Word: ellsworth
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That was big news. Big news elsewhere, though, often doesn't seem quite so pressing in Ellsworth. The October stock-market crash got one sentence last fall; the blueberry industry, a mainstay of the region, got a five-part series. But nothing is read more closely than the court page, a list of everyone caught speeding or driving tipsy or lobstering without a license. "I want to see if any of my buddies are in there," says Carmen Griffin, a waitress at the Pineland Diner on Main Street. It may be a yawn in Portland, Me., but in Ellsworth...
When Editor Wiggins, 84, wanted to tell his readers, many of whom live by and from the sea, what was happening in the America's Cup race, the weekly sent a reporter to Australia. The story was relayed by satellite to Washington, wired to an Ellsworth bank and then walked across Main Street by the bank's vice president...
...That's how things have always been done in Ellsworth, one neighbor counting on another. Ellsworth is the shire town of Hancock County, some two-thirds up the Maine coast, and gateway to the summer resorts of Bar Harbor. For more than 200 years, the town has hugged the Union River, which spills out into Union River Bay and eventually the bold Atlantic. The town was named for Oliver Ellsworth, an early Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Folks here are friendly. They can't help themselves. But Down Easters draw a line between outsiders -- "people from away" -- and locals...
...Ellsworth has reason to be wary of outsiders, who come here seeking tranquillity and disturb what tranquillity there is. They clog streets, drive up land prices and bring with them some anxieties they hoped to escape. And they talk funny. Not since the fire of 1933 swept down Main Street, consuming 130 buildings, has the character of the town and the region been so threatened. "We're getting a little class," says Victoria Smallidge, owner of the Pineland Diner, who moved here in 1970. Call it what you will, some locals are uneasy about a diner that offers a wine...
...Aesop-like bimonthly column. Once a "mover and a shaker," he steered the Washington Post's coverage of every crisis from the Berlin Wall to the Viet Nam War. No more. "You can't flatter yourself in the belief that you can leverage the world from the perimeter of Ellsworth, Me.," he says. "But I enjoy rural life a lot better than I do big cities. I'm at home in this environment." Happiness, he says, is an old age shared with Ben Franklin's three faithful friends: "an old wife, an old dog and ready money...