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.

On Active Duty: Tiana Schneider

Published in the Current

CAPE ELIZABETH (July 21, 2005): Spc. Tiana Schneider of Cape Elizabeth is a saxophonist in the 1st Armored Division Army Band, based in Wiesbaden, Germany.

A 2003 graduate of Cape Elizabeth High School, she recently returned home on leave with her boyfriend, Cpl. Chris Nicholas of Wisconsin, a trumpet player with the band.

“The weather has been so nice here,” Schneider said, especially because of the ocean breezes, which she does not have in central Germany.

Her band, one of four Army bands in Europe, has been very busy this spring and early summer, playing as many as two change-of-command ceremonies a day, and traveling extensively around Germany and throughout Western Europe to perform.

“Four out of six days we’re on a bus,” she said. The band is also playing at German beer festivals, which often include parades, in which they perform German traditional folk songs and marches, as well as American marches and jazz.

Recently, Schneider, 20, was among those sent to a change-of-command ceremony in Baumholder, another American military installation in Germany. The ceremony was held despite bucketing rain.

“I guess the only good thing about that day was there was no breeze,” she said. “There was so much water in my sax” she was dumping it out of the bell between songs and some keys stuck.

Schneider is reenlisting on Aug. 1. Her father, retired Coast Guard Chief Warrant Officer Charles Schneider, will give her her reenlistment oath, as he did when she enlisted.

She has volunteered to spend two years in Korea, starting in the middle of next year. Nicholas has also done so, and they hope to be stationed near Seoul with an Army band there.

“We definitely have the best job in the military,” Schneider said. Though some of her fellow soldiers think she has a 9-to-5 job, she tells them she has no weekends off, and an unpredictable schedule. But she does get to meet generals face-to-face after playing music for them, and has seen a lot of Europe while traveling to and from performances.

“I’m having a lot of fun with this,” she said.

“On Active Duty” is a continuing series profiling members of the community serving in the armed forces. If a member of your family is on active duty in any branch of the military, please contact Editor Jeff Inglis.

Tsunami-hit region a long way from recovery

Published in the Current

SCARBOROUGH (July 21, 2005): Residents of the areas where the tsunami hit last December are still in need of help to get back on their feet, a Catholic bishop from southern India told the Scarborough Rotary Club Tuesday.

Bishop Yoohanon “John” Mar Chrysostom Kalloor, bishop of Marthandam, in the southernmost district at the very southern tip of India, said he was two miles from the shore on Dec. 26, 2004, when the Indian Ocean tsunami struck his area.

He was in the middle of ordaining two young men into the priesthood, and went to the coast. “It was a tragic situation,” Kalloor said. He said he didn't see "even a single human life” in the first village he went to, struck by a 200-foot-high wall of water generated by an earthquake below the ocean floor off the Indonesian island of Sumatra, about 2,000 miles away.

In his local area, about 3,000 people were killed, most of them Christian, he said. “It was a massive burial.”

Local and international aid agencies started 42 camps for people displaced by the tsunami, which ruined homes and other buildings, destroyed boats and fishing equipment, and caused people to fear the sea from which many of them earn their living.

“Under my care, there were 5,000 people in four camps,” Kalloor said.

He told of a conversation he had with one boy whose entire family had died, and whose house had collapsed.

“He came and told me, ‘Bishop, I don’t want your food. I don’t want your clothes. I don’t want your money,’” Kalloor said. When Kalloor asked him why, “He said, ‘I want to die.’”

“I talked with him for hours,” brought the boy back to his own residence and helped take care of him for the next month and a half while the boy got his life back together.

In his village, the tsunami orphaned 150 children and widowed 50 women. “That is one small village,” Kalloor said, out of the vast area affected by the disaster.

But the need in his community did not begin with the tsunami.

As many as 700 children need money to help pay for school uniforms, shoes, textbooks and bookbags.

Every morning when he finishes Mass or prayers, “there are so many people waiting for me to ask some favors,” Kalloor said.

“Leprosy is a big problem.” He was once a director of a sanitorium that housed 4,000 lepers, who are often disowned by their families and left homeless.

“I got them under the bridges of the roads. They didn’t have homes,” he said.

In his diocese, which he has led since 1998, Kalloor has started a university and a home for lepers, as well as a new orphanage – in addition to the existing four – to house orphans from the tsunami.

That is part of the relief effort, which began with giving every family a small room in large tents, and providing them with food, water and sanitation.

The next step toward recovery is just beginning, he said, with plans to purchase fishing boats and nets.

“Ninety-some percent of the people who died in this area are poor fishermen,” Kalloor said. “Some of them are afraid to go to the sea,” but it is their best hope for providing for their families.

The final stage of relief is to build homes for the families, on land the government has purchased a ways back from the shore.

“Each day, I pray never to see such a scene again” as he saw after the tsunami struck, Kalloor said.

Editorial: Home for hospice

Published in the Current

SCARBOROUGH (July 21, 2005): The people working to bring a hospice to Scarborough probably hadn’t expected to encounter much objection to their idea. After all, each of us will die someday, and many of us – myself included – have a relative or friend who used hospice services before dying.

Hospice of Southern Maine has run into a little bit of resistance, mostly residents concerned about traffic on the small roads off Maple Avenue, including Hunnewell Road, where Agnes Desfosses has donated nearly five acres to the agency.

Traffic is a valid concern, and a common one, about new developments, whether residential, commercial or a bit of both, like this one. Hospice organizers plan to provide housing for up to 16 patients, as well as space for family members to stay, and so it sounds a bit residential, perhaps along the lines of an apartment building. But it will also be a non-profit health care building, with doctors, nurses and other professionals helping to care for the bodies and minds of the patients there.

The Town Council is working on a provision that would allow a hospice building in any residential area of town – while leaving hospices barred from commercial and industrial zones.

It would seem better for everyone, not least the patients and their families, to place a hospice in a neighborhood than a business park, even if neighborhood roads were not originally designed to handle the hospice’s additional traffic.

And it’s not unreasonable for residents to be concerned about the potential effects of such a project on their surroundings. It’s likely this type of objection would be raised in any neighborhood the hospice group selected.

This particular neighborhood has long been vocally concerned about traffic in their neighborhood. In late 2002, they successfully lobbied the Town Council to slow down traffic in their area, getting approval for the installation of new stop signs that they hoped would discourage people from cutting through the area to avoid the Oak Hill intersection.

Having recently reclaimed their roads from speeding short-cutters, they are rightly wary of having more traffic come through. The hospice will bring visitors, staff and deliveries. A traffic study would be able to tell more accurately than anyone’s speculation – either the residents’ or hospice organizers’ – how much more traffic it would all mean, and such a study should be conducted before the planning process gets much farther along.

The neighborhood is a quiet residential space, with children playing outside, and where adults jog, walk and cycle. The residents there have a right to that environment, just as the hospice group has a right to propose to the town their project and potential remedies for any negative impacts the project might have.

One possible solution could be to have the hospice group install sidewalks in nearby areas where pedestrian traffic is common. Sidewalks are missing from the neighborhoods along and adjoining Maple Avenue, and could provide increased safety for the runners, walkers and others using the roads there. They would also narrow the roads even more, which could tend to slow traffic.

There may be a place that would be better in an ideal world, but in this, the real world, five acres at no cost provide the perfect spot as far as the hospice is concerned. Buying a similarly sized lot in Scarborough or elsewhere in Southern Maine would be very expensive, perhaps prohibitively so, given the hospice’s desire to be close to major roads like the Maine Turnpike and Route 1.

Hospice is an important aspect of health care, and a crucial support for dying people and their loved ones. The neighbors’ concerns are not insurmountable, and the need for hospice is great. We hope that the hospice group can work with the town and residents to find a way to bring hospice services to Southern Maine.

