A percentage of people seem to be hard-wired or drawn to community service, leadership roles, and events in which they can serve their neighbors and fellow citizens. The Amateur "HAM" Radio Service offers a path to many rewarding public service opportunities.

Amateur Radio is regulated by the Federal Communications Commission, and one of the primary purposes for the existence of the Amateur Radio Service is "the value of the amateur service to the public as a voluntary noncommercial communication service, particularly with respect to providing emergency communications."

By Paul Sylvain

While Machias might serve up one heck of a July 4th parade, and throw a pretty good Blueberry Festival, the western Washington County town of Milbridge is not to be outdone when it comes to celebrating its annual weekend-long Milbridge Days each July. 

Whether you spend only a few hours or most of every day there, you’ll find plenty to see and do. And when you wrap up the entire weekend in clear, sunny, near perfect summer weather, as it was this past weekend, it can’t get much better than that.

By Paul Sylvain

More often than not, the first couple of select board meetings following the annual town meeting are fairly routine. Such was the case at the Machias select board’s July 23 session. While it was light on business, it was long on discussion, where the bulk of the 80-minute meeting centered on the Upper Machias Bay Master Plan.

By Will Tuell

Dr. Zafar Ahmad, who began practicing orthopedics at Down East Community Hospital (DECH) in Machias late last year, may be a long way from Great Britain where he grew up and studied medicine, but the Pakistani native said in an interview last week that he feels right at home in Downeast Maine mending broken bones, replacing hips, and helping patients from the area’s labor-intensive fishing industry get back on their feet. 

by Jonathan Reisman

The increasingly likely prospect that the voters of New York City will select Zohran Mamdani as mayor has left me appalled but not really surprised. Nominating an openly antisemitic communist is at least an honest move by the Democratic Party, and perhaps it follows the sage advice of AOC (top House Democratic fundraiser) and “JC” (Jasmine Crockett) for “authenticity.”

By Paul Sylvain

Washington County Sheriff Barry Curtis and Commissioners David Burns, Billy Howard, and Courtney Hammond are weighing the possibility of entering into a county vehicle leasing arrangement with Enterprise Fleet Management Services in Boston.

If an agreement is reached, it would mean that, instead of replacing aging vehicles by purchasing them through traditional car dealerships, the county would eventually be replacing them at a regular five-year interval through Enterprise.

By Nancy Beal

Nearly 40 Jonesporters turned out last week for a second look at a budget for their elementary school. It was a mob compared to the handful of voters who rejected an earlier version of the budget in a late May meeting at which two of the three school board members were absent. 

Word had spread about the earlier failure, and, as several of the school’s teachers had firmly predicted, the “right” people were there at the second meeting and approved the budget by a vote of 30 to 2.

Selectman Alley Resigns, Cites Work Demand

By Nancy Beal

Jonesport’s special town meeting on ordinance changes, originally set for July 23, has been postponed a week to 6 p.m. Wednesday, July 30, at the Jonesport Elementary School gymnasium.

The change was announced at the selectmen’s July 16 meeting and was prompted by the need to comply with posting and publishing schedules by which residents are informed of events on which they have a vote.

By Will Tuell

The Machias Area Little League has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years, as several of its baseball and softball teams have regularly punched their tickets to the state tournament. As Machias’s prestige as a league has grown, so too has enthusiasm amongst players, their families, and fans. 

By Paul Sylvain

With scarcely three weeks until the annual Machias Wild Blueberry Festival’s musical opens for its all-too-brief four-night run at the Centre Street Congregational Church, Gene Nichols and company are hitting their weekly rehearsals hard.

This year’s production, titled The Pringle Family Re-enactors, was written and is being directed by Nichols. With about 30 parodies of mostly well known songs planned for the show, calling it ambitious is an understatement.

Holmes, Pelivanis Smash Grand Slams in Offensive Outbursts

By Will Tuell

The Machias Area Little League 12U baseball team has clinched a berth in the state Little League championship playoffs, set to begin later this week at Beal Field in Machias. Despite outscoring opponents 56-7, the squad, coached by Michael Fergerson and Ryan Harmon, still had to play their way into the tourney, where many of them grew up playing ball. 

