A Little Comment(ary)...

More than a teen ends up shaken
By BILL NEMITZ

Jan Ritter apologizes to no one. She knows what she saw – an angry father getting physical in public with his teenage son – and as far as she's concerned, she witnessed a crime.

The problem was, the judge disagreed.

"I was very disappointed," Ritter said Friday, one day after the Washington County Superior Court listened to her story and stamped it "false alarm."

"I have grandkids and I don't believe in anyone being beaten on," Ritter added, "especially a child."

It all started back in June 2006 while Ritter, who works for Indian Township Community Health Services, stopped to pick up medication at a pharmacy on Main Street in Calais.

Sitting in her van, she watched as Ernest Neptune, 38, emerged from an adjacent restaurant with his then-13-year-old son, Derek, and "grabbed (the boy) by the collar and lifted him off the ground and shook him."

Neptune, still angry, then put his son down and yanked him by the arm into his pickup.

"I was surprised he was doing it with me sitting right there," Ritter said. "I don't know if he couldn't see me or if he just didn't care, but it was wrong."

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=152080&ac=PHnws

Is Heath 'bogeyman' of tolerance?
By BILL NEMITZ

Irony doesn't get any sweeter than this: The Christian Civic League of Maine is up in arms because Executive Director Michael Heath's picture was spotted on the bulletin board of (brace yourself) a church!

"A reasonable person could look at that and get the impression that they're kind of targeting (Heath) as the bogeyman," Michael Hein, the league's administrator, said Thursday.

Uh huh. And your point?

"I find it offensive," Hein said.

It happened a week ago today at the First Congregational Church in South Portland. The church's Diversity Committee held a public screening of "For the Bible Tells Me So," an award- winning documentary about five families dealing with the revelation that a son or daughter is gay.

Most of the 200 or so people who packed the church were supportive of the film's tolerant message. Less enthusiastic were the handful of Christian fundamentalists, including Hein, who showed up with cameras and notebooks in hand to document what they later called an "abomination" in progress.

But it wasn't the movie that prompted Hein later to confront John McCall, the church's senior minister. Rather, it was a posting on the Diversity Committee's bulletin board that juxtaposed Heath's picture and a column he wrote last spring denouncing same-sex marriage with a rebutting letter-to-the-editor by McCall.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=153358&ac=PHnws

Bud Sawyer comes back, big time
By BILL NEMITZ

FALMOUTH — He's tried the retirement thing. He loves doting on his seven grandchildren, dabbling in his woodworking shop and gazing through the telescope at what could be the most spectacular view anywhere of scenic Casco Bay.

But there's a problem: Bud Sawyer still can't keep his mouth shut.

"The good ol' days start tomorrow!" Sawyer said Friday, flashing a smile so broad that his eyes almost closed. "That's been my guiding principle."

Meaning he's back. Sometime in the next few weeks, the man whose name was long synonymous with local radio in southern Maine will dust off his headphones, flip on the microphone and once again bathe the area with his baritone banter and trademark chuckle.

"He's too good to sit idle," said Dave Patterson, who owns and operates WJZF, a nonprofit, low-watt, community FM station in Standish. "I listened to Bud when I was just a pup."

It all started when Patterson, who's awaiting Federal Communications Commission approval for a full-power FM license, decided recently that his programming needed a boost as well.

He approached Sawyer, 76, who spent much of his 50 years as a radio disc jockey high atop the local ratings -- most notably during a 25-year stint with WPOR that ended in 1997.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=153713&ac=PHnws

Councilor airs skepticism about pier
By BILL NEMITZ

It's not often that a member of the Portland City Council e-mails a floor speech to every journalist within earshot. But Dan Skolnik had his reasons.

"I don't want to be mischaracterized (down the road)," Skolnik said Tuesday.

His statement, which he read only hours after he was sworn in as a new councilor on Dec. 3, explained at length why he would subsequently vote against The Olympia Cos. -- and for Ocean Properties Ltd. -- to redevelop the city-owned Maine State Pier.

His reason: Ocean Properties, which ultimately lost the vote, could have built the $100 million project with its own money. Olympia, which won, cannot.

And that has Skolnik worried. So worried that before last week's council meeting, he asked for an executive session with Joseph Cuetara, a financial consultant from Boston who was hired by the city this year to analyze the competing plans.