Jeff Inglis, editor

Keeping the ships from the shore

Published in the Current

SOUTH PORTLAND (July 14, 2005): Four men and one woman are in charge of keeping the largest ships in Portland Harbor safe and sound as they come in and out of one of the busiest ports on the eastern seaboard.

Two of the Portland Pilots – one an active pilot with 43 years’ experience and another who retired four years ago after 43 years of his own – talked about their work recently at the Portland Harbor Museum.

The pilot company, a private firm not affiliated with any government organization, was founded in the early part of the 20th century, and “you might call it, in some respects, a closed company,” said Capt. Granville “Pete” Smith, a retired pilot who lives in Cumberland Foreside.

The pilots, all graduates of Maine Maritime Academy, hold master’s – also called captain’s – licenses from the U.S. Coast Guard and have undergone three years of training – at a ship-handling school in Europe, and five schools in the U.S. for “what-if scenarios” – and then 250 trips in and out of the harbor with other pilots.

After that comes a Coast Guard pilot exam, only part of which is to draw a chart of the entire harbor from memory, ensuring that instant recall of any point in the area is possible when the pilot is conning a ship on its way into or out of the harbor.

“There’s no chance for error,” said Capt. S.J.S. “Sandy” Dunbar.

Even after passing the test, the Board of Harbor Commissioners can ask for more training before granting a license.

“Once you get the license you get into our organization and for the first time in three years, you start earning money,” Dunbar said.

Time and tides

The formalized training is just one way their profession has changed with time.

But some things never change. The pilots work on 10-day shifts, when they are on call at any hour.

“It’s almost like being a fireman. You don’t know when that bell is going to ring,” Dunbar said. In the old days, they had to stay near the phone all the time. “Now, with pagers and cell phones, life is almost human.”

If one job comes too soon after another, the pilots may not go home. Instead, they may take a “kink” in the office on Union Wharf, or on the pilot boat. “Kinks are a little bit longer than a nap,” Dunbar said.

Pilots still meet their ships at the same place, outside West Cod and Corwin’s ledges, southeast of Two Lights, though there’s no longer a lightship there, and not even the 40-foot buoy that once marked it. Now the sea buoy – designated with the letter P, and in the phonetic alphabet of marine communications called the “Papa buoy” – is the meeting point.

It was chosen originally because it has “deep water, plenty of maneuvering room,” Smith said. “From the Papa buoy, it’s almost a straight shot right into Portland Head.”

But the way they get there is now very different.

“When we came in, we actually both started when there was a schooner as a pilot vessel,” Dunbar said.

The 70-foot schooner would motor out of the dock, sail out of the harbor to the lightship – where the sea buoy is now – and pause about 50 yards from the ship in need of a pilot. The pilot would jump into a dory and be rowed – or later, motored – to the side of the ship.

“That was a whole new experience, especially in bad weather,” Dunbar said. “The training was getting aboard – just getting to work.”

The schooner stayed so long – until the late 1960s – because “we were ingrained, being Mainers, with schooners,” Smith said. Also, “we were cheap,” and sailing was cheaper than paying for fuel.

On the schooner in the winter, ice was a big worry – as on any sailing ship – and pilots and crew alike had to constantly chip away the frozen sea spray from the deck, rails, spars and rigging.

“We lived in oilskins and rubber boots and very good gloves – and very strong hands,” Dunbar said.

A new pilot back then would get “on the job training” shadowing pilots. “A few of the pilots would let you do the work right away,” though they would be right behind the trainee, ready to make any needed corrections, Dunbar said.

Nowadays, the pilots use a 65-foot steel-hulled boat with heated decks and rails, but it’s still an adventure. “We call it getting to work and sometimes it’s a son of a gun,” Dunbar said. The pilot boat even pulls directly alongside the ship.

Now, it’s usually only a dozen feet or so until a climbing pilot reaches a gangway, required on any ship with more than 30 feet of freeboard, the distance between the sea surface and the ship’s rail.

“Prior to that … you went all the way up on a rope ladder,” Smith said.

On the way up

After the climb, there is still a modern twist. Post-Sept. 11, security on ships, especially international ones coming into a petroleum harbor like Portland, is tight.

Before Dunbar even gets off the gangway, there’s a security officer asking him for ID – even though he just scaled the side of a boat in, effectively, the open ocean, and the boat he just climbed off of says “Pilot” in huge letters, as does his jacket.

The next part is the same as ever. The pilot, still out of breath from the ladder climb, creeps across the pitching deck to the superstructure and up as many as six flights of stairs “behind some 22-year-old third mate skipping every other step,” Dunbar laughed.

There, on the bridge, the pilot greets the captain, learns about the ship and tells the captain about the port.

The pilot never takes the wheel of the ship, but is given the authority to direct its course and speed. “The skipper is the skipper,” Smith said.

The pilots don’t use GPS, though they do refer to radar to “look around,” but “our training is so instinctual that we don’t even use charts. It’s all up here,” Dunbar said, pointing at his head.”

Fast freighters take under an hour to come in, while a crude-oil carrier can take two hours, including the tugs.

“You don’t have a ship a day, you have like five,” Smith said. The port handles 60 to 70 ships a month, with some trips taking three or more hours, especially if it involved waiting for the tide to turn or for a berth to open up.

“I did three jobs in three and a half hours just a little while ago,” said Dunbar.

Editorial: Close the loophole

Published in the Current

SCARBOROUGH (July 14, 2005): Scarborough mother Denise Kring is rightly concerned that a provision in Maine’s juvenile-justice laws allows some juveniles to plead not guilty to a crime by reason of insanity without facing any compulsory medical treatment afterward.

The loophole is a major hole in Maine’s systems of justice and mental health treatment, and should be addressed immediately by state legislators. We are heartened to know that Sen. Phil Bartlett, D-Scarborough, is already at work on the matter.

Kring’s daughter Barbara, 20, was badly injured in March, in what police and prosecutors say was an assault with a knife by Barbara’s 15-year-old friend Lyndsay McLaughlin.

The nature and circumstances of the attack remain murky, even to investigators. District Attorney Stephanie Anderson has said in the past, and told the Current again this week, that some evidence appears to point to a suicide pact between the two, while other evidence contradicts that theory.

Barbara Kring and her mother have said in every one of their statements to the Current that Barbara was an innocent and unsuspecting victim, who had gone into the woods with McLaughlin intending only to become “blood sisters."

In a piece Barbara Kring wrote published in the Current in May, she wrote that she and McLaughlin were going to make small cuts on each other's hands and press them together, mixing the blood, as they had seen in the movie "The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood."

McLaughlin is accused of stabbing Barbara in the back and slashing her throat, after which she is believed to have stabbed herself in the stomach.

Were McLaughlin charged as an adult, she could be committed to a mental hospital or compelled to seek other treatment, until medical and legal authorities agreed she was healthy enough to be released.

We hope, and have no reason to doubt, that regardless of legal compulsion McLaughlin’s family will continue to provide any treatment necessary for her to deal with this incident and any related issues.

But it is not hard to imagine a situation, with another child in another family, in which the parents would not be so responsible and would only bring their child to a psychiatrist when ordered by a court to do so.

The juvenile-justice laws are intentionally different from those governing adult criminal behavior and consequences, based on the idea that young people may need additional guidance and support to correct errant ways.

This hole in Maine’s juvenile system is a difference that has the opposite effect. It removes a way that additional guidance and support can be offered, by preventing judges from imposing any conditions on young people who claim they are mentally ill and are therefore not responsible for their actions.

While we would all like to think that parents will do what is best for their children, the cold reality is that they don’t always, just as adults don’t always do what is best for themselves or each other from time to time.

That is why the law needs to allow judges, at the least, the option of compelling treatment for juveniles who plead not guilty by reason of insanity.

