There has been a very marked increase in the number of cases of drunkeness before the police court in this city of late. At Monday’s session 22 cases were brought into the court, which is a larger number than has been before the court in any one day for a number of years. Monday was not an exception, as the number has been unusually large nearly every day for several months past. What is the cause of this condition? Is it the result of Gov. Cobb’s Sturgis law and Pringleism?

50 Years Ago, 1955

A large greenish ball of fire, sighted in the sky last night by several Twin City residents and by others in Maine, may have been just a jet plane blinking its lights. That was the opinion held by the Public Information Office at Dow Air Force base at Bangor. The base said it had many planes aloft. Maynard Jordan, professor of astronomy at the University of Maine, concurred with this opinion after investigating. Some of those who saw a large object with a green and blue flame shooting through the sky at a high rate of speed believed it was a meteor.

25 Years Ago, 1980

It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t mid having a sludge dump in their backyard, and Auburn residents are no exception. More than 50 of them congregated at an informal meeting Monday night to make sure the Lewiston-Auburn Water Pollution Control Authority’s proposed landfill on the Jordan School Road “doesn’t turn into another Gray.”

The residents’ major concern was to guarantee that pollutants from the Authority’s treatment plant in Lewiston do not escape the site and contaminate local drinking water supplies, similar to the experience suffered in recent years by Gray residents.