Despite twenty below zero weather, there has been no time this winter when the autos have not been out, and it is interesting to note the difference between now and three or four years ago when the first snow sent all the machines to the winter quarters. The different makes of cars are vying with each other to make creditable midwinter demonstrations.

50 years ago, 1959

AUGUSTA-By sometime Tuesday Maine motorists will have paid $522,000 in gasoline taxes so far in 1959.

That’s as much as they used to pay in gasoline tax in a whole year under Maine’s original one-cent tax enacted in 1923.

Leroy T. Snowdon, executive secretary of the Maine Petroleum Association, said that present estimates indicate that motorists will pay a total of $32,000,000 in gasoline taxes in 1959 – $22,400,000 in the state’s levy of seven cents a gallon and $9,600,000 in the three cent federal tax.

A recently proposed increase in the federal gasoline tax could mean that motorists in Maine would pay an additional $4,800,000 a year, Snowdon said.

25 years ago, 1984

For those who love snow, Friday was not a good day. For those who love sunshine, it was, possibly, worse. But for those who love rain, drizzly, bone-chilly, rheumy rain, rain that mixes with the sand and salt and then gets thrown up all over your windshield and empties the car’s windshield washer, rain that turns ice and snow to slush and muddy slush at that…

For those people, it was a simply lovely day.