Jeff Inglis, editor

Sea Cadets visit for firefighting class

Published in the Current

SOUTH PORTLAND (July 14, 2005): Just over a dozen U.S. Navy Sea Cadets, including three from California and one from New Mexico, visited South Portland this week for training in Maine’s first firefighting and damage-control class for Sea Cadets.

The cadets, young men and women between the ages of 14 and 18, stayed at the Stewart Morrill American Legion Post on Broadway, and marched along the South Portland Greenbelt walkway to and from classes at the Coast Guard station on High Street.

Only one of the cadets was from Maine, while the others came from across the country. The class was organized by Roger Sabourin of South Portland, a retired Navy lieutenant who is commander of the Legion post and commander of the South Portland-based CG Group Portland Division of the U.S. Navy Sea Cadets.

The cadets’ week of classes, which included a trip to South Portland’s Central Fire Station for classes about fighting structure fires, earned them certification as firefighters on land and aboard ships.

The culminating drill involved a training unit owned by the Coast Guard, which places trainees in a shipboard situation where as many as eight different things can go wrong at once, Sabourin said. That teaches them to prioritize what pipes to repair first, for example.

On their first day, the cadets jumped right in, practicing using fire hydrants and carrying fire hoses in relay races. Each of them had to pass a physical fitness test before entering the class, which is just one of many the Sea Cadets program offers – including a version of the Navy SEAL special-operations classes.

Her granddaughter is a grandmother

Published in the Current

SOUTH PORTLAND (July 7, 2005): Yesterday was the 95th birthday for Marion Minerva Upton Burnham, a lifelong resident of South Portland, whose descendants now number 70, with another on the way.

Burnham, born July 6, 1910, is the eldest of five living generations of girls. Her eldest daughter Ruth has an eldest daughter Cathy, whose eldest daughter Melissa has a daughter Marissa.

“I went to two parties yesterday,” Marion said during a June 28 interview. One was for the 70th birthday of her son, Allen, who lives in Gray. The other was the first birthday for a great-great-granddaughter who lives in Westbrook.

She has twice been uprooted by development in the city. “Oil tanks took my folks’ house,” for the construction of the Portland Pipeline along Front Street, precipitating a move to Preble Street in Ferry Village.

But then World War II came, and the shipyards took that house.

“When they put the railroad track in for the shipyard, it went right through our house,” said Marion’s son Allen Burnham. Marion’s mother used to sell ice cream out of a cart to workers coming off shift at the shipyard. She gave the proceeds to her church.

The family moved to Thornton Heights, where they stayed for years, until Marion’s husband Ernest had several heart attacks in 1956. Then the family moved to a single-story home in Stanwood Park.

“I’ve lived in all parts of South Portland,” Marion said.

And all those years – even today – she has had company. Marion took care of her own mother, Ernest’s mother and his aunt, and her sister and brother-in-law, at times when they needed help. “My husband and I only had about two years together” with no one else in the house, she said.

Years of togetherness

“We’ve always been kind of close,” said Ruth Small of Portland, Marion’s eldest daughter, beginning an oft-repeated chain of different voices continuing each other’s thoughts and sentences.

“We see each other often enough,” said her brother, Allen.

“That’s what’s great about this family,” said Ruth’s daughter Cathy Lemar of Gardiner.

“I remember growing up, every Sunday the family got together,” Ruth said, ending the thought.

And they’re closely tied to South Portland. After Marion married Ernest – who was from Boothbay – the couple moved to a Portland apartment for a brief time.

After about two months, “I was ready to come back,” Marion said. They moved in with her parents for a time, and their daughters Ruth and Beatrice were born in the house on Front Street. Allen, the youngest, was born at the Maine Eye and Ear Infirmary in Portland.

Ernest worked at the Chaplin Motor Company on Forest Avenue. Marion, who had picked sardines during school, worked first in a rug shop and then in food service at Mercy Hospital.

Of her six siblings, Marion is the oldest and the only one still alive. Her children stay close by – Bea lives the longest distance away, in Texas with the husband she met in the Army.

“They’re awful good to me,” Marion said. Bea visits several times a year, to see her active mother.

"You rattle the keys and she's ready to go," Bea said in a phone interview.

Marion’s memory remains sharp – "she's got a better memory than I do," said Bea – and she has an endless supply of stories about her life and her family. A family favorite is about her driving lesson out in Scarborough, with Ernest giving her directions.

She came to an intersection, and Ernest told her to turn one way. She did, but he realized his mistake and told her to turn the other way. “We took down mailboxes,” Marion said, drawing peals of laughter.

Marion also remembers embarrassments with good humor. A longtime member of local churches – People United Methodist until the early 1940s and Thornton Heights United Methodist for the 62 years since her move to that neighborhood – she recalls hosting a church group at home, where she and Ernest raised hounds.

During the gathering, a hound gave birth. “Was I ever put out,” Marion said.

Sharing stories

In addition to Marion’s stories, other family members have collected many more.

Bea remembers the house on Front Street was just over the fence from school. "We used to just push the boards to the side and crawl through."

She also recalls "Old Joe's skating rink," a frozen pond near the Coast Guard station where everyone went skating. "That was back in the times when everybody went out and you didn't have to worry about your kids."

Family historian Carol Campbell of South Portland – whose grandmother was a first cousin to Marion’s father – has collected many of the family records and has researched the stories.

Marion’s earliest identified American ancestor was an indentured servant from Scotland, captured by Cromwell at the battle of Dunbar in 1650 and imprisoned in England. Very few survived the harsh conditions of imprisonment, but among them was an Upton, who was sold to Saugus Ironworks in what is now Massachusetts. He worked off his servitude, and one of his descendants, David Upton, served as a Minuteman during the American Revolution and later settled on Chebeague Island, where he is buried.

One story Carol told at a recent family gathering was a story Marion’s daughter Ruth Small had never heard, about her great-grandfather, who was lost at sea.

That man, Marion’s grandfather, Horace Upton, died at sea in an August storm in 1893. When he left for that trip, his youngest daughter, then 3, cried and didn’t want him to go. He came back to the house, sang her the old hymn “Throw Out the Lifeline” to comfort her, and then left again on a trip from which he never returned.

“I just got goosebumps!” Ruth exclaimed as Carol told the story. She remembered the hymn – “I haven’t heard it for a long time” – with its lyrics about a man at sea, “drifting away … sinking in anguish” and in need rescue.

Horace’s two brothers, Capt. George Upton and Capt. Joseph “Joad” Upton, were ferry captains on the Lottie and Mae, running from Ferry Village over to Portland.

Joad also worked as a lighthouse keeper. His last posting was at Two Lights in Cape Elizabeth, where in 1934 he was found dead at the foot of one of the light towers, having fallen from the top after suffering a heart attack or stroke at age 65.

Another lighthouse also figures strongly in Marion’s life: She and Ernest were friends with the Holbrooks, who were the keepers of Bug Light back when there was a keeper’s house next to the beacon. The Holbrooks stayed a bit inland with the Burnhams during the winter, and the Burnhams would visit at the Holbrooks at the seaside during the summer.

Marion’s granddaughter Cathy, in particular, has gotten interested in some of these older stories, fueled in part by the interest of her own grandson, Christopher Armstrong, 10, who loves to hear the tales.

“It never seemed that important to me but it does now,” Cathy said.

Editorial: Looking for dough

Published in the Current

CAPE ELIZABETH (July 7, 2005): The Cape Elizabeth schools should not make Cape’s taxpayers pay extra for one construction project just because another came in cheaper than expected.

The schools are asking the Town Council for permission to take $133,000 the town’s voters earmarked for the Pond Cove expansion and use it to pay for things on the high school renovation’s wish list.

It’s true that the Pond Cove project doesn’t need the money – the actual cost of building the kindergarten wing was 10 percent lower than projected. So this idea does not hurt the Pond Cove project, and it could help the high school.

But voters approved $1.5 million for Pond Cove and $7.9 million for the high school. They did not approve $9.4 million for both together, and they were never asked – or told – what should happen to any money “left over” at the end of either project.

