(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. 27, 2001

Edward “Packy” McFarland died Dec. 19 after a long battle with heart trouble. It was a strong, all-embracing heart, for which he was admired by most people in Scarborough, and for which they honored him during his life and after his death. His heart was his greatest asset and, in the end, his final weakness.

“He was extremely good at motivating kids that were atypical athletes,” said current Scarborough High School athletic director Frank Spencer. “He made them feel good about themselves.”

And that is perhaps his lasting legacy in Scarborough. Former players and students remember him as a great man, with some corny catch-phrases like “A boy in sports is a boy not in trouble.”

But Dan Warren, one of Packy’s players who grew up to live and work and coach baseball in Scarborough, said he often finds himself repeating Packy’s pithy platitudes to his own players, 30 years later.

Warren, who played on Packy’s last conference championship baseball team in 1971, became even better friends with him as an adult than they had ever been at the high school.

“He was a tremendous people person,” Warren said. “He makes great eye contact with everybody, and this was a guy who was legally blind for the last 10 years of his life. He would put himself six or eight inches from your face and have a conversation.”

The economy likely will have the biggest impact on 2002, according to local officials, but the only thing for certain, one said, is the days will be getting longer.

Scarborough Town Manager Ron Owens said in the new year the town will continue to see steady residential growth, although it will be paced slower than in the past few years. “I think that homes will be built, but it might only be 100 to 110 new homes,” Owens said. We will definitely see the development plans for the Scarborough Downs property.

“These plans will really begin to define what that part of town will look like in the future,” Owens said.

At a time when there has been a spike in patriotism, across the country, four local young men are applying to take the long road into military service.

They are aiming for admission to the country’s elite service academies, and if they get in and make it through, they will come out as leaders – officers in the Navy, Army, Air Force, Marines or Merchant Marine.

Dan Shevenell and David Greenwood of Cape Elizabeth, and Matt Reichl and Ben Tourangeau of Scarborough, have been nominated by Maine’s congressional delegation to attend U.S. military and service academies next year.

When Alan Hyman starts throwing out ideas, like an Internet TV studio and a movie-making sound stage, he sounds like he’s talking about Silicon Valley. But he’s talking about Scarborough.

The Scarborough resident and cofounder of I-many, the largest software company in Maine, confirmed in an interview with the Current last week that he plans to develop the land behind his restaurant, American cafe? & lounge. He’s just not sure what he wants to put there.

“I have no definite plans right now,” said Hyman. “I would like to do something in the next couple of years.”

By selling off the town’s current community center at 1226 Shore Road, selling the vacant lot next to Town Hall and selling about four acres of the town-owned Gull Crest property off Fowler Road, the Cape Elizabeth Town Council is hoping to raise at least $500,000 toward the cost of renovating the Pond Cove Millwork building into a new community center.

Other revenue sources for the project include having people pay to have rooms, or the entire center, named after them. Town Manager Mike McGovern and Community Services Director Sue Weatherbie believe six of the smaller rooms at the community center could be offered for naming at a price of $10,000 each, while the larger rooms could be priced at $25,000 each. This would provide at least $50,000 toward the project.