Scarborough woman assists ABC 'Makeover'

Published in the Current

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saving the history of neighborhood stores

Published in the Current

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editorial: Helping with housing

Published in the Current

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revals next week

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

Jeff Inglis, editor

Mother blames state for fatal crash

Published in the Current

SCARBOROUGH (Sep 22, 2005): The family of a Scarborough woman killed in a truck accident on I-95 July 29 blames state officials for her death.

Pat LaNigra, the mother of Tina Turcotte, 40, who was killed when a tractor-trailer crushed her car, said her loss has been “devastating” and made worse by knowing it could have been avoided if state legislators had crafted better laws and police had done a better job of enforcing the ones already in place.

“This would have been prevented had the state backed up its own laws,” LaNigra said. “If their job was done the way it should have been done, Tina would still be here today.”

The truck driver, Scott Hewitt, 32, of Caribou has an extensive record of bad driving, including more than 60 convictions and more than 20 suspensions of his driver’s license. He had also been involved in a fatal crash in 1994, after which he pled guilty to three minor trucking violations and received a six-month suspended jail sentence.

“He was a bomb waiting to explode,” LaNigra said. Legislators and police are “allowing people to die on the roads and they’re just slapping hands” of bad drivers.

Hewitt, who was charged with nine misdemeanor crimes and two non-criminal traffic infractions in connection with the crash, has not been charged with anything that holds him responsible for Turcotte's death.

Hewitt has been charged with operating after suspension, possession of a suspended driver’s license, operating without authority, operating after being placed out of service, two counts of falsifying duty status records, operating without a medical certificate, operating while in possession of a radar detector, operating while in possession of a controlled substance, operating an unregistered motor vehicle and operating without insurance.

No felony charges

Although police found marijuana in the cab of Hewitt's truck, and he tested positive for it in a blood test, Kennebec County District Attorney Evert Fowle said there is no evidence Hewitt was impaired at the time of the crash.

The accident report from the Maine State Police indicated Turcotte and a tractor-trailer cab in front of her were slowing down because traffic was backed up in front of them. But Hewitt, who driving a tractor-trailer behind Turcotte, did not slow down, according to the report.

An assistant district attorney and four police officers at the scene, including one specially trained to recognize people under the influence of drugs, did not believe Hewitt was impaired, Fowle said, noting that marijuana can stay in a person’s bloodstream for as much as a month after a person uses the drug.

“We’re looking for any possible way to prosecute the more serious crime of manslaughter,” Fowle said.

But that’s not possible, because Hewitt’s behavior does not meet the legal definitions of “recklessness” or “criminal negligence,” Fowle said.

Both of those require a person be proven to have made a “gross deviation” from the “standard of care” an average person would use under the same circumstances, and Hewitt’s behavior was not that, Fowle said.

Fowle said the law does not allow him to consider the circumstances under which Hewitt was driving. “We’re looking at the actual driving,” Fowle said, “the operation of the vehicle itself” to determine whether the driving was reckless.

“What he was was inattentive,” Fowle said. “Inattentiveness has never been a basis” for a prosecution for vehicular manslaughter in Maine, he said.

Fowle said Hewitt is not being charged with being a habitual offender because the Secretary of State’s office, which handles driver records, did not classify him as such.

And he is not being charged with driving to endanger because that requires a similar standard of proof to manslaughter, Fowle said.

Fowle said he has talked to Turcotte’s family and said he answered the questions they had. “I told them to come back if they had more questions,” Fowle said.

He said he felt he owed them a personal explanation of the charges.

“It’s not an easy decision to make,” Fowle said. The only worse decision, he said, would be to “bring a charge that’s not supported by the evidence or the law.”

Husband hires lawyer

Scott Turcotte, Tina Turcotte's husband, referred all questions to his attorney, Michael Vaillancourt of the South Portland firm Ainsworth, Thelin, Chamberlain and Raftice. Vaillancourt said a lawsuit is “a possibility,” but would not indicate who might be the defendant in such a suit.

“Scott (Turcotte) was very disappointed” in Fowle’s decision not to charge Hewitt with manslaughter, and believes the evidence shows “Tina’s death being caused by Mr. Hewitt,” Vaillancourt said.

Scott Turcotte is interested in changing state laws, as are his parents-in-law, Pat LaNigra and her husband, Tina’s stepfather, Bob LaNigra.

But they are pained by the thought that “this could have been prevented” by applying the state’s existing laws more effectively, Pat LaNigra said.

Noting that Hewitt had possession of his driver’s license, which had been suspended, at the time of the crash, she and her husband ridiculed the state’s efforts to confiscate the license by mailing him notices.

Bob LaNigra said when a couple gets a divorce, a sheriff’s deputy comes to each person’s home and serves them papers they have to sign right there.

He wondered why that same care was not taken to get licenses back. He wants deputies to “physically remove the license as well as the license plates” from the vehicle of a person whose license is suspended.

And he said that if Hewitt had not had his license, a New York state trooper who stopped him the day before the fatal crash would have stopped him from driving on to Maine.

‘Someone’s not doing their job’

The LaNigras are working with Gov. John Baldacci and several state legislators, including Sen. William Diamond, D-Windham, a former Maine secretary of state, to change the laws.

But they are upset that other state initiatives appear to be getting more attention, including the newly hiked cigarette tax, which doubled Monday, going up to $2 per pack.

“Smoking isn’t even against the law,” said Pat LaNigra.

The couple wants stiffer penalties for bad drivers, and fears that politics will get in the way.

“Someone’s not doing their job. The laws aren’t strict enough,” said Pat LaNigra.