By Doss Dennison

The Jacksonville Campground in East Machias is gearing up for its 160th year of hosting its annual week-long Christian camp meeting July 20-25. But before detailing the camp meeting’s schedule of events, I want to share some of the campground’s fascinating history, including events that led up to its beginning.

It doesn’t seem possible that the United States of America could be so divided that it would draw a line, choose sides, and fight the bloodiest war in our history amongst ourselves. Or, does it? 

Down East Community Hospital recently added a new GE state-of-the-art Revolution Ascend CT scanner to its arsenal of state-of-the-art diagnostic tools.

This project started in December of 2024 by researching different brands of scanners that would best fit the hospital’s Imaging Department’s needs and which brand would provide the high-quality imaging DECH has grown to expect for our patients. Imaging staff fully researched different CT scanners, then visited a GE facility in Milwaukee in January to see what they had to offer.

By Paul Sylvain

Historic Liberty Hall will open its doors to the public for a grand open house from 1-4 p.m. Saturday, July 26, at 325 Port Road/Route 92, in Machiasport. The event comes 152 years after the construction of the majestic building, just a stone’s throw from the Gates House, was completed in 1873. 

The event’s organizers say the focus of this year’s open house is on the building’s theatrical history. The group also hopes the event will raise awareness and funds to continue restoration work to return the building to use by the community.

By Paul Sylvain

Machias set a high bar on Friday for next year’s Semiquincentennial Independence Day parade. One visitor to the area from Bangor was overheard saying as the last vehicle passed by, “Wow, what a parade! It’s even better than Bangor’s.” 

Selectmen Approve Feasibility Study

By Nancy Beal

Jared Farn-Guillette of the Maine Department of Transportation has been visiting Jonesport for two years. He periodically makes the rounds of the town’s roads with the selectmen, soliciting suggestions about what the town might want for improvements. 

By Will Tuell

Residents of Whiting will have a rare opportunity to celebrate a two-hundredth birthday this weekend as town officials prepare for the town’s bicentennial July 11-13.

While the actual two-hundredth birthday of Whiting was Feb. 15, 2025, organizer Mary Alice Look said in a recent interview that locals have been planning a summer celebration for over a year now.

By Jayna Smith

After decades of planning and years of construction, a new six-mile stretch of highway connecting I-395 to Route 9 officially opened to traffic Friday, June 27, 2025, marking the completion of one of Maine’s most significant recent transportation infrastructure projects.

The $107 million project — formally known as the I-395/Route 9 Connector — extends east from Brewer to Eddington, creating a more direct route for travelers and commercial vehicles between the Bangor-Brewer area and eastern Maine, including access to Atlantic Canada.

Review by Paul Sylvain

In my Sept. 4, 2024, review of Pitch Black Ribbons’ Aug. 29 show at Bad Little Falls Park, I wrote, “As for me, I hope it's not another year before I see them again. Their show … was a genuine late summer treat.”

Call it a self-fulfilling prophecy, but fortunately, I didn’t have to wait a year and managed to catch brothers Clint and Cody Phipps on July 3, in the third of this summer’s Kitchen Concerts at Bad Little Falls Park. 

Fishermen’s Pottery Uniquely Downeast

By Nancy Beal

Broderick Alley is a full-time Beals Island lobster fisherman with the maximum allowable number of lobster traps — 800 — which he hauls from a 43-foot lobster boat named Miss Jennifer. 

The boat is named after his daughter, Jennifer Ciappetta, who also lives on Beals and, like her father, fishes 800 traps from her 36-foot Bigfoot & Carissa, named for her two standard poodles. They act as each other’s sternman, hauling his gang of traps one day and hers the next.

By Phil Stuart

Fred Kneeland Jr. of Cherryfield will be inducted into the Maine Baseball Hall of Fame on Oct. 26 in Portland. Freddie follows in the footsteps of Addison’s Dickie Norton who was inducted in 2023 and joins a surprising number of Downeasters selected for that honor. 

Kneeland becomes the 16th Washington County resident to enter the Hall of Fame and the second from Cherryfield, joining major leaguer Carlton Willey, who was in the initial class back in 1970.