There was nothing tame about Wednesday’s racing at the Fair Grounds. It was a big day, Governor Hill and his staff being guests of honor, and it was only fitting that every horse should have raced its prettiest. Not a single heat could be called slow. Not once when the horses turned into the stretch could the winner be picked out with hardly a degree of certainty. It was a fight every second.

50 Years Ago, 1954

Auburn Mayor Merle S. Merrill made a strong appeal last night for Auburn citizens to oppose the rate increase requested by the Lewiston Gas Light Co. The Public Commission has called a public hearing on the company’s request for 10 a.m. Thursday at the Lewiston city building. Mayor Merrill, in a statement, said he felt citizens are paying a sufficiently high rate for gas service and that unless wages are increased proportionately the existing rate for domestic gas use should not be increased.

25 Years Ago, 1979

The newsman, camera hanging from his neck, was standing talking to members of the Pinehenge School football team when it happened. The explosion startled everyone in the circle, and the newsman turned and instinctively aimed his camera at the sky, catching the puff of smoke from the first explosion of a Navy P-3 Orion aircraft. Then a second explosion and the plane broke up and fell from the sky, the newsman running for his car and in moments speeding down the highway to where the pieces of aircraft had fallen. The scene was an unforgettable one, and the way the newsman wrote about it engraved an indelible impression on the minds of the stunned readers. The crash – at that time the worst air disaster in Maine history – took the lives of eight Brunswick Naval Air Station flight crewmen aboard the Orion. The coverage of that air tragedy on Sept. 22, 1978, earned long-time Sun reporter Edmund A. MacDonald a journalistic honor Friday night.