Maine
Opinion: My doppelganger cut a wide swath in Maine broadcasting
The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
Murray Carpenter is a journalist in Belfast and author of “Caffeinated” and “Sweet and Deadly.”
Here’s some great advice for radio journalism, memorable, pithy, and always useful: “Keep your ears open, and your mouth shut.” I’ve passed it along to many aspiring radio reporters. Oddly, this advice came to me via my doppelganger, the Maine broadcast pioneer Murray Carpenter.
I first heard about him in 1997 when I was working as a reporter for The Republican Journal, a weekly in Belfast. When talking to sources, I had the same experience a few times. “Murray Carpenter,” they’d say, “Did you used to work up around Bangor?” I’d say no, I was new to the area. But I got the idea that another Murray might have been out there somewhere.
A few years later, I was publishing Northern Sky News, a newsprint monthly covering the environment of New England and the Maritimes. Carol Carpenter Ketcham, a subscriber in Connecticut, emailed to say that her father had worked in Maine for years as a media entrepreneur. He was Murray Carpenter. Ketcham filled in some of the blanks, and it became clear that my doppelganger had cut a wide swath.
He arrived in Maine in the early 1950s after working in advertising in New York, and began working with former Maine Gov. Horace Hildreth at his Bangor AM radio station WABI. By January 1953, when WABI launched the first TV station in northern New England, Carpenter was the manager and a co-owner with Hildreth.
According to Judith Round’s history of Bangor TV, things got lively when Carpenter applied for a radio license in Portland: “Guy Gannett, another newspaper and radio station owner, convinced Carpenter to pull out of the Portland market, in exchange for licensing preference for a second station in Bangor — WGUY (Channel 2). Carpenter, who had relinquished his ownership of WABI, was now back in Bangor competing against his former partner, Horace Hildreth.”
WGUY never became a TV station, and Carpenter soon sold the radio station WGUY (which evolved into WKIT, later owned by Stephen and Tabitha King). But he kept the studio on Mount Hope Avenue and used it to launch the TV station WTWO in 1954. Carpenter sold WTWO in 1958, and it became WLBZ.
By 1963 Carpenter was in Florida, where he owned the pioneering FM station WTCX. He died of Alzheimer’s in 1990 before I became a journalist, but our connections mounted.
In 2022, a story I reported for NPR caught the ear of Robin Ketcham, in Ohio. He reached out to me to see if I might be related to his grandfather, Murray Carpenter. (Robin is the son of Carol, who’d contacted me 20 years earlier.) Ketcham passed on more details about Carpenter, including that he was a pilot who loved to fly his Mooney airplane. Ketcham said his grandfather had the first TV in Maine; it’s still in the family and it still works.
The most notable connection to my doppelganger came a bit earlier, in 2007, when I was working as a radio reporter in Maine Public’s Bangor studio. I was lucky to work alongside Maine radio veteran Barry Darling, who was eager to hear if I was related to Murray Carpenter.
Darling says Carpenter was one of the most interesting people he met in over 50 years of Maine radio and television work, a broadcasting genius who cobbled Channel 2 together from a heap of used equipment from a station in Puerto Rico. And he had interesting quirks, Darling says. He’d often drop off the radar and go fishing for a few days, leaving the station in the hands of his employees.
Darling’s earliest memory of Carpenter was when he was 13. He and his father, who worked in broadcasting, went to a reception at Carpenter’s house in Bangor. Darling’s father had told Carpenter that Barry was interested in getting into radio.
“Let me give you a piece of advice that I hope you’ll remember,” Carpenter said to the young Darling, “Keep your ears open and your mouth shut.”
FALMOUTH, Maine (WABI) – The now former commissioner of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife has a new role.
Judy Camuso has been selected as the new president of Maine Audubon.
She will take over Andy Beahm’s position.
Beahm will be retiring next month.
Camuso will become the first woman to lead the environmental organization.
She became the first woman to become commissioner of the MDIFW back in 2019, a position she held for seven years.
Copyright 2026 WABI. All rights reserved.
