When Ralph Damren turned 80 on Friday, he was in a familiar place: a high school football field.
Damren was officiating a matchup between Wells and Old Town at Victory Field in Old Town, his final game after a 56-year career as a referee.
“I’ve had enough,” Damren said. “There are enough good guys [officiating]. They can chase the kids around.”
Damren said what he enjoyed most about refereeing football games was the camaraderie with the other officials.
“We all banded together,” he said.
He said at the end of every football season, there’s a get-together for the officials across the state and their spouses.
“It’s like a referee’s prom,” he said.
Damren, who has been inducted into the Maine Principals’ Association Hall of Excellence, said he liked “being out there on the field with the kids. It made me feel a little younger.”
Mike Bisson, the assistant executive director of the MPA and a football official, called Damren a “very special” person.
“He has influenced every one of us. He has been a mentor,” Bisson said. “When I started officiating, he ran the weekly meetings and was the rules interpreter.”
Bisson was a football and baseball coach at Mattanawcook Academy in Lincoln and said he was “always happy to see” Damren officiate one of his games.
“And he has meant a lot to the MPA,” Bisson said.
Damren is also serving his 33rd and final year as Maine’s representative on the National Federation of State High School Associations’ football rules committee.
There are three football games Damren will always remember.
He will never forget the LTC championship game between Stearns High of Millinocket and Bucksport in 1983. Bucksport won 6-0 in six overtimes.
“It was the first day of hunting season,” Damren recalled. “It had rained all night long and was turning to snow. It was a mud bowl. Everybody was slipping and falling down.”
The Stearns kicker tried a field goal but slipped and fell.
“He told me it was like kicking a brick,” Damren said.
He also remembered seeing the Bucksport fans dressed in their orange hunting gear running from one end of the field to the other during the overtimes. “They would all be crowded around each other in the end zone.”
“It was the coldest, wettest and most uncomfortable I have ever been at a football game,” he added.
He also remembered a game involving the Maine Central Institute post-graduate team and a visiting team from Laval, Quebec.
“There were about 20 fans from Laval, but, just before the game, two huge buses of Laval students and fans arrived. There were 80 or 90 of them. Some of the students were painted blue and white. And when they got off the bus, the students were carrying cases of long-neck beer,” Damren said. “Wally Covell was the athletic director at MCI and he wouldn’t let the game start until they put the beer back on the bus.
“Laval scored first and when they were lining up for the extra point, a couple Laval fans ran on the field waving a Quebec flag. And they didn’t have a stitch of clothing on,” Damren recalled with a chuckle.
Local police officials were summoned to the field and order was restored, he said.
MCI won the game.
“It was a pretty good game,” said Damren, who noted that the Laval team was used to the Canadian Football League rules, which are very different from the rules used here.
The other game he recalled was a state championship game in the early 1980s between Bangor and Thornton Academy of Saco. It was played at Bowdoin College in Brunswick.
As the officiating crew emerged from the tunnel and started walking toward the field for the start of the game, a whiskey bottle landed at the feet of the head referee, who happened to be a warden at the Maine State Prison in Thomaston.
They returned to the tunnel and the head referee made a call on a walkie-talkie.
“There weren’t cell phones at the time. Some state troopers arrived and they marched out onto the field with us and they also escorted us back to the locker room [after the game],” Damren said.
Damren, who played high school football and baseball at MCI and attended the University of Maine at Farmington for a year and a half, has also been inducted into the Maine Baseball Hall of Fame. He said he will umpire for his 60th and final baseball season next spring.
After the football game, which was won by Wells 51-13, Damren said Old Town football coach David Gross gave him a helmet signed by Old Town’s coaching staff and players.
“I thought that was a nice touch,” Damren said.
