An old Scarborough story

Big thanks to Scott Leonard, who runs the excellent Old Blue Genes blog over at http://oldbluegenes.blogspot.com/. He dropped me a line this weekend because he thought some of you Strange Maine readers would be interested in a story he recently did a piece on, and I think he's right:

The Clukey Fire of 1949
http://oldbluegenes.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-clukey-fire-of-1949.html

As with many stories of bygone days, the newspapers tell a disjointed and partial version of the tale, revising the events that led up to a disaster as the witnesses step forward with different stories each time. This one is particularly convoluted, and in the end I don't know that the final version of events made anyone particularly happy. But it did make for a lot of newspaper coverage.

Scott Leonard delves into the murky ashes of the fire that killed WWII veteran George Clukey, and the history of Vinegar Road in Scarborough, Maine, where he lived.

Check it out!

Toilet fire? Yep, toilet fire.

I can't make this stuff up.

The Bangor Daily News made up the title for it, though.

Toilet fire reported in Rockport
By Abigail Curtis, BDN Staff
Posted May 01, 2011, at 4:03 p.m.

ROCKPORT, Maine — A would-be arsonist used a dollar bill and alder branches Saturday night in an attempt to set a fire in a portable toilet outside a Route 90 convenience store.

“That is odd. That is very bizarre,” said Traci Cultrera, a cashier at the Tolman Pond Market. “I’m blown away that they used their own money.”

She said that staff had discovered Sunday morning that there were a bunch of “brambled sticks” in the urinal, along with the dollar bill. Not much damage was caused by the fire in the toilet, which is adjacent to the store.

“Just a little charring on the Porta-Potty,” she said. “Good thing it didn’t manage to catch. If it did, we would have lost the whole store.”

Patrolman Dana Smith of the Rockport Police Department said that he had been called to the scene to investigate.

“It started to burn, but either somebody showed up, or they got sick of waiting for the green branches to burn,” he said. “The dollar bill was pretty much gone.”

He said that he encouraged the store’s staff to get better security cameras. Smith said that he thinks he has a suspect in the matter.

“You just never know what you’re going to get,” he said.

Source:
http://new.bangordailynews.com/2011/05/01/news/toilet-fire-reported-in-rockport/