The Cape Town Council is questioning whether a $9.2 million renovation of the high school and Pond Cove School should be delayed until the economy improves.

With the economy tight, and deficits mounting at the state level, schools are expecting a reduction in aid to education.

“This could not come at a worse time financially when we are expecting further reductions in state aid,” Council Finance Chairman Mary Ann Lynch told the Current in an interview.

But Lynch, who is also the council liaison to the school building committee, said there is no question in her mind that the kindergarten should be moved to Pond Cove School.

“We do need to do that at some point,” Lynch said.

“In the end the School Board may be faced with the question of what is more important – the buildings or programs,” Lynch said. “While there is no question of need, the council has to ask: Would it be more responsible to wait awhile?”

As a young man working the farms in Cape Elizabeth, David Stack can remember more than one fruitless trip to Boston ending with a truckload of cabbage being dumped into the harbor.

“They started getting so much cabbage from California that they couldn’t buy ours sometimes,” Stack said.

“Communication wasn’t that great back then, so we wouldn’t find out until we got down there. Then we had no choice but to dump them.”

Stack’s story was one of many told to come out during a presentation last week by Carol Anne Jordan on the history of farming in her hometown.

With the Thomas Library community room packed with farmers and Historic Preservation Society members, Jordan had an enthusiastic and well informed crowd to work with.

Using her own family’s 180-year farming history and research she had compiled for a USM history paper in 1977, Jordan took the crowd from the earliest Cape settlements to the boom time of more than 50 family farms in town, all the way to the present day’s handful of agricultural enterprises still left.

“For the early years, farming was a subsistence type of occupation in Cape,” Jordan said, adding that it started in the 1630s and 1640s for the most part. “You grew food on your land to feed your family.”

The image of Jeff Gorman still haunts Tim Bryant. He still remembers the day he turned on the radio and heard that Gorman was the lead suspect in the disappearance of Amy St. Laurent, a mystery that had plagued police and the media for weeks.

A couple years ago, Gorman worked for Bryant, the service manager at Bill Dodge in Westbrook.

Gorman reconditioned cars there until they caught him stealing stereos.

“It’s disturbing to know that if he had finally made it to jail, this wouldn’t have happened,” said Bryant.

Gorman is on trial for St. Laurent’s murder this week. As the trial goes on, those who knew him in Westbrook, where Gorman spent much of his time, will be watching.

The testimony of Jeffrey “Russ” Gorman’s own mother, former Scarborough resident Tammy Westbrook, could be what sways the jury in the ongoing Amy St. Laurent murder trial.

Superior Court Justice Nancy Mills decided Wednesday that testimony Westbrook gave to a grand jury in February could be submitted as evidence in her son’s trial, which started Monday and has progressed at a slow pace.

The prosecution sought to use a tape and transcript of the grand jury testimony only after Westbrook denied having any memory whatsoever of the grand jury proceedings, let alone her testimony, which incriminated Gorman.

John Rich of Cape Elizabeth now makes his home in a combination of a summer cottage and former South Portland store building near Two Lights, next door to the sea captain’s house where he spent summers growing up.

“They say you can’t go home again, but I did,” said Rich, who returned to Cape after a successful career as an international newsman and war correspondent Before he managed to make it back to Maine, he spent a lifetime exploring the world. It began after he graduated from Bowdoin College in 1939. He had majored in French and had wanted to become a French teacher. His work on the college newspaper, though, led him to take a job with the Kennebec Journal newspaper, moving on a year later to the Portland Press Herald.

When World War II began, Rich was in Maine, not knowing much about the enemy.

“I’d never seen a Japanese at the beginning of World War II,” Rich remembered.

The U.S. Navy was no different. They discovered they had very few people who spoke Japanese, “so they started these language schools,” Rich said. He joined up, training as a future translator and interrogator, learning the basics of Japanese reading, writing and conversation.

Last week the Scarborough Town Council took the unusual step of recognizing a single individual by officially naming a day after resident Leonard K. Libby, a member of the Scarborough Lions Club for the past 50 years.

Thursday, Jan. 16, was declared to be Lion Leonard K. Libby Day to honor Libby for his numerous contributions to the town, not just through the Lions Club but also as a member of the rescue unit for 22 years and a current member of the fire police.

When asked in an interview what he would do on his “day,” Libby laughed and said the first thing he was going to do was close down all the roads. The second – ask for the keys to Town Hall so he could sell it. “I get in trouble sometimes for what I say, but you really have to laugh and have a good time when you can. Life is too short not to have fun,” Libby said.

Thomas Houge, a student at Cape Elizabeth Middle School, has been accepted into the People to People World Leadership Forum. Houge will join a select group of students in Washington, D.C., in late March and early April to earn school credit while exploring some of our nation’s most prominent monuments and institutions.

The Scarborough High School Poetry Club sponsored a night of poetry and music Friday, Jan. 10.

The event included many young poets, as well as poets who have had their work published. They were all present to share their love of poetry and their works with each other. Teacher Marita O’Neill is the advisor for the Poetry Club.

She knows a number of poets in the Portland area and invited three of them to come and read on Friday.

The gathering featured the three poets of Trinity, Jay Cox, Dennis Camire and Peter Manuel. The three poets get together and often write poems that are complimentary to each other and are read in groups of three, hence the name Trinity.

Saying he wanted the school department to step up to the plate and decide once and for all what it wanted to do with the town owned drive-in property off Route 1, Scarborough Town Councilor Steve Ross urged his fellow councilors at a meeting last week to pass a resolution stating their intent for the property.

With only Councilor Sylvia Most objecting, the council agreed to a plan for the drive-in for a community park that would include athletic fields, reserve a site for the construction of a YMCA or possible community center and allow for the construction of a through road from the high school out to Sawyer Road along the northerly boundary of the property. The road has been seen as a critical element to the high school expansion project because it would allow for a second outlet from the school and the current athletic fields.

Lorraine and Leonard Libby at their Scarborough home in this file photo from the issue of Jan. 16, 2003, after the Town Council declared a Lion Leonard K. Libby Day. The “medal” around Leonard’s neck was made by family friend Norma Maroon.       
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