Secretary of State Dan Gwadosky is looking to increase restrictions on teenage drivers to improve road safety in Maine, but driving schools and driving students aren’t happy with what he has proposed.

Gwadosky would like to discuss with the public and legislators the possibility of increasing the driving age from 16 to 17; banning teens from driving between midnight and 5 a.m.; extending the length of time new drivers must hold learner’s permits before they can get their licenses; extending the ban on carrying passengers for an additional three months; and mandatory license suspensions for teenage drivers who get traffic tickets.

Several students in a Best-Way Driving School class, most of whom were 15 or 16, didn’t like Gwadosky’s ideas, especially raising the license age to 17.

Jacqueline Schmidt, in the minutes before she started her learner’s permit test, said she likes being able to get her license earlier rather than later, but she realizes safety is an issue.

“There are a lot of immature people that I know,” Schmidt said. Some of them, she said, should pay more attention to what they’re doing when they’re behind the wheel.

The real crunch, she said, comes when teens are 18 and have graduated from high school. Then, to get back and forth to work or college, they need a license.

“Once you graduate, you really need to be able to drive,” Schmidt said.

For Christmas 1943, Harry Foote got no rest, “no presents, no party, no big meal.” He and the rest of the First Marine Division spent Christmas Day that year, and about three weeks afterward, attacking Japanese positions on the Pacific island of New Britain.

U.S. strategists thought the Japanese would not expect an invasion on “that sacred day, ” said Foote, who later became the editor of the American Journal newspaper. “But it was war, and the First Marine Division landed.”

They started at the airfield on the western end of the island, at Cape Gloucester. “As we landed, they bombed us and strafed us on Christmas Day,” Foote said.

“ We were in rain and mud from that day on.” Instead of luxuriant holiday meals, they ate “Spam and canned hash.”

Driving down Church Street in Scarborough, one can’t help but get in the holiday spirit. From end to end, almost every house on the street is lit up with Christmas lights.

But one house stands out among all the others – that of Chris and Ellen Pallotta.

The Pallottas have lived on Church Street for the past six years and every one of those years Chris and the family have spent four eight-hour days putting up a total of 13,000 lights. Chris said having all those Christmas lights is a way to be “really festive” and also a way to step back and enjoy the season.

“We definitely burn some power this time of year,” he said with a laugh.

Indeed, when the Pallottas moved into their house on Church Street they had to add two extra circuit breakers to accommodate the power demands. An electrician friend, who came around for a visit one Christmas, got out his meter reader and found the Pallottas’ Christmas lights draw 27 amps of power.

Cape Elizabeth is one of eight communities chosen in New England – and the only one in Maine – as a model for attracting strong leaders to its board of education.

The town now will be part of a study done by the New England School Development Council on how towns can attract excellent school board members.

“When you have an outstanding school board and superintendent working as a team,” students do very well at learning and on independent testing, said researcher Richard Goodman. The study is being funded by a $40,000 grant from the Wallace Reader’s Digest Foundation.

After seven years of studying leadership in public school systems around the region, Goodman and his colleagues decided that one question had never been asked: “What does it take for a community to attract and retain” school board members “who care about children and know or learn quickly the role of the school board,” Goodman said.

“Cape Elizabeth is one of those in Maine that’s been considered to be a top school system for a number of years,” he said.

Michael Mowles of Cape Elizabeth is a staid mortgage officer at Lighthouse Mortgage on Ocean House Road by day, but by night he enters into the long-gone world of chivalry and knighthood as a member of the Society of Creative Anachronism.

Almost every Tuesday evening, Mowles and other members of the society gather at Sullivan Gym on the University of Southern Maine’s Portland campus to learn about the rules of fighting in the Middle Ages, including fencing and armed combat.

On Monday nights Mowles can be found rehearsing with still other members of the society learning to play medieval music on a Celtic folk harp.

Other members of the music group play mandolins, recorders, guitars and drums.

Every third Monday the music group is joined by more members of the society who are learning medieval dance.

After 15 days in North Carolina, four workers from Bartlett Tr e e Service in Scarborough returned home Dec. 23, just in time for Christmas.

“It’s good to be home,” said Troy Delano just after getting his suitcase off the baggage carousel at the Portland Jetport. It was the longest he had ever been away from home.

His wife is due to give birth Dec. 31, and she was waiting eagerly for his return, hoping she wouldn’t go into labor early. “I was having some faith,” she said.

The men pulled 10-hour days from the beginning to the end, with no real time off. “We worked right straight through,” Delano said.

It was only fitting that the men head south after a Dec. 4-5 ice storm knocked out power for over 2 million North Carolina residents and damaged buildings and cars, resulting in a federal disaster-area declaration for the region.

Scarborough Town Councilors balked last week at simply approving a request for a $1.4 million bond to build new access roads into and around the high school, saying the plans had not been thoroughly discussed with them first.

The council also feared that plans to build a new access road from Sawyer Road into the high school could limit the town’s use of the former drive-in property.

On the Friday after Christmas, a bunch of excited Scarborough High School and Middle School students and their families will be waiting in the SHS parking lot for a group of exchange students from the Central American country of Costa Rica.

Almost every moment of the two weeks that the Costa Rican students are here in town has been planned, including a trip to the movies, bowling, downhill skiing, a potluck New Ye a r’s Eve dinner and a lobster bake courtesy of Bayley’s. There will be 15 Costa Rican students, mostly around the age of 15 and a little younger, staying with host families and attending school until Jan. 13.

Many of the host students will then be heading down to Costa Rica for two weeks in April, in what will be a true cultural exchange.

The Christmas lights at the Pallotta residence on Church Street in Scarborough are pictured in this photo from the issue of Dec. 26, 2002.