Former chief still going strong

Published in the Current

SOUTH PORTLAND (Aug 4, 2005): Jim Darling of South Portland has helped train hundreds of South Portland drivers and shaped its police force, but his local ties run deeper still.

Darling, who turns 94 today, Aug. 4, was born in Ferry Village, and has stayed in the area his whole life. He and his family lived in Portland before becoming pioneers in the Broad Cove area of Cape Elizabeth. “We were the only ones there,” he said.

Darling remembers his father trying to get a skiff off the beach to get out to the boat during a northeaster, but the waves drove him back. “His boat eventually sunk that night,” taking to the bottom all of his traps and his dory.

The family – “there were 13 of us altogether” – stayed in Broad Cove eking out a living into the 1920s.

Darling went to school at the Bowery Beach schoolhouse, now the Lions’ Den.

“We walked a mile to get there,” up a dirt road, he said. “When the snow came, we just had a little trail up to the school.”

When he finished the five grades there, he still walked up there, to catch a horse-drawn wagon to class at Pond Cove School, where the Thomas Memorial Library is now. High school classes were held on the second floor of Town Hall.

“The summers were idyllic,” Darling said. “On the last day of school we came home, took off our shoes and didn’t put them back on until school started.”

Winters were different, living by kerosene lamps and well water. “It toughened you up in a lot of ways,” Darling said.

The family eventually moved to the Riverton area of Portland for a brief stay, and then to Front Street in South Portland.

Making a new life

Just after coming back to South Portland, Darling met the woman who would become his wife. The two were at a housewarming in Ferry Village and struck up a conversation, what Darling now calls “just one of those chance meetings, which turned out to be perfect.”

Merle, a bank teller, died in March at age 90, after 69 years of marriage. She was born on Feb. 4, so the couple would celebrate one’s birthday and the other’s half-birthday on those dates each year.

He works hard to keep her memory alive. Last week he baked a pineapple pie. “I found it in my wife’s recipe book. I don’t remember her ever making it and I thought I’d try it,” he said.

He and Merle raised three sons, Peter, who died in 2000 of asbestos-related cancer; George, who is a Methodist minister in Clinton; and Dana, who lives on Two Lights Road in Cape Elizabeth.

In February 1941, Darling started work with the South Portland police.

“I was the seventh man on the police department,” he said. “We had no training, nothing. You learned by doing.”

“During the war, they discovered there wasn’t enough young men who knew how to drive the trucks” the Army needed, so the federal government started driver education courses.

“I was always interested in traffic safety,” so Darling began teaching classes at South Portland High School, where he taught 80 kids a year for eight years, while also working full-time as a police officer.

As a result of his work, he attended a traffic safety institute at Northwestern University, from which he brought back many ideas that would become common practice in South Portland and nationwide.

Formalizing the police

“I put seat belts in cruisers,” he said, recalling having to convince people during test drives, zipping quickly around corners to show how seat belts can help prevent accidents by keeping drivers behind the wheel.

Later, “we were the first to use the breathalyzer.”

Another first is “burned” into his memory: “I was the first officer on the scene of that plane crash in Redbank,” on July 11, 1944, when a bomber clipped a tree while trying to land at the Portland airport.

He remembers the challenge of identifying the 15 dead, many burned beyond recognition.

“The one person who could identify them was a blind girl” who had talked to many of the victims earlier in the day and remembered what they said they were going to have for dinner, Darling said. “She knew what they ate,” allowing authorities to identify some victims by the contents of their stomachs.

On Jan. 1, 1959, Darling became chief of police, a job he held until retiring in 1968.

“I liked the work. I liked meeting the people, but you lose a lot of faith in human nature,” he said.

The couple enjoyed their retirement as well. Darling did more of the woodcarving that had been a hobby, making the seagull that sits out front of his house, as well as models of puffins, ducks, geese, eagles and owls that decorate the shelves inside and the homes of a few folks who bought them or were given them over the years.

