School's Out Video

http://youtu.be/XbNEOJMGFAo


A special treat for all our graduating seniors.


Youtube link for Alice Cooper "School's Out for the Summer."


Copy and paste this link into your browser for the complete words and the performance of Alice Cooper singing the song, "School's Out for Summer." One of my favorite rockers back in the day.

Ghosts on Main Street

The Black Bull, on the corner of Main and Limerock Streets

My family has a special place in our hearts for Emmet Meara, the writer of this piece. I posted this link to the Bangor Daily News on Facebook recently, but thought those of you not on Facebook might enjoy it too. My brother, Ted, worked with him for many years when Ted was Rockland Bureau Chief for the Bangor Daily News. No doubt, Ted has a few stories of his own to tell. Maybe we can get him to tell a few down the line. I’ll keep you posted.

Ghosts haunt memories

of Main and Limerock

By Emmet Meara, Special to the News

From “Maine Living” Online Feature story of BDN site

My friends are an undependable lot, prone to being fashionably late or, in the case of Jefferson Phil, not showing up at all. So I arrange to meet them, when I must, at bars and restaurants where, truth be told, I don’t care whether they show up.

Today, the gathering place is the Black Bull on the Rockland corner of Main and Limerock streets. It may not be Hollywood and Vine, but it has its own rich history.

As I sit alone on the barstool, drinking a Smithwick’s beer fresh from Ireland, I watch the 20-somethings gather with their friends and dates. They stare at the hi-def television, watching “SportsCenter.” But I stare out the windows where the show is much better.

It was here, in three different and visible Bangor Daily News offices, that I spent what I laughingly call my “career.” It could have been worse, I suppose.

It started in the same building as the Black Bull, where Gregory’s Clothing Store used to be. We had an office at 410 Main St. on the second floor above The Coffee Shop. I loved the job, but part of the duties included sitting around until 11 p.m. or so, waiting for high school basketball scores. On Feb. 15, 1976 (could it have been that long ago?), a blasting cap was placed in a gasoline can on the floor of The Coffee Shop right under my desk.

My father had suffered a heart attack, and I was called to Boston. My seat was occupied by the son of Ted Sylvester, the bureau chief.

In later testimony, it was reported that the blasting cap was erroneously placed in the gasoline. If it had been placed a few inches higher, out of the liquid, about half the block would have exploded, experts said. If I had been sitting in my chair, I would have been blasted through the roof, they tell me.

It was the story of the decade, and the coffee shop owner and his accomplice went to jail. I survived.

I was sitting in the second office, across the street at 419 Main St., on May 30, 1979, when the call came in that a Downeast Airlines plane had crashed in Owls Head. Now, you have to understand that only a small percentage of these calls ever ended up to be accurate. Because it was so foggy that night, I found it hard to believe that anything was flying. I doubted the report until the moment I called the terminal. The airline confirmed that its DeHavilland Twin Otter had crashed in the woods just south of the runway with 18 people aboard.

Sylvester was off at the scene, and I stayed in the office, working the phones. The police shut down Main Street, anticipating the flow of ambulances from the crash. But only one ambulance came through Main and Limerock that night. We thought that was strange.

That was because only one passenger survived while 17 passengers and crew were killed.

On one lazy afternoon, June 22, 1981, I was staring out the window at Main and Limerock when I saw Safet Likay walk across the intersection. I said to Cynthia Robinson, our chain-smoking secretary, “There’s the guy who shot at Steve Peterson.” Likay was getting divorced and was represented by several different attorneys, including Peterson. Likay, in broken English, told a Belfast judge that he had money when he started his divorce and now he had none. He was so mad at Peterson that he took a shot at him in his Camden office. The bullet, if memory serves, ended up in a law book.

Likay was out on bail and now was represented by attorney Peter Sulides, who had an office at Limerock Street a few feet away. What I didn’t know was that Likay had shot Sulides a few seconds earlier and was making his escape. Sulides lived, but was crippled for the rest of his life. Likay was captured, tried, convicted and sentenced to the Maine State Prison.

When they brought Sulides back from the hospital, the ambulance stopped at Main and Limerock. They emptied out that same coffee shop for that one as Sulides waved weakly to his friends and neighbors.

Eventually, we had to move out of 419 Main St. The radio station that owned the building needed the space. We moved to 7 Limerock St., the same office where Sulides was shot. The landlord, James Brannan, eventually put a plaque on the building so no one would forget the shooting.

I sat in the Black Bull with all those ghosts, reliving the history that happened right outside those windows.

I watched the young crowd partying and wondered whether my friends would ever show up.

---

Send your feelings about this story to Emmet at: emmetmeara@msn.com.

