If you have been trying to find the Cat Calendar Contest on Kingdom Animal Shelter's website, you know that it isn't there - yet.  I heard from Helen this morning that there are technical difficulties getting the voting process to work.  Those kinds of things are tricky - just ask Fred!  We haven't done voting on our site, but getting all the Ice Out Contest ticket pages to operate flawlessly took lots of time and caused a few headaches.

Keep watching - as soon as we have the information that the process is operating, I'll let you know.  Then you can begin voting (one vote per household per day, as I understand it) for your favorite kitty picture.  I'm anxious to just see all the photos.  I sent three, if I remember correctly, of Woody, and I'm anxious to see his "competition"!

I think I mentioned that I'm scanning all the raw material we used for the Cabot oral history book.  As I go through the pages of each interview (I've done about six or seven), I can take time to just scan the page, otherwise I would never get through, and besides that, if I lose my concentration I forget where I am in the process of scanning.  When that happens, I may omit a page or scan one twice, and since I'm scanning to pdf, that's a pretty big deal because the resulting file is a continuous pdf and if something is left out or an additional page is added, it's not an easy process to fix.  Some of these interviews are 50 or more pages long, and I do not want to have to do them over.  Consequently, I try not to interrupt the rhythm when I'm scanning.

That said, I do catch glimpses of interesting stuff, or when I do the index for each interview, I can then go back and read something that caught my eye.  Today I was doing the interview Amanda Legare did with Dr. Frank Caffin, who lived and served the Cabot and surrounding communities in more recent years.  He was 78 at the time of the interview, in 1991.  He came to Cabot in 1950, when the town advertised for a doctor, offering $2,000 for one to locate here.  Dr. Caffin said that after six months "we were making money, so I gave the money back to the town."  Some years later, it was Dr. Caffin who provided Cabot's first ambulance, a vehicle that had been used by a funeral director in Marshfield.  The funeral director, Richard Houghton, gave it to Dr. Caffin, who donated it to the town.  Dr. Caffin asked the town to add the vehicle to the group policy they had in force for their trucks and tractors, and the town clerk told Caffin,"You're nothing but a God damned outsider trying to show the natives how to run the village.  We'll never use it and don't want it."

So Dr. Caffin insured it himself, which he said cost over $4,000.  That was in 1967.  He then proposed the ambulance service to the town with the proviso they would serve not only Cabot, but  anywhere else they were needed, because other towns like Danville and Hardwick didn't have ambulances at the time.  The townspeople voted for his proposal and Cabot Ambulance Service was born.  Mrs. Caffin helped train crews for Cabot and eventually other towns, and they managed well on donations.  Mrs. Caffrin later became district director of ambulance training programs.

Dr. Frank Caffin died on July 5, 1991; his wife, Virginia Caffin, died on March 29, 1999.

I remember watching the Caffins launching their extremely large boat here at Joe's Pond some summers.  Frank had been in the Navy, and the boat was a cherished reminder, I think.  I wonder what happened to that boat?