In the absence of the question, and without an advance declaration of intent, voters would fairly assume that any money not needed to accomplish the stated goals of a project would simply not be spent.

If the schools needed to do $100,000 worth of additional work at the high school, they should have included that amount in the request they sent to the voters.

They didn’t include it in the request, though, and for two very good reasons: First, the estimates showed the workers would be able to do what they needed to do with $7.9 million. And second, school and town officials were worried the high school project might not pass if the cost estimate was too high.

So now, nearly two years after getting the projected cost low enough to pass muster with the voters, they want to raise actual spending without voter approval, to cross items off a wish list of “add-alternates,” those items that could be done if more money becomes available.

The original idea of add-alternates was that construction costs were uncertain. If the cost of the high school work had turned out to be lower than expected, as happened with Pond Cove, any “extra” money – anything remaining from the $7.9 million – would be used for other work, such as new upholstery for the auditorium seats.

Voters were told – in the form of the question on the ballot – that local borrowing on each project would be for bonds in an amount “not to exceed” the total carefully chosen by officials balancing school-building needs with voter-approval likelihood.

Voters were not told that if one project ended up with extra money, it might actually be spent on the other – that the amount spent could be a figure that actually did exceed the dollar amount on the ballot.

The argument that both referenda passed with strong majorities doesn’t mean the outcome would have been the same if the amounts were any higher. And the argument that a vote for one project was a vote for the other also doesn’t hold water: The vote tallies were different for the two questions.

Cape Elizabeth taxpayers do support their schools, with millions upon millions of dollars every year. But that support is not a given, and handling money responsibly is the best way to ensure it.

In fact, neither school officials nor the Town Council were certain the support was there back in 2003 when the two projects went out to voters – which was one reason the council didn’t approve the spending outright, without a referendum.

What the schools should be asking to do – and what the residents should demand of the Town Council – is to return that money to the taxpayers, by not borrowing it when it’s not needed.

If the schools and the council want to spend more on additional work at the high school, the question should go back to the voters. It’s their money.

Jeff Inglis, editor

Two boats sink in one day

Published in the Current

CAPE ELIZABETH (June 30, 2005): Two boats sank off Cape Elizabeth in the course of a few hours Saturday, with no injuries to any aboard or any rescuers.

The first sinking happened in the late morning Saturday. The Cape Elizabeth Water Extrication Team was called to Kettle Cove for a sailboat in trouble at about 9:30 a.m., according to WETeam Capt. Joe Mokry.

“There were four large fellas in a very small boat” watching their 26-foot sailboat take on water.

“It appears they touched the bottom hard,” Mokry said. There was a hole in the bottom of the boat, and the men tried to drive it up onto the beach to prevent it from sinking completely, he said.

That effort failed, and the men waited with WETeam members for the Coast Guard to arrive. The Coast Guard took the men back to Portland.

Mokry said Tuesday the boat had already been salvaged and removed. “In an area like that, you need to get the boat out” to prevent it from being a hazard to navigation. “It was sticking up a few feet anyway above the surface,” Mokry said.

The second boat was a 13-foot Boston whaler that sank off Richmond Island at about 3:30 p.m. when the four men in that boat – loaded with diving gear – came quickly around a corner out of the lee and into five-foot seas. The boat was quickly swamped, and the men were in the water.

A WETeam member was in his own boat nearby, and was able to rescue the four men.

“It’s been pretty busy,” said Mokry, noting an emergency call for a woman on a “large yacht” at anchor near Crescent Beach June 23 and a report of a boat with a fire in the engine room off Richmond Island last week.

Those two both ended well, Mokry said. After Mokry talked to the yacht’s skipper to determine exactly where the boat was, the woman was transferred to a WETeam boat and then to a Cape ambulance for a trip to the hospital.

Location information was also a challenge for the boat on fire. After it was located not “in Kettle Cove near Richmond Island,” as had been reported, but off Prouts Neck in Scarborough, the two men aboard were unhurt and “did everything right,” Mokry said.

The fire in the engine compartment was out, but the boat was disabled. It was helped into harbor in Scarborough, Mokry said.

“We’re thinking it’s going to stay fairly busy,” said Mokry, who in his day job trains emergency workers in rescues in and on the water, as well as on boats.

He said he did a training session down in Wells this weekend, and during the class they did three actual rescues.

“The boats out there are unbelievable,” he said, saying that so many people were cooped up by bad weather for so long that they all want to get their boats out at the same time.

He suggested that people make sure they plan for bad weather – like a fog bank two weeks ago that triggered a search for boaters in Harpswell who were later found unhurt – and other unexpected problems. He suggested people carry a cell phone with a fully charged battery with them, so they can call friends and family in the event they are delayed returning.

Without a way to communicate, such as a cell phone or a radio, people are often reported missing two or three hours after they were expected to return, and “a large-scale search” is begun right away, Mokry said.

More often than not, the people are fine but didn’t have a way to tell anyone they were just pulling up into a cove to wait out bad weather, or had gone a different route for some reason.

“A lot of times it’s really unnecessary because people aren’t planning for contingencies,” he said.

Editorial: Be prepared

Published in the Current

(June 30, 2005): Even before Wednesday afternoon's storm took out power and roads, it was important to be careful when boating, as eight people learned last weekend in the ocean off Cape Elizabeth.

None of the boaters were hurt, which is fortunate, but their boats sank, reminding them and all who recreate on the water that the ocean is a fun place, but has its dangers.

And now, in light of the recent high winds, torrential downpour and lightning strikes, it's even more evident that people heading out onto the water - or even out for a hike, bike ride, picnic or drive - need to have a plan in case the unexpected happens.

As Cape Elizabeth Water Extrication Team Capt. Joe Mokry noted in our Page 1 article, a lot of people are not making those plans, even skipping something as simple as making sure the cell phone is fully charged before an outing.

If people are stuck somewhere or have to take a different route, they can be delayed. Without the ability to communicate with friends and loved ones, those left at home may call the authorities and have them begin a search, risking emergency workers' lives.

There's nothing wrong with calling out all the police, fire, ambulance and water rescue people who are needed, if people are really in danger.

But if there is a way to avoid doing so - if people are really fine, just anchored in a cove to ride out a high wind, for example - a simple cell phone or radio call can save rescuers a lot of time, and the folks at home a lot of worry.

There are plenty of people - and I am one - who would rather not hear a cell phone ring in the middle of the woods or out on the deck of a boat rocking on a lazy sea. But you don't have to spoil the outdoors to be safe.

Bring the cell phone, but turn it off unless you need it. If you're running late, turn it on and make that call. On a boat in a fog bank or on a bike trapped by rising floodwaters, a cell phone suddenly changes from a wilderness-ruiner to a lifesaver.

Taking a few precautions can help you stay safe, and can help those who are prepared to come to our rescue stay as safe as they can, too.

Jeff Inglis, editor

Storm hits hard

Published at KeepMeCurrent.com

SCARBOROUGH (June 29, 2005): As the Current went to press Wednesday, Scarborough, Cape Elizabeth and South Portland were experiencing a major thunderstorm with numerous local lightning strikes and heavy downpours.

Intermittent power outages took down traffic lights and forced local businesses to halt operations. The rainfall led to localized flooding, which covered parts of many roads, including Two Lights Road in Cape Elizabeth and Payne Road and Beech Ridge Road in Scarborough, with several inches of fast-moving water.

The edges of several roadways were reported by police as being eroded – in some places, significantly – by the water.

Several houses were reported as possibly struck by lightning, and emergency crews were going from place to place cordoning off fallen wires and trees, warning drivers about dangerous road conditions and checking on homes and residents.

More information will be available in the Current, which will be on newsstands Thursday morning.