Skolnik's concern: Ongoing jitters in the money markets might make financing a $100 million project tougher now than it seemed six months ago.

The executive session had lasted only 17 minutes when, Skolnik said, there was an "attempt" to end it and get on with the vote in open session. He managed to prolong the discussion another 10 minutes.

And?

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=154601&ac=PHnws

Law firm bobbles theft case
By BILL NEMITZ

There's dumb. There's really dumb. And then there's Verrill Dana LLP.

The once-prestigious Portland law firm lost much of its hard- earned luster this week when it acknowledged, under duress, that its investigation showed that former partner John Duncan for years had pilfered tens of thousands of dollars from his clients and from the firm.

That, in itself, looks bad. But what well may look worse in the long run is how the firm handled the scandal -- starting with its treatment of Ellie Rommel, Duncan's secretary-turned- whistleblower.

"My mother raised me to tell the truth. I raised my kids to tell the truth," Rommel said Thursday. "So what choice do I have but to tell the truth?"

Her story will be told in painstaking detail in the coming months -- first to the Maine Human Rights Commission and then (unless Verrill Dana comes to its senses and settles) in civil court.

It boils down to this: Last May, after months of peeking into files to confirm her suspicions that Duncan was stealing from an elderly client who'd entrusted her sizable assets to him, Rommel gave two weeks' notice, handed the evidence of Duncan's skullduggery to her higher-ups and decided to run, not walk, away from Verrill Dana.

But then, after meeting with a therapist who told her to keep the job and go on short-term disability leave to deal with her perpetual anxiety attack, Rommel sat down with managing partner David Warren and said she wanted to rescind her resignation.

"(Warren) said, 'Can't let you do that,"' Rommel recalled.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=155302&ac=PHnws&pg=2

All of Maine has stake in this land plan
By BILL NEMITZ

He's spent most of his life representing – and fighting for – his fellow northern Mainers. So state Sen. John Martin, D-Eagle Lake, knows how to draw a battle line.

"This hearing should be in the woods of Maine," Martin groused Saturday morning as the Land Use Regulation Commission set up for yet another day of testimony on Plum Creek Timber Co.'s development plan for the Moosehead Lake region.

For the record, LURC already has held one hearing on the proposal in Greenville, and plans to hold another. Still, the fact that the seven commissioners would travel all the way to Portland clearly did not sit well with Martin.

"If they're going to have a hearing about northern Maine in Portland," he said, "then they should have had a hearing about the (redevelopment of Portland's) Maine State Pier in Aroostook County."

Martin, who later testified in support of Plum Creek's proposal for two resorts and 975 prime house lots overlooking Moosehead and nearby lakes, speaks for many in his neck of the woods when he says that folks in southern Maine have no business meddling in what many call "the other Maine."

Try telling that to the crowd that by 9 a.m. had swelled past 500 at the Holiday Inn by the Bay – by far eclipsing the turnouts at the two previous hearings, in Greenville and Augusta. Or to the 300 among them (177 against Plum Creek's plan, 107 for it and 16 neither for nor against) who stood en masse to be sworn in as witnesses.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=155643&ac=PHnws

‘Miracle’ spares him for Christmas
By BILL NEMITZ

SOUTH THOMASTON — Holiday season weighing you down? Ron Richards knows the feeling.

"Half an inch," Richards said Friday, holding his thumb ever so close to his index finger. "That much and I'd be dead right now."

It happened Monday. Richards, who's spent the last two months living out of a motel room with his girlfriend, Denna Hewlitt, and their three little girls, was on the verge of making his dream come true: An old mobile home he'd bought for a buck was all fixed up and ready to move from a lot on Towers Hill Road to DePatsy's Mobile Home Park in nearby Waldoboro.

Richards, sprawled on the snowy ground, was reaching in under the mobile home to remove the cinder block supports and hand them to Hewlitt and Matthew Springer, his nephew.

"I was right here," Richards said, digging his boot into the snow. "And just for a second, I pulled my head out."

He picked the right second. Suddenly, a temporary support let go and the whole structure fell with a thump to the ground -- missing Richards' head by less than and inch and pinning his right arm all the way to his shoulder.

"I freaked," said Hewlitt.

"I just kept yelling, 'Get me the hell out of here!' " said Richards.

A woman in a nearby house heard the commotion and called 911. Rescue crews from South Thomaston and Rockland rushed to the scene.

