PORTLAND, Maine (AP) - The man who survived nine days alone on Mount Katahdin as a boy, a university climate researcher, a young marijuana advocate, and half of the TV and radio comedy team Bob and Ray are among notable Mainers who died in 2016.
Donn Fendler’s ordeal is known to Mainers because his book, “Lost on a Mountain in Maine,” is required reading for many fourth-graders.
Fendler said he used techniques learned as a Boy Scout to survive on the state’s tallest mountain. Bruised and cut, starved and shoeless, he survived by eating berries.
Fendler, who died at age 90 on Oct. 10, never seemed to tire of recounting the tale to children.
“I tell every one of them they have something inside them they don’t know they have,” he told The Associated Press in 2011. “When it comes up to a bad situation, they’re going to find out how tough a person they are in the heart and the mind - it’s called the will to live.”
Other notable deaths in Maine in 2016:
- Gordon Hamilton, a University of Maine professor, died when he plunged into a 100-foot crevasse in Antarctica while conducting climate research. The Scottish scientist was riding a snowmobile while identifying dangerous crevasses when one of them swallowed his machine Oct. 22. Hamilton, who was 50, spent much of his time in Greenland and Antarctica studying the movement and melting of glaciers and how that contributes to rising sea levels.
- Cyndimae Meehan, who moved from Connecticut to Maine so she could receive cannabis to treat a rare form of epilepsy, died March 13. She was 13. Her mother brought her to Maine to get access medical marijuana after failed attempts to treat her frequent seizures using federally approved drugs. Family members said medical marijuana helped her regain her strength. Connecticut doesn’t allow pediatric medical marijuana use.
- Bob Elliott, half of the enduring television and radio comedy team Bob and Ray, died on Feb. 2 at age 92 in Cundy’s Harbor, part of the town of Harpswell. For nearly 45 years, until the death of Elliott’s comedy partner Ray Goulding, Bob and Ray entertained millions of radio listeners and television viewers.
- Conrad Cyr, a native of Limestone who went on to earn a law degree from Yale University and to become a federal judge, died July 28 at 84. Cyr was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to serve as a U.S. District Court judge in 1981, and was elevated to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by President George H.W. Bush. He also served on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in Washington, D.C.
- John Christie, a ski enthusiast who was a former owner of Saddleback Mountain and general manager of Sugarloaf, died May 7 at 79. Christie oversaw installation of the gondola at Sugarloaf when he was general manager, and owned Saddleback from 1972 to 1975. He also worked as general manager of Mount Snow Development Corp. in Vermont.
- Robert Dunfey Sr., a real estate developer who transformed a pastoral landscape into the Maine Mall shopping center, the state’s largest shopping mall, died Aug. 23 at age 88. The former resident of Cape Elizabeth was one of the co-founders of the chain of Dunfey Hotels now known as Omni Hotels. He died in New Hampshire, where he had moved.
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