Rosenfeld: Lots more work to do on Haigis

Published in the Current

SCARBOROUGH (June 23, 2005): After $10 million in utility installation on Haigis Parkway, “it’s going to take developers with very deep pockets to get the sites ready.”

That's part of what Harvey Rosenfeld, president of the Scarborough Economic Development Corp., told members of the Scarborough Community Chamber of Commerce last week.

Rosenfeld addressed the chamber at its annual meeting Thursday at the Black Point Inn, telling chamber members a lot remains to be done to the parkway's parcels before they are ready for businesses to build on them.

The utilities, while present, are only in the street, and the lots will have to be surveyed, have roads and other infrastructure designed and most likely split up for smaller developments, Rosenfeld said in a follow-up interview. That process will likely involve developers buying the land, doing preliminary work and then reselling subdivided parcels to interested companies.

Rosenfeld told the chamber about his marketing plans for the area, saying Maine is not a good place for businesses to make money, but should sell its “quality of life” to major developers.

“The best reason for doing business in Maine” is “quality of life,” Rosenfeld said. “If profit’s the main goal, there are other better places to be.”

Maine has large numbers of elderly and poor people, and a low number of college graduates.

“We are not a particularly skilled population,” he said. “That, unfortunately, does not equip us to compete in the 21st century.”

Making matters worse are the state’s high taxes, long distance from the rest of the country and “limited financial resources” – a few people paying taxes for a very large statewide infrastructure and a lot of demand for increasing services.

But, he said, “Maine can become more prosperous” by investing in education and promoting how nice it is to live here.

He asked chamber members to help his promotional efforts. "Stop badmouthing the state," he said, suggesting they tell businesspeople from other areas of the country why they live here, why they raise their families here and why they are still here.”

Rosenfeld also suggested businesspeople get involved at all levels. At the state and regional level, he suggested supporting regionalization, noting that within 50 miles of Scarborough are more than 100 local governments serving over 600,000 people.

Comparing that to large metropolitan areas with consolidated municipal services, Rosenfeld – himself a former municipal manager – said “there is duplication of services.”

He also suggested people get involved locally, with the town’s Comprehensive Plan Update Committee. That group is reviewing the town’s zoning and will recommend changes to the Town Council. He said they are considering changes to zoning west of the Maine Turnpike, to possibly allow more businesses from Running Hill Road to Exit 42.

And Rosenfeld said business leaders should “help build the best educational system at all levels.”

“We simply can’t skimp on how we fund education and expect to be competitive,” he said.

He also outlined a marketing campaign that is just beginning to pitch development on Haigis Parkway to major developers around the country.

“These are people who can buy 40 acres anywhere in the country,” he said.

He gave out copies of a professionally designed marketing brochure for “Scarborough’s Professional Gateway,” the marketing name for the area near town's Turnpike exit. The road running through it “will always remain the Haigis Parkway,” Rosenfeld said.

He compared the future of the Haigis Parkway area with Research Triangle Park in North Carolina and the Route 128 technology corridor outside Boston, saying he wants to draw “cutting-edge research centers,” “precision manufacturing” and “world-class hospitality ventures” to the area.

To that end, SEDCO will be distributing more than 70,000 of the brochures locally, in “a national mailing to developers around the country” and at trade shows around the country.

Rosenfeld said the lots on Haigis Parkway, and a few along Payne Road that are also part of the region, will take lots of money to develop, even after the town spent $10 million installing water, sewer, gas and electricity.

Half of that cost is being charged to the landowners in a tax-increment financing district deal Rosenfeld authored and presented to state officials for review. He said they didn’t initially understand what he was proposing, because it had never before been done in Maine.

“The owners are sharing the cost of the infrastructure,” Rosenfeld said.

Two of the parkway’s largest landowners – Linwood Higgins’s Three Diamonds Realty and Scarborough Downs – are suing the town, saying the assessment of fees was done unfairly.

Rosenfeld dismissed concerns that the lawsuits could cause developers to be wary of getting involved, saying, “public-private partnerships are really the way to go.”

While he said “any lawsuit has a negative publicity,” the arrangement as it is “in the long run will pay off.”

Editorial: Bad for business

Published in the Current

SCARBOROUGH (June 23, 2005): We hear a lot about Maine having a bad climate for business, and most notably we heard it again last week from Harvey Rosenfeld, Scarborough’s top person for drumming up business. It’s getting worse, and that needs to change.

“If profit’s the main goal, there are other better places to be” than Maine, Rosenfeld told members of the Scarborough Community Chamber of Commerce.

It was Thursday lunchtime when he told chamber members the real value for business in Maine is “quality of life” for workers, rather than actually making the owners money.

The following night, Maine’s lawmakers voted to accept a state budget that made Rosenfeld’s statement about profits ring even truer.

The Legislature did not just raise corporate income taxes, but also cut back on state reimbursements to companies for major investments in equipment. The state’s expected revenue from the changes? $16 million over two years – not nearly enough to be worth the loss of goodwill, or perhaps sympathy, from big businesses with a presence in Maine.

Gov. John Baldacci talks the good talk, saying he is defending Maine jobs and has a plan for developing Maine’s economy. If this is that plan, he needs to think again, and fast.

While the state is certainly in a budget hole, taxing business more is not the way to get out of it – especially not taxing large businesses that have invested heavily over the years and are longtime cornerstones of local, regional and state economies.

These businesses are the ones that employ large numbers of people in their own and surrounding communities. They are the barometers of Maine’s economy.

They should be expected to pay their fair share of the state’s expenses, but should not be looked at as a cash cow for state budgeters when other wells run dry.

The companies are rightfully upset and reconsidering future investments in Maine, which should have occurred to lawmakers before they voted.

UnumProvident, which has been shifting staff members and assets out of Maine in recently years, says it doesn’t like the message the state is sending. We can’t afford to shove companies like UnumProvident out the door without any plan for replacing the jobs and local investments they provide.

But an increased tax on business investment is worse than no plan for replacement – it’s a deterrent for companies that might be considering Maine’s quality of life in the future. They certainly won’t be considering making any money here.

And UnumProvident is not the only company angered by the new taxes.

National Semiconductor says the new budget has broken a promise made by state officials in their effort to get the company to invest here – a promise that the state would reimburse the company for every penny it pays in local taxes on business equipment.

States don’t break promises to big business without huge long-term consequences.

Rosenfeld shared with the chamber members a vision of Haigis Parkway as home to top-notch research centers, high-tech companies and precision manufacturing.

If Scarborough – or Maine – is to have a prayer of that vision coming true, the state’s increasing taxation of businesses has to be reversed now.

Jeff Inglis, editor

Historic ship gets refurbished home

Published in the Current

SOUTH PORTLAND (June 16, 2005): An important piece of American history and Maine lore has a refurbished home on Spring Point in South Portland, as well as a tribute to a man key in its preservation.

A portion of the clipper ship Snow Squall, launched in 1851 from the Cornelius Butler Shipyard on Turner’s Island in Cape Elizabeth (now South Portland), is part of the permanent collection at the Portland Harbor Museum.

The gallery has been refurbished and was reopened for the first time last week, showing off the new elements of the exhibit, including a display in memory of maritime historian Nick Dean, the man who rediscovered the wreck of the Snow Squall in the Falkland Islands in 1979 and spearheaded her return to Maine.

Dean, who was also the first director of the museum when it was called the Spring Point Museum, died in January at age 71. His widow, Zibette Dean, attended the gallery’s opening, as did Dave Switzer, who with Nick Dean wrote a history of the ship, called “Snow Squall: The Last American Clipper Ship.”

The ship was a fast freight ship carrying cargo around Cape Horn between the east and west coasts of the United States, as well as across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

In 1863, she escaped from the Confederate raiding ship Tuscaloosa near the Cape of Good Hope in an all-day race pitting crew skills and ship speed against each other.

