Read more about Jan. 18, 1943, in the SunJournal.com archives.

100 Years Ago: 1923

Mrs. Horace E. Gibbs, 198 Granite Street, Auburn will entertain the Auburn Art Club Friday this week. The subject for the afternoon will be “Art.” Roll call will be answered by interesting newspaper items.

50 Years Ago: 1973

Lieut. Robert Holt of the Auburn Fire Department will address parents of the children in the Day Care and Headstart at the meeting tonight at Lincoln School, corner of Sixth and and Broad Streets, Auburn, at 7:30 pm. Lt. Holt  will talk about fire prevention, safety in the home, and will show films made at the recent Libbey Mill fire.

25 Years Ago: 1998

The devastation wrought by the recent ice storm that plunged half the population of Maine into the black, and electric company budgets into the red, might have been diminished, said a spokesman for Maine’s largest electric utility.

Far fewer Mainers would have been in the dark, cold and inconveniences of prolonged outage if Central Maine Power Co. had altered its tree-cutting policies. But the alteration likely would have sparked widespread resistance by most municipalities and property owners, at least before the storm.

“The thing we could have done more of is a very aggressive tree trimming, but it wouldn’t look very nice and people wouldn’t accept it for more than a once-every-century event,” said CMP spokesman Mark Iskanian. “The only thing we could have done in advance was literally clear-cut under all our power lines and nobody would want that.”

Preventive measures, such as tree trimming and equipment safeguards, will be the subject of an investigation by the state Public Utilities Commission and, possibly, by independent experts, in order to determine who will pay for the state’s largest power outage of this century.

More than a week after the storm ravaged central and western Maine’s electrical grid, crews were still working to restore power to nearly 50,000 Mainers. At the height of the storm half the state’s population was powerless. The cost of the storm is still being tallied.

The material used in Looking Back is produced exactly as it originally appeared although misspellings and errors may be corrected.