By Ward Peck
Editor
    Residents and their guests gathered last week for a dinner celebrating a special birthday at the Mill Cove Apartments building at the corner of Broadway and Cottage Road. The building itself is about to turn 25.
    The building officially opened to residents on March 1, 1982. Now operated as subsidized public housing, the building has seen many residents come and go over the past two-and-a-half decades, but from the beginning the building has fostered a strong sense of community that has endured, according to long-time residents.
    It was those residents– the pioneers– who served as the guests of honor at the dinner, which was attended by more than 40 people in the second floor Joseph Greeley community room.
    The pioneers are the seven remaining original tenants who have been there since the building opened it’s doors–Edythe O’Keefe, Hazel Dalfonso, Louise and William Callahan, Arlene Fullerton, Lance Gridley and Florence “Flossie” Morridge.
    The seven have seen bridges come and go and supermarkets remodeled again and again. They have done their part to instill that sense of community that the more recent residents now enjoy– buying furniture for community rooms and pots, pans, dishes and silverware for the common kitchen enabling them to put on dinners such as the one celebrating the most recent milestone. They have produced plays and contributed to documentaries. Lance saw the need for a handrail outside the building and made sure it was installed– a necessity in the slippery winter months.
    “I love it just as much as I did the day I moved in,” Flossie who is in her 90’s said in her sixth-floor apartment with a view of Portland Harbor and the Portland skyline, while a small tube in her throat exhaled rhythmically. “I have no intention of leaving for a long time.”
    Flossie, who lived on B Street with her sister and mother watched the building as it was constructed and wondered.
    “I would look up and wonder what floor I would be on,” she said. “When we got the word we were going to move in, we were asked what our one wish was. Mine was to be on the waterside and I got it. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I can hardly stand going to the store I love the view so much.”
    In her twenty-five years she has seen friends pass and remembers fondly her best friend, Margaret Cullen. Together Margaret and Flossie started a building association and soon dreamed up ways to raise funds for the building.
    After many dinners, lunches and beano tournaments the association had enough money to put on a theatrical production. Their first production was a “mock wedding” with Flossie- then in her 80’s playing a pregnant secretary (the father was marrying someone else). The show was such a hit it was replayed again and again on South Portland’s community television. Next came a mock trial spoofing a controversial building policy that threatened to expel any resident caught feeding pigeons.
    “It’s such a nice place to live. We’re like one big family,” Flossie said.