York County

So when the word affordability is used, it's now become interchangeable with the word unaffordable.

So we sort of have this interchangeable word of Cumberland County and York County being unaffordable for people to live in.

How do people afford to live here, whether it be to own or to rent? So, Maine housing, like finance agencies all across the country, has different approaches as to how we do that.

We try and be creative with the funds that we get and we try and sort of figure out what we can do with what we have.

Anyway, Diatribe.

Well, so what I want to know, because like I don't, I'm not from York County.

Actually, originally I'm from like up in central or western Maine.

And so like I've been down this way for about 10 years, but But yeah, tell me who you are and where you're from, and then we'll eventually get into why in the world you would want to get involved in politics in the sense of in the middle of the 2026 political divide.

Worked for the Saco Police Department, then a little later on, the Biddeford PD, I'm just naming the agencies now.

Also the Maine Marshal Service, I did some work there.

York County Sheriff's Office, spent a lot of time there.

especially working connected with the SOCOPD because I was doing investigations.

And it is such a great resource of stories in here.

Unfortunately, when I picked this book up, I had already finished and submitted my book on at York County.

If I had had this book when I was writing that, it probably would have been twice the size.

That's how much good stuff is in here.

Don't

you?

Well, I wish I had had this when I was, again, writing my book, Haunted York County.

I do go to Maine and do events every now and again, but not as often as other places.

I remember the Boston Globe, I think it was David Nye wrote a piece about how what we had done had left locals scratching their heads and opponents bewildered because we came out of nowhere and won that convention.

I remember it came down to York County literally the last, cause they call these things in alphabetical order.

And so, you know, Androscoggin County and, um, you know, I started calling out each County and, um, we, Aroostook County, and then we, we, and it's, it's literally still, we, we've, we're, we're behind Cranston still going because of what we had to do going into York County.

And, um, I remember I was in the room with Vice President Mondale and the national staff.

I was just the state director of a convention at the time.

And York had 113 or 115 votes.

delegates.

And I just and I knew Lenny Stern, a guy named Lenny Stern, fabulous organizer, was my York County director.

It was not long after sunrise, and Stephen Waterman, fresh from his dip in the river, had scrambled up the hillside from the hut in the alder bushes, where he had made his morning toilet.

An early ablution of this sort was not the custom of the farmers along the banks of the Saco, but the Waterman house was hardly a stone's throw from the water, and there was a clear, deep swimming-hole in the willow cove that would have tempted the busiest man, or the least cleanly, in York County.

Then, too, Stephen was a child of the river, born, reared, schooled on its very brink, never happy unless he were on it, or in it, or beside it, or at least within sight or sound of it.

The immensity of the sea had always silenced and overawed him, left him cold and feeling.

Next she peered into one of the bean-pots, and seemed pleased that there was still something in its depths.

Then she gathered the fragments neatly together in a basket, and, followed by her friend, clambered down the banks to a shady spot where the Boomshires were lined up expectantly.

It is not difficult to find a single fool in any community, however small, but a family of fools is fortunately somewhat rarer every county however can boast of one fool family and york county is always in the fashion with fools as with everything else the unique much-quoted and undesirable boomshires could not be claimed as indigenous to the saco valley for this branch was an offshoot of a still larger tribe inhabiting a distant township its beginnings were shrouded in mystery there was a french-canadian ancestor somewhere and a gipsy or indian grandmother they had always intermarried from time immemorial when one of the select men of their native place had been asked why the boomshires always married cousins and why the habit was not discouraged he replied that he really didn't know he supposed they felt it would be kind of odd to go right out and marry a stranger Lest Boomshire seem an unusual surname, it must be explained that the actual name was French, and could not be coped with by Edgewood or Pleasant River, being something quite as impossible to spell as to pronounce.

As the family had lived for the last few years somewhere near the Killick Cranberry Meadows, they were called, and completely described in the calling, the Cranberry Fool family.

And it's the down ballot races that we sometimes call the down ballot, which are the less important is what people think of them is like your city council, your school board, your house of representative, even some Senate races were within a hundred votes.

Like, so in 2024, there was one race I know in York County that was literally decided by a single vote.

that we, that Republicans won.

And I think there was another one somewhere else in the state where a Republican lost by one or two votes.