While paramedics tried to get keep Richards warm and get an intravenous line into him -- they couldn't because his veins were too cold -- firefighters inserted two air bags under the mobile home and started inflating.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=157353&ac=PHnws

Turnpike takes a toll on reason
By BILL NEMITZ

Consider yourself warned. Much of what you're about to read makes absolutely no sense.

We're talking, weary traveler, about the Maine Turnpike -- or, to be more specific, how much each of us pays to drive on it.

Six months after it was commissioned to make some sense out of the turnpike's topsy-turvy toll system, the Turnpike Toll Equity Advisory Committee acknowledged this week that it has spent much of that time stuck in the (mental) breakdown lane.

The problem, as committee member and well-known Maine economist Charles Colgan put it, is a toll system so "fiendishly complex" that it has taken months for the 22 committee members to get their heads around it -- let alone fix it.

"You have to consider that it's the product of 30 years of multiple decisions -- each of which made sense in its time and place," Colgan said Thursday. "But together, when you add it all up, it looks confusing."

Make that "wicked confusing."

Say, for example, that you're headed north on the turnpike toward downtown Portland. You can take Exit 44 and run smack into a 60-cent toll as you enter Interstate 295. Or you can take Exit 45, which also leads you directly to I-295 for free.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=158509&ac=PHnws

This time is always in her hands
By BILL NEMITZ

ANDOVER — She unlocked the door to the Town Hall as the winter light faded Friday afternoon. Up one stairway she climbed, then another, then through the large attic piled high with cellulose insulation, then up two more stairways as steep as ladders

"Here it is," Peggy Madigan said, catching her breath after the 54-step ascent. "Our clock."

These are the days when we all mark the passage of time. One year ticking down to its final seconds, another all wound up and ready to unfold -- all calibrated in these parts by a clock and bell that tower over this out-the-way hamlet in the western Maine mountains.

A clock powered not by electricity, but by a 59-year-old woman who appreciates, better than most, the rhythms of everyday life.

Madigan is the keeper of Andover's time. Twice a week for the past 11 years, she's climbed the tower -- shivering in the winter and sweating in the summer -- to wind the old Howard Co. clock that shows the time in four directions and rings out the hour like, well, clockwork.

Her parents wound before her and her grandfather before them. His name was Phil Learned, and he had the foresight 98 years ago to scrawl on the tower wall, "Clock started Nov. 15, 1909 at 4:50 p.m."

"It was bought for the town by the King's Daughters Society," said Madigan. "Six hundred dollars for the clock and bell, installed. Pretty neat, huh?"

Neat indeed. Sturdy steel cables connect the clock and bell via multiple pulleys to their counterweights -- two wooden boxes filled with rocks.

A maze of gears ticks away each second -- all cleaned and oiled four times a year by Brad Thibodeau, another clock lover.

An old stool sits in one corner because, notes Madigan, "I can't do those 90 turns without a break."

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=158856&ac=PHnws

Taser rescues two lives
By BILL NEMITZ

BRUNSWICK — He's been there and done that. Thus, Brunswick police Lt. Shawn O'Leary knows better than most what a police officer goes through after he's forced to shoot and kill someone.

"It's like a freight train," O'Leary said this week. "You've got the media, you've got the AG's office, you've got the investigation. It's overwhelming."

It happened to O'Leary 10 years ago: Responding to a 911 call, he and another officer found themselves in the middle of a fight in a crowded apartment. A man in a wheelchair, who'd told a friend that he planned to "get myself shot," shrugged off a blast of pepper spray and lunged at O'Leary with a butcher knife, forcing him to fatally shoot the man.

"I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy," O'Leary, who was later cleared of any wrongdoing, told me at the time. "I just want people to know that I'm not proud of what happened. There's nothing else I could have done ... and I hope this never happens again."

A week ago Thursday, it almost did. Once again, O'Leary found himself facing a man with a butcher knife. Once again, despite orders from O'Leary and three other officers, the man refused to stop.

"He wasn't slowing down at all, " O'Leary said. "He was kind of looking right through us -- he had that crazed look."

O'Leary had the man, Victor Perez, in the cross hairs of his patrol rifle. Taking a deep breath, he put his finger against the trigger and, as Perez got too close, began to squeeze.

"All right," O'Leary thought to himself, "here it comes."

Or not.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=159770&ac=PHnws