100 Years Ago: 1924

An article for November 30, 1924 is unavailable, therefore an article for November 30, 1923 is being offered instead.

Everett Carter Marston, senior at Colby College, missing since Saturday night was found in Portland. He came home Friday afternoon, accompanied by friends who have been searching for him since Tuesday.

Marston told the officers he didn’t  know how he came to Portland and  that he did not know where he’d been, since he left college Saturday night. On Friday morning he saw his own picture in a newspaper, and this suddenly restored his collection, he said. He asked the Portland Police Department if they were searching for him, with the result that the young man’s family was immediately notified that he was found.

50 Years Ago: 1974

A new lieutenant is expected to be named at the next meeting of the Lewison Police Commission, tentatively slated Monday at 5:15 p.m. An agenda has not yet been prepared, police Chief Lucien Longlin said today, but there IS a lieutenancy to be filled. Speculation has it Sgt. Arthur Ferguson is likely.

There are currently three sergeants eligible for the promotion: Ferguson, John Fortin and Normand Cloutier. Also eligible, but a step down in rank, are Roger Bisson, Marcel Belanger, Laurier Dehetre, Roy Perham Jr., and Normand Poulin.

Department rules and regulations state that to be a lieutenant an officer must have served at least five years on the force and have held the rank of detective.

25 Years Ago: 1999

John Lewis is still agitating thirty-four years after he led 525 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., into the nightsticks and bullwhips and tear gas of the Alabama State Police into history.

“Talk about racial issues,” he told an audience at Bates College Monday night. “Confront them.”

He and others fought too hard, bled too much, to let the issue get pushed back into the corners and under the rugs.

But how do we do it? people asked. Race is such a taboo subject, they noted.

Lewis told them to have hope.

“We must never, ever give up,” he said. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once told him that without hope, a person doesn’t exist.

Lewis told the questioners to build “pockets” in their community where issues can be discussed. Visit the battlegrounds of the civil rights movement, he said. Come home. and start dialogues.

“There’s nothing wrong with agitating for what is right, what is fair, what is just,” he said.

Lewis contributed to that dialogue Monday as the guest speaker in the Muskie Archives Millennial Series. More than 125 people filled the room, some standing in the back, to hear the Alabama share-cropper’s son who was a leader in the civil rights movement and, today, represents Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives.

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