In 1864, the Snow Squall was on her way from New York to San Francisco but ran aground near Cape Horn. She limped back into Port Stanley in the Falklands and was abandoned.

“It sat there for 114 years,” said Hadley Schmoyer, the museum’s new curator, who started the job April 20.

When it was discovered in 1979, it was one of a few remnants of the American clipper shipbuilding years, and a rare specimen of how the ships were designed and built, Schmoyer said.

Because clipper ships were built so quickly and with many changes from ship to ship – all in search of a few extra knots of speed – there were few models left to show how they were built.

Dean, an Edgecomb resident, recognized the value of the find, and coordinated the work required in returning her to Maine.

Other parts of her hull are in the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, South Street Seaport Museum in New York City and the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park in California.

The evening also saw the opening of the new seasonal exhibit at the Portland Harbor Museum, called “Old Salts and New Directions” and focusing on the people who work in and around the harbor.

Among the artifacts is a scale model of the Casco Bay Lines steamer Maquoit, handmade by Capt. Larry Legere of Cape Elizabeth. Legere, the operations agent for the lines, is the son of Capt. Edward Legere, who captained the ferry steamers for many years, and the father of Alexandra Legere, who also works for the ferry company.

Editorial: Hail and farewell

Published in the Current

CAPE ELIZABETH (June 16, 2005): As graduation season winds up for another year, we wish all of the graduates well, their parents too – and a special "good luck" to the graduates’ younger siblings, who now step up a rung in their own growth ladder.

Scarborough’s 202 graduates and Cape Elizabeth’s 129, all newly minted this week, join 221 of their neighbors in South Portland who became alumni last week, taking on new roles in the community and in their lives.

Many of them will leave town to attend college or other professional training, or to enter the military. Some will stay near home, either living in town while attending classes nearby, finding a new job or sticking with an old one.

To all of these – and any other subgroups – we offer hearty congratulations and wishes of good luck.

By now, you have chosen your role models and begun to follow them. But you will find still others who affect how you live your life. Choose cautiously those whose models you will follow, as no road is truly clear from the outset.

One example we hold up this week, not just to celebrate an extraordinary graduate making an unusual choice, but also to provide food for thought and discussion among parents, students and teachers, is Megan Barnes of Cape Elizabeth.

As we read on Page 1, while many of her classmates are headed to college, she is delaying that route – not forever, she says now, but perhaps. Instead, she is headed to Ecuador to work in an international school where she studied during part of her junior year, seeking out international experiences to enrich her learning and development. (Plus, it’s fun.)

It’s very common in this country to go directly from high school to college, and for many students, that’s the proper way to do it. But there are a whole lot of high school graduates for whom college right after school may not be the best idea.

Schools and parents should be open to the idea students who don’t follow any of the three traditional American paths for high school graduates: college, work or the military.

In other countries, from Europe to Australia and New Zealand, it is very common to take a year or more before college for what is sometimes called an “OE” – overseas experience. Some young people work, as Barnes is doing, while others just travel. Many do a mix – traveling until they run out of money and then working for a bit to make it back.

That type of experience is very valuable, and even those going directly to college should seek some sort of study abroad if they wish to truly understand this incredibly diverse and wonderful world we share.

People on an OE meet others in similar quests from other countries, visit faraway lands and explore not only other cultures but their own, and themselves.

High schools strive to prepare their students for the “real world,” but can go only so far – staff and teachers know it just as well as parents and students. Some sort of additional education or preparation is needed before these young adults are fully fledged.

There are a number of routes available – including college, work and the military. But there is another, and Barnes has found it, all on her own, and stuck to it despite advice to the contrary from teachers, guidance staff and administrators.

She should be proud for growing up to be the young woman that she is, as all the graduates should be proud of who they have become.

We look forward to hearing more of Barnes, and of all of the class of 2005. May they all grow to know their own minds, choose their counsel wisely, and refuse to take no for an answer, no matter how authoritative the rejection may seem.

Jeff Inglis, editor

Pipe bomb found on Cape beach

Published in the Current

CAPE ELIZABETH (June 14, 2005): A pipe bomb found in the surf stayed on a Cape Elizabeth neighborhood beach for five hours Sunday, while children and adults played nearby.

Cape police and a State Police Bomb Squad member said the item was dangerous, and warned the public against going near any such device.

But, when officers handled it, they did so without any special protective gear. The bomb technician said his training has taught him to handle dangerous substances properly.

“It was high noon, the beach was full of kids” when Cameron Gale, a beachfront resident, found the pipe while picking up trash on Casino Beach with his 4-year-old daughter, Annie, putting the garbage in a child’s sand pail.

“My daughter and I go down once a week and do the rounds,” he said. “There was no way to know it was a pipe bomb,” so Gale “tossed it in the bucket with the rest of the trash.”

“It sat next to our towel for five hours in the roaring hot sun,” Gale said. “Everybody was walking by it.”

The pipe was “rolling around in the debris” in the surf, and looked like a harmless piece of copper pipe, Gale said.

"There was no fuse," he said, and no way to know what it really was.

It was still shiny copper, Gale said, so it had not spent much time in the water. “I think if it had washed up it would have been more corroded,” he said. “The little bar code was still intact.”

Not until he brought the pail up to the house and started throwing away the items did Gale peel a piece of tape off the eight-inch pipe, revealing a hole drilled in it. At that point, he realized it was more than a pipe.

He took it out of the bucket, put it on his woodpile and called the police.

Sgt. Andrew Steindl came to the house, picked it up – spilling some gunpowder in the process – and drove it back to the police station, where he covered it with a sandbag in case it blew up.

“I felt it was safe to handle,” Steindl said Tuesday. Otherwise, he said he would not have touched it.

A bomb expert from the Maine State Police came to the station Monday to collect the pipe and destroy it, Steindl said.

That officer, Sgt. Mike Edes, is a member of the State Police Bomb Squad. He took the pipe away and blew it up. "We don't try to dismantle it," Edes said.

The pipe bomb contained gunpowder, he said. "It was very unstable."

Edes said Gale "really put himself in a great deal of danger" by handling the bomb.

Steindl said he handled the bomb with care but without special protective equipment, and Edes said he did the same. Edes said his training taught him to be more careful than perhaps Gale was being. "We know what we're doing," Edes said, calling Gale's actions "the dumbest thing I ever saw."

Steindl and other officers searched the Casino Beach – a neighborhood beach just off Shore Road – on Sunday and again Monday, and found nothing.

“We kind of think it was a one-time thing,” said Police Chief Neil Williams. He suspects someone was either getting rid of the bomb or wanted to see it blow up.

Steindl said the investigation is considering all possibilities for how it got to the beach, including washing up from a boat or being intentionally brought to the beach by someone.

“This is not a terrorist bomb,” said Gale. “Kids do it and they’re going to keep doing it.”

That is his theory – some neighbors mentioned they heard fireworks on the beach Saturday night, and Gale’s trash collection efforts turned up some bottle-rocket debris in nearby rocks.

Edes, from the bomb squad, said pipe bombs are more than just fireworks. "A real pipe bomb is going above and beyond" usual mischief, he said. "We don't see a lot of them just as jokes. When you're dealing with pipe bombs, you're usually dealing with some bad actors."

Cape police have distributed leaflets in the immediate neighborhood, with a picture of the pipe bomb and a warning to people not to touch “anything remotely resembling this.” Instead, people should stay away from it and call police, at 767-3323.

221 graduate from South Portland

Published in the Current

SOUTH PORTLAND (June 9, 2005): South Portland High School graduated 221 seniors Sunday, in ceremonies marked by bright skies, cool breezes and beach balls bouncing among the graduates.

The first diploma was awarded to the family of Anthony Varanelli, a member of the class who died during freshman year.

Honor Essayist Jeana Petillo challenged her classmates to contribute to society. “Giving back is something we can all do, regardless of where we are going next year,” she said.

