Welcome to my message board.
New member registration has been disabled due to heavy spammer activity. If you'd like to join the board, please email me at MaxDevore at hotmail dot com.
New member registration has been disabled due to heavy spammer activity. If you'd like to join the board, please email me at MaxDevore at hotmail dot com.
Bangor Tommyknockers tour on July 4th
The Greater Bangor Convention & Visitors Bureau will hold a "Tommyknockers & More" bus tour at 2 p.m. Sunday, July 4, leaving from the Bangor waterfront in the Front Street parking lot next to the harbor master's office.
The tour points out similarities between the city and the fictional town of Derry, Maine, the setting of several novels by author Stephen King. The tour guide will be Ryan King.
Reservations are required and can be made by calling the Greater Bangor Convention & Visitors Bureau at 947-5205 or (800) 916-6673. Cost is $10.
The tour points out similarities between the city and the fictional town of Derry, Maine, the setting of several novels by author Stephen King. The tour guide will be Ryan King.
Reservations are required and can be made by calling the Greater Bangor Convention & Visitors Bureau at 947-5205 or (800) 916-6673. Cost is $10.
Comments
Lin
I can't wait to see all the fun stuff in Bangor.
Lin
PS - The SKEMERS have done a tour with Ryan King but the tour the GBCVB is offering was developed over the past 3 years and contains stops and information not included in their tour. This tour is one developed by the GBCVB and approved by Stephen King.
BANGOR -- The Greater Bangor Convention & Visitors Bureau would like to remind "faithful readers" of Bangor author Stephen King that there are still seats available for the last run of the "Tommyknockers & More" Bus Tour on October 31, 2004.
"We would love to have as many as possible on this tour on Halloween", said Paul Hilchey-Chandler, Marketing Coordinator for the Greater Bangor CVB and The Maine Highlands. "Maybe some fans will come dressed as their favorite character from a Stephen King book. That would make things even more fun."
The tour begins at 2:00 p.m. at the Bangor Waterfront in the Front Street parking lot next to the harbormaster’s office. Reservations are required and must be guaranteed. They can be made by calling the Greater Bangor CVB at 947-5205 or 1-800-91-MOOSE. The cost is $10.00 per person.
Ryan King is a volunteer for the Bangor Museum and Center for History, presenting their Mount Hope Cemetery Tour and Candlelight Tours of Downtown Bangor. The History Channel has featured him in Haunted Maine and he has appeared on Weekend Explorer, a program on PBS. He has been interviewed for numerous articles, a number of which have appeared in the Bangor Daily News, Downeast Magazine and United Airlines magazine Hemispheres.
The Greater Bangor CVB is a non-profit organization which exists to stimulate economic vitality by promoting the Bangor region as the preferred destination for meetings, conventions and visitors.
STEPHEN KING
The "Tommyknockers & More Bus Tour" of Bangor may well be the most entertaining two hours you ever spend on a bus, whether you're a die-hard Stephen King fan or are only barely familiar with King classics like "Carrie" and "The Shining."
Many of King's stories are set in a fictionalized version of Bangor called Derry, and the bus will take you to see the ominous standpipe from "It" along with the manhole where a murderous clown emerges in the same tale.
But the tour is far more than a trip to every local landmark that ever turned up in King's work. It also tells the fascinating and increasingly rare story of a regular guy who became enormously successful, then set out to help the place that inspired him.
The tour will take you past the coin-operated laundry where King worked for $1.60 an hour; he based the character of the mother from "Carrie" on a woman he met there, according to the tour. You'll drive past the rundown house where he lived when he got a telegram that his work had been accepted by a publisher; he was too poor to have a phone.
The bus tour also includes the many municipal improvements he's helped pay for, like a community swimming pool and baseball field. But the highlight for King fans will be a stop outside his red-and-cream Italianate-style mansion, where the wrought-iron gates have a spider-web design and are topped with black bats and a three-headed Hydra.
On our right: The Bangor Civic Center, which appears in the Dark Tower series.
On our left: Bass Park, which is Bassey Park in the books.
And then later on, below us: “The sewer hole that Pennywise the clown comes out of in ‘It’ is right there! It says ‘sewer’ on it.”
Sadly, no stop for a photo op. There wasn’t the time. We had the fictionally haunted water tower to get to.
Bangor is awash in Stephen King, and most people already associate the horror master with the Queen City, but do they know how big his payday was for “Carrie”? Where “Firestarter” had its world premiere? How he and Tabitha decorate at Christmas?
Bet you a lit peace sign they do not. (Hangs right on their front porch, no less.)
Enter, the official tour.
The Greater Bangor Convention & Visitors Bureau is putting on “Tommyknockers & More: The Stephen King Literary Bus Tour,” a mix of little-known facts, real-life sites and film locales. The Kings signed off on it six years ago.
In advance of the tour’s sixth season, Levy gave media a sneak peek.
Artistic director at the Penobscot Theatre, and in his third summer as jovial guide, Levy likes to start with a simple fact base to build on.
The writer was born in 1947. Moved to Durham at 11. Authored “The Village Vomit” as a teen. Graduated from the University of Maine in 1970. Bought his frequently photographed house on West Broadway in 1980.
“And now’s when I say, ‘Off we go.’”
The bus could barely travel a block without Levy piping up.
Passing the Bangor Daily News, he said that the Kings, put off by 400 people showing up on their doorstep one Halloween, ran an ad the next year announcing they wouldn’t be home.
Next to the BDN, the big Paul Bunyan, which Levy said had a cameo in “It.”
One of the first tour highlights: the apartment that King and his wife moved into after getting $200,000 for his first-published book, “Carrie,” in 1974. The building, with chipped blue and gray paint in a tight row of apartments, now has a little plastic skeleton dangling from its porch.
It was a step up from their digs in Orono.
“They now had a little bit more money to move into town and to reconnect the phone lines,” Levy said. “Even got a new car, a blue Pinto.”
Their current abode, another drive-by destination, couldn’t stand more in contrast. According to Levy, the red and cream Italianate villa, with 23 rooms and an indoor swimming pool, was built in 1856, the first house on a street eventually filled with the homes of lumber barons.
On the tour, there’s no stopping and gawking, out of respect for the Kings, but if you had something more permanent in mind...
“There are a couple of houses here for sale on the block, so if you’d like to be Mr. King’s neighbor, by all means, call up one of the real estate agents,” Levy said.
Also making an appearance on the guided ride: Mt. Hope Cemetery, where a scene from “Pet Sematary” was shot; Thomas Hill Standpipe (that haunted water tower); and Bangor International Airport.
“I like telling the story of how the ‘Langoliers’ was filmed at the airport. They had to make it look like Logan,” Levy said.
In King’s books, Levy said, particularly “It,” “Insomnia” and “Bag of Bones,” King writes about the town of Derry, a thinly disguised nod to Bangor.
“The first paragraph of Chapter 12 (in ‘Insomnia’) takes place at Penobscot Theatre. I’ve got that framed at home. That’s pretty cool,” said Levy.
The Bangor Opera House, which houses the theater, was also the site of the worldwide debut of “Firestarter.” Drew Barrymore came to town for the premiere.
“There are a lot of similarities between Bangor and Derry, but the biggest difference is that in Derry, people have a habit of disappearing at the rate of 40 a year, never to be heard from again,” Levy said.
That’s less likely in real life. Perhaps you shouldn’t hang around that sewer grate too long, just the same.
“The biggest similarity is that residents of both Bangor and Derry have the habit of being able to look the other way,” Levy said. “Strange things happen.”
>>> More here