Insight: Unconditional Love Lessons

By Ed Pierce

Someone once wrote that once you have had a wonderful dog, a life without one is a life diminished and from first-hand experience, I know that to be true.

Ed Pierce and his dog Sundance are shown in a photo from
August 1977 on their farm in Los Lunas, New Mexco.
COURTESY PHOTO 

In the summer of 1974, I was 20 years old, had been married for a year, and was attending college at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. We lived on a 3-acre farm and had recently lost the family pet, a long-haired dachshund who had died the previous winter. One afternoon I spotted a note on a bulletin board in the Student Union Building that another student was moving, couldn’t take his dog and was looking for a good home for her.

I called the number listed and we agreed to meet the next morning on campus. When I arrived, he was waiting for me with the dog, a young German Shepard mix that he had named Sundance. He handed me her leash and left before I could ask him any questions about her age, her health or her demeanor.

At home on the farm, it didn’t take Sundance very long to adjust. She had a gentle disposition and quickly made friends with all the other animals on the farm, including a horse, sheep, goats, peacocks, a burro, a rabbit, several cats and my mother-in-law’s dog, a large standard poodle named DeeDee.

The veterinarian examined her and said she was spayed and in excellent physical condition. He estimated her age to be about 2 years old.

Sundance fit right in at the farm and we found she was a great watchdog, letting us know when someone pulled into our driveway. She accompanied us on long walks after dinner in the summer and was there with me as I mowed the grass or raked leaves. She loved to ride in the car with me when I went to the post office and would sit beside me as I watched college basketball games on television during the winter months.

When Carlton Fisk of the Boston Red Sox hit the game-winning home run in the 12th inning of Game Six of the 1975 World Series, Sundance was there with me and jumped up with me to celebrate.

Despite being loved by everyone in the family, she also had a sneaky side. About a week after a security alarm system was installed in our home, we had gone next door to visit with our neighbors when the alarm sounded. It was a motion detection system triggered by movement four feet off the ground. I raced back home when the alarm sounded but couldn’t find any intruder or anything out of the ordinary.

Later during supper, my wife’s mother asked me where I had moved the pie she had made. She had baked it earlier that afternoon and had set it out on the counter to cool. I told her I didn’t move it and we all searched for the pie without success. Someone had apparently entered our home while we were gone, grabbed the pie still in the pie tin and left before I arrived just two minutes after the alarm had first sounded. And this thief had done all of this in front of Sundance standing guard over the house while were next door with the neighbors.

That night I went to pick up a sock off the floor in our bedroom and noticed something metallic partially sticking out from under our bed. It was an empty pie tin, and I realized the thief was my own dog. She had stood up on her hind legs, snatched the pie tin off the counter setting off the alarm, carried it back to the bedroom, ate the pie and pushed the pie tin under the bed to hide it.

As the years passed, I enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and had to leave Sundance at the farm with my mother-in-law as I was assigned to units in Germany, The Pentagon in Washington, D.C. and in Arizona. Upon completion of each assignment though Sundance was there to greet us as we arrived back home and she was thrilled when I decided to return to college and we were living back on the farm.

When I graduated from college and landed a job as a newspaper reporter, I would take her with me from time to time when I had to conduct interviews for my job. One time she got to befriend two miniatures mules before a town parade and another time she explored a new hiking trail with me that was recently opened by a local conservation group. 

The only thing she didn’t seem to care for were firecrackers and sparklers on the Fourth of July. The hissing sound of the sparklers would make Sundance revolve in circles howling and if a firecracker went off near her, she would try and hide under someone’s nearby chair seeking safety.

In 1989, Sundance began having trouble getting up and walking because of severe arthritis and a decision was made with the veterinarian to end her suffering.

In my lifetime I’ve had many great dogs and from Sundance I learned that the bond we make with a dog is as lasting as can ever be. <

Andy Young: Reaching the century mark

By Andy Young

This past March 6 former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan turned 100 years old. Nineteen days later, frizzy-haired film critic Gene Shalit did the same. And if he stays extant for another month, comedian/writer/director/actor/producer Mel Brooks will join them in the centenarian club on June 28. Completing 10 decades of life is particularly remarkable for those born in 1926, since life expectancy for Americans born that year was just 56.7 years, per historical life tables published by the Social Security Administration.

According to the Pew Research Center, approximately 108,000 centenarians were living in the United States in 2024. That was second to Japan, home to an estimated 146,000 100-plussers. But even with ongoing advances in medicine, science, and nutrition, surviving ten decades is still no easy feat. The last time someone counted, people aged 100 or more comprised just .03 percent of America’s population. The next three nations in the century-old citizens standings are China (60,000), India (48,000) and Thailand (38,000).

Statistically the 100-plus population is growing. United Nations projections indicate America’s total of 100-year-olds will quadruple by the year 2054, to over 500,000, although by that time China’s centenarian count will have surpassed ours. Earth’s true longevity leader, though, is Thailand. If predictive data is correct, there will be 49 centenarians per 10,000 people there in 2054. China’s world-pacing 767,000 old-timers will represent a mere six people per 10,000 there.

Basic math indicates that if the above figures are correct, 99.7 percent of those born in 1926 aren’t around to celebrate their personal centennial this year.

Distinguished people born that year no longer available to blow out 100 candles include Soupy Sales, Leslie Nielsen, Joe Garagiola, Pete Rozelle, Ralph Abernathy, Jerry Lewis, Gus Grissom, Hugh Hefner, Queen Elizabeth II, Harper Lee, Cloris Leachman, Don Rickles, Miles Davis, Fidel Castro, Christine Jorgensen, Andy Griffith, Tony Bennett, Donn Fendler, Anne Jackson, Fidel Castro, Emile Francis, Dr. Bob Richards, Duke Snider, John Coltrane, Chuck Berry, Y. A. Tittle, and Joe Paterno. But maybe the most impactful now-deceased person born in 1926 was Vasily Arkhipov, the Soviet submarine officer who refused an order to launch a nuclear torpedo at U.S. Navy ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Were it not for his action (or more accurately, his courageous inaction), it’s possible no one would be around to celebrate a birthday this year.

