Bar Harbor Police Beat: True Stories from the Police Files of Mount Desert Island, Maine by Sassaman, Richard (1996) Paperback - Softcover

Sassaman, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0963733516 ISBN 13: 9780963733511

Publisher: Legends, Lies, And Local History, 1996

Synopsis

Bar Harbor Police Beat describes what the police in a Maine coastal vacation town did over a 10-year period.

About this title

About the Author

Richard Sassaman was an excellent high school student in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, graduating in the top 1/2% of his class. He soon dropped out of Duke University, however, and became a shiftless wanderer.

He has traveled widely in the United States, making some 60 cross-country trips (through over 2/3 of the nation's counties) in the last 30 years. His articles and photographs describing different aspects of America's history, places, and social customs have appeared in more than 50 magazines and newspapers, including Air & Space/Smithsonian, American Heritage, American History Illustrated, American Photographer, The Christian Science Monitor, Country Journal, Historic Traveler, Modern Maturity, Sea Frontiers, Sports Illustrated, Travel/Holiday, Travel & Leisure, Whole Earth Review, and Yankee. His work also is included in The Durability Factor (Rodale Press, 1982) and Helping Nature Heal (10 Speed Press, 1991).

In February 1998, with the inauguration of his weekly show Bar Harbor Beat on WMDI-FM, Sassaman became the area's radio talk show host. He first visited Bar Harbor, Maine in 1971, and moved there in 1986 with his wife, the artist Susan Gross. For the last 12 years they have been building their first house, which she designed, and since 1993 have worked even harder at raising their first child, son Ezra Rigel Sassaman (who also was her idea). The author maintains an office (sort of) in his bedroom in Bar Harbor, where he (occasionally) goes to work.

Sassaman himself has been arrested three times in his life, and (twice) talked his way out of it.

From the Back Cover

Law & Order, As Practiced Down East

Checking on reports of a large party in a field last Wednesday, officers discovered only one reportedly inebriated individual and a whole herd of cows.

Police received a report that someone had been throwing garbage, such as potatoes and fish, onto land next to a home. When they investigated, police found that another neighbor had thrown squid across the road.

According to police reports, the man was attempting to drive a vehicle down Cottage Street while sitting on the hood.

It was discovered that a visiting camper had dumped his vehicle's holding tank in the bank's parking lot. The 66-year-old Alabamian was summonsed for Release of Offensive Odors.

From the Inside Flap

Millions of people come each year to tour the scenic Maine coast and visit Bar Harbor, the most popular town in Vacationland. But few visitors, while sunning or sailing or shopping or snacking on lobsters, realize that this glorious paradise is actually a hotbed of

Crime Last Thursday, police received a report of suspicious circumstances at the Emerson School when an unidentifed caller reported seeing somebody inside the school late at night. [They] responded, and discovered a cardboard cutout of Michael Jackson hung in one of the doorways.

Violence A local man is still unsure whether or not he will press charges after another man reportedly bit the alligator off his Izod brand shirt.

Deceit Police received a complaint of three winter coats stolen from a Southwest Harbor residence, but the complainant soon called back. It seems the housekeeper had sent the coats off to the cleaners.

Passion According to officers, the teens, whose parents were notifed of the incident, did not see the officers approach because of steamed windows and their activities inside the car.

Bar Harbor Police Beat True Stories from the Official Files of the Police Forces of Mount Desert Island, Maine At last, the book that dares to blow the lid off the real Bar Harbor.

Also by the Author: Drums Along the Mohawk Gulliver's Travels Hamlet The Iliad Moby Dick The Pit and the Pendulum The Red Badge of Courage Silas Marner Uncle Tom's Cabin

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

(from chapter one) Most people around town will tell you Police Beat is their favorite feature in the newspaper, where they turn to first when they open the Times every Thursday. (Second most popular seems to be the obituaries; as one man once told me, I check them next, to see how I'm doin'.) Since starting my research, I've discovered that almost every true Bar Harborite will be happy to tell you his or her favorite Police Beat item of all time, if you ask politely. (Like with those potato chips, it's hard to stop at one, but most people have a special favorite.)

I've now read more than 13 years worth of Police Beat columns I started getting pretty sick of them near the end, to tell you the truth so I especially find it hard to choose just one. For sentimental reasons, I suppose, my favorite is the first PB item I ever remember seeing.

I was traveling out West at the time, when my sister the long-time Bar Harborite sent me a short clipping from the Times. One item only, with an opening sentence that got your attention right away:

A Bar Harbor man escaped injury after being struck by a gasoline pump on the 23rd.

The rest goes like this:

The incident occurred at the Cottage Street Variety Store. According to police reports, a 1972 Mercury, driven by so-and-so, 18, of Cedar Avenue, slid on ice and sheared off the regular gas pump. The pump hit so-and-so, 40, of Norway Drive, knocking him to the ground. Damage to the [Mercury] was listed at $100. Estimates of damages to the gas pump (including loss of revenue) were put at $2,000. (1-28-82)

I appreciate this item for two reasons. First, it's a modern-day metaphor, a predicament worthy of Kafka. (Or Chicken Little.) You're walking along happily, just minding your own business, when POW!, out of nowhere, a gasoline pump comes flying by and flattens you.

Second, like many Police Beat items, this one is lacking what Paul Harvey would call the Rest of the Story. That poor man did he see the pump coming? Did it get him in the back, like a cowardly villain out of the Old West? And how far down the icy street did this pedestrian-smashing pump slide? Was the man heading into the Municipal Building, to protest an increase in his property taxes; or was he coming out of the Shop n Save carrying two bags of groceries, headed for his station wagon, when he got mowed down?

I enjoy the fact that the items in Police Beat often leave a lot to the imagination, which usually is far more satisfying than real life.

Anyway, since I conceived this book, I've really wanted to read it. Being lazy, however, I started by avoiding the subject for five or six years. I figured my great idea the best of Police Beat was obvious, and that someone else soon would think of it. . . and do all the actual work.

I waited and waited, but nothing happened. And I still really wanted to read this book. Finally, one day I went to the bathroom in a MDI home, and there on the wall I found a Xeroxed sheet of paper. Over time, the homeowner, who I'll call Mr. X (not his real name, which is Terry Good), had cut out 17 separate PB items from the paper and assembled them into one spectacular column, making it look like everything had happened during one definitely exotic week.

Nude bongo playing. Alfred Hitchcock making obscene phone calls. A baggie of crushed Tylenol sold for $137. A dead cow at the Seal Cove town landing. A poetry student reported missing, but not really missing at all.

And last but not least (she was first, on the page) the famous woman driver in Southwest Harbor who reportedly made a U-turn in heavy traffic while eating a banana, brushing her hair, and bouncing up and down in her seat. Later that day, officer George Dineen spotted the [woman driving] along Clark Point Road with a fully extended umbrella sticking out of the driver's side window. When the officer stopped the car, the woman reportedly asked him, Do you think it's going to rain? (6-23-88)

Here at last was the book I'd been waiting for, although it was only 17 items long. Mr. X had done a Police Beat haiku instead of the larger volume I'd imagined. Nonetheless, it was enough to make me reluctantly admit to myself that I didn't want to wait any longer to read the book you're now holding in your hands (unless you're a 2-year-old, or a chimpanzee, reading while using your feet).

Edition details

• Publisher: Legends, Lies, And Local History
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0963733516
• ISBN 13: 9780963733511
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 164