100 Years Ago: 1924

Fred W. Barron of Bath is the champion garden here so far as is known. He has planted his first patch of peas.

50 Years Ago: 1974

Second District William S. Cohen was seen warming up in front of the Capitol Building in Washington, D. C. for the fourth Annual Walk-A-Thon to be sponsored by the Lewiston-Auburn Jaycees on Sunday, April 28 for the benefit of the March of Dimes. The congressman expects to start at 9 am and finish the 16 mile walk at 1 pm at the rate of dour miles per hour making some money for the cause.

25 Years Ago: 1999

When Sandra Hebert saw the man who stopped a moving driverless vehicle rolling through traffic on a busy street to save her children, she clutched him around the neck and hugged him for more than a minute.

“There’s no way I can thank you enough,” she told him. “You saved my kids.”

Bruce Helmuth of South Witham Road was driving down Main Street in Auburn Sunday night on his way home from a friend’s house when he saw a van back out over a curb in front of Florian’s Market.

As he approached he saw a child at the wheel. Quickly he parked at the Big Apple Mobile Station and ran into the road to stop traffic, then the van.

“I did something that anybody should have done if they saw it,” said Helmuth, who turned 21 yesterday. “Basically, I saw it happening and I said, ‘If I don’t do it somebody else could get hurt.’ The van could have been broadsided or it could have backed into the gas pumps.”

He said he first stood behind the van and pushed with all his might to keep it from rolling into Big Apple’s gas pumps.

Then one of the kids in the van put the van’s transmission in “Drive.”

Helmuth ran around to the front and stopped the van from rolling into Florian’s itself. “It was an adrenaline rush, for sure,” said Helmuth of the incident.

With Helmuth between the van and the building, Don Hamel — a juvenile probation officer who was inside Florian’s — came out and put the van in “Park.”

Helmuth, a 1997 Edward Little High School graduate is a hiker and a mountain biker and is training to become a deputy with the Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Department. He works for Extreme Sports, a bike shop on Lisbon Street, and is part of the Dairy Joy Legend Series race team, which involves classic cars.

Helmuth left the scene Sunday night before anyone could get his name. Witnesses were quick to call him a hero.

“This guy literally risked his life to try and stop it,” said Chantel Leavitt after watching the incident. “He didn’t even care about his own safety. He just did what his instincts told him to do. He should be the hero of the year.”

Helmuth said he doesn’t consider himself a hero, that I was just doing what any citizen should have done.

Sandra Hebert was inside the market when she saw the Pontiac van with her two children, Shane 5, and Benjamin, 2 roll into the street. She rushed outside.

“I was petrified. It was nothing I want to go through again. I learned never to leave my car running with my kids in it again,” she said.

Hebert didn’t get a chance to thank Helmuth on Sunday, but she later learned his identity through a friend.

On Tuesday, Hebert called Helmuth to thank him. Later in the day they met for the first time.

“My whole family is so grateful for what he did. We can never repay him,” she said.

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

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