“Everyday people will continue to influence and inspire others with small acts of kindness,” she said.

Honor Essayist Leia Crosby, who recently returned from a semester in Thailand, echoed the theme, urging her fellow graduates to “have an open mind and an open heart and the courage to take risks.”

She recited a quote from the diploma she received at the end of her Thailand semester: "To live is to risk dying, to hope is to risk despair, and to try is to risk failure. But only a person who risks is free."

She said the school had given them a good foundation on which to build their futures. “South Portland High School has not just given us an education; it has taught us to develop our education on our own,” Crosby said.

Class Salutatorian Shana Kieran, who said she is “going back to basics these days,” told of the recent rediscovery of her favorite childhood book, “Miss Rumphius” by Barbara Cooney.

It is a picture book about a girl who dreams of growing up, going off to see the world, settling by the sea, but has been taught that “she must do something to make the world more beautiful,” Kieran said.

So when she gets older, Miss Rumphius settles by the sea and plants lupin seeds all up and down a hillside outside of town.

“Once in a while we need to get outside of ourselves,” Kieran said, reminding her classmates, teachers and assembled friends and relatives that the class “began our freshman year on Sept. 4, 2001.”

“Over the last four years our awareness of terror and fear have been heightened,” she said. “This is a time when we need people to do things,” like improving the world and helping people gain understanding of each other.

She said there are a lot of groups, even in the school, with people divided by political lines, social issues, class, race and even “people who listen to rap, people who listen to country.”

“Be open to new ideas and new ways of thinking,” she said, suggesting that people do something to make the world better. “It’s not about fixing the world or eliminating evil,” just making things nicer for each other, she said.

Valedictorian Tim Cahill began his address by invoking the age group that has been called “the greatest generation” – the people who were young adults at the beginning of World War II and faced huge challenges that they rose to and overcame.

“Our generation comes of age at a time of uncertainty and fear,” said Cahill. “The challenges for us are great.”

But, he said, in his own class there are “ordinary people already doing extraordinary things.”

He praised nearly two dozen of his classmates by name, and the rest by association, saying they are working in a wide range of ways to make South Portland and the world better places.

He said Hannah Dunphy has "devoted countless number of hours" with Amnesty International, leading the school's group and representing all Maine students to the larger organization.

He told of Shana Kieran and the Key Club's efforts to make money and give it to needy causes, and of Matt Fitzpatrick, "who is too young to join the Marines" but volunteers on weekends training and recruiting others, and will join when he can.

Cahill honored the achievements of Seth York, who will attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point; Martha Shaw, who is joining the Air Force; the class's three Eagle Scouts, Nick Meyer, Sam Jackson and James Kemer; and Kyle Dixon, owner of his own landscaping business and a dedicated volunteer in the community.

He recognized the artistic ability of graffiti artist Eli Shank, whose work can be seen at the legal tagging wall in Portland, and on the class of 2005 T-shirts; and Tyler Dyment's caricatures and Ben Braley's photography.

Cahill told of athletic prowess, too: record-setting track athletes Courtney Albin and Eric Giddings, Whitney Morrow's 1,000-point basketball career, and columnist and softball star Amanda Aceto.

Some students have other interests, too, Cahill said: "Annie Clancy is the heart and soul of all our auditorium performances. Alex Trout is the go-to guy for any kind of technical assistance. ... Casey Doucette and Jeana Petillo work harder than anyone will ever know to keep our class fired up and on track."

He pointed to two students in particular for extending the reach of South Portland High School around the globe: Leia Crosby, who spent a semester in Thailand, and Xibei Ding, who moved to Maine from China this year. "They have shown us how to be citizens of the world," Cahill said.

Two wars, two generations, one flag

Published in the Current

SCARBOROUGH (June 9, 2005): When Sgt. First Class Garth MacDonald leaves his bunker in Iraq to go on a mission, he takes with him a rare artifact: a Maine state flag that was carried by a soldier in Vietnam more than 30 years ago – his uncle Jim.

MacDonald, a 1986 Scarborough High School graduate, is a member of the 716th Military Police Battalion, part of the 101st Airborne Division, based in Fort Campbell, Ky. He is now on his second tour in Iraq, and is again in Mosul, helping train Iraqi police officers, who do their jobs under constant threats to their lives and families.

Although the circumstances surrounding the wars and their lives are different, MacDonald's service runs parallel in many ways to that of his uncle. Although they both won medals for bravery, neither MacDonald nor his uncle talk much about them. They have at times used the same words in correspondence with family. And carrying a Maine flag has been important to both of them.

When Jim went over to Vietnam – he had dropped out of college and volunteered to fight – he wanted a Maine state flag. Carol called state officials, asking them to send a flag to her brother.

She got nowhere, and ended up calling Gorham Flag Company, whose owner not only hand-delivered the flag to her, he gave her a discount on the purchase.

That flag went to Vietnam and flew there, and returned home safely with Jim.

“When Garth went over the first time, Jim couldn’t find the flag,” so Carol sent another, new Maine state flag to him in Iraq. Garth wanted the flag, and his mother wanted him to have it, to pass on the tradition.

When he came home in April 2004 after about a year in Iraq, she went to greet him in Kentucky, but Garth got to Maine first: His homecoming flight stopped to refuel in Bangor, and “he was very proud to say he was from Maine.”

After some time at home in Tennessee, where he lives with his wife and three sons, just over the state line from the fort, the family headed up to Maine’s North Woods to unwind and reconnect.

“We knew it was just a matter of time before he’d have to go back, but you don’t think about that,” Carol said.

By the second time Garth was heading to Iraq – in January – Jim (who lives in Presque Isle) had cleaned his attic and found the flag, the same flag he had flown in Vietnam.

Now that flag hangs on the wall in Garth’s office bunker, and goes on missions when he leaves the base.

The similarities between her son and her brother startle Carol, and make her smile with pride. Both men went through jump school, and are quiet about their combat medals.

On his first tour, MacDonald, a career soldier, earned a Bronze Star for courage under fire during a firefight with Shiite militants in Karbala in October 2003, during which his battalion’s commanding officer, Lt. Col. Kim Orlando, was killed, along with two other soldiers.

“Garth drove his Humvee between incoming fire and the wounded,” shielding them from the enemy, said his mother, Carol MacDonald.

His uncle did a similarly brave thing in Vietnam, calling in fire on his own position during a firefight. He didn't tell her about it for decades – not until Carol told him about Garth’s medal.

“These folks who get these medals are never overjoyed,” she said.

Jim told her he thought he could have avoided the dangerous situation for which he was honored. Garth, who will be 38 in October, told his mother, “I just did what I had to do.”

There are differences too, mostly in the circumstances surrounding their service. Jim signed up for an unpopular war, and his family was left with little emotional support and only rare contacts with him.

“We didn’t have e-mails. You waited for the mud-coated letter with that red dust,” Carol remembered. She has a single picture of her brother during his service.

By contrast, Garth has slideshows of his service on his laptop computer, Carol is part of a Kentucky-based Family Readiness Group by e-mail, and the two are often in touch by e-mail. Carol has even figured out how to make the technology keep her even closer: She sends Garth greeting cards through the America Online service, which tells her when he has picked up the message, even if he doesn’t write back right away.

But the similarities keep coming. “Just before Jim came home, he sent me a letter and at the end of it he said, ‘Keep the faith,’” Carol recalled. Though he had never heard about that letter, Garth used the same three words to end an e-mail he sent when on his way home from his first tour in Iraq.

Both have cared for the flag. “This one he will bring home and give back to Jim,” Carol said. “He may live in another state, but Maine has always been his home.”

“I feel about my son the same way I did about my brother,” Carol said. “They go away, they shoot people, they come back changed forever. … That’s the saddest part.”