For their 50th anniversary, Darling and Merle, then in their 70s, took a Volkswagen camper across the country, traveling 10,000 miles in 10 weeks on a marathon tour to see friends and family.

For his 85th birthday, his sons got him a dog. And last month, he got his first computer. “I can write an e-mail,” he said.

Maine Attraction: Portland's inland and coastal secrets

Published in National Geographic Adventure

Come August, Mainers and Maine-lovers take to Portland's Casco Bay like lobsters to salted herring. But while the bay's more than 200 islands offer countless opportunities for sailing, paddling, and lighthouse ogling, savvy visitors combine coastal attractions with inland thrills to create the ultimate seaside escape. Hit the coast, sure, but also bike a back road, climb a local hill, and save an evening or two to check out the urban scene in Portland's very own warehouse district-bum-boutique haven: the Old Port.

INN AND AROUND
Drop your bags. The 1835 vintage Inn at ParkSpring ($149; www.innatparkspring.com), just off Portland's bustling Old Port, offers an eclectic medley of lodgings, from 19th-century colonial bedchambers to renovated modern rooms - all air-conditioned to cool you down after a hard day's exploring. In the morning, get your fill of Maine blueberries and other local delicacies at the inn's breakfast table before setting out on your day's paddle or pedal.

Treat your ears. Seven nights a week, top local and regional artists, like the rockabilly group King Memphis, jam at the Free Street Taverna's downstairs bar (207-772-5483). Accompany the set with a pint of local summer ale like Geary's or Shipyard ($3).

Fill your belly. Wrap up your day's coastal adventures like a true-blue Mainer: Eat seafood from a plastic basket at a picnic table right on the rocky shore. The Lobster Shack at Two Lights (207-799-1677) in Cape Elizabeth specializes in steamed lobster and lobster rolls, but their lobster stew ($13) - a coastal favorite little known elsewhere - steals the show ($4 to $22 for entrées; lobster prices vary with market).

OUT AND ABOUT
Bike by morning. If you only have a few hours, rent a bike from CycleMania ($20 a day; www.cyclemania1.com) and head north out of town for the rolling countryside along the lightly traveled State Routes 9 and 115. Don't forget your snack money: At Toots Ice Cream (207-829-3723) on Walnut Hill Road, just south of the junction with Route 9 in North Yarmouth, you'll have a chance to meet the cows who contributed to your chocolate shake.

Hike by day. A scenic hour's drive northwest of Portland is Pleasant Mountain, in Bridgton, where the three-and-a-half mile (round-trip) Ledges Trail affords summit views that extend to New Hampshire's Mount Washington.

Paddle by night. Choppy surf and hidden rocks make a nocturnal paddle on Casco Bay a dicey proposition. But at Scarborough Marsh - the state's largest - you can paddle in the enchanting stillness of a full-moon night. Your naturalist guide from the Scarborough Marsh Audubon Center ($12 for a one-and-a-half hour trip; www.maineaudubon.org) will attune you to the great horned owls hooting from their perches and the black-crowned night herons stalking in the darkness.

Resources: To find out about the best sea kayaking between Kennebunkport and Bar Harbor, take the ferry to Peaks Island to visit the Maine Island Kayak Company (800-796-2373; www.maineislandkayak.com). For other pursuits, stop by one of Maine MountainWorks's two Portland stores (207-879-1410).

Residents object to ‘highway’ to historic farm

Published in the Current

SCARBOROUGH (July 28, 2005): One elm tree with tracks of construction vehicles on two sides of it remains along Cecile and John Carver's driveway. The tree is the last that remains of a long row planted along Marion Jordan Road by the Jordan family.

"It would be just terrible if that went," said Cecile Carver.

Carver is one of a group of residents who are objecting to changes that have come to their picturesque corner of Scarborough as the result of a new housing development on the historic Cole Farm off Marion Jordan Road. They believe the changes happening there are similar to ones happening all over town.