"The Wicked Coast" - Guest story

It always interests me how people “from away” see coastal Maine people and how they live their lives. I think this writer, Paul Theroux, is pretty darned accurate.  (He even has a familiar French-sounding Maine name) I found this story on the Jackson Memorial Library website. It was originally printed in the Atantic magazine. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

The Wicked Coast

Maine is a joy in summer, but even more captivating in winter.

By PAUL THEROUX

Published in the Atlantic

"WHEREVER YOU LOOK on this coast, you see a Wyeth vignette. It was an icy diamond-bright day in late winter in mid-coast Maine, under a cloudless sky, the tide ebbing from the ice chunks that encrusted the rocky shore like blocks of salt, the north wind whipping whitecaps across the bay. This stretch of water, the lower end of Penobscot Bay, known and charted and fished by Europeans for more than 400 years, once teemed with cod as it now teems with lobsters. As for the particular details of seaside granite and tangled kelp and white clapboard houses and driftwood washed smooth by waves, it is clearly Wyeth country. The man known locally as Andy once lived and worked just down the peninsula, at Port Clyde. His painting The Patriot depicts the father of the man who still runs the nearby sawmill."

I was visiting a lobsterman friend to ask a favor. This man greeting me would himself suit a Wyeth portrait. He was warmly dressed, a heavy coat over a down vest, cord trousers, rubber knee-high boots and a fisherman’s thick rubber gloves. He was crouched in the sun on his own dock, surrounded by tall stacks of lobster traps.

“What are you doing here?” And he laughed, because he’s used to seeing me in the summer. I laughed too, hearing “doo-in hee-yah.”

I said I needed him to run me out in his boat to an offshore island where I had to transact a little business. Of course he said yes, no problem, did I want to go right now before the tide ebbed away?

We were soon on the water, the wind cutting my face, the islands glittering around us. The last ice age carved this coast, created the narrow south-trending peninsulas and lumpy granite islands, all of it now softened by tall spruce trees, “The Country of the Pointed Firs,” as one of its literary chroniclers described it. In summer these trees perfume the coast and support osprey nests. My friend was telling me how this had been an awfully snowy winter. It was not a complaint—for months it had been perfect for snowmobiling up near Rangeley. Oh, yes, very cold, but he had warm gear and added that one day (“I am serious”) a few years ago on that trail, the temperature was 37 below zero, Fahrenheit. And he laughed.

Most visitors to coastal Maine know it in the summer. In the nature of visitation, people show up in the season. The snow and ice are a bleak memory now on the long warm days of early summer, but it seems to me that to understand a place best, the visitor needs to see figures in a landscape in all seasons. Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter. You see that the population is actually quite small, the roads are empty, some of the restaurants are closed, the houses of the summer people are dark, their driveways unplowed. But Maine out of season is unmistakably a great destination: hospitable, good-humored, plenty of elbow room, short days, dark nights of crackling ice crystals.

Winter is a season of recovery and preparation. Boats are repaired, traps fixed, nets mended. “I need the winter to rest my body,” my friend the lobsterman told me, speaking of how he suspended his lobstering in December and did not resume until April.

But his son, younger and stronger, was preparing, this week in early March, to set out his traps—800 of them. His chosen area was 35 miles out to sea; with his stern man helping, he could bait and set 100 traps a day. What I take to be heroic effort is an average day for men like him, and women too—it’s not unusual to see a woman piloting a lobster boat and hauling traps.

I love talking to this man and his neighbors, because they are the enduring community of the Maine coast, making a living in the same fruitful and laborious way that people here always have. The coast was known to Europe from the earliest times. John Cabot claimed it for King Henry VII in 1497, Verrazano sailed “down east” in 1524, Captain Weymouth set foot here in 1605 and was rowed in a shallop up St. George’s River, which he named. Charts made during these voyages were used by Europeans seeking fish. Indeed, as Bill Caldwell writes in Islands of Maine: Where America Really Began, fishermen from England, France, Spain, and Portugal were familiar with Maine’s islands—so much so that by the early 1600s as many as 300 foreign fishing vessels were working the waters off the Maine coast.

The Wawenock chief Samoset, who befriended the Pilgrims at Plymouth, was born a little way down the coast, at Pemaquid. (He knew English; some say he learned it from another Indian, who’d been kidnapped by English explorers.) Thoreau claimed that the wilderness of Maine was as wild as any on Earth, and his Maine Woods (portions of which appeared in The Atlantic) is persuasive on that theme. I agree with Bill Caldwell that America began here, and it endures here in the same venerable way.

The landscape of the mid-coast is summed up in the plangent lines that begin the poem “Renascence,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was born near here:

All I could see from where I stood

Was three long mountains and a wood;

I turned and looked the other way,

And saw three islands in a bay.