Editorial: No vacancy

Published in the Current

SCARBOROUGH (June 9, 2005): The Scarborough Planning Board’s concern over what happens to the present Wal-Mart building is well-placed, especially now that the board has approved a new, 24-hour super Wal-Mart that will be built across the street.

Wal-Mart’s operation in Maine started relatively small, with a 114,000-square-foot store on Payne Road in 1992

Since then, the company has opened 11 department stores, 11 Supercenters and three Sam’s Clubs around the state, in locations from Biddeford to Presque Isle.

Wal-Mart apparently has even bigger plans for Maine, with a regional distribution center in Lewiston, a 24-hour Supercenter proposed in Scarborough and a similar one not five miles away in Westbrook, all in the works.

Earlier this year, the company vacated a 93,000-square-foot building on 17 acres in Waterville, to head to a new 207,000-square-foot Supercenter nearby.

Now that’s happening in Scarborough, too. But what is to come of the existing building? Could a company, which as of January had 325 vacant buildings nationwide totaling 25 million square feet, leave this one vacant for a long time?

If it did, that would leave a large black mark right in the middle of prime retail territory. That’s what residents, businesses and town officials are worried about, and what the Planning Board has moved to control.

The board has that option only because the two store locations are so close together that Wal-Mart itself needs to run the road to the new store across the existing store’s parking lot.

So the board has cleverly applied the rules about approving projects, granting approval for the road with conditions that would allow them effectively to close a portion of it if they don’t like what’s going on at the old store – even if that is nothing.

That gives Wal-Mart a real incentive to do something with the store, and fast. In fact, the company says it is close to a deal already, and may have something set up within the next 90 days, though the new store will take months to build.

It’s true that the location, right on Payne Road, in what has become the retail destination area around the Maine Mall, is profitable and likely desirable. And all the people heading to Wal-Mart will pretty much have to drive right by the old one. That’s quite a carrot for developers, though the expense of converting or refitting such a large building might make them look just a little ways down Payne Road to some of the vacant land.

The Planning Board’s efforts give Scarborough a stick to go with the carrot.

Covering the city

Readers will notice this week that we have added two special contributors who will help us improve our coverage of South Portland, without losing our focus on Scarborough and Cape Elizabeth.

Alan D. Johnson is a former publicist and reporter, most recently contributing to his previous community’s newspaper in Florida, and has covered a wide range of topics.

Leora Zucker, a former member of the Israeli Defence Forces, is a student at Southern Maine Community College, where she is involved with the campus newspaper, the Beacon. Both live in South Portland.

We welcome them to our family of writers, and look forward to working with both of them.

Jeff Inglis, editor

Editorial: What are they on?

Published in the Current

CAPE ELIZABETH (June 2, 2005): You have to admire the gall of the Cape Elizabeth High School student government, who asked point-blank for a rule change that would let students drink, smoke and do drugs more often, with fewer consequences.

And you have to wonder why the school administration and School Board have begun actually considering such a change.

While the present substance-abuse policies are incomplete – they don’t address third offenses, for example – and vague in places, the students’ proposed changes aren’t the way to fix them.

What the students want is clearly laid out in the proposal from the Student Advisory Council: “if substances are used at any time when the participant is not under contract, i.e. between or before seasons, the consequences outlined below do not apply.”

Of course, the students want each contract to last only for a single season, rather than all year long, as is now the case. That lets them take advantage of the “between or before seasons” time and drink all they want.

And then: Rather than a first offense (except if a student turns herself in) being the end of the season for the student, the SAC wants that to happen upon a second offense. Only upon a third offense – rather than the present rules’ second infraction – would a student be kicked off all teams for the rest of the year.

It gets better: “‘Extra-curricular’ identifies with many activities offered at Cape Elizabeth High School, but to be consistent, a student is only suspended from activities in which they represent the school or compete in.” So students could still participate in non-competitive school activities, no matter how many times they get caught drinking.

But, after a clause that does require teen hosts of parties to face consequences, comes the real kicker: “(Note: those under contract who attend a party but do not abuse substances are not subject to the consequences of this policy.)”

It sounds like they're just trying to protect the innocent people at parties. But what it really means is that if a student denies he was drinking, smoking or doing drugs, and no one else comes forward to say otherwise, the only music they’ll face is the singing of Cape fans as they march onto the playing field once again.

Who’s going to come forward and snitch on her friends? Nobody. So the proposed policy is completely ineffective, which is just what the students want.

Let’s remember: Drinking and doing drugs are illegal. The schools can’t condone it in any way, even by loosening the rules.

This is, you will recall, the town that is home to dozens of teens who went wild at Sugarloaf over New Year’s 2003, drawing the ire of the Carrabassett Valley police chief, who was not only upset at the teens but also at the parents who refused to go pick up their wayward children.

It is also a town in which locals of all ages are charged with OUI just about every week, and at least one young person every week – often someone under 18 – gets a summons for illegal possession or transportation of alcohol. (Check the Current’s police logs for details.)

Well-known party spots abound, but when police or school officials intervene, parents have been known to get upset not at their children but at the authorities trying to keep order and enforce the law.

While teen drinking and drug abuse are not unique to Cape, other towns are handling the issue very differently.

In Westbrook recently, when seven top basketball players were caught drinking, those players – and the whole team – had to pay the price. The school board upheld the decision, despite parents’ appeals. The players were suspended from the playoffs, and the team was knocked out of competition.

In South Portland last month, a 17-year-old man was badly beaten with a baseball bat at a party where there was underage drinking, leading the schools to consider strengthening – not weakening – their rules.

But under the Cape students’ proposal, only people unlucky enough to be both over 18 and actually summoned for possession of drugs or alcohol would be punished. (State juvenile-justice laws prevent police from telling school officials the names of those under 18 who get summonses for possession.)

The Cape School Board has some tough questions to answer in their review of the substance-abuse policies: What about the students who commit third offenses? Why don’t the consequences of an infraction in the spring carry over into the fall? Should students who turn themselves in get a lighter punishment?

But the real questions they must answer are these: How did you allow a group of high school students to get you to even consider gutting your alcohol policy? Why did you not just say no?

Jeff Inglis, editor

New tanks coming to Mobil

Published in the Current

SCARBOROUGH (May 27, 2005): The Oak Hill Mobil Mart is still open for business while new gas tanks are installed and the old ones are ripped out over the next several weeks.

There was a brief delay earlier this week when workers digging the holes for the new tanks hit ledge, and had to wait for a hydraulic jackhammer to be brought in. Owner Lisa Brady was concerned she might have to close the station if workers had to blast away the ledge.

The in-ground gas tanks must be replaced because they have served out their useful lives of 10 years, according to state and federal regulations. At the same time, Brady is replacing the pumping units and the canopy over the pumps, to comply with ExxonMobil Corp. regulations. The outside of the building is also getting a “facelift,” she said.

Winds take down trees, power

Published in the Current

(May 26, 2005): High winds downed trees and limbs and took out power to more than 13,000 homes in Southern Maine Monday night, leaving some without power into Tuesday afternoon.

Broad Cove in Cape Elizabeth had some outages Tuesday morning, according to Cape Police Chief Neil Williams. Some “very small pockets” in Scarborough were still out Tuesday afternoon, said Central Maine Power spokeswoman Gail Rice, who said the company hoped to have all power restored by midnight.

She said forecast high winds for Tuesday night might cause more damage and slow repair work.

Several areas in Cape Elizabeth, Scarborough and South Portland had outages ranging from around an hour to several hours Monday night.

The storm also kept local public work crews busy. Scarborough Public Works Director Mike Shaw said he had six workers out for a good portion of Monday night dealing with fallen trees.

The storms also have caused some minor beach erosion, damaged the stairs at Higgins Beach and caused some minor damage at the pier system at Pine Point Fisherman's Co-op.

Shaw said the department has been fortunate there has not been any major damage such as roads washing out. Looking at the bright side, he said things would be far worse if it were snow rather than rain.