Mary Lello, whose home looks out over the Cole Farm land, said the problem is not the people doing the road-widening work, or the developer, who is just doing what was required by the town.

“It’s about this town,” said Lello, a lifelong Scarborough resident. “They’ve changed it so drastically.”

Marion Jordan Road used to be a 16-foot-wide road with grassy shoulders. At the end of the road was a sign marking the beginning of a 12-foot-wide private road whose sole purpose was to provide access to the Cole Farm, a 41-acre estate that was home to Rev. Franklin Cole, who died in 1997, and his wife, Eleanor, who died in 2004, and to the home of Cecile Carver and her husband, John.

Now both roads are being torn up and replaced with a 20-foot-wide strip of pavement, bordered by several feet of shoulder and drainage swale, for a total width of 50 feet, according to plans of the project.

In addition, a new road, 10 feet of asphalt plus 20 feet of gravel, and shoulder and drainage swale, is being built across what used to be a field, to provide a second access route for fire trucks to reach the homes being built on the farm.

Wide roads

“This is basically the town’s fault,” said Cecile Carver. The fire department had “no problem” getting to her home, at the far end of the private road, when her alarm system malfunctioned.

“Now the town for some reason decided there had to be this highway,” she said.

“It was an old road that predates some of the ordinances,” said Town Planner Joe Ziepniewski.

The standard width for all roads in town is 24 feet, Ziepniewski said. The Planning Board reduced the required road width to 20 feet, which is the “absolute minimum” in the town's fire lane ordinance, he said.

Fire Chief Michael Thurlow said that width, also codified in state law, is necessary for eight-foot-wide fire trucks to pass each other.

The extra four feet are required to prevent trucks from slapping mirrors, to have room for hoses to be laid in the roadway, to allow for snowbanks in the wintertime, and to allow pumper trucks to be parked next to fire hydrants without blocking the road for other rescue and fire vehicles, he said.

In addition, it is standard in town to have a five-foot shoulder shoring up the pavement, and providing room for underground utilities, before the drainage ditch begins, according to Town Engineer Jim Wendel.

The wider road has required cutting down several trees along Marion Jordan Road, which has distressed neighbors. Lello called the road construction zone “an absolutely bombed-out disaster area.”

Developer Paul Hollis said he would be replanting vegetation along the road. “I want the same privacy reinstated back there,” he said, noting that the road is “not any wider than any legal road in Scarborough that’s being built.”

Another town mandate protested by neighbors is the clearing and leveling of part of the field for the secondary access road, crossing property owned by Herb Ginn.

“They’ve destroyed that field,” said Carver. “I think it’s a disaster what they’re doing in this town. They’re destroying it.”

The secondary access is required in town law, to let fire and rescue trucks through if Marion Jordan Road is impassable.

Neighbor Marie Demicco said Marion Jordan Road couldn’t possibly be blocked by downed trees, because all of the large trees have been cut down.

Marion Jordan Road is clearly the preferable route: Lello has driven both routes to the Black Point Fire Station, and found that the fire station is four-tenths of a mile if she drives out Marion Jordan Road to Spurwink Road. If she follows the new road across the Ginns’ land, the fire station is a mile away.

Ginn said he has no problem with the road: “It’s never going to be used.”

Frustration with the town

Neighbors say town officials did not help them understand what was going on or why.

“It seems way beyond what’s necessary,” Lello said. “We just don’t understand why their mandates are so vast.”

“Maybe (the road) was a little narrow,” Lello said, but the widening has “blasted us out of here.”

Neighbor Howard Lehrer also questions the town’s motivation for requiring the road be so wide. “I’m hoping they don’t know something we don’t know,” he said, fearing the prospect of more development in the neighborhood.

Resident Jerry Sanders said he wanted more support from the town.

“I wonder why the town has not really counseled us and helped us a little more” about what to expect and what their role is as easement holders, he said. When he asked for that help, he was told town officials don’t do it.

