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

Issue of Dec. 20, 2001

At Cape Elizabeth High School’s “Winter Concert” earlier this week, there wasn’t even a hint of holiday de?cor in the auditorium.

In Scarborough, at Wentworth Intermediate School, the kids participated in Celebration Week in the final days before the holiday break. This year the students celebrated “diversity in our world, our nation, our community and ourselves.”

What’s verboten is any celebration of Christmas or Hanukkah. It is school practice in both towns that if there is any discussion of holidays, it is done as part of the children’s education about different cultures.

“The school is taking the separation of church and state thing way too far by not allowing us to celebrate Christmas in school,” said Scarborough sophomore, Ashley Drew, in the Current’s feature, “Teen Talk,” last week.

“I know that at the intermediate school they can’t even sing Christmas carols. These rules don’t allow us to celebrate our beliefs freely.”

Added senior Nate Johnson: “We never have the good old Christmas parties that we used to have when we were younger. It’s not really fair that we can’t celebrate Christmas in school.”

Al White leaned his 6-foot-2 frame toward the microphone. “All Aboard!” his voice boomed to the waiting crowd outside Track 7 at Boston’s South Station. In 1965, White was the conductor in charge of the last Boston & Maine passenger train to leave Union Station in Portland for Boston. Now, at 81, he signaled the inauguration last Friday of the new Downeaster passenger rail service, a joint project of Amtrak and the states of Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

Looking at Oak Hill now, with its busy four-way intersection and strip mall development, it’s hard to believe that less than 20 years ago it was still a fairly quiet residential neighborhood.

Now traffic whizzes by on busy Route 1, Black Point Road and Gorham Road. Over the years, Oak Hill also has become the de facto town center, housing Town Hall, the public safety building, the library, the post office, the high school, the middle school and intermediate school. According to Scarborough historian and author of “Images of America Scarborough,” Rodney Laughton, Oak Hill literally extends from the center of the hill down to the flats on all four sides.

A picture in his book of Oak Hill in the 1950s, looking down Gorham Road, shows how the area was surrounded by farmland and how little development there was at that time. The Wentworth Farm, for instance, consisted of 178 acres and was a working farm from the 1890s until about the 1970s when the family sold off the last parcel for the construction of what is now known as the Wentworth Intermediate School.

A new sign has taken the “Bintliff” out of Bintliff’s American Diner on Route 1. The diner dropped the name of its eponym, Roger Bintliff, after his partner bought out his share of the restaurant.

Bintliff and Alan Hyman opened the restaurant in July. Their relationship remains a partnership, according to Bintliff. The two men just had different interests in the property. “He wanted to get more invested in the property,” said Bintliff. “I wanted to continue opening restaurants.”

Steve Kenney of Scarborough, whose career has been mostly in the area of finance and higher education, recently announced his intention to run for governor of Maine as an Independent. Kenney said that he has been interested in running for office since college.

“I realize that I have taken a different route than some others but I’m banking on my background in higher education and finance,” Kenney said. “I have gotten my training in the ‘legislature of life,’” he added.