100 Years Ago: 1922

Miss Bernice Nelke, College street, Lewiston, sailed July 19 from Hoboken, N. J. for Vienna, Austria, where she will study music for a year. Miss Nelke is the only daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Nelke, being born at Livermore Falls and moving to Lewiston with her parents when a small child. She is a fine pianist and has taken lessons for many years from the best teachers. During the past year she was pianist at Smith College at Northampton.

50 Years Ago: 1972

Lewiston’s Central Fire Station committee voted last night to use a dark gray mortar instead of the traditional white for the building’s brick facing.

Architect George Head showed the committee small sections of the brick which would be used, and the committee decided it liked the darker mortar better. The committee also decided to eliminate a partition underneath a stairway near the garage for the chief’s car. The chief explained that he wanted the space, which would have been closed off for storage and records he would seldom need. The partition was to have been made of plaster, separating the space under the stairs from a closet. The change is not expected to cost any more money.

The board also voted to have steel beams for the first floor, fireproofed at a cost of $823. The fireproofing is done by putting reinforced concrete under the beams.

25 Years Ago: 1997

It was much like the opening day at summer camp anywhere in Maine. The 170 girls and boys stood in a sea of green tshirts line at the entrance of what was Camp Powhatan on Pleasant Lake in Otisfield. Nervous smiles and folded arms hinted at first-day-at-camp jitters.

The campers,13 to 15, had gathered for an opening day announcement. About 60 counselors, 20 facilitators, and other camp personnel were there too. But this wasn’t just any summer camp. It was the Seeds of Peace International Summer Camp, founded in 1993 by former White correspondent and Hearst Newspaper foreign editor John Wallach to help foster lasting peace in the Middle East. And these just weren’t any campers. Each had been hand-picked by the government of lsrael, or the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza, or the governments of neighboring Arabian nations of Egypt. Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia and Qatar.

Among the campers was the daughter of Saeb Erakat, second in command to Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat. Another is a cousin of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  All were selected, from the 2000 who applied, on the basis of recommendations from their and their capacity of shared communications.

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