“If they don’t help the citizens plan, it seems like there’s a piece of the pie missing,” Sanders said.

He said the neighbors dealt with this individually, not as a neighborhood, leaving homeowners “feeling powerless.”

He has come to believe that “the town has these guidelines they have to follow or they get sued. … Where does it end? Does every community get a heliport or a helipad” to rush accident victims to the hospital, he asked.

“None of us have gone through this before,” and have been very disturbed by the project, approved in Town Hall, which is “a separate community from the community at large,” he said.

Trouble with the developer

Project developer Hollis is also taking heat for how he is handling the work.

Neighbor Marie Demicco said he originally proposed “a very grand plan for a very wide road with very wide shoulders” narrowed by four feet only after she and her husband objected.

Other neighbors are upset by the fact that Hollis, who had originally said he would live in the Coles' former farmhouse at the center of the development, no longer plans to do so.

His wife decided against it "at the 11th hour," Hollis said, after moving twice in seven years.

Hollis is now planning to split the farmhouse lot, which also contains a barn, into two parcels, selling the farmhouse and keeping the barn, which he wants to restore.

“There’s not any more houses going in,” beyond the 10 approved initially, he said.

He admits he probably went about things “backwards” by seeking permission for the lot split from the Planning Board before talking to the neighbors about it.

After hearing about the residents’ objections, he asked the Planning Board to delay its consideration, and plans to meet with landowners in the development itself next week.

He said he has told neighbors along Marion Jordan and Meadowood Drive to “put a meeting together and I’ll be there.”

Jerry Sanders is one of the neighbors Hollis asked to organize a meeting. He said he hasn’t yet because “no one really wants to.”

Sanders said he hopes to avoid an antagonistic relationship between neighbors and Hollis. But he said town officials and the developer described the changes as “‘minimal effect.’ Then when the machines come in, there’s a maximal effect that’s just shocking. … It’s not like anybody lied. They just didn’t create an accurate picture.”

Editorial: Parents: Get involved

Published in the Current

(July 28, 2005): When police officers have to work harder to get parents more involved in their children’s safety, there’s a problem.

But that’s where we are. As we see on Page 1, local police officers and law enforcement agencies around the state have banded together in a couple of efforts to help keep teens safe. One program will let parents know when kids are driving badly, and the other asks parents to grant advance permission for police to enter their homes if kids are left home alone and hold parties or cause other disturbances.

Our communities, Scarborough, Cape Elizabeth and South Portland, have already had similar practices in place for a while. In Cape Elizabeth and Scarborough, for example, many of the officers call parents when a teen driver is stopped for a violation.

But South Portland has never had a program for parents to register a home when a teen is left there alone for several days. And Cape’s program like that has never gotten widespread involvement, though some parents do take advantage of it.

Few South Portland parents have used the “How’s my driving?” bumper-sticker effort, perhaps because teens share the car and the adults don’t want to hear the feedback on their own actions.

Police are effectively challenging parents to participate more, by coming up with new ideas – and taking on more work for themselves, like calling parents – to help keep teens safe.

We can be sure it’s not because they want more work. Actually, they want to keep kids safe, and reduce their own workload in the future. By stopping problems when kids are young and the challenges are relatively small, police hope they can prevent more trouble in the future, including more serious crimes and bad car crashes.

Parents need to reciprocate the cops’ efforts, seeking out information from the police on how their children are behaving, and acting on what they learn.

There’s an axiom about parenting: The main job is to get the child to age 18, safe and healthy; anything more than that is a bonus. While there’s more to parenting than that, it’s certainly a place to start.

At the paper we hear stories from time to time about how one parent or another yelled at a police officer calling to talk about a teen’s wrongdoing. That sort of response is not appropriate. If there is a stern talking-to to be doled out, it’s not to the officer who caught the kid.

Parents need to understand how their actions affect their children, even beyond the teenage years.