Marilyn Monroe would have turned 100 this week. Frozen in America’s collective mind as the glamorous but tragic Hollywood sex symbol who died at 36 in 1962, she’s not the only one seen in a perpetually attractive light due at least in part to a premature demise. Who knows how an increasingly aggressive inquisitive media (not to mention the scandal-hungry, celebrity-obsessed consumers of their digging) would have impacted the memories of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy had any of them lived to a ripe old age. Imagine either Kennedy living past 100, or Dr. King at 97, the age he’d be if he were still alive today.

Speaking of difficult to picture, do you remember Samantha Smith, the 10-year-old Mainer who wrote a letter to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov in 1982, and then accepted the Communist party’s general secretary’s invitation to come for a visit. She was subsequently recognized as the world’s youngest peace activist and died in a tragic plane crash less than three years later.

She’d have turned 54 this year, the day after Mel Brooks turns 100.

There are, it seems, some advantages to dying young.

But that’s easy to say for those of us who are ineligible to do so and have been for quite some time. <

Insight: Echoes through Time

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

As the youngest member of my U.S. Air Force unit in Germany in 1977, I recall thinking that someday, if I was lucky, I might be among the oldest. Now almost 50 years later as we get ready for another Memorial Day, that thought has become reality.

Ed Pierce's first supervisors while serving 
in the U.S. Air Force were TSgt. Bill
Crosland and Sgt. Chauncy Pippin.
COURTESY PHOTO 

I had been assigned to the 601st Air Support Operations Center in Bonames, Germany as a communications specialist and it was no picnic. The isolated location was shared with a U.S. Army airfield, and my unit was entirely mobile, meaning we spent a lot of time out in trucks and living in tents outdoors.

Not only was I the youngest member of my unit at the age of 23, as it turned out, I was also the lowest ranking airman on site. As an E-1 Airman Basic, it was expected that every cleaning task, floor mopping, trash removal or weed pulling job was all mine.

My department was led by E-6 Tech Sergeant Bill Crosland from Warner-Robins, Georgia, a tall Vietnam veteran, who spoke little but when he did it was always impactful and meaningful. Crosland believed that airmen learned through experience and that meant on occasion you would fail. He would then pull you aside and use it as a lesson for improvement. He would tell me that the highest compliment that he could ever pay to someone is they never made the same mistake twice.

His second in command of our department was another Vietnam veteran, E-4 Sergeant Chauncy Pippin. He was short in stature, standing about 5-foot-5 and had a pronounced Texas drawl. It was hard to overlook all the straw-colored blond hair spilling out from under his cap, but I later found out that most of it was a toupee.

Pippin would usually lead the preparedness drills and mobility exercises, ensuring our unit had enough diesel fuel, the communications equipment was in good shape and in working order, and he was responsible for lining the trucks up properly before a unit convoy would depart the site. He would waddle from side to side when he walked and I thought he resembled the cartoon character Mr. Magoo, walking along muttering to himself.

Under the tutelage of Crosland and Pippin, in over two years there, I went from being a total newcomer to being able to perform my duties with my eyes closed. I learned every aspect and function of the equipment and how to handle problems when they came up. But I also learned an invaluable lesson in acceptance.

One day when I arrived for work, Crosland handed me a broom and told me that he wanted every unit sidewalk swept and when I finished that job, he wanted me to sweep the street in front of our unit headquarters too.

As I pushed the broom along, I questioned why I had been given such a menial task. It was mindless work and truly meant nothing, I thought. The longer I spent sweeping, the more I thought about how little my supervisors thought of me and bemoaning my fate as the lowest ranking person in my unit.

But then something happened that changed my entire way of looking at the military. Within 20 minutes after I completed my sweeping job, a staff car pulled up in front of our unit headquarters and a general stepped out for a meeting with our unit’s commander. It was a light bulb moment for me. I realized our commander had passed the word to Crosland that we needed to spruce up the grounds before the general’s arrival.

I decided that instead of questioning or overthinking every order or task that I had been given, to just go ahead and perform each job as asked, knowing that there was a reason my superiors wanted me to do these jobs. It was a revelation for me to understand the ways the chain of command and military hierarchy operated, and it ultimately paid dividends for me.

In 1978, three other E-1 Airman Basics arrived for duty at the 601st Air Support Operations Center and I was no longer the lowest-ranking person there. That fall I received my first promotion to E-2 Airman and a year later, I was promoted to E-3 Airman First Class. In November 1979, I was reassigned by the Air Force and flew home to the United States from Germany.

I’ve kept in touch over the years with a few of my friends from the 601st Air Support Operations Center. I had lunch with Sergeant Mike Hodges, who now lives in Texas, about 20 years ago. Sergeant Chuck Tarantola lived near me in Florida and came to my 50th birthday party. 

Through the years though, I have wondered what happened to Bill Crosland and Chauncy Pippin. Last week I got my answer. A Google search revealed that Crosland died in 2017 at the age of 79 and Pippin had also passed away in 2017 at the age of 77.

Today I find myself thinking back to my time with the 601st Air Support Operations Center and what it meant to me to serve with guys like Crosland and Pippin. Memorial Day is a good day for recalling their influence upon my life. <

Tim Nangle: 132nd Legislature Recap – Turning Community Concerns into Practical Solutions

By Senator Tim Nangle

Now that the 132nd Maine Legislature has adjourned, I’ve been reflecting on the work we accomplished this session and the people that shaped it.

