Feb. 1, 1984

“Good ’till Spring!” from Shaw’s – pink or white grapefruit, five for $1; 10 pounds potatoes, $1.19; sliced pastrami, $1.98 lb.; iceberg lettuce, 49 cents a head; Italian bread. 69 cents.

Hans Hemkes, owner of The Hamlet in Westbrook, unveiled to the Gorham Town Council and Planning Board a plan for a sister mobile home park on land he owns across the town line. The park would have 116 to 120 mobile home sites, each 70 by 100 feet. He also plans 50 three-quarter acre lots for manufactured homes to be individually owned. The Hamlet

has more than 250 mobile homes, all on the Westbrook side of the line. Hemkes got a cool reception from the Gorham boards but a promise that they will think about it.

Tuffy S. Laffin will file papers this week to run as a Democrat

for the Westbrook seat in Maine’s House of Representatives that he held six years as a Republican, now District 33.

In announcing his candidacy, Laffin called for a death penalty in Maine as he did when in the Legislature. He also called for getting drivers who are drunk off the highways.

Westbrook is studying leachate problems at the Sandy Hill

landfill that could shorten its life. It has been expected to last

another 12 to 15 years. The city must report on the leachate to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection by June 30.

Meanwhile, the City Council went ahead Monday and voted $13,500 toward a study of a Council of Governments-Regional Waste Systems electricity-producing trash-burner. The COG burner is one of four other suggested ways of handling the city’s solid wastes.

John E. Whitmore began work Jan. 16 as a Westbrook police

patrolman, Deputy Chief Wayne Syphers acknowledged Friday after a newspaper report. Whitmore is a former Portland policeman.

For the first time, Westbrook will be host to the Maine State

Little League baseball championships in August. The state’s top teams of 11 and 12-year-olds will play at the Joseph A. Warren Field.

The Westbrook High wrestling team turned in its best performance of the season last Saturday in a big quadrangular meet at Massabesic High School in Waterboro. Not only did the Blazers defeat Marshwood, they also battled a strong Deering squad to a 29-all standstill.

Feb. 2, 1994

A backhoe opened a grave in the deeply frozen ground of St. Hyacinth Cemetery Wednesday, not to put a coffin in but to take one out, a witness has reported. The citizen said that two suit-and-tie- dressed men using walkie-talkies oversaw the removal of the coffin and a cemetery worker said when

asked what was going on, “It’s confidential.” An undertaker also said it was confidential and referred a report to Portland police. A later report was that the body had been sent to Augusta for an autopsy and that it was the body of a woman who died last year and is now thought to have been murdered.

Portland confirmed that it was a suspicious death and medical

examiner will perform an autopsy to try to determine the cause of death.

Two men walked into the Fleet Bank in downtown Westbrook Monday and two minutes later left with more than $10,000 in paper money in a paper bag. They were dressed in somewhat unusual fashion – ski masks pulled down over their faces with slits for eyes and mouth. Each carried a handgun. Man A stayed in the lobby area and shouted instructions to four customers, four tellers and assorted bank employees. Man B leaped across the teller’s counter and went down the teller line, scooped cash out of three tellers’ drawers into the bag, then leaped the counter again and escaped through a rear door. They left in a stolen car, found later at the Eagles Club, several blocks away, and presumably escaped in a waiting vehicle.

“Maybe it was a Freudian slip,” Superintendent Edward Connolly said to the Westbrook School Committee with a grin Wednesday. In his memo to the committee about budget choices, he had used the word “tax” for “task.” He had written: “I do not feel comfortable preparing a budget that has a tax increase or staff reduction without direct school committee discussion. I know this is a tough tax and it is a different

way of doing business.”

Standish Rescue told Gorham Police that a tractor-trailer truck

swung left and sped past a hurrying, lights-flashing rescue unit on Route 25 near the West Gorham Fire Station. Patrolman John Reed and Sgt. Wayne Coffin blue-lighted the driver and gave him a warning. Reed said, “Common sense tells you that when an ambulance has its lights on, something is happening. You don’t pass rescue vehicles.”