A whale has been feeding off Prouts Neck for the past several days. Local residents alerted the Marine Animal Lifeline on May 17, when two humpback whales were spotted.

Since that day, only one has been seen at a time, though MAL President Greg Jakush said they might be taking turns feeding in an area right offshore of the yacht club.

Police said some residents are concerned that it might get stranded in shallow water, and Jakush said others are concerned “just about having a 40-foot whale that close.”

Do you know where Bicentennial Park is in Scarborough?

For the last month, Town Councilor Patrick O’Reilly, who has lived in Scarborough for most of his life, has been asking himself and people around town the same question.

The issue was raised when the council’s Ordinance Committee was asked to review the town’s parking ordinance in order to allow people to park later at night especially at the beaches. Some in town thought it would be nice to be able to park at the beach on a moonlit night and take a walk with a loved one or their dog. Among the places to park included in the parking ordinance was Bicentennial Park.

“I looked at (fellow councilor) Steve Ross, and he looked at me, and I asked him if he knew where this park was and he didn’t know and I didn’t know, so I started asking around,” O’Reilly told the Current. “I just figured it would be good to know what I was voting on,” he said.

“I thought this park sounds nice. I wonder where it is,” O’Reilly said. “I must have asked at least 10 people in town who I thought would know where it was, but none of them did. Some of them had no idea. There were a lot of guesses but most did not know where the park is located.”

“I’m now 90 percent certain that the park is next to the fire station on Pine Point. I assume the park was named for the nation’s bicentennial in 1976.”

In the early 1950s, Eleanor Lorfano, now 85, got tired of driving her own truck to fires and serving her husband and his fellow firefighters coffee and doughnuts out of the back of the pickup. She wasn’t tired of getting up in the middle of the night. Instead, Lorfano wanted some help and some company.

She got together members of the seven fire company auxiliaries in town and proposed setting up a canteen truck that could take food and drinks to the town’s firefighters if a blaze went on for a while.

The group, all women, found a used truck and quickly raised the $3,000 necessary to buy it. That truck went to its first fire on Ross Road with a card table in the back, Lorfano remembered at a meeting of the Scarborough Fire Department Canteen May 20 at the Dunstan fire station.

Some volunteers built cupboards and installed a stove, water tank and a big countertop into the truck, which saw many fires, including big fires in Saco and the old dance hall on Gorham Road, Lorfano said. During the war, Lorfano and several other women had beenthe fire department while the men were in the military. She was certified to drive fire trucks and even put out fires. After the men returned, she and others maintained their involvement in the department through the canteen.

She remembered taking coffee to men fighting fires at the town dump, affectionately called “the Scarborough Town Park” in the canteen’s logbook. When rats would sometimes escape from the fire and run over near the canteen truck, Lorfano remembered men and women racing around trying to chase them away.

June 5 will be Captain Angelo Mazzone’s last day at the Scarborough Police Department. He’s done nearly every job at the department in his 20 years of service, from animal control officer to youth aid officer to detective sergeant and now captain.

Mazzone has never had a home in Scarborough, but he feels like he lives here. “Scarborough’s like a second home to me now,” he said.

Chief Robert Moulton said the department will miss Mazzone. “He’s been like a right arm to me,” Moulton said. “He’s an excellent police officer. I’m going to miss him a lot.”

Scarborough school volunteers Shelia Ouellette and Pat Beidleman were recognized recently by the Maine Partners in Education at a tea at the Blaine House. This was followed by a luncheon at the Senator in Augusta.

Bruce Gullifer, Scarborough’s director of Community Services, has been answering plenty of questions about a proposed skateboarding park in Scarborough, from parents, school board members and of course, pesky reporters. But some of the toughest questions have come from his kids.

“I have a 9-year-old and a 14-year-old, and that’s all I hear when I go home at night,” said Gullifer.

It ’s all he hears about especially since he found out construction on a local skateboarding park wouldn’t begin until next spring. Members of the Skateboarding Park Committee had been hoping construction could begin sometime this summer.

“It’s really nobody’s fault. It’s just one of those things,” said Blue Smith, who has been working to get a skateboarding park built in Scarborough for more than a year now.

“The kids are disappointed. When you’re a kid, you want everything now. ”

Those youthful expectations have run up against the reality of environmental regulations and the almighty dollar. The search for a temporary park has, once again, hit a crack in the pavement on the way to the half pipe. This time the crack comes in the form of a permit required by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.

Eleanor Lorfano holds a jumpsuit worn by early members of the Scarborough Fire Department Canteen in this file photo from May 23, 2002. (File photo)