State Senator Tim Nangle

One of the best parts of serving our communities is getting out of Augusta and spending more time back home, talking with neighbors at local events, hearing concerns from families and small business owners and seeing firsthand both the challenges and strengths that make our region so special.

Many of the bills I worked on this session were guided by these conversations and a simple idea: government works best when it empowers people to solve problems before they become full-blown crises.

Whether it’s helping veterans stay housed or ensuring survivors of human trafficking can continue accessing critical services or strengthening Maine’s mental health response system, much of my work this year has focused on stability, prevention and protecting the people and communities that make our state strong.

One bill I was especially proud to sponsor was LD 2135, which helps prevent homelessness among Maine veterans. Too many veterans face barriers to stable housing because of past rental debt, financial hardship or the reluctance of landlords to take on perceived risk. This new law creates the Veterans Housing Provider Incentive Fund, which will help nonprofit housing providers work directly with landlords, reduce barriers to housing and keep veterans housed before a temporary hardship turns into homelessness.

No one who has served our country should lose housing because they can’t get help when they need it. This bill is about stepping in early and giving veterans the support they’ve earned through their service.

That same principle shaped another bill I sponsored this session, LD 2136, which provides temporary bridge funding for survivors of human trafficking after unexplained federal delays disrupted critical services here in Maine.

For years, organizations like Preble Street have helped survivors access housing, medical care, counseling, legal assistance and other essential services. But after the federal government delayed funding that these programs rely on, survivors in Maine had to be put on waitlists for help.

People escaping trafficking and abuse should not be told to wait for safety because of bureaucratic delays in Washington. This legislation ensures those services can continue while federal funding issues are resolved.

I also sponsored LD 1216, which formally codifies the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline into Maine law. While many people are familiar with 911 for emergencies, 988 provides an easy-to-remember number for Mainers experiencing mental health crises or suicidal thoughts.

By placing 988 into state statute, we’re ensuring this resource remains a stable part of our crisis response system for years to come. Mental health emergencies deserve the same urgency, coordination and accessibility as any other public health crisis.

Protecting Maine communities also means protecting the natural resources that define our state and support our economy. That’s why I sponsored LD 1904, which helps municipalities enforce shoreland zoning laws without forcing local taxpayers to shoulder overwhelming legal costs.

This legislation was inspired in part by the town of Raymond’s years-long legal battle involving deliberate removal of protected shoreline vegetation along Sebago Lake, one of the cleanest drinking water sources in the country, by a private landowner. Smaller communities should not be financially outmatched by wealthy developers when trying to protect clean water and uphold local ordinances.

The bill establishes a revolving loan fund that municipalities can access when facing major shoreland zoning enforcement costs. The fund is designed to sustain itself over time through repayments and penalties collected from violations under Maine’s natural resource protection laws. In other words, the goal is to make sure towns have the tools to enforce the law without creating a long-term burden on local property taxpayers.

Finally, I was proud to advance LD 2179, which strengthens consumer protection for Mainers purchasing vehicles through large online dealers like Carvana. As more vehicle sales move to online-only platforms, Maine consumers deserve the same transparency, accountability and safety standards they would expect from a traditional dealership. 

The Legislature’s work is never fully finished, and there is always more to do. But I’m proud of the progress we made this session to strengthen mental health services, support veterans, protect vulnerable Mainers, defend our natural resources and improve consumer protections for Maine families.

These bills all started with real conversations about real challenges facing people in our communities. I’m grateful to everyone who shared their experiences and helped shape this work.

988 offers 24/7 judgment-free support for mental health, substance use and more. Text, call, or chat 988.

For the latest, follow me on Facebook at facebook.com/SenatorTimNangle, sign up for my e-newsletter at mainesenate.org, or contact me directly at [email protected]. You can also call the Senate Majority Office at 207-287-1515.

The opinions in this column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions or views of The Windham Eagle newspaper ownership or its staff. <

Andy Young: A half-dozen essays for Memorial Day

By Andy Young

It goes without saying that writing essays consisting of exactly 600 words each week for a family newspaper is no easy task. There have been occasions when churning out such an article has been the equivalent of scaling Mount Everest in nothing but jeans and a short-sleeved T-shirt. Given the curveballs life throws from time to time, conjuring 50 dozen relevant words that make some sort of sense can be next to impossible. But how then does one accomplish this Herculean feat? The answer: split the job up into six essays of 100 words each. Like, for example, this one.

If it seems like Memorial Day is coming early this year, well, that’s because it is. The holiday is celebrated annually on the last Monday of May. This year’s final May Monday falls on the 25, and that’s the earliest Memorial Day can be, since any May that has a Monday the 24 also has a Monday the 31. Memorial Day was first celebrated on May 30, 1868. It was originally called “Decoration Day,” and was intended to honor union soldiers who had died during the Civil War. Sudden thought: is there really any such thing as a “civil” war?

Remembering the exact date of Memorial Day wasn’t all that complicated for the holiday’s first 100 years, because it came on May 30 every year. However, all that changed in 1968, when Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. It moved the celebration of George Washington’s birthday to the third Monday in February, and Memorial Day to the last Monday in May. It also made Columbus Day a federal holiday and changed Veterans Day from November 11 to the fourth Monday in October. Veterans Day got moved back to November 11 in 1978 for reasons that are unclear to me.

The Memorial Day parade was huge where I grew up. The procession marched from the firehouse to the town hall, and everyone in town lined the parade route to salute the marchers. Boys wanting to participate had to either play Little League Baseball or be a Boy Scout. In retrospect, maybe I chose wrong. The skills the scouts learned were, it turns out, a lot more useful than the ones we learned from baseball. Scouts could start fires without matches and survive in the woods. I could throw a ball faster than they could, but really, how useful is that?

