Eugene Boivin's Epic Rumford Nuclear Waste Rant

Joseph Eugene Boivin (1939-2010) was a native of Rumford, Maine and served as its Fire Chief until 1989. In late 1990, he performed this Epic Rant to John Williams and Matthew Scott of the nascent Maine Low-Level Radioactive Waste agency, which was charged by the Maine Legislature with finding some unlucky Maine town whose people were so stupid that they would accept a giant radioactive waste dump in their town, the waste being from the Maine Yankee nuclear reactor in Wiscasset, Maine.

You can hear Eugene's rant here.

At the time, I was a free-lance news reporter for the Lewiston Maine Sun-Journal newspaper and lived on Waldo Street in Rumford. Eugene Boivin showed up at the official 'getting to know you' meeting held by the state agency and gave Messrs. Williams and Scott a piece of his mind. His rant is very trenchant and was so forceful that I think it made the State of Maine give up trying to push this radioactive crap onto the present and future citizens of Rumford. The other place they were seriously looking at was land in the Bottle Lake Pluton near Lincoln, Maine claimed under treaty by the Penobscot Indian Nation. They were trying to push this garbage onto the people of Rumford or onto Native Americans on the Penobscot. They weren't holding meetings in Cape Elizabeth or Cumberland Foreside, as I recall. Kinda funny how that happens. Eventually, the State of Maine sent all of it to Barnwell, South Carolina where it is now entombed.

Eugene Boivin's Rant was very inspiring to me as a young (27 y.o.) reporter and citizen in 1990. It is important that people continue to exist who are not afraid to speak up for the common good in such a forceful manner, if only to serve as examples for the rest of us.

Sonny Probe 'does' the Androscoggin River

The Androscoggin River in Maine has the infamous repute of being so filthy and forlorn that it forced President Richard Milhous Nixon to sign the Clean Water Act in 1972. No, it didn't catch on fire, like the Cuyahoga in Cleveland, Ohio. Wet shit doesn't burn. It just smells like shit. Forever.

So here's the song.

Sonny Probe plays Roger Miller's "I Catch Myself Crying."

Here's a Sonny Probe performance of a Roger Miller song from the upcoming Sonny Probe release "The Lost Live Album."

This album was literally lost. No really. I found it in the cellar in a trash bag on Saturday. I had never listened to it before. It was raining like hell and about 50 degrees so I listened to it in the shed and there were sparks coming off the CD player, but that was because it was shorting out from the rain. And so the whole thing sounded like crap, even the parts where I spent 10 minutes tuning the guitar and then just standing there not doing anything. So I re-recorded everything on it and changed all the songs and words and notes while keeping it in the spirit of the original, which I never heard.

No, but seriously, this is from January 2002 in Bethel, Maine from the Night Which Was So Horribly Horrific That People Went to the Hospital and Some Vomited Even Before the Performance. It was a tough crowd but perserverance is a word that begins with a letter, so like an octopus we must all assemble small hiding spots from coconut husks and sometimes eat sharks and lament amphora depletion.