(As reported in the Bangor Daily News)

10 years ago – March 22, 1997

BANGOR – There was a long pause after a stately woman in a black velvet dress said the word “emphatically” and everyone in the audience at the Penobscot County Spelling Bee looked at 13-year-old Jennifer Teague of Glenburn.

“E, m,” she said, sitting at one end of the stage, while Jessi Dvorak watched her from the other end after several rounds of just two top spellers left. Teague mis-spelled the word and Dvorak spelled it correctly. She also spelled the final word, “heretical,” properly to take the county title.

There was a big smile on Dvorak’s face. She sat with beads in her hair and her hands in her lap. She spoke a few sympathetic words to Teague, who had been a tough opponent.

Some schools have stopped having spelling bees because teachers and parents have complained that they are too competitive and only really teach rote learning.

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LEVANT – Residents did vote to close a portion of the Ross Road permanently during a special town meeting 20 years ago. That’s the premise selectmen decided to operate under, based on the only four affidavits they received from those who participated in the town meeting.

Three of four selectmen agreed to accept the evidence provided by four residents who unanimously confirmed that a majority of residents voted to permanently close the Ross Road from the Randall-Orr property line to the H.W. Brann line during a special town meeting on Sept. 30, 1977. Town records from that meeting have been lost.

25 years ago – March 22, 1982

BANGOR – Seeking a vision of a nuclear-free world, local organizers of the World Peace March are preparing for the arrival later this month of a contingent of Japanese and American religious and lay people who will lead the New England leg of the international demonstration.

Richard Russell and Mary Beth Lewis, of Maine Clergy and Laity Concerned in Bangor, said that efforts to coordinate the march are progressing smoothly. They said local people already have indicated their support for the march by volunteering food and lodging for the march leaders, who are expected to walk from Bangor to Portsmouth, N.H., approximately 200 miles in 18 days.

The World Peace March began in April 1981 after a meeting in Japan of the World Assembly of Religious Workers for General and Nuclear Disarmament. The movement started as an inter-faith project by a Japanese Buddhist religious order, which carried the march throughout the country and into Europe before bringing it to the United States.

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BANGOR – James A. Taylor Osteopathic Hospital in Bangor has been selected as the recipient of a financial grant from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Maine for establishment of a community exercise course and jogging track.

Basically, the Par Fitness Course will consist of a series of stations offering warm-up, stretching, muscle-strengthening, cardio-vascular conditioning and cool-down exercises, combined with a jogging track.

Taylor Hospital officials currently are investigating available sites in the Stillwater Park section of Bangor, hoping to locate the course in the immediate vicinity of the hospital.

50 years ago – March 22, 1957

OLD TOWN – Ten members attended the Nokomis 4-H Club meeting at the home of Mrs. Leroy Weymouth in Stillwater.

The cooking group studied salads and worked on scrap books under the direction of Mrs. Stephen R. Gould; and the first-year sewing group went to the home of Mrs. Oscar McCannell after the business meeting to work on wrist pin-cushions.

The second-year sewing group fringed napkins and worked on aprons under the supervision of Mrs. Weymouth.

Each member of the Canoe City Extension Group planning to attend the meeting at the YMCA Community House is requested to bring a washable garment that has been laundered, either satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily. The meeting topic is “Better Care For Longer Wear,” under the direction of Mrs. Frederick Perkins.

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OLD TOWN – Six Old Town High School students have been named to participate in the Maine Speech Festival: Sandra Lee, serious dramatic section; Debbie Cutler, poetry; James Bishop, original oration; Mayra Colon, extemporaneous speaking; Thomas Anderson, group discussion and Linda Stewart, humorous dramatic section.

Representing the school at the Spear Speaking Contest will be Catherine Binette with a cutting from “The Robe” and Walter Goodwin with an oration, “Lift the Iron Curtain.”

100 years ago – March 22, 1907

DEDHAM – D.S. Burrill is at work for Rowe Brothers marking lumber at their mill in East Holden.

E.W. Burrill and wife went to Bucksport Tuesday and returned in the storm Wednesday, having a very hard time getting home on account of the roads being badly drifted.

Miss Alice Black, after spending the vacation at home, returned to the Castine Normal School Tuesday.

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BUCKSPORT – The high wind of Wednesday afternoon drifted the snow that came Tuesday night and Wednesday morning into the roads so as to make them impassable Thursday afternoon.

Those who arrived on the evening train Wednesday and lived in the back part of town were unable to reach their homes and obliged to remain in town overnight. The drivers on RFD routes 2 and 4 were unable to make their trips and had to return to the village.

The star route to East Bucksport driver also was obliged to return. This storm will add to the snow hills of the town a large amount for the winter. Taking the winter as a whole it has been the most expensive one for a number of years on account of the many heavy snowstorms accompanied by high winds, which made lots of work to keep the roads open.

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BANGOR – The way this winter holds on is enough to make one think that Artemus Ward was not so very far off the track in his description of the Maine climate when he said it was a pretty good climate, ‘ceptin’ that for about three weeks in August the sleddin’ was a little hard.

Thus far this winter, right here in Bangor, we have had 116 days of what Artemus would have called fairly good sleddin’. And the Lord only knows how much longer it will last. The other day things began to look spring-like and everybody cheered up, when along came a howling blizzard that added six to eight inches more snow to the mountains already existing.

New York City has spent $2.5 million getting rid of snow this winter, and Bangor has spent a little something. Both cities are way behind Budapest, Hungary, where they shovel the snow into manholes, there to be melted by jets of steam from the municipal boilers.

Thus, instead of being laboriously loaded into carts and hauled to the river, the snow runs off in floods through the sewers, giving the entire system a fine flushing. Talk about killing two birds with one stone! The Americans can learn, it seems, from the Hungarians.

Compiled by Ardeana Hamlin