When I was a 9-year-old member of the Easton Little League Hawks, I wore uniform number 2. The low numbers were on the small jerseys; the bigger the kid, the higher his number. Our giant kid wore number 15. I loved being number 2, until one day a teammate told me that in his house “Number 2” was a nasty thing they did in the bathroom that wasn’t “Number 1.” All of a sudden being number 2 wasn’t such a great thing. Fortunately, I continued growing, and by the time I hit sixth grade I had progressed to number 12.

What was initially intended to be an occasion to decorate the graves of fallen Civil War soldiers later became a national holiday designated to remember and honor the fallen veterans in all of America’s wars. It’s a solemn occasion, particularly for those who lost friends or family members in either of the two world wars, not to mention subsequent conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, among other places. My small contribution to the holiday is to write six 100-word essays to remind people of the holiday’s true significance.

I’d like to see one of those Boy Scouts try that. <

Insight: What’s that mean?

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s was a special time to listen to the radio, as it was the Golden Age of Rock n’ Roll, and some of the songs I learned all the words by heart.

South Korean singer Psy had a huge hit in 
America in 2012 with 'Gangham Style,' a song
in Korean about a trendy suburb of Seoul.
COURTESY PHOTO 

But since I didn’t speak a foreign language, there were a few songs that I had no idea what they were about.

For example, my father would always turn up the volume on his car radio whenever the 1958 tune “Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu” would be playing. Sung entirely in Italian by a singer named Domenico Modugno, it was commonly known for the refrain “Volare.” I later learned that “Volare” means to fly in Italian and it’s a song about flying through a blue sky feeling free and happy.

A few years later in 1963, Kyu Sakamoto, a Japanese singer, topped the Billboard Popular Music chart with his song in Japanese called “Sukiyaki.” For years I never knew what that song was about, but I enjoyed listening to it, even though I did not understand one word of it. When the song was later used in the television show “Mad Men,” I decided after 50 years of hearing it to google the lyrics and discovered that in Japanese, the song describes the singer walking and looking up to the sky to stop his tears from falling while remembering a lost love.

In 1964, Belgian singer Jeannine Deckers, nicknamed “The Singing Nun,” reached Number One on the music charts worldwide with a song in French she called “Dominque.” Like with “Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blue” and “Sukiyaki,” I had no clue about what “Dominique” was about, but it was a catchy song. It’s a simple tune about a Spanish Catholic priest named Saint Dominic, who founded the Dominican Order of nuns to which Deckers belonged.

These days it’s common to turn on the radio and hear a song in a foreign language and not know what the song is about. There is Bad Bunny, a prolific Puerto Rican singer whose songs are sung in Spanish. His music has been so popular that the National Football League had Bad Bunny as its featured performer during its Super Bowl halftime show earlier this year.

And there’s no denying that the influence of K-Pop and bands from South Korea singing in Korean have received major airplay in America for the past decade.

The first South Korean singer to have a significant hit in America was Psy, whose “Gangham Style” song with Korean lyrics was the second highest charting song on Billboard Popular Music charts in 2012. It seemed for a while that Psy and that song invaded popular culture. It aired everywhere from the local dance club to a live performance on NBC’s “Today” show.

For those who don’t know, the “Gangham Style” song refers to a lifestyle associated with the Gangham region of Seoul in South Korea, a supposed trendy, hip, and classy area populated by wealthy, status-seeking residents.

Through the years and across the decades, there have been many foreign language songs that became hits and yet most listeners have little idea what they mean.

In the 1980s, a song in German called “99 Luftballons" by the band Nena was a smash hit in Europe before its video aired on MTV. A direct translation in German of the title is sometimes given as "Ninety-Nine Air Balloons." It’s an anti-war song known in English as "Ninety-Nine Red Balloons" and tells a story about how balloons are mistaken for UFOs, resulting in a near-century cataclysmic war with no winner.

Anyone who has attended a wedding in the past 30 years undoubtedly has heard the song “Macarena” sung in Spanish by Los Del Rio, a duo from Andalusia, Spain. The song lingered on American music charts for weeks and eventually hit Number One in 1996. It also spawned a dance craze leading to its continuing popularity at wedding receptions.

The Los del Rio singers say the “Macarena” dance started when audience members improvised arm movements displayed by the singers during an instrumental part of the song at concerts. The dance eventually blew up and overshadowed the song’s popularity but the two are forever linked and inseparable. 

Other popular songs that many Americans took to heart without knowing what the lyrics meant in a foreign language have become cherished tunes, such as Jose Feliciano’s 1970 “Feliz Navidad” sung in Spanish. It means "Happy Christmas" and is a traditional holiday greeting in Spanish used to wish someone a merry Christmas season.

Another smash hit was The Sandpipers’ 1966 song “Guantanamera." The song is sung in Spanish and is about a woman from Guantánamo. It’s adapted from a traditional Cuban patriotic song by Cuban poet José Marti and relates an expression of love for Cuba and of solidarity with the poor people around the world.

1958’s “La Bamba” by Ritchie Valens, sung entirely in Spanish, was among the first rock n’ roll hits. A Mexican folk song, “La Bamba” is about a man who tells his fiancée, "I'm not a sailor, I'm a captain," about his ambitions in life.

If music is indeed a universal language, these songs show that great tunes have no barriers. <

Andy Young: Snap judgments: make ‘em, but don’t act on ‘em

By Andy Young

Most rational people think it’s wrong to judge others and believe it’s particularly egregious to do so upon meeting someone for the first time.

I disagree.

I frequently assess people spontaneously. I don’t feel bad about it either, since I strongly suspect that as I’m doing it, the vast majority of those people are sizing me up and immediately drawing their own conclusions, most of which are probably accurate.

About 90 percent of my initial perceptions of people I encounter for the first time are correct. But that’s a nice way of saying I’m mistaken the other 10 percent of the time. I still maintain there’s nothing wrong with forming quick opinions of new acquaintances. However, it’s vital to never act on those appraisals.

