It’s good to see a farmer’s market has returned to Westbrook after it died off several years ago due to a lack of business.

Although it’s late in the season and only a handful of farmers are participating, people now have a place to buy locally grown fruits and vegetables without having to drive to Portland. And, local farmers now have a place to sell the food they’re growing.

Westbrook resident Kathy Poirier, who also worked to help the city build a skate park, deserves credit for getting the market started again. She went to the farmer’s market in Portland to recruit farmers for a Westbrook market.

As she, farmers and the city consider how to keep the market going next year, they might want to heed the advice of Lloyd Storey, the owner of Storey’s Garden Center on Route 302. Storey was the last farmer to participate in the city’s previous farm market, which died off completely three years ago when he decided the amount of business he was getting wasn’t supporting the employee he was paying to work there.

The city’s last farm market struggled after it moved from the CVS parking lot to the Dunn Street American Legion Hall, a location with less traffic passing by. The following year the market moved to Riverbank Park along Main Street, but it never got as much business as it did when it was located at CVS. Storey said the market also suffered from a lack of exposure, because there were no advertisements or signs to support it.

Storey said he wouldn’t likely participate in the city’s new farm market unless the city put up signs and advertised for it. He said markets need something to draw people in; people won’t just show up because local farmers set up their stands, particularly now because they are competing against big box stores that offer many of the same products, albeit ones frequently grown outside of Maine.

Located along Route 25, the revived farm market would seem to be in a good location, with plenty of traffic passing by to produce business. However, if Westbrook’s farm market is ever going to take off, with other farm markets established nearby and big box stores offering similar products, the city, as well as local farmers and residents, are going to have to support it.

Maine journalism loses pioneers

We were saddened this week to hear of the loss of two pioneers in journalism – Eddie Driscoll and Roger Snow.

Snow was once the owner of the newspaper that eventually became the American Journal – The Westbrook American. He also founded the South Portland and Cape Elizabeth Journal. Snow eventually sold both newspapers to Harry Foote, who merged the two newspapers and operated them as the American Journal for the next 40 years.

Foote called Snow a pioneer in the weekly business in Southern Maine. “He believed in weeklies long before most people did,” he said. “I think of him as the grandfather of the many weekly papers around us these days.”

Driscoll made his name in a different form of journalism – broadcasting. Driscoll would be familiar to those who lived near Bangor years ago and watched him on WLBZ-TV, where he worked for more than 30 years.

Driscoll and his wife, Ruby, who lives in Gorham, were the subject of a profile in the American Journal two years ago. Ruby Driscoll cared for her husband in recent years at the Barron Center in Portland, where he battled Alzheimer’s disease. She plans to continue volunteering her time Barron Center to work with other residents there.

Readers will find the stories of both of these men on the front page of the American Journal this week.

-Brendan Moran, editor