Monday, March 18, 2019

John Hickenlooper's time Down East in 1970


A few years ago, I was in Denver writing this POLITICO story on how the city built a metro-wide light rail system from scratch, a story that led to my interviewing then-governor (and former Denver mayor) John Hickenlooper.

He gets on the phone, hears I'm from Maine, and first thing he says is "You must know (D.L Geary Brewing founder) David Geary" (both men are micro brewing pioneers); the second is that as a teen he spent a summer volunteering at a free school in Maine. That school, it turned out, was in Robbinston and had been co-founded by Susan Tureen, who had been pushed out of her public school teaching job probably because she was married to Tom Tureen, the Passamaquoddy tribe's new attorney, in the midst of the epic land claims fight.

Now Hickenlooper is running for president, so I put a fuller story together for this week's Maine Sunday Telegram. Enjoy.

For more on the situation in Easternmost Maine in 1970, see the 29-part Press Herald series "Unsettled," especially Chapters 10 to 13.


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