Why not? Exhibit A concerns a fellow I’ll refer to here as Jeff (because that’s his actual name). He and I shared a three-bedroom apartment one winter with two other guys, Duane and Tim. (Those aren’t their real names, but they know who they are.)

The four of us were spending a winter working for a minor league hockey team as, in no particular order, ticket manager, athletic trainer, radio announcer, and concessions manager. None of us was getting paid much; it’s not a coincidence that no billionaire ever got his start selling tickets to East Coast Hockey League games. But given the services we were providing, our pay rate was probably fair. After all, it wasn’t like we were working on a cure for cancer.

Jeff took charge of getting our shared bills paid. He volunteered for the job shortly after we moved into the apartment, and the rest of us eagerly and unanimously approved him before he could change his mind.

My initial judgement of Jeff came on the evening the first phone bill arrived. The four of us were bonding in front of our favorite TV show. Jeff, being a good roommate, waited until Beavis and Butt-head was over before getting down to business.

Phone bills were different back then. There was a basic monthly service fee, plus a separate charge for each long-distance phone call made during the billing period. That amount varied based on the call’s length and the time of day at which it had been made. Jeff passed the bill around, asking each of us to initial each long-distance call we’d made. After that was done, he added in 25 percent of the service charge, punched a few buttons on his calculator, and determined what each of us owed.

When Jeff told me my total came to $25.05, I opened my wallet, extracted a $20 bill and a $5 bill, and handed them over.

Jeff took the money.

An awkward silence followed.

A very loooooong awkward silence.

Finally, Jeff stuck out his hand, palm up, and repeated, calmly but firmly, “I said you owe $25.05.”

That’s when I instantly concluded that Jeff was the cheapest person on the planet.

But I quickly realized I was mistaken. After pocketing my nickel, Jeff told Duane he owed $39.97. Having just witnessed the previous scene, Duane quickly produced two $20 bills. Taking them, Jeff got up and marched wordlessly into his bedroom. When he returned moments later, he was holding three cents change.

My initial judgment of Jeff had been dead wrong. Thank goodness I didn’t act on it, because the moment that he gave Duane those three pennies I realized Jeff was, in reality, the most scrupulously honest person on the planet.

This story ends happily.

My second evaluation of Jeff was, it turned out, 100 percent correct. <

Rookie Mama: The sign said long-haired freaky people need not appliances

By Michelle Cote
The Rookie Mama

My husband and I purchased our second home 16 years ago last week, a fairly new build at the time. I suppose it’s not fair to say that the kitchen came with appliances of questionable quality – although I sure had my questions – because our family, which mathematically tripled since then with our swift move from two to a sextet, has highest demands for our appliances.

We’ve since replaced nearly every appliance in our busy dining and cooking space tucked among cabinets with Scotch tape markings of kiddo drawings of yore, countertops that saw better days, all on wooden floors and treads worn by time and Red Flyer Big Wheel loops around the kitchen island by our now-teen.

I know full well that appliances surviving five years or longer today is like 20 years in 1990s-years, because every single person ever knows things aren’t built to last as they once were.

My parents had the same television set, washer and dryer, refrigerator, throughout my childhood without needing to replace them regularly, and yours probably did, too.

Back when we used to call it a television "set" years before the stream.

I wasn’t a child of the avocado appliance era, but those things lasted – and proudly so – well into my kiddo-hood from my parents’ generation.

Today I still use my mother’s and mother-in-law’s handed down and indestructible dusty rose and orange Tupperware pieces, which hold up beautifully and put my 2000s-era storage containers of the same brand name – more like Tupper-worse-for-wear – to shame.

This column is not about appliance demise as it is about timing, and even a bit of gratitude sprinkled in.

Last week, my stovetop was the latest casualty to die an unexpected death and go to domestic device heaven, and as one can imagine, timing of these things is never ideal.

My glass top range cracked, and I blame my Dutch oven.

See – Just another example of how old-school cooking methods crush the newer contraptions.

Our replacement stove won’t arrive for two more weeks, and so we adapt, using our trusty camp Blackstone grill for our stovetop needs in the interim.

I’m thankful the rainy but warmer May weather has allowed me to grill outside during this momentary inconvenience, unlike a time years ago in which we lost power in a snowstorm and had to cook outside.

In a snowstorm.

I’m outdoorsy, but definitely not that outdoorsy.

This temporary detour of plans allows us to not only take a beat to be decidedly creative in how we meal prep, but gives us an opportunity to be thankful for the functioning gadgets we do have, use regularly, and to which we seldom give a second cooking-sprayed thought.

In motherhood, my favorite innovation I’ve witnessed is the advent of curbside grocery pickup.

Because I remember all too well living the weekly Tetris game feeling like a one-horse-open-sleigh dragging double carts around the Dairy aisle, dodging oncoming shoppers as best I awkwardly could, and the hours-long process of groceries when I only had two kiddos.

Because I’ve lived through this, I whisper a prayer of thanks each time I pull up to the grocery store and kindly attendants cart out my online groceries for me and help me bag up the breads and bananas and bodega goods aplenty.

I never take this for granted, because I’ve lived that transition. 

I want to leave the one-horse-open awkward sleigh rides with double Tetris carts-in-narrow-aisles far in the past among the VCRs and dial-up.

But kitchen appliances of convenience? They’ve existed my entire life.

And I don’t miss them until they are gone.

Out like an oven light.

How did they do it before the Crockpots and the coffee makers, the refrigerators and ranges?

I venture it sure was an adventure to get the daily things done.

I adore camping with my family every summer and cooking in the wild– as wild as a campground can deign to be – but at the end of the long weekend, I’m happy to be snug as a bug who wants to give my dishwasher an epic hug.

So today I’m grateful.

I may be down a stove range with a replacement arriving on a date that also ranges, but it will come.

And years from now when this story is long forgotten, my hand-me-down Tupperware dishes will still be here to witness the next great appliance replacement tale.

