April 13, 1983

Recent defeats notwithstanding, some old friends are back in Westbrook school circles. Plans to make Westbrook Junior High School a middle school and to close Forest Street School and Warren Kindergarten Center are being pushed by Superintendent Edward Connolly without objection from the School Committee. All students in the city would go to Prides Corner School or Saccarappa School for their first three years, to Canal or Congin for the next three years and the

junior high for the next three years. The plans were presented to parents of present students last week. The plans reject the

recommendation made by a Citizens School Study Committee in November.

Aldermen, who had scheduled detailed discussions of five department budgets Monday night, found themselves facing a $2.65 tax rate increase. Then they asked Mayor William B. O’Gara to take $454,000, about 5.5 percent, out of Westbrook’s net city budget for the year beginning July l. They left him the option of raising revenue estimates or cutting expenses, or doing a combination of those things.

Westbrook police notes: Prowlers were reported on Cottage

Place. When police arrived, they saw teenagers running down the street. A Rhode Island man was arrested and taken to the county jail after he refused to leave the police station lobby at 11:50 p.m. Kids were setting off fire alarms in a Brown Street apartment house. The landlord said their family was being evicted because of continual problems. Rowe Ford reported a car abandoned in the lot. The dealership called back an hour and a half later to say that the car had been turned in by a Falmouth man in a voluntary repossession. A burglar

alarm rang for Cinema City. Police found the door insecure and people sitting in the lobby waiting for the movies to start. A drunk was trying to ride a bike on Main Street near Park Hill at 5 p.m., but was “all over the road.” Police told him to walk on the side of the road, and he did, into Gorham.

Annie Lamb of Gorham is celebrating her 100th birthday April

13, and will be presented with the Boston Post cane for being the town’s oldest citizen. Mrs. Lamb was born on April 13, 1883, to Davis and Lilias Small of White Rock, Gorham. She went through eighth grade at the old White Rock School, now the community building, and attended Gorham High School. In 1915 she married Willie Lamb, a Windham native who moved to White Rock with his family when he was 11. They

celebrated their 68th wedding anniversary on Sept 25. Mrs. Lamb has five children, 24 grandchildren, 51 great-grandchildren, and 10 great-great-grandchildren. Annie churned and sold butter and tended a flock of chickens while her husband grew potatoes and kept six to eight milk cows. “She’s done a million pounds of butter, give or take a few

pounds,” said her daughter, Viola. Mrs. Lamb is blind but has a lively mind and a sense of humor. She remains at the center of family life in a big chair by the kitchen window, and gets around in a wheelchair.

April 14, 1993

A Secret Service agent and his wife spotted a wanted man while they were out to dinner in Auburn Saturday night, then chased him all over back roads all the way back to Westbrook in their family car, at speeds of 120 mph. The chase came to a TV thriller end at the sharp curve on Bridge Street, when the chased car crashed into the fence at the back of the Spinning Mill. The agent leaped from his car in the rain, pointed his pistol in two-handed police style at the fleeing man and told him to hit the ground. The agent’s frantic wife flagged down help from members about to enter the nearby Eagles Club.

Then she held a flashlight as her husband kept

the 6-foot-plus, 260-pound wanted man where he was, face down on the soaking road shoulder for maybe 10 minutes until Westbrook police arrived to help. “Drop now or I’ll shoot,” the agent ordered the man. “And he went down hard,” she said. He flinched his arm once and after a profane warning from the agent, kept still. “I don’t think he dared to blink an eyebrow after that,” she said. The man, according to Westbrook police, was Charles Pike, 72, of 120 Center St., Auburn. The police were mum on what Pike was wanted for.

Denise Watts of Westbrook spent Easter Sunday like she has spent many other days since her arrival at Boston Children’s Hospital to keep watch over her 9-year-old daughter, Amanda, who was admitted on March 12 with respiratory problems after choking on a hot dog while attending a Monster Truck Rally at the Cumberland County Civic Center. Doctors are intentionally keeping Amanda in a semi-conscious, sedated state, slowing down her metabolism to help heal the young girl’s lungs, her mother said.

Westbrook Alderman Lionel Dumond sent out a questioaire to residents offering choices on how he should vote on ways to save money. He offers “cut,” “hold,” or “raise” choices on 18 kinds of city expenses. He also asks citizens how they like tax bills four times a year.

Rene J. Daniel, a former educator in the Westbrook school system, has opened a new store called P.C.E.S. at 99B Larrabee Road, Westbrook. The business specializes in providing educational materials for teachers, parents and students.

Students could be moved around the Gorham school system, giving them more space at each school if a new middle school is built. One proposed location for the new building is behind the municipal offices. Currently, 298 seventh- and eighth-graders attend Charles C. Shaw School. A new school would accommodate around 400 sixth-, seventh- and eighth graders.

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