To the editor:
I am suggesting that the once-proposed Dickey Lincoln Hydro Project in northern Maine be put on the front burner. This project will save 2.3 million barrels of oil annually. An interview that John S. Day had with Sen. Ed Muskie around 1978 was published in the Bangor Daily News under “The Way It Might Have Been.” Muskie proposed to then Secretary of the Interior Stuart Udall that the Passamaq uoddy Bay tidal power project be combined with a dam on the Upper St. John River to produce a single massive hydro-electric generation project. President Kennedy went for the idea, and approved funding to begin planning for the project.
On Oct. 24, 1963, John F. Kennedy spoke at Homecoming at the University of Maine at Orono. He was supposed to make a big push for the Quoddy project, but put off the talk in favor of a major pronouncement on foreign policy. The President flew Air Force One over both the Passamaquoddy Bay and the St. John River to emphasize his support for the project. President Kennedy was killed in Dallas almost a month to the day later.
The Johnson Administration became preoccupied with the War on Poverty and later the Vietnam war, and Quoddy died. Dickey Lincoln kept limping along, Congress would appropriate a few hundred thousand dollars every few years, but never enough to actually begin construction.
Muskie said “Those millions of gallons of water/the power that could have been generated. A project like that would have lasted 100 years. It would have been around along time after the oil ran out, they could have built Quoddy for 80 million,” Muskie declared. At this time oil cost 50 cents a gallon. As the headline in the Bangor Daily proclaimed, I think often of “The Way It Might Have Been.”
On a personal note, Pete and Mary Day, my wife Joan and I attended Pres. Kennedy’s speech at Orono that beautiful autumn day. As he walked up the west side of the football field, the late Mary Day and myself got to shake hands with him. He said nice to see you to me, and he was a taller man than I had thought, very handsome and under direct sunlight his hair was brownish blonde.
It appears to me that our Governor, Senators and Representatives on both the state and national level should get behind this project. Their silence is deafening.
Westfield