But not too soon.

So cheers to May, and the way we pivot in times of appliances gone awry.

Because I’ll soon again be cooking at home, home on the range.

­­– Michelle Cote lives in southern Maine with her husband and four sons, and enjoys camping, distance running, biking, gardening, road trips to new regions, arts and crafts, soccer, and singing to musical showtunes – often several or more at the same time!

Insight: Up the Down Escalator

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Just after Christmas in 1979, I made my way to a new duty station in the U.S Air Force and it took some adjustment to get used to.

For the previous two years, I had been assigned to a unit based at a remote U.S. Army airfield outside of Frankfurt, Germany and had been reassigned to the 2044th Communications Group based at The Pentagon in Washington, D.C. After spending more than a month at home on leave, I flew into what was then called National Airport and was given a room in the barracks at Fort Myer in Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington.

Reporting for duty at The Pentagon, I was given a tour of the building by our unit’s administrative officer and found it to be like a small city. There was a bus depot, a Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority subway location, a candy store, Walgreens, a barber shop, a clothing store, fast food restaurants, a doughnut shop, a florist, a museum and more.

The 2044th Communications Group had two locations in the building, one upstairs and one in the basement. I was grateful that I had been given my own office across the hall from the group’s commander within in the 2044’s offices in the basement.

My job was to publicize unit activities and to submit articles and photographs about 2044th Communication Group personnel to military newspapers for publication. I found that my office had been equipped with an awesome electric typewriter and an expensive Nikon 35mm camera and everyone assigned to the unit supported my work.

The 2044th commander, Col. Gerald Bronnenberg, would suggest stories for me to work on and would seek out my advice for ways to make the unit even better than it was. I suggested to him that we create a catered monthly luncheon for those assigned to the unit and their families featuring guest speakers. He loved that idea and some of the speakers at those events included Assistant U.S. Secretary of Labor Ernest Green, who was one of the Little Rock Nine, a group of black students who were the first black students ever to attend classes at Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas. We also had Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force Jim McCoy speak at one of the luncheons and so did former U.S. Prisoner of War in Vietnam Col. Mike Lane.

It seemed that the longer I worked at The Pentagon, the more I enjoyed the experience. I loved exploring and visiting all the historic sights and things to do in Washington and Col. Bronnenberg appreciated my efforts publicizing the unit.

I did have help though in doing that because my best friend from my previous Air Force assignment, SSgt. Daryl Green, was the editor of The Bolling Beam newspaper at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington. He was always looking for great stories coming out of The Pentagon to publish and it made my new job covering the 2044th Communications Group easier.

2044th personnel worked in three different eight-hour shifts so my work hours covering them would vary. One morning I was headed upstairs from the basement to interview an airman for an article. To get there, I took a unique escalator that could run two different ways. By pushing a button, the escalator would reverse directions going both up and down, but that direction would automatically change again when it reached the top or bottom floors. 

I pushed the button to change escalator direction, and it took me up to the first floor, but before I could step off, an officer named Major Feldbauer who appeared at the bottom of the escalator asked me to reverse its direction so he could ride up to the first floor. I pushed the button to reverse the direction for him, but it was stuck in that position.

He shouted at me to push the button again, which I did, and again nothing happened. He then lost his temper and screamed a direct order at me to change the escalator’s direction. No matter how many times I tried pushing the button to reverse it, it wouldn’t work. I told him that and he yelled at me that I was playing around and he would have me court-martialed for not following his orders. I politely told him the button wasn’t working, and I would report the faulty button to building maintenance. He told me he would see me disciplined for not following a direct order.

For weeks thereafter, if I saw Major Feldbauer coming down a hallway in The Pentagon, I would hightail it in the other direction. I avoided him like the plague but eventually he found out my name and what unit I was assigned to. Col. Bronnenberg called me into his office and sitting there was the major who had been looking for me. He explained how I had “disregarded” his direct order.

Col. Bronnenberg told Major Feldbauer that the escalator was faulty and it had happened to him before. He said that I was not responsible and that I had acted respectfully toward the major, and I would not face any charges.

I was greatly relieved but never used that escalator ever again. <

Barbara Bagshaw: LD 2226 A Flawed Fix for Maine’s Education Funding Formula

By State Rep. Barbara Bagshaw

LD 2226 was introduced through a placeholder bill just one month before the end of the legislative session. The Education and Cultural Affairs Committee sent an empty bill to Legislative Council for approval while awaiting a critical report from MEPRI on the Essential Program Services (EPS) funding formula. While most agree the formula needs updating, I was deeply troubled by how rushed the entire process was.

State Rep. Barbara Bagshaw

Just days before the House vote, legislators received a massive amendment disguised as a language review. For two years, as an elected member of the Education Committee, I have repeatedly called for action on Maine’s declining student test scores. I have formally requested on the record a roundtable discussion with Education Commissioner Pender Makin and the Department of Education to address these declining scores, along with serious FERPA and Title IX violations that could cost Maine millions in federal funding.

During an appropriations meeting, Commissioner Makin promised on the record to provide specific documents and explanations before our work session. Those materials were never delivered. Dr. Cyr from the DOE also repeatedly assured me the information was forthcoming. We received nothing. The commissioner did not attend the work session, yet we were still expected to vote on a major supplemental budget without this critical information. Much of the committee’s time was spent reviewing bills submitted by the Department of Education, essentially being told how to advise them.

This dynamic is backwards. The Legislature should be providing oversight and direction to the Department, not the other way around. Instead, we saw repeated requests for more funding and less oversight. According to the Maine Department of Education, public school enrollment has declined by 12,000 students over the past decade – a 6.6 percent drop – yet non-teaching positions and overall education spending have continued to rise dramatically since 2014. As a former teacher, I support properly funding our schools. However, we must demand a better return on that investment. We need to refocus on core academics – math, science, and reading – rather than placing disproportionate emphasis on equity and inclusion initiatives.

