A Little Comment(ary)...

South Portland praised for commitment to safety
Meghan Gaven
Transportation Chair
Small School PTA/South Portland

I would like to publicly offer my thanks and compliments to the city of South Portland for its support of our neighborhood's request for traffic-calming measures near Small School.

The Transportation Committee at Small School was created last year to investigate new ways to encourage children and families to walk or bike to school.

This mandate led to many fruitful discussions regarding the sidewalks and roadways of the neighborhood, as well as concern regarding the speed and volume of traffic around the school.

After a speed study was done by the city in June, it became clear that serious steps needed to be taken to slow down cars and discourage non-neighborhood traffic from using the street as a cut-through from Broadway to Preble.

More than 30 neighbors on Thompson Street signed a petition to request that speed tables be installed on the street. Speed tables will not discourage all speeders, but hopefully, they will jolt a few of them to their senses.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=146669&ac=PHedi

Mayor again, by a write-in landslide
By BILL NEMITZ
Staff Writer Portland Press Herald

AUBURN — He strode into a packed Roy's Allsteak Hamburgers Friday morning, that trademark, grab-life-by-the- horns smile spreading across his face. A handshake here, a pat on the back there and, by the time he wove through the breakfast crowd to his corner table, applause rained down like confetti.

"I'm so embarrassed," Mayor John Jenkins said, still smiling, as he half-buried his face in his hands. "This is too much."

Stop the presses. A crowd says good morning to a politician by dropping their forks and clapping their hands and he's ... embarrassed?

"Geezum," Jenkins said, still shaking his head in genuine disbelief. "I can't believe this."

Who can blame him? Three months ago, Jenkins announced that he'd accomplished all his objectives as this city's top elected official and, while grateful for the opportunity to serve, would not seek re-election.

Then last Tuesday, local voters said, "Sorry, Mr. Mayor. But you're not going anywhere."

By the time the ballots were tallied, Jenkins the noncandidate had been ushered back into office with 2,166 votes -- every last one of them a write-in. The two mayoral hopefuls actually on the ballot, Eric Samson and Fred Sanborn, trailed far behind with 1,305 and 514 votes, respectively.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=146960&ac=PHnws


Auburn Mayor John Jenkins, center

Special delivery to Ashlee: Happy anniversary from Iraq
By BILL NEMITZ

Dear Ashlee Johnson,

We haven't met, although I already feel like I know you. I've been in touch via e-mail the past week or two with Spc. Joshua Simpson, who's with the Maine Army National Guard over in Iraq and, as you know, looks forward to marrying you after he gets home late next spring.

Josh contacted me because he needed a favor. He knows that Thursday is the third anniversary of the day you and he fell in love. He also knows that this deployment, his second to Iraq, has been tough on you. As he put it, "she misses me something wicked."

Josh misses you that much and then some, Ashlee. He misses you so much that he asked me if I could use this space to help him tell you how his world, even from afar, revolves every day around you.

I suggested that he send me some lines about him and you. Within a few days, a 1,700-word love story landed in my inbox. Take it from someone who tells stories for a living, Ashlee, it's very good stuff.

Josh told me how you met back in 2004 while you both worked at Pizza Hut in Windham. How he "took a chance" and gave you his number and said if you ever needed anything, don't hesitate.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=147811&ac=PHnws

A plea for answers in man's death
By BILL NEMITZ

She sat in her East Deering duplex Thursday morning, her face a mask of fatigue and grief. All around her sat relatives and friends from Portland's Sudanese community -- some with tears in their eyes, others with questions.

"People should not forget this," said Margaret Ciriako through an interpreter. "If anyone has information, if they saw something, they should come forward to the authorities."

She will bury her 26-year-old son, Edward Okeny, this morning following a funeral at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. But even as she stands over his grave at Forest City Cemetery in South Portland, she will not know how or why he died.

Nor do Portland police.

"We're treating it as a suspicious death," said Deputy Police Chief Bill Ridge. "It's suspicious because we don't know what happened to Mr. Okeny."

