Hello, Class of ‘79! Hope you are well and enjoying the good things that life has to offer. Please remember to send me any news you’d like to share. I, and I think your classmates, enjoy hearing about what you are doing. We are also still looking for ideas about a class gift to commemorate our 50th year after graduation (yikes!) so please send them along.
Jenny Wood Collier wrote, “I graduated with a degree in social work in ’79 and now 46 years later, I am moving towards retirement. I feel truly blessed that I didn’t get into Colby (where my brother went) and ended up in Maine. My love of Maine has been lifelong. I don’t think social workers ever really retire but I am shifting focus from my current job as CIT coordinator (assists law enforcement, corrections officer, and Juvenile Justice workers in dealing with mental health crisis situations) with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and a local county here in northeast Pennsylvania, to doing very part-time online counseling.
“I am extremely grateful to the University of Maine for providing me with the wonderful basis in the field I have spent a lifetime working within. My four years at UMaine were some of the best of my life and I have made lifelong friends. I am still close with my roommate Gail Hall Aseltine and we try to see each other each year. I also remain close to other roommates and dorm mates (Dunn and Hart Halls) and people I worked with at Wells cafeteria. A bunch of us try to get together in Maine every few years. We hope to have a get-together next summer again after a couple years that didn’t come together.”
Earl M. Anderson spent most of his interscholastic basketball coaching career in the Newport-Pittsfield area, beginning with the boys’ team at Maine Central Institute in Pittsfield from 1986 to 1990. He also coached boys’ basketball at Hampden Academy in 1994 and 1995 while still teaching at MCI. Earl also coached the Nokomis girls’ basketball program from 1995 to 2007, including a three-year stretch from 2001 through 2003, when his teams compiled a 61-5 record and won the 2001 Class A state championship, a second Eastern Maine crown in 2003, and reached a third regional final in 2002. He was hired as the boys’ head coach at Nokomis in 2021 and led the team to a Class A state championship in 2022. Earl is one of only a few Maine coaches to have won girls and boys basketball state titles at the same school. He did it with an amazing team — all the Flagg boys — Hunter, Ace, and Cooper Flagg. Cooper described him in this way, “He just expected us to play with 100 percent effort every time we were on the court. And if we weren’t giving that, then we were going to be sitting on the bench. Every day in practice, we were running on the court. You’re never walking off with him.” Earl also served as athletic administrator at both MCI and Nokomis before retiring from a 33-year career in education in 2013.
Greg Wilfert has been the park manager of Scarborough Beach State Park since 1983. He has been a lifeguard at the beach for more than 50 years starting at age 17 and has rescued more than 100 people — he stopped counting after he reached 100! In 1993 the beach became privately managed following state budget cuts. Greg leased the land from Sprague Corporation and eventually went into business with them, forming Black Point Resource Management, and they have been managing the beach for 26 years. He owns three water rescue Newfoundland dogs who have been taught how to rescue and support lifeguards. He only takes off one day a month during the summer season — to groom the dogs! He plans to be a lifeguard as long as he can.
Dale Phillips has some new writing out — Halls of Fear, a collection of scary stories; A Great Reckoning, the seventh Zack Taylor mystery; a story “Gas,” in Snakeberry: Best New England Crime Stories 2025. The anthology will be published as a trade paperback and ebook. The story was inspired by a painting by Edward Hopper. He will be leading a discussion on the publishing business at Maine Crime Wave, a mystery conference in Portland, ME, and he will be on two podcasts: “Bringing Life To Characters” with R. Weir, and Bonnie D. Graham’s “The Future of Publishing + AI.”
Congratulations, Dan Warren, on your retirement after 42 years practicing law in Scarborough, ME. Stop by the Oak Hill Professional Center to see the beautiful plaque commemorating history/ownership of the building (including the Jones & Warren law office).
Hope to hear from you!