We must also listen to parents and address the actual educational needs of Maine students. In a particularly troubling move, the majority party lifted the cap that previously limited how much municipalities could raise property taxes each year. What was once tied to the cost of living is now uncapped. Local officials will almost certainly take full advantage of this change. This is not how government should function. Too many of my constituents have been forced to sell their homes or leave the state because they can no longer afford the tax burden. State and local officials are increasingly confiscating wealth from hardworking Mainers rather than serving them.

Under the current administration, the state budget has nearly doubled over seven years, with millions more added through supplemental budgets. There has been minimal input from the minority party. Maine has a serious spending problem.

I voted against LD 2226 – not because the EPS formula doesn’t need reform, but because the process was rushed, the bill was not ready, and it contains troubling provisions. The held harmless clause guarantees funding levels through 2031 regardless of continued enrollment declines. The new formula also fails to connect funding to student outcomes. Additionally, the bill carries a massive unfunded fiscal note. We should have waited for the full MEPRI report, done our due diligence, and developed a responsible formula that improves academic excellence without pricing families out of their homes. Our students deserve better.

It is an honor to represent part of Windham in the Legislature. If there is any way that I can be of assistance, please contact me at [email protected]. My office phone number is 207-287-1440. You can find me on Facebook. To receive regular updates, sign up for my e-newsletter at https://mainehousegop.org/

The opinions in this column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions or views of The Windham Eagle newspaper ownership or its staff. <

Andy Young: Maximum work for minimum wage

By Andy Young

Maine's last minimum wage increase took effect this past New Year’s Day, upping the state's minimum hourly pay rate from $14.65 to $15.10. It also increased minimum wage for service workers to $7.55 per hour.

When I was in high school the term used to describe people earning $7.55 per hour was “filthy rich.” The year I turned 16 the minimum wage was less than 24 percent of what it is today. Where I grew up there were two job choices for high school students who, like me, lacked a driver’s license and/or access to a car. One was cutting grass for the recreation department. The other: performing manual labor for one of the two orchards in town.

I picked fruit, pulled weeds, dug irrigation ditches, and performed other duties the fulltime employees at Aspetuck Valley Orchards considered too menial or distasteful to handle themselves. Many of those disagreeable chores made me wonder if it was worth getting out of bed each morning to earn a mere $1.85 per hour.

One particularly loathsome job was harvesting peaches, which then as now, ripen during the hottest portion of the summer. Peach pickers perspire heavily while they work, meaning the microscopic bits of peach fuzz on our fingers would migrate via the rivers of sweat that cascaded down our bodies, ultimately settling anywhere there was a fold in the skin. By day’s end I felt like I had rolled around naked in fiberglass insulation for an hour or so, and it took a great deal of painful scrubbing to rid myself completely of the itch.

One morning a group of us learned to our dismay that the professional Jamaican peach pickers we worked alongside were making a princely 35 cents per basket of peaches picked, while the rest of us earned the paltry minimum wage. Our boss, leering evilly, offered to pay us at the same rate as the imported pickers that day. What we learned: like most jobs, picking peaches isn’t as easy as the pros make it seem, nor (at least in our case) was it anywhere near as lucrative to get paid at the same rate they did.

Another repulsive chore was cleaning the cider mill. Fulltime employees made cider every late-summer or early-autumn Friday afternoon, cleaning the mill when they finished. However, when 4:30 arrived, if the job wasn’t completed, the room was locked up until the following morning. What awaited the unfortunate weekend employee assigned to clean it 15 hours later was the overpowering smell of rotting, fermenting apples and hordes of yellow jackets big enough to wear license plates and mean enough to have made them. On the too-frequent Saturdays I was assigned to that particular chore, I knew it was going to be a grim morning, possibly because the boss would ask me for names of my next of kin before handing me a hose and a raincoat and then telling me to get started.

Despite these and other odious tasks I always worked my hardest, and some months later the orchard’s head honcho confirmed that tirelessly toiling without complaint was indeed the right thing to do. Telling me that he was impressed with my effort and good attitude, the orchard’s Big Kahuna informed me that he was raising my wages by 15 cents per hour.

Ecstatic, I shared the exciting news at the dinner table that night, but my usually supportive mother seemed oddly underwhelmed. Puzzled, I asked why she wasn’t more impressed. “Read this,” she said, handing me that day’s newspaper.

The front-page headline read “Minimum Wage for Agricultural Workers Rises to $2 Per Hour.” <

Insight: Unlikely eyewitness to history

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

I never knew it until many years thereafter, but I once worked for an American hero who is credited for saving many lives in a forgotten chapter of our nation’s history.

Joe Chavez, a 200th Coast Artillery member from New
Mexico who was serving in the Philippines at the onset
of World War II, was forced by Japanese captors to
take part in the Bataan Death March, a brutal 65-mile
trek through intense heat to a prisoner of war camp.
COURTESY PHOTO 

While preparing to return to college after serving in the U.S. Air Force in the 1980s, I answered a newspaper ad looking for typing help. We agreed to meet at his home, which was only five minutes away from where I lived, and he could tell me more about the job.

Arriving at his house, Joe Chavez greeted me at the door and had a sense of urgency about what he wanted to accomplish. He was retired and lived alone following the death of his wife and his health was poor. Severe diabetes resulted in him losing his vision.

A long career in construction caused his feet to hurt all the time, so he walked around barefoot, even in winter. While taking his trash bin to the end of his driveway, he cut his right foot, and it later developed into gangrene causing doctors to have to amputate his right leg at the knee. He used crutches to get around and was adept at climbing and descending stairs with them.

