(Editor’s note: Looking Back is a new weekly column including news items reported 10 years ago in The Current, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in September 2011.)

Issue of Jan. 2, 2002

When John F. Kennedy met John Houbolt, a Scarborough resident, in the hallway of a Washington hotel in 1960, he had no idea he had just met the man who would save the space program from failure and the country $25 billion dollars.

Houbolt’s persistence would eventually put a man on the moon.

Houbolt and Kennedy were both lost. On their way to an awards ceremony, they chided one another about getting lost in a hotel. But Kennedy, then a senator running for president whose challenge to the space program spurred its success, and Houbolt, whose work behind the scenes insured it, never met again.

“If you want to know how we got to the moon, you came to the right man,” said Houbolt, as he walked down the hall to the door of his Piper Shores apartment more than 40 years after his chance meeting with Kennedy.

Now in his 80s, Houbolt came to Maine this fall to retire. He and his wife, Mary, chose Maine because they will be closer to their three daughters, who live in neighboring New England states. Mary Houbolt’s love of the ocean brought them to their Piper Shores apartment, where they can see it from their window. Houbolt still has an office at the Langley Research Center, which does research for NASA in Virginia. More than 40 years ago, Houbolt was working there as an aeronautical engineer at the height of the Cold War and the space race.

In 1959, NASA had begun work on putting an American on the moon. NASA scientists were focusing on two routes to the moon: a direct launch and a plan known as Earth Orbit Rendezvous.

Houbolt wanted them to consider a third route: the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous. A relative outsider to the mission, his responsibilities at Langley were to run the structures division, not decide how NASA would get a man to the moon. That didn’t stop Houbolt from championing an unpopular idea.

Ted Hatch and Kristina Underkoffler of Scarborough were among nine couples married New Year’s Eve courtesy of local radio station Kiss 99.9.

Cape Elizabeth research botanist, Jim White, is now selling a new plant pest repellent, Anti-Pest-O. It is biodegradable and made from natural products. But the real surprise, White said: “It works!”

The product, White said, fills a gap in pest-control sprays. While many sprays help control a wide range of insects, most of those are toxic to the environment. Other products are natural but only work on one or two types of insects.

You name it, they’ve probably got it at Ruth’s Reusable Resources. The operation run by Ruth Libby and her husband Tom provides free supplies to teachers for use in their classrooms. Each member school district pays a membership fee, which allows teachers to go to Ruth’s for anything from post-it notes to felt for art projects.

Ruth’s began in the basement of the Libby’s home on County Road about eight years ago after Ruth received a letter from her son’s kindergarten teacher asking parents to save things like egg cartons and juice can lids for use in arts and crafts projects. Ruth enlisted the aid of her mother, her grandmother and some of her mother’s friends who also started saving such items.

In order to fund capital improvement projects at Cape Elizabeth’s Ft. Williams Park and “keep the park a world class site,” the town has approved the creation of the Ft. Williams Charitable Foundation. First organized this summer, the goal of the foundation is to create an endowment fund for the park to pay for maintenance and capital improvement projects. The president of the new foundation is Jeff VanFleet.

“We are still in the early stages of organization and strategic planning, but our ultimate goal is to get an endowment fund going. We are making a concerted, concentrated effort to raise funds for the park,” VanFleet said. Some ways to raise funds would include a capital campaign, an annual fund drive, specific fundraising events and going after private and public grant money, VanFleet said.