July 1980

Westbrook aldermen voted, 3-2, in committee to raise the pay of Michael Cooper, assistant city solicitor, $5,000, to $25,000. If it passes the full City Council, Cooper will be the city’s second-highest-paid employee, second to Harold Parks, the mayor’s administrative assistant.

Scarborough’s Town Council voted to sell the town’s 115 acres at the airport industrial park for $330,000 and to spend $1.3 million (to be borrowed) to develop the land – streets, sewers, etc. The buyer is the Greater Portland Building Fund, which was given an option on the land last year. The industrial park also will include 51 adjoining acres the Building Fund has bought from Lloyd Wolf and Robert Adam.

Thomas Bennett, Windham dollhouse maker, is making a scale model replica of Windham’s historic Parson Smith House.

Pine State By-Products, South Portland, which makes animal meal from poultry and fish, is dumping some leftovers into the sea.

Gorham’s First Responders (medical rescue unit), now three years old, needs more members. Those serving now include Adair Murray, Cheryl Perram, Jean Barter, Anne Parmenter, Kathy Chicoine, Glen Dunlap, Floyd Pomelow, Bill Keller, Dale Sinclair and Jan Labrecque.

A new contract raises Gorham police pay 7 percent this year and 8 percent next year. Patrolmen’s pay will rise to $289 a week.

After roof and structural repairs, the Windham Junior High School gym will reopen when school resumes. It has been closed since December.

Gary Moore took over as Windham’s school superintendent July 1. He has a three-year contract with beginning salary of $26,000.

The Rev. William A. Chamberlain, superintendent of United Methodist churches in Southern Maine, is leaving for a position with Field Services of Global Ministries.

U. S. Rep. David Emery is walking from Bridgton to Portland this week, meeting the people, with side trips by auto for speaking engagements.

South Portland will pay $440,000 of the cost of rebuilding the Broadway underpass of the railroad tracks. The underpass frequently floods, and is so shallow that the railroad tracks scalp high trucks. The job involves a general revision of stormwater runoff in the area. It will cost “upwards of” $2.5 million, the rest of which will be state and federal.

Traffic signals hung from cables are being installed in Vallee Square, Westbrook, and the wooden poles that have held them since before urban renewal are being removed.

U.S. Sen. George J. Mitchell has named Larry Benoit, Cape Elizabeth, as his field representative for Cumberland and York Counties.

July 1990

On July 4, nature put on its own fireworks, a big lightning show. The U.S. Weather Service office in Albany, N.Y., which runs a network of lightning detectors, counted 213 strikes in Cumberland County between 4 and 6:30 p.m. and another 700 between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. The wind blew 55 miles an hour at the Portland jetport, and several trees were uprooted.

South Portland City Manager Jerre Bryant is recommending that the city renovate Lincoln School instead of putting a big new addition onto Skillin School as the School Department wants. The School Department wants to close Redbank and Sawyer schools. Lincoln is under year-to-year lease to the Greater Portland Christian School.

The Gorham Arts council will bring its eighth annual Celebrate Gorham Day Saturday, with help this year from Gorham Community Services and Maine Street ’90. Gov. John McKernan will be in the parade.

Westbrook has agreed to let two out-of-town lunch wagons use more than a single truck, Golden Eagle Co., Saco, and the Patty Wagon, South Portland. They sell at factories, gas stations, construction sites, offices, etc.

In a letter, George W. Maley Sr. charges that Windham’s School Committee failed to advance Sue Taylor from vice chairman to chairman because she is not “another rubber stamp controlled by the superintendent,” John Love. Mrs. Taylor said she wants to “avoid creating a division.”

Westbrook is advertising the sale of $9,950,000 in city bonds, with repayments due each Nov. 15 through 2010. In an advertisement, the bond agency invites Westbrook people to buy.

After a complaint of fireworks on Lincoln Street, Westbrook police ordered a 46-year-old man to court for possessing them.

A group of Gorham residents led by Bernard Rines is urging a bypass of the Route 22-Route 114 intersection in South Gorham. The bypass would connect Gorham’s South Street with Scarborough Gorham Road.

Two new developments would bring 286 single-family homes to streets off Elmwood Avenue, Scarborough. The William Reagan Realty Development Group plans 199 and the Winward Corporation plans 87.

South Portland’s City Council has decided to stick with 7 p.m. as the starting time for its meetings. It considered starting with an executive session at 7, to be followed by a public session when it ended. Judy Carpenter was among citizens who objected; she said citizens never would know when to show up.

Susan Avery-Rosenblatt was chosen by the South Portland City Council to fill a vacancy on the Board of Education left by the resignation of James Dyer. Other candidates were Andre Hamond and Rita Caron.

Corsetti’s Market, inheritor of a long tradition as the store at Windham Center Road, North Windham, is getting curbing across its front and side, with entrances, courtesy of the state. Access to the store and its parking lot has always been free and open.

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