If a police officer is not sent to the home of a suspended driver to confiscate their license, Bob LaNigra said the person should have a short time to mail it in, and should face additional criminal charges for failure to do so.

He wants increased enforcement efforts on the roads and increased fines for breaking laws, saying the revenue from the fines could pay for the additional staff required to improve patrols and truck inspections.

He said in 1996 the Legislature decreased mandatory jail sentences from six months to a year, citing jail overcrowding, and refused to increase fines because people from northern Maine couldn’t afford them.

Though the fines have been increased since, he worries that any law changes “won’t be strict enough because they’ll be compromised.”

Pat LaNigra said fines should be high, and had little sympathy for people who couldn’t afford them. She said Hewitt’s friends and family members knew he was driving illegally, and suggested he hit them up for financial help to pay the fines. She said eventually they would stop helping him and he would be forced off the road.

Into the future

Both Pat and Bob LaNigra are concerned that, though Hewitt may face some jail time, he will eventually be eligible for his license again.

“He’s a bomb waiting to blow up. He’s a murderer waiting to kill,” said Pat LaNigra. “Sixty-eight convictions, kills two people and there’s no law to get this man off the road forever.”

She is concerned the state is sending the wrong message to young drivers, who, she noted, risk losing their licenses for running stop signs.

And she doesn’t believe Fowle’s allegation that Hewitt was merely “inattentive.”

“How long can you be inattentive” that you don’t see a car and a tractor-trailer cab in front of you, she asked. “It’s not inattentiveness; it’s incompetency.”

She thinks a proposal from the state to publicize the worst 100 drivers in Maine is too little, given that there are tens of thousands of people with suspended driver’s licenses, many of them with five or more suspensions.

“This is a no-brainer,” she said, asking that the list be expanded to at least 1,000, or possibly even more.

“These people are on the road constantly, not just truckers,” she said.

She wants people to write to the governor and their legislators, and to remember “the people that you vote in were partially responsible for this.”

She noted that not all truckers are bad drivers, and that not all bad drivers are truckers. “Tina’s father was a trucker for 25 years and he never once got a suspension,” she said.

The couple and Tina’s husband are planning a memorial charity dance on Friday, Oct. 21, at the Asylum in Portland, to benefit the Susan Komen Breast Cancer Fund and Lab-Quest, in honor of Tina’s having survived breast cancer. This was her fifth year cancer-free.

And on Sunday, Oct. 30, the Great Pumpkin Race in Saco, which Bob LaNigra has organized since 1978, will split its proceeds with its usual beneficiary, the American Lung Association, and charities close to Tina’s heart. “She was a great animal lover,” said Pat LaNigra. The charities receiving money in Tina’s honor have not yet been determined.

Pat LaNigra is still pained and bitter. “I’ve just lost so much faith in the system,” she said. “This would have been prevented if the state was doing its job.”

Editorial: Give them food

Published in the Current

SCARBOROUGH (Sep 22, 2005): Young people need good food to help them grow up to be healthy, strong adults. It’s up to adults to give them that food, and to help steer them away from unhealthy choices.

The Scarborough Board of Education has temporarily suspended a state requirement that all food served on school grounds meet some qualifications as minimally nutritious.

And while that’s fine for a very short period of time, the board should, as it plans to, review the food served on school grounds and at school functions, with an eye toward making the available choices good for kids.

The board has suspended the rule, recently imposed by the state, to avoid surprising booster groups for sports teams and extra-curricular groups, who often sell candy and baked treats to raise money, and have likely bought sugary goodies to sell at games and activities.

In the past, some groups in town have even sold Krispy Kreme glazed doughnuts to raise money.

And while the money goes to a good cause, the food should, too. Schools and school groups should not be in the business of selling goodies of negligible nutritional value.

What’s defined as non-nutritious food is quite lenient. A food must provide at least 5 percent of the federally recommended daily intake of at least one of eight nutrients: protein, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, niacin, riboflavin, thiamin, calcium and iron.

Anything that provides less than 5 percent of all of those nutrients is fairly called “junk food,” and is not what adults should be serving children, no matter the setting.

The guidelines, as Dr. Lisa Letourneau of the Scarborough Wellness Initiative notes in a Page 1 article, still allow some chips and candy bars to be sold in schools.

School meal programs started in Europe in the 1700s, and moved to the United States in the 1800s, with the idea of providing children at least one nutritious meal each day.

That is still a vitally important goal, and should not be forgotten, especially with childhood obesity at an all-time high and rising. Our kids are unhealthy, and we need to fix the problem, not point fingers at others.

Adults in all venues – home, school, jobs and after-school activities – are responsible for helping children grow up healthy.

Schools are an important factor in this because they are places communities send their children to learn good habits, smart ways to approach the world and positive behaviors that will help them be productive members of society as adults.

The goal of school lunch programs should not be to provide children with junk food, nor to make money for the school. It is also questionable whether school lunch programs should be required to pay for themselves, as is the case in Scarborough and common elsewhere.

The school lunch programs should focus on providing healthy, nutritious foods at a reasonable cost.

If children – or parents – want food other than what a school provides, they can provide it with their own money from supermarkets or other stores. It may cause a loss in revenue for schools, but lunch should be about nourishing children’s bodies in an environment that also enriches their minds.

The same goes for food sales by school-related programs, like booster clubs. The clubs exist for the benefit of children. If good food won't raise the money they need, perhaps the boosters could look to the dozens of local organizations that raise money without selling food for ideas, such as craft sales, event programs and raffles.

While candy is a sure seller, that’s part of the problem, not part of the solution. The Scarborough school board should ban non-nutritious food sales by school lunches, boosters and other groups using school facilities.

Jeff Inglis, editor