Many small towns I know in Maine are as tight-knit and interdependent as those I associate with rural communities in India or China; with deep roots and old loyalties, skeptical of authority, they are proud and inflexibly territorial. These traits, deplored by some people “from away,” are the secret of their survival. I like these Mainers for their self-sufficiency; they are uncomplaining almost to a fault, indeed studied self-deprecation is the normal mode for such people, who superstitiously make a point of never boasting of a great catch. “Not bad” is passionate for a Maine lobsterman. They are renewed by a sustaining culture. My friend the lobsterman is also a volunteer fireman, as well as a trained (and unpaid) emergency medical responder. Onshore, whenever his pager summons him, he hops in his pickup truck and answers the call.

Late fall and winter is also a time when Mainers get creative. I know many painters, sculptors, and weavers who spend this time of year at their art. The expression cottage industry does not do justice to others’ achievements in knitting, quilting, basket-weaving, bottling maple syrup. Many of these products are sold at the State of Maine Cheese Company on Route 1, halfway between Rockland and Camden. This modest but well-stocked cheese-maker sells cheese curd squeezed that same day, as well as seven-year-old sharp cheddar, and a dozen other varieties.

Rockland, the commercial hub of mid-coast Maine, was a blue-collar town originally based on shipbuilding and later on the fishing, granite, and lime industries. After Camden just up the coast became gentrified and prosperous, Rockland—with fishing in decline, and no longer an exporter of rocks—reinvented itself as a destination, with a world-class art museum, the Farnsworth (a showcase for three generations of Wyeths), and a renovated classic one-screen movie theater, the Strand, as well as good restaurants, bookshops, and a series of weekend summer festivals celebrating lobsters, blues, and boats.

Maine does not end at its coast. Its beauty is repeated in its islands, thousands of them if one also counts those rock ledges known locally as “knubbles”—small knobs—some of them supporting a tree or two. Traditionally many Maine islands were offshore depots for fishing and lobstering; some served as pastures for keeping cows, or for quarrying granite; lighthouses still stand on some of them. Some are privately owned, with summer houses on them, and a look of defiant seclusion as though challenging John Donne’s assertion that no man is an island. On the Maine coast, some men are islands.

Headed out with my friend that day to one of those granite islands topped by tall spruce trees, I asked him what he had been doing lately.

“Shrimpun,” he said.

He and his son had spent the past few weeks trapping and netting shrimp. It was a hard business at sea on those windy, freezing winter days, hard too because the shrimp have a short shelf life unless they’re quickly shipped, peeled, and frozen. They are medium-sized. The catch is not huge. The price that week was 75 cents a pound. Not much, but never mind.

“Tasty?”

“Wicked tasty.”

Paul Theroux has written 28 works of fiction, 15 works of nonfiction, and a play. His latest book is A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta.

Sea Goddess Log

This log is a new feature. If I knew how to set up a message board for this subject I would, but this will have to do. I will post here any and all comments you care to send me about the Sea Goddess Pageant for the Lobster Festival every year. If you care to add to or answer any of these posts, send them to me also and I will add them in. I will number the threads, so please tell me which thread you wish to add your comments to. I am looking specifically for the names of Sea Goddess for each of the 63 festivals as well as their courts. Any other side information you can add (especially if you participated in a pageant) would also be appreciated. When I come home this summer, of course, I will check things out more thoroughly at the library when I go through the Courier archives.

Thread #1 Sara Sylvester Tavares:

"The Kippy Karnival queen was always the first princess announced. In 1964 that was Dawn Crudell. I am pretty sure. Linda Studley was in that year as well if not the next year. Susan Ames won and I believe that was 1964. Pamela Gay also won I believe that would have been 1961 or 62 and I believe went on to become Miss Maine. Am not totally sure of that fact, but know she went beyond the festival."

(Dawn Crudell, Linda Studley, and Susan Ames were all Southenders) If you know for sure that Susan Ames won in 1962 and what year Pamela Gay won for sure, please email me that info.

From Sara, May 19:

"Susan Ames would have been 64 or 65, right after we graduated. 62 is too early.

Thread #2 Bette Sylvester Bergeron:

I was a Princess in 1980… I was third, Kim Brooks (I think) was the runner up… but I didn’t know the girl that won that year

Thread #3 from Rockland History Facebook Page, May 22:

Rockland, Maine History wrote: "Ann Lord of Parsonfield (York County) was Sea Goddess in 1950, Signe Swanholm of Thomaston in 1949."

Thread #4, May 23, Me:

I found this list of all the Sea Goddesses on the Maine Lobster Festival History site. If you are one of these Goddesses; or know one of these Goddesses; or were a member of one of these Sea Princess courts; and have any information of a personal nature: about the pageant itself, your personal story, where you are now, etc. please email me at southendstories@aol.com. I’m counting on you to help me get this project further on down the road. Thanks in advance.