YESTERDAY …
10 years ago — June 25, 2005
(As reported in the Bangor Daily News)
BREWER — Several members of Brewer’ student body are seeing things a little clearer now that they have glasses made and adjusted by student opticians enrolled in the Penobscot Job Corps Center’s optics program.
Student workers at Visual Integrity, the local Job Corps optics center, already have made 13 of the 40 pairs of glasses the program is donating to students and pupils in Brewer as part of the Job Corps’ 40th anniversary, optics teacher Jeff Bergin said.
The optics program started in Bangor four years ago after it was discontinued at Loring Job Corps Center in Limestone.
BANGOR — It’s 6 on a Saturday night. You’ve got guests coming for dinner in an hour. You open the fridge to find: one moldy piece of cheese, one questionable bottle of milk and jar of peanut butter. Things are looking grim. Then you open the cupboards. Same deal: a ratty looking ginger root, a head of garlic, a bottle of soy sauce.
Looks like time to make a reservation. Or if you are Ann Orr of Bangor, time to make dinner. Minus the cheese and milk, of course.
That’s how Ann Marie’s Secret Sauce — a Maine-made marinade with a cult-like national following — came to be.
25 years ago — June 25, 1990
BANGOR — When Joe Bosse lost his job as a store manager, he used a hobby and heritage to build a new career into a successful business.
In 1976, Bosse was managing a W.T. Grant store in Bangor when the retail chain declared bankruptcy and closed its doors. Not one to sit idle, Bosse decided to turn his woodworking hobby into a job.
He purchased a house in Holden and built a shop on the property. By pursuing woodworking, Bosse continued a family tradition. His father was a cabinetmaker and his grandfather was a master cabinetmaker.
Originally, Bosse called his operation the Holden Pine Shop. But he later changed the name to Holden Cabinet and Furniture Co. because he did a lot of work with hardwoods and didn’t want customers to stay away because they thought he only worked with pine.
BANGOR — James Blanchette of Old Orchard Beach Drive was presented with the National Boy Scouts of America’s Whitney M. Young Jr. Service Award in recognition of his outstanding service to low-income youth in the Katahdin Area Council, Boy Scouts of America. Scoutmaster of Troop 313 in Bangor, he had been active in scouting for 11 years.
Young was known throughout his life as a spokesman for civil rights and as executive director of the Urban league from 1961 until his death in 1971.
50 years ago — June 25, 1965
BANGOR — Bangor Public Health Department announced that a pathogenic bacteria known as Salmonella, capable of causing disease in man, has been isolated by the State Department of Health and Welfare from water samples obtained by the Bangor department from turtle tanks in a check of several local retail stores.
This organism only recently has begun to be associated with pet turtles because of several outbreaks of Salmonellosis in families across the country, which had pet turtles in the homes, said Public Health Director William Shook.
The disease can cause acute intestinal upset sometimes requiring hospitalization and is particularly hazardous to those persons handling turtles.
The turtles are apparently infected in their natural habitat in the swamps and bayous of Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi. Many of these boggy areas are apparently heavily polluted with sewage and the turtles may ingest the infectious organisms while feeding. They are captured in these areas for the national wholesale market.
100 years ago — June 25, 1915
BREWER — The Men’s Guild of the Methodist Church have made plans to earn money for their share of the church debt in an original way. A series of automobile parties is being arranged in order to carry out the following plan: On certain pleasant evenings autos will leave the church around 7 o’clock and take the number of persons which each car can hold on a ride into adjoining towns and return in about two hours. Each night a different route will be covered. Each person pays the small sum of 25 cents which in turn is used for church money.
These autos are generously loaned and driven by members of the guild and the idea should meet with popular favor.
BANGOR — A number of Bangor people are members of or are interested in the Union Society of the Civil War, an association composed of men who are descended from the civilians who rendered distinguished service to the Union government during the war and others who were noted for their patriotism.
Charles E. Hamlin, formerly of Bangor, grandson of Hannibal Hamlin, is historian-general of the association. Mr. Hamlin is now editor and publisher of School, a New York periodical having a large circulation and widespread influence, being practically the official organ of the New York City Board of Education.
One of the honorary vice presidents is the Hon. Hannibal Hamlin of Ellsworth, ex-attorney General of Maine, the son of Hannibal Hamlin, the vice president of the United States under President Abraham Lincoln.
The society, organized in 1908, has members who had ancestors who fought in both the Union and Confederate armies.
Mary Pickford, the $2,000-a-week queen of the films, heads the procession of celebrities at the Park Theatre, appearing as Glad, the London street waif, in a Famous Players production of Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s remarkable romance, “The Dawn of Tomorrow.”
Compiled by Ardeana Hamlin