Upon meeting him, I discovered that despite his physical issues, Joe had purchased a word processor, a computer-like device for creating, editing, formatting and printing documents and it was something highly unusual to own in rural New Mexico in the 1980s. He wanted me to type on the word processor what he dictated to me, and to help him write a children’s book for his grandchildren.

When the first book was completed, he had me print out the manuscript and drop it off at his publisher. He asked if I would help him write another book, and then a third book, a fourth and a fifth. Each book was less than 30 pages long and he was self-publishing them to give to his grandchildren for Christmas.

At the end of my work for him, I went over to his home to collect a paycheck for a month’s worth of typing for him, and he told me that he had spent all his money publishing the books and couldn’t give me a check. Instead, he instructed me to go to the freezer in his garage and pick out a reasonable number of packaged steaks and ground beef. Before I had come to work for him, he had purchased a side of beef and was storing it in the freezer.

When I got home, my wife was mad that Joe hadn’t paid me in cash and we had to scramble to pay that month’s electric bill. It taught me a lesson to always find out from employers how they planned to compensate me for my work.

About 15 years later when Joe passed away, I learned a bit more about him from reading his obituary in the newspaper.

As a young man, he had enlisted in the U.S. Army and was assigned as part of the 200th Coast Artillery from New Mexico in the Philippines. His unit was forced to surrender to the Japanese following the Battle of Bataan and on April 10, 1942, along with other American prisoners of war, Joe was subjected to undertake an arduous 65-mile trek to a prison camp in Luzon. It has been described as the “Bataan Death March.”

The Japanese had gathered an estimated 78,000 prisoners of which 12,000 were Americans and 66,000 were Filipinos on a forced march up the east coast of Bataan. The POWs were not told how far or how long they would need to march through the intense tropical heat, and they suffered unspeakable cruelties.

Japanese guards clubbed POWs with rifle butts for no reason. Those who dropped from exhaustion or sickness, fell behind, broke ranks to fetch water, or tried to escape were bayoneted, shot, or beheaded. Dragging themselves onward, the prisoners endured horrific conditions, brutal heat and inhumane treatment.

Along the march, Joe Chavez is credited with picking up and carrying soldiers too weak to go on. He was mistaken for dead twice but refused to give his captors the satisfaction of killing him. Somehow, against all the odds, Joe was able to survive. 

Over six days, the POW caravan marched roughly 65 miles until they reached the village of San Fernando. In groups of 100 men, the Japanese forced the POWs into railroad boxcars designed to hold no more than 40 people, causing more men to die of heat exhaustion and suffocation. Arriving in the town of Capas, the prisoners disembarked and continued marching for seven more miles to Camp O'Donnell where they were held until the war ended.

Joe never spoke to me about what he had witnessed during the war or the unthinkable conditions he had overcome to be able to return to his life in New Mexico after World War II. He was discharged from the U.S. Army, and later got married, became a home builder, and had two children and five grandchildren.

I didn’t know it then, but I had been in the presence of a war hero and someone who had endured more pain and suffering than I could ever imagine. <

Andy Young: A shock for the trash man

By Andy Young

The garbage truck driver is in for a surprise when he comes down our street this Thursday morning, because he’ll notice something at the foot of my driveway he hasn’t seen all year: an actual bag of trash. The last time I put one out was the week after Christmas.

Like more than 100 municipalities around the state, my town uses a “PAYT” (Pay as You Throw) system of collecting refuse from its citizens. Residents are required to put all the non-recyclable items they’re discarding into official town-issued trash bags. The idea is to make people more cognizant of the amount of waste they’re producing. This would, at least in theory, increase recycling while at the same time reducing the cost individual cities and towns pay to the private companies they’ve contracted to dispose of their community’s rubbish. The good news: recycling is free, meaning the more items one puts in their recycling bin (rather than the trash), the better it is for the environment, and for the involved individual’s bank account.

Personally, I love the PAYT system. Last time I checked a package of 10 of my town’s official green trash bags costs $25, meaning putting out one bag per week would annually set me back $125 and change.

I use generic bags in my kitchen trash can. When one is nearly full, I collect everything from the other rubbish receptacles in the house, stick those scraps into it, and then compact the contents and deposit the now-fully-stuffed kitchen sack into the green 33-gallon town bag in the garage.

How many generic kitchen garbage sacks fit into a large municipality-issued trash bag depends on what sorts of things are being jettisoned. Since I don’t eat meat and the fish I consume is boneless, there aren’t any animal byproducts to dispose of which helps keep my garbage can from smelling like, well, garbage. And since what I discard consists almost entirely of frozen food wrappers and paper products, compacting it with a simple push of the hand is both easy and (mostly) sanitary.

Another key component of my current waste removal system is a small, stainless steel compost bucket that comes equipped with an effective odor filter. Every biodegradable leftover (banana peels, apple cores, onion skins, etc.) goes into it, and when it’s full, I bury the contents in the woods behind my backyard, making sure to do so in a hole that’s at least a foot deep.

I also give what’s being interred at least 50 vigorous chops with my shovel before covering it. Digging a shallower hole, failing to chop sufficiently, or not adequately covering what I’ve buried would invite raccoons, skunks, and other scavengers I’d prefer not to share space with to make habitual visits to what could, without proper maintenance, become an unintentional all-they-can-eat backyard buffet. 

I replace my generic kitchen trash bag whenever it gets filled, which generally takes two to three weeks.

So how many of those filled white bags can fit inside a big, green, town-issued one? Around six, or maybe seven if my trash compactor (a size 14 shoe with 170 pounds of human in it) is operating at peak efficiency. Stepping on sealed bags of trash primarily composed of paper is just as effective as any expensive mechanical device at reducing the cubic footage of one’s household waste.

Grossed out by the thought of using your shoe to flatten your trash? Don’t be. After all, leaving a large footprint on a full bag of garbage is a lot better than leaving a larger-than-necessary carbon footprint on our already-beleaguered home planet. <