TOPSFIELD, Maine — Jenna Stoddard is not sure where her son will spend his days when he starts preschool next fall.
Sending him to East Range II School would be convenient and continue a legacy. Stoddard lives just down the street and her husband graduated eighth grade there in 2007, one in a class of three. Topsfield’s population has dropped since then. The school now has five students, two teachers, few extracurricular activities and nobody trained to teach music, art, gym or health.
Stoddard’s son is too young for her to worry about that now. But the school may not be open by the time he is ready to go. Topsfield, a town of just 175 residents, will vote on whether to close the school on April 30. If it closes, the boy would likely be sent to preschool up to 30 minutes away in Princeton or Baileyville.
“That’s a pretty fair distance for a kid, a 4-year-old, who is now on a bus all by himself,” she said. “[If] school starts at [7:45 a.m.], what time is the bus picking 4-year-olds up here? And what time is he going to get home at?”
Topsfield is an extreme example of how an aging, shrinking population and rising property taxes are forcing Maine towns to make difficult choices about their community institutions. Just over a dozen people came to a Wednesday hearing on the idea of closing the school. The crowd was mostly in favor of it.
“It is emotional to close the school in a town,” Superintendent Amanda Belanger of the sprawling Eastern Maine Area School System said then. “But we do feel it’s in the best interest of the students in the town.”
Teacher Paula Johnson walked a reporter through the building, which is small by Maine standards but cavernous for its five students. It has four classrooms, a small library, and a gymnasium. There is also a cook and a custodian for the tiny school.
A hallway trophy case serves as a reminder of when the school was big enough to field basketball teams. Topsfield’s student population has never been large, but the school’s population has dropped dramatically over the past few years. It had 25 students in 2023, with many coming from nearby Vanceboro, which closed its own school in 2015.
As the student population dwindled, the cost of sending students to Topsfield climbed. With fewer students to defray the costs, Vanceboro officials realized they would be paying $23,000 per student by the last school year. So they opted to direct students to nearby Danforth, where tuition was only $11,000 per student.
East Range lost seven students from Vanceboro, bringing its enrollment below 10. Under Maine law, that means the district may offer students the option to go elsewhere. Parents of the remaining students in grades 5 through 8 took the option and sent their kids to Baileyville. This school began the year with eight students; three have since pulled out.
In Topsfield, Johnson teaches four of the remaining five, holding lessons for pre-K through second grade in one classroom. Another one down the short hallway is home base for the other teacher. She focuses on the school’s lone fourth grader and occasionally teaches one of Johnson’s first graders, who is learning at an advanced level.
The other teacher, who holds a special education certificate despite having no students with those needs, plans to leave at the end of the school year. If the school stays open, that will leave Johnson responsible for educating Topsfield’s youngest students, though the school will need to budget for a part-time special education teacher just in case.
After 11 years at the school, Johnson is not sure what she will do if voters shut it down.
“We’ll see what happens here,” she said.
Topsfield’s school board, which operates as a part of the Eastern Maine Area School System, is offering its residents a choice: continue funding the school only for students between preschool and second grade at an estimated cost of $434,000 next year or send all students elsewhere, which would cost less than $200,000.
At Wednesday’s hearing, the attendees leaned heavily toward the latter option. Deborah Mello said she moved from Rhode Island to Topsfield years ago to escape high taxes.
“It’s not feasible for the town of Topsfield,” she said. “We cannot afford it and it’s not like the children don’t have a school to go to.”
Others bemoaned the burden of legal requirements for the small district, including the need to provide special education teachers even if they don’t need one. Board members also mentioned that in 2028, the district will become responsible for educating 3-year-olds under a new state law. That adds another layer of uncertainty to future budgeting.
“It sounds like we’ve been burdened something severely by this program and that program by the Department of Education, to the point where a small school can’t even exist,” resident Alan Harriman said.
“And that’s been happening for a long time,” East Range board chair Peggy White responded.
Daniel O’Connor is a Report for America corps member who covers rural government as part of the partnership between the Bangor Daily News and The Maine Monitor, with additional support from BDN and Monitor readers.
