Rummage sale raises $6,925 for Katrina relief

Published in the Current

SCARBOROUGH (Sep 29, 2005): The "Rummage for Relief II" yard sale raised $6,925 for the American Red Cross efforts for Hurricane Katrina relief Saturday, earning $3,925 in cash and donations. A local business that prefers to remain anonymous is matching $3,000 of the amount raised.

Organizer Carrie Callahan, on whose lawn the sale took place, said her garage was full of donated items for sale on Thursday, and Friday morning brought more carloads and truckloads of items.

The main sale was held Saturday, but on Sunday "it still looked like a full tag sale," because there was so much stuff, Callahan said.

She said some people took advantage of the opportunity to pass on more generosity. One woman came from elsewhere in Maine, arriving late Saturday. She bought eight boxes of books several bicycles, to give to children in her hometown, Callahan said.

Many of the leftover items were donated to local charities, including homeless shelters and a shelter for single mothers. The remaining donated items – mostly furniture – will be given to the Salvation Army, Callahan said.

Kids with cap gun cause scare

Published in the Current

SOUTH PORTLAND (Sep 29, 2005): A trio of young South Portland boys caused a scare at the Brown Elementary School Friday, waving a realistic-looking cap gun from a balcony of a home across the street from the school.

School officials took the threat seriously and called police, who responded with three officers, who realized the gun was not real, according to Officer James Fahey.

The gun was confiscated, and the boys’ parents were called to the scene, where adults and children were sternly spoken to by officers. No criminal charges were filed, Fahey said.

Scarborough woman assists ABC 'Makeover'

Published in the Current

SCARBOROUGH (Sep 29, 2005): A Scarborough woman is part of a massive effort to build a new home for a lobsterman, eight years after another Scarborough man helped the fisherman survive the loss of a limb.

Mary Nablo said she was asked to coordinate volunteers for the project for the hit ABC television show "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition." In the show, which will air in December, a construction crew will tear down a house and rebuild it in seven days.

The home belongs to a Wells lobsterman, Doug Goodale, who lost his arm in a freak accident while lobstering alone in 1997.

He caught the right sleeve of his slicker in the winch he used to haul his lobster traps up from the sea floor, and it crushed his hand, wrist and forearm, as well as throwing him overboard, according to the doctor who treated Goodale at Maine Medical Center after the accident.

That doctor, Scarborough resident Donald Endrizzi, was surprised to learn of Goodale’s good fortune Tuesday evening, but immediately remembered the situation. “It’s not something you forget,” he said.

Goodale managed to cut himself loose from the rope and get back into the boat with the use of just his left arm, shutting off the winch and then cutting himself free of it, before driving the boat back to shore with one arm.

Goodale collapsed on the dock and was taken by ambulance to Maine Medical Center. “His arm (was) completely mangled," Endrizzi remembered. “The nerves and arteries were all shredded.”

After his arm was amputated and cleaned up, Goodale “was unbelievably remarkable,” driving his truck two weeks later, Endrizzi said, calling his feat of survival “Herculean."

"I can’t imagine this guy managed to get back in the boat,” he said.

Nablo got involved through “a friend of a friend of a friend,” who called to ask if she could help organize the effort.

“They wanted someone who knew a lot of people” and had good organizational skills. Nablo, who has coordinated a number of community events, including Operation Cupid, in which Scarborough Middle School students collected donations and sent care packages to members of the 133rd Engineer Battalion in Iraq earlier this year.

“They told me a couple weeks ago to free up my schedule,” Nablo said. “A lot of us have been kept in the dark.” She did not even know the exact situation until seeing it on Channel 8, Portland’s ABC station, Tuesday evening.

“There’s a bunch of people all coming down from Scarborough” to help, and Nablo is looking for more helpers.

Saving the history of neighborhood stores

Published in the Current

SOUTH PORTLAND (Sep 29, 2005): Kathy DiPhilippo grew up in South Portland and has fond memories of the city’s neighborhood stores, so it was no surprise she wanted to include a chapter on them in a book about the city’s history.

What was a surprise was what she found when trying to research them: Next to nothing.

DiPhilippo set out to fill that void and recently published, "South Portland: A Nostalgic Look at our Neighborhood Stores." The book tells the story of local groceries, pharmacies and food spots, like Bennett's Ice Cream Bar in Thornton Heights. She will talk about the book on Wednesday, Oct. 5, at 7 p.m. at Nonesuch Books and Cards in Mill Creek.

DiPhilippo, whose maiden name is Onos, grew up a few steps from L and A Variety at the corner of Broadway and Elm Street, and walked by there every day on her way to and from Kaler School.

“When I was a kid, I would go to Mill Creek and there was King’s and there was Wellwood’s,” said DiPhilippo, who is 37.

DiPhilippo, who is the historian for the South Portland Historical Society, started looking for old photos to illustrate a history of the city.

“There are stores that there are no photographs of,” she said, including L and A. She looked for King’s and Wellwood’s too, coming up empty in the archives of the local society, the Maine Historical Society and Greater Portland Landmarks, though those searches yielded pictures of other stores.

She also started learning about the history of some of the neighborhood shops.

