July, 1980

Expecting to save half on heating and cooling, William Frank and Edward Stubbs plan to build an underground duplex home on Reg Roc Road, South Portland. The Planning Board has given its OK. One side of the house will be open to the weather.

Yoka Feijen van Maanen, of the Netherlands, has brought her daughter and sons, ages 9, 7 and 3, to visit the Raymond MacLean family, 30 Phillips Road, South Portland, where she spent the 1961-1962 year and attended South Portland High School.

Petitions seek a referendum on recall of the Gorham town budget.

The Festival of the Arts, planned as the first of an annual sidewalk show, will be held in downtown Westbrook July 26.

On recommendation of Neal W. Allen III, executive director, the board of directors of Regional Waste Systems gave preliminary approval to extending the hauling contract of Linwood R. Higgins Co. at $325,000 to $375,000 next year. Higgins began last year at $232,000, a year, moved to $257,000 this year, and asks increases of $50,000 in payroll and up to $117,000 in other costs. Directors refused to put the contract out to bid.

The Rouse Co., Columbia, Md., says the chances are that it will build the Yankee Mall in South Portland by 1983. It is planned on 88 acres behind the Maine Mall and would have Filene’s, J. C. Penney, Lechmere Sales and Porteous as tenants.

Davis and Hanscom, Steep Falls, will build Gorham’s new elementary school on Main Street.

A roller skating rink will open in Gorham’s former IGA store in September.

A four-mile canoe trip down the Dunstan River will be held Saturday by the Scarborough Nature Center.

Rene and Eva (Boivin) Marier, 567 Saco St., Westbrook, marked their 50th wedding anniversary June 21. Among those honoring them were daughters Anita Skinner, Cecelia Bernard, Marcella Hesound and Lucia Warren. They received cards from President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, and from Sen. George Mitchell.

July, 1990

Westbrook aldermen will meet tomorrow on the school budget, $15,096,219. A motion to cut it $200,000, which is 1.3 percent, lost, 3-3, in committee.

In South Portland, parents want to keep Redbank School, they told reporter Cavenaugh Kelly of the American Journal.

David Shaw, president of Idexx Corp., Portland, confirmed that Idexx may lease vacant space in the Data General plant in Westbrook. It would employ nearly 200. Idexx now is in the former Portland Co. locomotive works at 100 Fore St. A report is that Idexx has doubled its work force every year for several years. Half of the former Data General building is occupied by PRECISmetal, successor to Data General’s sheet-metal cabinet division. Idexx is good at research and development, said Shaw, who founded it six years ago. It has three locations in Europe and a subsidiary in Japan.

Joseph H. Poitras II, 28, of 36 Dana Court, Westbrook, fell into the Presumpscot River at Saccarappa Falls Park, apparently hitting his head on rocks. It took an hour to find him, and he was dead.

In a half-page ad, the Maine Department of Transportation invites the people of Portland, Westbrook, Gorham and Scarborough to a meeting to discuss the future of Route 25.

Reconstruction this year is planned for High, Depot and Androscoggin Streets in South Windham.

Gorham police get a 5 percent raise in their new one-year contract. Starting pay is $380 a week.

The Uptown USA Carnival will be at the Sebago Lake baseball field July 18-22 for the third annual Standish Big Lake Festival.

Phil Charest has left his seat on the Gorham Town Council. Five running for it in a special election are Robert Benson, David Linehan, Albert Mosher Jr., Fred Robinson and William Schulz.

Eighteen Westbrook businesses, chiefly variety stores, took a full-page advertisement urging Westbrook to refuse multiple licenses for out-of-town lunch wagons.

Scarborough’s Board of Education voted unanimously to ask for state approval of a new middle school and a classroom wing each on Blue Point and Pleasant Hill Schools.

The Standish Budget committee favors a 10.17 percent increase in spending that would raise the tax rate, now $12, to $13.22. In June, citizens voted down a budget that would have raised the tax rate $2.10.