The Bollard Bulletin: December 3, 2024
Cartoon Tuesday: Fighting on, like Monte Paulsen
Monte Paulsen and Gary Santaniello co-founded Casco Bay Weekly in 1988, publishing it from an apartment on Clark Street in Portland’s West End. When I moved to town 10 years later and got a part-time job at CBW as its listings editor, both men had moved on and away, so I never met Monte, the founding editor, though his free-thinking outlook and rebelliousness still guided the alt-weekly’s ethos. And when The Bollard began life in 2005 in a West End apartment around the corner from the original CBW HQ, it was intended to keep that paper’s voice and spirit alive.
Last night, Santaniello, the founding publisher, sent me a link to a remembrance of Paulsen, who died on June 26. It’s a stunning story — even for many of Paulsen’s former colleagues in journalism and green-home construction, the field he later entered — because few knew he struggled for most of his life with hard-drug addition. He succumbed to a fentanyl overdose on a bench late at night in a rough section of Victoria, British Columbia. He was only 61.
I hope you’ll take a few minutes to read editor David Beers’ beautiful remembrance of Paulsen in his publication, The Tyee, an independent investigative-journalism website in B.C. for which Monte contributed work. “This captures him pretty well,” my CBW/Bollard colleague Al Diamon, who worked with Paulsen, wrote about Beers’ piece. “He was a visionary and sometimes an asshole. He was tough to deter when he was wrong and impossible when he was right.”
Some of the same scourges Paulsen took on, like slumlords and hate groups, are battles The Bollard still fights. Our “That’s My Dump!” series, for example, was directly inspired by his work outing negligent property speculators in downtown Portland. So this post, and everything The Bollard does, is in furtherance of the stubborn declaration Monte and Gary made 36 years ago: Maine must have a fearlessly independent press willing to expose exploiters of every stripe and uplift and enlighten its people. I’ll always be grateful to Monte and Gary for breaking the ground from which this alt-monthly magazine grows. May this spirit never rest, but always revive.
Now take it away, Bollardhead…
Music
Andy’s Old Port Pub
Open blues jam
7 p.m., no cover (all ages)
Byrnes Irish Pub (Brunswick)
Irish Session (open jam)
6 p.m., no cover (all ages)
Flask Lounge
Open DJ night
8 p.m., no cover (21+)
Gritty McDuff’s
Travis James Humphrey (country, rock, pop)
6 p.m., no cover (all ages)
club guide
Happenings
Screening of Raoul Peck’s documentary Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, about the Black freelance photographer’s work in South Africa, at SPACE (538 Congress St., Portland) at 7 p.m. Tix: $10. 828-5600. space538.org.