“I’ve read every history of South Portland that I can find” and had never seen much on Uncle Andy’s, founded by John Palanza, so she interviewed him and realized the richness of the stories the shops could tell.

“There are people who love history and there are people who like nostalgia,” and she crafted her book to appeal to both sets, with historical facts and thorough research as well as people’s recollections of the places she describes.

“I interviewed a lot of people in their 80s and a few in their 90s,” she said. “People went to stores and they had memories – wonderful stories.”

As her research drew her deeper she realized the stores alone would fill a book, not just a chapter in a larger work. She asked people about their favorite stores, and also sought out people who could help with oral histories of specific stores of significance.

The time people spent with her, and the depth of their memories, made her feel “a responsibility to document” the history. “It became a quest.”

In the process, she learned that retail sales changed after World War II. Before the war, many stores had old wooden floors with sawdust on them to absorb spills. Goods like flour were sold in bulk from large containers.

Back then, “you’d go down and hang around the store,” and catch up with friends and neighbors who passed through.

After the war came “modern” store innovations like linoleum floors, as well as more pre-packaged food. And supermarkets arose, pushing corner groceries to change or give way.

“The ones that did make it through were the ones that smartly changed to the variety store,” DiPhilippo said.

She continued her search for old photos, eventually scoring a success in the city assessor’s office, which had remnants of an early 20th-century collection of photos of every building in the city.

“All that was left was a couple of ‘B’ streets, not including Broadway” and the streets whose names started with “C,” including Cottage Road, DiPhilippo said. But it had photos of several landmark buildings, such as the building that is now Red’s Dairy Freeze, when it was still a Tastee-Freeze, and before the barn-style roof was put on.

She worked on the book for a year, from the first interviews through sending it to the publisher in July. The mother of three small kids, she had hoped to finish by the end of the school year, but as the deadline neared she realized she wasn’t going to make it, even though she was working every night until 3 a.m.

During the days, her mother would come over to help take care of the two youngest children, who are not yet attending school, while DiPhilippo worked on the book.

“I could not have done it without her,” DiPhilippo said. Sometimes her kids would work on “their books,” pieces of folded paper they would draw or write on, while she worked on hers.

She is now working on two other book ideas, both about local history. “I just love South Portland history,” she said.

Editorial: Helping with housing

Published in the Current

(Sep 29, 2005): One Scarborough woman has been working to relocate Gulf Coast residents to Maine, recognizing that those who needed help paying for housing before Hurricane Katrina are even more in need now.

And another Scarborough woman is coordinating volunteers giving a Wells lobsterman a new home because his is in poor repair. Read more about them and their efforts on Page 1.

Both of these are worthy efforts, and we should be proud that people in our communities are helping with them. But they should not overshadow a similar problem right here at home: Affordable housing is hard to find in Scarborough, Cape Elizabeth and South Portland, and is getting even more scarce all the time.

There are a few projects, including Brickhill in South Portland and the Chamberlain brothers’ proposal for their property in Dunstan, which could help the situation. But even as they move forward, market forces are pushing housing prices higher.

Driving around our three communities over the past few weeks, I’ve seen several large, nice houses going up. Two of them, medium-sized homes on relatively small pieces of land just off Highland Avenue in South Portland, now have a big sign out front: “Starting at $425,000.”

The others have more modest signs, but are no more affordably priced for lack of a big ad.

Housing prices are outstripping increases in personal income. From 2000 to 2004, Maine’s per capita personal income grew 7.3 percent, according to the Maine Department of Labor. But in just the past 12 months, Maine’s housing price index rose 13 percent, according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight. Even median home prices, as announced by the Maine Association of Realtors Wednesday, rose 7.7 percent.

Developers and landowners have a right to make money from their investments. But following present practices, they risk saturating the market, reaching a point where they are building homes nobody can afford.

It would be better for everyone if they found a balance, building expensive homes for those who can afford them – and they exist – while building smaller, less expensive homes as well.

Many of the developers working on local projects, including the Chamberlains and Brickhill’s Richard Berman, are local residents, who can experience the value of the communities they help create.

We are lucky in this: Many communities around the country are in the hands of absentee developers, who have little reason to care about anything but the almighty dollar.

As Cape Elizabeth and Scarborough review their comprehensive plans, and South Portland looks at neighborhood plans for Mill Creek and Knightville, leaders and community members should look closely at what they can do to promote the development of affordable housing.

They should explore ways to create incentives for developers to diversify housing, such as exempting affordable housing units from school or other impact fees, often assessed to offset the expenses a town will incur as a result of increased population. They could also exempt affordable housing from caps on the number of new homes that can be built, or offer, as Scarborough did with a recent development in Oak Hill, permission to build more homes than traditional zoning would allow in exchange for some – or all – of those additional homes being made to qualify as affordable.

Our local developers, we hope, can be prevailed upon by social and economic forces to help our communities remain strong and diverse, with recent college graduates, young families, parents with school-age children, empty-nesters and retirees all finding places they can afford to call home.

Revals next week

In next week’s issue of the Current, we will begin publishing the results of Scarborough’s recent town-wide property revaluation. The full listing of properties in town, their owners and land and building values, will be published over two weeks, because of space constraints. Pick up the Current next week to get your copy.

Jeff Inglis, editor