May 30, 1990

Saturday, June 2, is Westbrook Together Day, the 11th annual celebration of the event, and Riverbank Park will hum with hometown families enjoying themselves. There will be music, dancing, humorists, an auction and plenty of tasty dishes. The parade steps off at 10 a.m. on Lincoln Street at the Eagles Club, moving down Main Street and winding up at the park. It just can’t rain this year, but if it does, the party will be postponed a day, to Sunday.

R.J. Grondin and Sons, Gorham general contractors, paid $1.4 million for 331 acres in back of the Windham transfer station, and plans to expand the neighboring Flynn gravel pit, which the company owns, onto the land. The seller was S.D. Warren Co. The site is off Route 302, with no road frontage. “There’s gravel on that land,” said Philip Grondin. He and his brother Bob are partners in the company.

The news that the Gorham Town Council heard Thursday was that the budget as presented by the schools and now-departed town manager, John Marcarelli, will need a tax rate hike of nearly 20 percent, $4.69 per $1,000, if it is passed as written. A majority of the council then voted in a show of hands to try to trim the rate hike to only $1.72, what they had been told would be the expected increase in “fixed” costs alone. That was to mean a total of $420,000 in cuts, of which they decided to try to find $320,000 in the $5.2 million municipal side and $100,000 from the $10.6 million school side.

Both Shaw Junior High School and Gorham High School were evacuated in separate incident last week when someone telephoned bomb threats to each of the schools. The threat at the junior high school got classes dismissed for the day, but when a similar call was received at the high school, classes were only disrupted for about half an hour. Gorham police are investigating the threats.

Taxidermist Matt Nicely of Gorham did such a lifelike job of mounting a deer head that it won best of category honors at the Maine Association of Taxidermists conference recently. Nicely, who operates Northwoods Taxidermy out of his home on Route 114, displayed a yearling buck in velvet that was shot in Gorham.

Advertisement: Grand Opening – Gorham Decorating Center, 30 South St., Gorham, June 1 and 2. Clowns! Balloons! Refreshment! Come in ad say hello. Register to win free gifts!

May 31, 2000

Someone fired seven shots from a .30-06 hunting rifle into the air at Westbrook Gardens around 2 a.m. Monday. That thunder in the still night brought so many calls to Westbrook police that it swamped their phones, and some called the sheriff’s department or state police, who passed word along. Westbrook police in bulletproof vests, including Chief Steven Roberts, and Gorham police as well, went to the scene and began a series of interviews with anyone who’d seen anything. Some had seen a man in dark clothes go to a certain apartment, and by “a convoluted route,” according to Roberts, police were eventually led to a transient reportedly living with a girlfriend at 144 Westbrook Gardens. He was arrested Monday afternoon on several charges, including reckless conduct with a firearm.

A smaller bus will come every 15 minutes on the run between Prides Corner in Westbrook and Monument Square in Portland, starting June 6, Metro announced. That will cut waiting time in half. The buses will replace big ones that run every half hour. Metro has set up a new park-and-ride lot at Four Seasons Bingo, Prides Corner, to encourage drivers who live farther out to park there and use the bus for work or errands in Portland.

Shawn Moody, owner of Moody’s Collision Center, was recently named Business Person of the Year by the Gorham Business and Civic Exchange. Moody, a Gorham native, has served on the town’s Comprehensive Plan Committee, and is currently on the By-Pass Committee. He is a supporter of youth and adult athletic teams. He started what is now Moody’s Collision Center while still a student at Gorham High School in the late 1970s, eventually also operating Gorham Auto Parts.

When classes start again at the University of Southern Maine’s Gorham campus in September, a 231-space parking lot off Route 25, behind the admissions office, will be completed. Originally planned to be a 90-car lot, the size was increased to accommodate cars from a new residence hall planned across campus below the field house. The residence hall will be completed in September, as well.

Gorham’s cable access Channel 3 hit two snags that prevented it from televising Wednesday’s School Committee meeting, a meeting that school leaders said they wanted parents to view. The meeting took up two sensitive issued – Shaw Junior High School and a proposed new school drinking and drug policy. Studio Manager Georgia Humphrey said the two TV cameras Gorham owns are old and need to be fixed or replaced. One is unusable. Also, the one camera person working for Channel 3 resigned a few days before Wednesday’s meeting. It takes two people to produce the shows.

Westbrook Teachers Association honored seven retirees at a banquet last week. The retirees are Francis Amoroso, Odena Randall, James Parr, Ken Knapton, Winnifred Merrill, Cynthia Evans and Hal Taylor.

Day’s Jewelry Store in Westbrook was opened in 1947 at 866 Main St. In 1971 the store expanded to carry appliances, renovating an adjacent space that had been vacated by longtime occupant Hood’s Drug Store. In 1974, the Westbrook Urban Renewal Authority acquired the building and slated it for demolition. Day’s Jewelry moved across the street to 857 Main St. to a space that became available when Romonow Furniture closed its Westbrook store. Day’s remained there several years before closing the Westbrook store and moving to South Portland. Fajita Grill occupies 857 Main St. To see more historical photos and artifacts, visit the Westbrook Historical Society at the Fred C. Wescott Building, 426 Bridge St. It is open Tuesdays and Saturdays, 9 a.m.-noon, and the first Wednesday of each month at 1:30 p.m., September-June. Inquiries can be emailed to westhistorical@myfairpoint.net. The website is www.westbrookhistoricalsociety.org. Photo and research courtesy of Mike Sanphy