Dear Editor:

Not long ago, the Boothbay golf course was a nine-hole delight offering the challenge of fighting  a chipmunk for the golf ball you shot into the woods. To play, twice around, you paid $8. Beer and stories flowed. The beer was good, stories, especially golf stories, were suspect.

Behind the first tee was the Ocean View Cemetery. A lovely man named Frank and his wife co-managed the course. It was Frank who advised the curious that a large body of water at one time fronted the cemetery. It was built as advertised.

How things change.

Frank and his wife are gone, replaced by a golf magnate intent on changing the way people live and drive.

He is so dedicated to altering the feel, character and appearance of Boothbay that complacent selectmen and their town manager, in gratitude for his making Boothbay a Myrtle Beach of the north, his willingness, in secret, accompanied only by his lawyer and a construction firm, to share with them a personal vision of what Boothbay in the future will look like, might be willing to replace atop the monument that tired-looking Union soldier with a visage of a modern golfer, clad in plus-fours, wearing eye-shades and, in place of a rifle, a #2 iron donated by his pro shop.

Things change. They really do.

Paul E. McArdle
Boothbay