This much police do know:

On the evening of Oct. 20, Okeny and two other black men entered the Hannaford Supermarket at Back Cove. According to Ridge, the store security video shows them "purchasing alcohol" and leaving.

From there, they went to an apartment on Anderson Street. Later in the evening, people there told police, Okeny left alone and on foot.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=148397&ac=PHnws

This strike is about respect
By J.P. DEVINE
from the Morning Sentinel

Moses came down from Mount Sinai with two tablets full of words. Like Jay Leno and Jon Stewart, Moses got the applause, but he was just the front man. The real writer, according to the Old Testament, was (drumroll) God. But to show you how little respect writers get, even top dog writers like God, there are at least five best selling books today that tell us He doesn’t exist. Ain’t it always the way? No respect.

Those are the jokes, folks. But it’s no longer funny. Screenwriters are on strike and, as a retired member of the guild, I support it. Not only that, but now it’s personal. My youngest is an actor’s agent in Beverly Hills who depends on working actors. She writes from the front.

“Agencies as small as mine, Progressive Artists, are generally known as ‘boutique agencies.’ Boutique agencies that have been hit the hardest are those who specialize in representing writers, who are now not working. Under California law, agents get 10 percent of what their clients make, and that’s all, so if the clients are not working, the agency is not making any money.”

Sorry, Jillana, I told you to stick with the law.

My oldest, a publisher’s account executive who hawks the written word, brought boxes of cupcakes to the writers at CBS, alongside Jay Leno and Eva Longoria (”Desperate Housewives”), who brought pizzas and cookies. Union.

http://morningsentinel.mainetoday.com/news/local/98478199.html

Egg in nog? No joke, says Smiling Hill
By BILL NEMITZ

When your family owns and operates a place called Smiling Hill Farm, you tend to go through life with a grin. But last week, the best Warren Knight could manage was a grimace.

It started with a spot inspection from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration -- it happens every year or two at the Westbrook dairy farm and has never been a big deal.

But this time was different. Looking over a fresh batch of the Smiling Hill egg nog, the inspector did a double take: The bottle cap -- the only place on the otherwise all-glass container with any printing -- was out of federal compliance.

How so?

"Eggs were not listed as an ingredient," Knight recalled.

Egg, you see, is an allergen. As such, the inspector told Knight, it must be explicitly listed as an ingredient somewhere on the one-and-three-eighths-inch-wide cap.

"But the cap says 'Egg Nog!' " protested Knight.

Didn't matter.

"But we're limited by cap space," Knight persisted. What's more, they can't start slapping warning labels onto their reusable bottles without gumming up the bottle washer.

Not the feds' problem.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=148740&ac=PHnws

Holiday helping at the hospital
By BILL NEMITZ

LIMINGTON — The way Tammy Liberty sees it, any parent with a child in the hospital on Thanksgiving traditionally has two choices.

"You can leave the hospital and go home and try to enjoy the meal, knowing your child is still there," Tammy said. "Or you can sit there by the bed and act like it's just another day."

Either option, she said, "is unacceptable."

Tammy, 30, knows a thing or two about hospital vigils. Her son Jonathan, who will turn 3 next month, has logged months at Maine Medical Center with a list of ailments that would make most parents blanch.

There's laryngomalacia, a softening of the upper larynx that blocked Jonathan's airway unless he lay on his back. Roll him onto his stomach and he'd immediately start to suffocate.

There's Hirschsprung's disease, a disorder of the lower intestine that left him unable to have bowel movements. And a related condition called enterocolitis, which inflamed his colon.

There have been surgeries and colostomy bags, which Tammy became an expert at emptying. There have been long hours spent at Jonathan's bedside -- at least once with the family pastor -- praying that he'd get better.

He did. And the older he gets, the fewer times Tammy and Howard Liberty have to take him to the hospital.

Still, Tammy hasn't forgotten how lonely a place it can be -- especially around the holidays.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=149511&ac=PHnws

Mirth and feasting, 1800
By BDN Staff
Bangor Daily News

Harriet Beecher Stowe moved to Maine in 1850 with her husband, Calvin Ellis Stowe, a professor at Bowdoin College. In Brunswick, she wrote her famous "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and many stories about New England life, including "The Pearl of Orr's Island" (1862) and "Oldtown Folks" (1869). The latter offers a vivid description of Thanksgiving soon after the Revolutionary War, and is a particularly fitting reminiscence for today.

