OXFORD – The ice fishing season opens Wednesday, but there is no ice on Lake Thompson, so permission to fish there will not as yet do the people here much good. The water is flowing as freely through the lake as on a June day. A man who has lived in Otisfield on the shore of the lake for 40 years, says that he never before saw the lake in that condition at this season of the year.

NORWAY – The annual ball of Oxford Castle, No. 2, Knights of the Golden Eagle, was held this evening at the opera house and was a grand success.

50 years ago, 1958

• Happy New Year! For America, 1958 looks like a year of decision. We have to decide whether to continue with business as usual and politics as usual, trusting to luck and the mistakes of our enemies, or whether to roll up our sleeves and pitch into a great battle for survival that might not be decided for 20 years or 50 years, or even a century.

• In a letter to stockholders yesterday, President William F. Wyman confirmed reports that the Central Maine Power Co. will go out of the appliance sales business early in 1958. Wyman said the firm will continue to service merchandise already sold, and he did not indicate how many employees might be laid off.

25 years ago, 1983

• In 1977, says the U.S. Bureau of the Census, only 702,000 businesses were owned by women – 7.1 percent of all the nation’s business firms, excluding large corporations. But a new report published recently by the Internal Revenue Service unveils an astonishing 2.8 million female-owned businesses, a leap that makes women the fastest-growing group of new entrepreneurs in this country.

PORTLAND – Cumberland Farms Inc. is at the center of another pricing controversy – this time over gasoline, not milk. The Maine Attorney General’s office is investigating charges that the convenience chain’s self-service stations in Oxford and Androscoggin counties are selling gas below cost, in violation of state law.