BANGOR, Maine (WABI) – Good morning and Happy Sunday everyone. Skies are cloudy with fog across much of Maine this morning. Rain has entered locations along the interstate and to the northwest. Temperatures vary from the upper 30s to mid 40s. Winds are out of the SE between about 5-15 mph.
Today will be a wet and impactful day with rain and even snow anticipated as a large cold front passes through Maine. Skies will be cloudy with plenty of fog lasting through the morning. Rain will expand across the interstate by the late morning hours, reaching Downeast locations by midday/the early afternoon.
By the early to midafternoon, temperatures will start to drop across northwestern locations as the cold front passes through Maine. This will result in rain turning over to mixed precipitation and eventually snow across the Western Mountains, Moosehead region, and Northern Maine. Rain will continue steadily and at times heavily across the foothills, Interstate, Coast, and Downeast. A few thunderstorms are even possible closer to the coast.
Snow will expand across areas to the northwest of the interstate this evening, reaching all the way down to Interior Midcoast communities, the Bangor region, and Interior Downeast areas by sunset and into the start of the night. Precipitation will taper off across Western Maine shortly after sunset, before exiting the entire state around midnight tonight. High temps today will vary from the low 40s to low 50s with SSE to NW gusts reaching 20-25 mph.
Snowfall totals will vary under 2 inches across Western, Northern, and Interior Downeast locations. However, a few pockets of 2-4 inches are possible, mostly in higher elevations across the mountains. Rainfall totals will accumulate around a half inch to three quarters of an inch when all is said and done.
Precipitation will be out of Maine by midnight tonight, with cloudy conditions giving way to mostly clear skies by sunrise. Lows overnight will dip back below freezing across much of the state, from the low 20s to mid 30s tonight, so cover up any plants or flowers outside. WNW gusts will reach 20-25 mph. A Small Craft Advisory is expected offshore.
Skies will be partly to mostly sunny across the interstate and coast on Monday morning. However, by the late morning to midday hours, clouds will build with a few scattered rain and snow showers in spots. Conditions will remain on the cloudier side in the afternoon before clearing up around sunset into the start of Monday night. Highs will be chilly on Monday, from the low 30s to upper 40s. WNW to SW gusts will be a bit breezy, reaching 20-25 mph, which will add to the wind chill factor.
High pressure will build on Monday night, remaining overhead on Tuesday. Skies will be sunny in the morning, becoming partly to mostly sunny in the afternoon. Highs will remain cool, in the 40s across the board with North to SW gusts only reaching 15-20 mph.
A weaker low-pressure system could bring showers across Maine on Wednesday and Thursday. There is a bit of model uncertainty on exactly when it will impact Maine. The GFS has impacts on Wednesday, while the EURO, GRAF, and GDPS models have most of the impacts on Thursday. We will continue to monitor this system and potential impacts. All it looks to provide as of now are cloudier skies and rain showers, with some snow shower chances farther to the North.
By Friday and Saturday, conditions are trending on the drier side with sunshine and average temperatures returning to the forecast.
SUNDAY: Highs from low 40s to low 50s. Cloudy with AM fog. Rain becoming widespread throughout the day, turning over to snow to the north & west during PM. SSE to NW gusts reach 20-25 mph.
MONDAY: Highs from low 30s to upper 40s. Partly to mostly sunny early. Developing clouds with scattered rain/snow showers by midday/afternoon. WNW to SW gusts reach 20-25 mph.
TUESDAY: Highs throughout the 40s. Sunnier AM. Partly to mostly sunny PM. North to SW gusts reach 15-20 mph.
WEDNESDAY: Highs from low 40s to low 50s. Mostly cloudy with a few rain showers. Few AM snow showers possible North. SSE to SSW gusts reach 20-25 mph.
THURSDAY: Highs from mid 40s to mid 50s. Cloudier skies with rain showers possible. Some AM snow showers possible North. NW gusts reach 20-25 mph.
FRIDAY: Highs from upper 40s to mid 50s. Partly cloudy. NNW gusts reach 20 mph.
Copyright 2026 WABI. All rights reserved.
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