understand. He wore this man’s hat in the study at the back of the house and posed for his wife’s pictures beside a framed black-and-white photograph of Dow himself, the hat on his head, surrounded by his troops.

Later, Quatrano would say wearing that hat made him feel especially close to Dow. He had only lived in Dow’s house for a few months and already he was hooked on a dead man.

"I felt shivers down my spine when I put that hat on," he said. "I can’t describe it."

Sara Donnelly can be reached at sdonnelly@phx.com