Studies show that parents’ driving habits influence teen drivers’ habits more than any other source. If kids are learning from the people who run red lights – as happens at nearly every local intersection all day, every day – we’re all in a lot of danger out on the roads.

Parents also need to get real. Studies keep showing that parents are in denial about their children’s behavior, including how often they drink – or whether they drink at all.

Few teens resist the chance to drink or experiment with other risky behavior. That was the case when I was a kid, when my parents were kids, and when my grandparents were kids.

The same types of temptations exist now as have ever existed. Somewhere between their own teenage years and their children's, as part of growing up, people come to believe they are doing something different – that they, as parents, are changing the circumstances around their children to be something other than their own childhoods.

And many do, in many ways making their children's lives better. But the world outside the house has not changed so much, and believing – even knowing – your kids have it better than you should not extend to believing your kids act differently than kids ever have in the face of peer pressure, temptation and curiosity.

Parents who are planning to go out of town and leave their kids in charge of the house should let the local police know. Even if the kid doesn’t throw a party intentionally, friends who find out about an adult-free house have been known to show up and create a party where none might have existed before.

Parents should allow police into their homes to break up parties, no matter their cause. And they should make sure they find out what kind of driving habits their children are learning and practicing on the roads of our communities. Getting involved is the only way to make a difference.

Jeff Inglis, editor

Standoff ends in arrests

Published in the Current

SOUTH PORTLAND (July 28, 2005): A Portland man was being held without bail at Cumberland County Jail this week following his arrest Monday after a nine-hour standoff with police in South Portland.

Police have charged Dana Goodine, 46, of Portland with failure to submit to arrest and creating a police standoff, since he emerged at 8 a.m. Monday from from a house at 724 Broadway where he had been holed up since 11 p.m. Sunday.

Police said Goodine, who was wanted on several warrants, had threatened police. One of the warrants was issued by a judge before whom Goodine was supposed to appear a couple weeks ago, according to South Portland Police Chief Ed Googins.

The others were issued by Goodine’s probation officer, revoking his probation on two counts of motor vehicle burglary and two counts of theft by unauthorized taking.

Goodine had shown up recently at the Cumberland County Courthouse for an arraignment but had left before the proceedings began, according to sheriff’s deputies and court security officers.

“I do not know why he was there or what his status was,” Googins said, noting that his only knowledge of the incident was from Goodine’s probation officer.

An anonymous caller told police Goodine would be at the home Sunday evening. When officers arrived, Goodine refused to come out of the house, Googins said.

Police believed he was armed with a handgun and had received an “officer safety teletype” about Goodine saying “he, having multiple warrants, has made statements that he will not be arrested, that he will go down in a blaze of glory,” Googins said.

Police surrounded the house, using tactical teams from South Portland and Scarborough, as well as two Portland officers with their armored vehicle.

Police had an arrest warrant for Goodine, but not a search warrant allowing them to enter the home, so they had no legal authority to do so until a judge signed off on it Monday morning, Googins said.

At that point, police fired bean bags through several windows into the house, and were preparing to fire tear gas to try to force Goodine out. Police negotiators also were involved, ultimately talking Goodine into surrendering at about 8 a.m.

“He has a rap sheet about one inch thick,” Googins said.

A second man in the home, Roy Chase, 45, of South Portland was also arrested. Googins originally said he was not under arrest but had been handcuffed “for his safety and ours,” and was only being questioned.

Chase has been charged with creating a police standoff and hindering apprehension, according to Detective Sgt. Ed Sawyer.

A woman who police think told Goodine he could use the house was not on the premises during the standoff, Googins said.

The building had been vacant a while, said a worker at General Courier, next door to the house.

Police closed Broadway between Anthoine Street and Kelly Street, disrupting morning commuters. The road reopened just after 8 a.m.

South Portland police have searched the house and have found material they would only classify as “evidence,” Sawyer said. Googins said there may be additional charges filed against Goodine.