In his warmly lit den, Howard Wright opened a binder of yellowing newspaper clippings. The same landmark dominated glossy page after glossy page — the Portland Breakwater Light, or to most, Bug Light.

“I was the first one in the lighthouse after it was abandoned,” he said as he turned a page.

The 24-foot-tall lighthouse will celebrate its 150th birthday with a party on Saturday hosted by the Rotary Club of South Portland-Cape Elizabeth. It recently received a fresh coat of white paint for the occasion. 

But in the summer 1971, when Wright wandered through what was then an industrial ghost town, remnants of an abandoned shipyard, he saw the dilapidated Bug Light. All of the glass in the lantern room had been shattered, and someone put up plywood to keep the weather out.

“I saw what the vandals had done to my Bug Light,” he said. “It pained me.”

It didn’t look like what he remembered from his childhood.

Wright, now 96, spent childhood summers on Peaks Island, staying in what was then his great-grandparents’ cottage. Some of his earliest memories are of exploring the island as an inquisitive 6 year old. “I knew every nook and cranny,” he said. 

His ties to the land around the lighthouse run deep. His great-grandfather used to store his catboat in Cushing’s Cove before it was filled in. Wright’s great-grandparents lived in the brick house that is now the South Portland Historical Society’s headquarters, and his mother played in the widow’s walk as a little girl. 

Wright felt that he “grew up with the light itself.” So when he saw it in disrepair as an adult, he decided to do something about it. That winter, he started to speak with General Electric, the owners of the land, about his desire to prevent further deterioration of the light.

After World War II, when the lighthouse was strategically turned off to avoid being spotted by enemy ships, subs or planes, the lighthouse had been abandoned. Vacant, it fell prey to vandals. 

In the summer of 1972, Wright got to work. He signed a contract granting him permission to work on the property and relieving General Electric of all responsibility and liability. 

The first thing he did was drill his way through the rusty lock. 

“I didn’t know what I was going to find,” he said.

When he opened the door, he saw rocks. Lots of them. “The spiral staircase had glass and stones everywhere,” Wright said. “What a mess.” 

That summer, when he wasn’t working for Handy Boat, Wright spent his days doing “ordinary grunt work” at the light. He cleared the space meticulously, treating it like an archaeological site. He removed the stones in batches, combing through them to see if there was anything of note.

“It’s not like I found King Tut’s tomb,” he said with a chuckle. 

But he found two special items: an old phone, estimated to be at least a hundred years old that he is still refurbishing, and a cowl — the metal ventilator that hung above the lantern to regulate the flow of air.

While he was cleaning the lighthouse, he put his own lock on the building to protect it from more vandalism. “I was the only one with a key to the lighthouse,” he said with a grin. 

General Electric took over when Wright returned to Philadelphia for the school year and did what he described as a “bang up job” including maintenance work, repainting and an installation of bulletproof windows to protect the light from projectiles. 

This was not the first time Wright cleaned up a historic site. While teaching at a farm school for boys from broken homes in the Philadelphia area, Wright led many opportunities for his students to learn about history up close. Wright and some of his students cleaned up overgrown and vandalized sites like Fort Mifflin and the Olympia. 

And Wright never lost his love for lighthouses. The interior of his house in East Boothbay is covered in them. A lighthouse stained glass window above the back door. A lighthouse clock. Lighthouse pillows. A blanket covered in lighthouses.  

For many years, he became a lighthouse keeper, or at least pretended to be one. 

He volunteered at Burnt Island Light from his early 70s until he could no longer climb the stairs, and he served as the president of the board for years. 

In one of the photo albums in his den, he flipped to a photograph of him dressed in a period-appropriate lighthouse keeper uniform, complete with a white cap. In the photo, he crouched down to greet a young girl with curly blond hair. 

“This photo is how I want to be remembered,” he said.