Are there any of my readers who do not know what Thanksgiving day is to a child? Then let them go back with me, and recall the image of it as we kept it in Old town.

People have often supposed, because the Puritans founded a society where there were no professed public amusements, that therefore there was no fun going on in the ancient land of Israel, and that there were no cakes and ale, because they were virtuous. They were never more mistaken in their lives. There was an abundance of sober, well-considered merriment; and the hinges of life were well oiled with that sort of secret humor which to this day gives the raciness to real Yankee wit. Besides this we must remember that life itself is the greatest possible amusement to people who really believe that they can do so much with it, — who have that intense sense of what can be brought to pass by human effort, that was characteristic of the New England colonies. To such it is not exactly proper to say that life is an amusement, but it certainly is an engrossing interest that takes the place of all amusements.

When the apples were all gathered and the cider was all made, and the yellow pumpkins were rolled in from many a hill in billows of gold, and the corn was husked, and the labors of the season were done, and the warm, late days of Indian Summer came in, dreamy and calm and still, with just frost enough to crisp the ground of a morning, but with warm trances of benignant, sunny hours at noon, there came over the community a sort of genial repose of spirit, - a sense of something accomplished, and of a new golden mark made in advance of the calendar of life, — and the deacon began to say to the minister, of a Sunday, "I suppose it's time for the Thanksgiving proclamation."

http://bangornews.com/news/t/viewpoints.aspx?articleid=156805&zoneid=34

Irish have a love affair with death
By J.P. DEVINE

You have to be pure-blood-crazy-Black Irish to understand this, but the Irish have a love affair with death. Consider O’Casey, Shaw, Joyce, down to Swift and all the way up to Paddy Doyle. Who else but an Irishman would title a story “The Dead.”

Take, for example, my grandfather’s five brothers, who were grateful each Thanksgiving only to curse God, life and all of its mysteries the very next day. I am reminded of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s cycle of emotional states when dealing with grief, which most of us suffer one time or the other, but which the Irish have made an art form. For me this applies to the beginning of winter and all the grief that goes with it for the aging homeowner. Winter is, to the young, full of glitter, to the elderly, a premonition.

l. Denial. It’s only Nov. 22, and it’s snowing already, and I’ve still got water in my basement from the big rain a few days ago. A friend I kissed two days ago just called and said she had something she thinks is a cold, but the doctor’s not sure. Memo: Stop kissing and hugging for the year. (My throat is itchy, this isn’t happening to me!)

2. Anger: The news just announced that gas is going up another three cents this weekend. So I drive out in the rain to the gas station to beat the price rise just as I see the owner out there with his long-handled rake shoving up bigger numbers. “Can I fill up my tank before you do that?” I shout over the noise of the traffic. “Sorry,” he says, “It’s already on the pump.” (WHY is this happening to me?)

More: http://morningsentinel.mainetoday.com/news/local/1671673194.html

A 'violation of trust': Inside theft hits fraternal groups hard
Once seen as a model citizen, now he's a confessed embezzler. Bob Libby’s true character remains a puzzle.
By TREVOR MAXWELL
Staff Writer Portland Press Herald

He was a successful businessman, keeping the books at top Portland companies.

He was a respected brother in fraternal organizations.

And to this day, he's a beloved husband and father. Since his wife's stroke in 2002, it has been Bob Libby helping her in and out of the wheelchair each day, year after year.

But Libby had a secret.

As the sole bookkeeper, he was stealing from the very groups that trusted him: the Maine Charitable Mechanic Association, Deering Masonic Lodge No. 183, the trustees for the Masonic Temple in Portland, and the Masonic Learning Center.

By the time Libby was caught in July 2006, checks were bouncing and the power was about to be shut off at the Maine Charitable Mechanic Association building on Congress Street.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=150378&ac=PHnws


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