By James V. Horrigan
Staff Writer
Judy Roy has a slogan.
“My goal is to do the best for the most with the least,” said the newly-elected member of the Scarborough Town Council.
Those words might seem clichéd if they rolled from the tongue of a first-time politician, but Roy served nine years on the council in the ‘90s before being term-limited out of office, and possesses a long record of community activism and achievement.
But the phrase wasn’t borne out of political experience. Or expedience, she said.
“It’s an old Army triage principle. We do the best that we can for the most that we can with the least that we can. It’s the method the Army used when they triaged soldiers in World War II,” she said.
Roy, 64, was never in the Army, but she’s been a nurse for more than four decades, including 12 years teaching at Mercy Hospital School of Nursing.
“One of the classes I taught was called Disaster Nursing and I used that principle for what you’ve got to do in case of a disaster. You just try to do the best you can for the most people with what you have and move on,” she said.
It’s tough, she said, but necessary.
Roy grew up on a farm on Beech Ridge Road, where her family raised their own cattle, pigs and chickens on a 48-acre spread that her late father, Joseph Roy, bought for $3,500 in 1952.
“He was a great guy who did everything. There wasn’t anything my dad couldn’t do,” she said, describing Joseph Roy as a jack-of-all-trades. His skills included radiator repair, carpentry, plumbing, electrical work -and butchery. Most of that last gruesome task was done in private, but when it came to preparing chickens, it was a family affair.
“My dad would wring their necks, my mother and I used to clean and pluck them. And I used to do the barn chores and milk the cows at night, too. I had two older brothers but they were gone by then, so I became the third son. I had to help dad do lots of things. He was very frugal and we made do with what we had,” she said.
Although he never became very rich, he was a good provider, Roy said, who did more than just put food on the table.
“We were the first family in our little area on Beech Ridge Road to have a telephone. That was in 1952. The neighbors used to come across to use it. We had to teach one of them how to use it because he’d never used a phone. We were also the first ones to have TV. It was an Emerson,” she said.
Scarborough was a lot different in those days, she said. Neighbors looked out for each other in many ways.  One instance has always stuck in her mind.  
“It must have been ’56 or ’57. We had a neighbor, Walter Briel, that lived near us and one time we were coming back from North Scarborough. I’m not sure where we’d gone, but I was with my mother and father and there was a terrible thunderstorm. When we got close we saw flames and smelled smoke,” she said.
Roy and her parents thought their home had been struck by lightning. They were fortunate that it had not. Briel wasn’t as lucky. His barn had caught fire and quickly burned to the ground.
But Joseph Roy came to the rescue, his daughter said.
“My dad organized a barn-build. The community got together and built Walter a new barn. Isn’t that great? All the ladies made food and brought it. There was even a little article in the paper about it,” she said.
Roy said one of Briel’s daughters, Karen Briel Lothrop, has never forgotten her father’s generosity.
“When I was running for town council she called me and said ‘I want one of your signs on my lawn.’ And when she came to the polls she made sure I knew she was there. They still remember it. The only bad part about it is that poor Walter fell off the staging and broke his hip during the barn-build,” she said.
Does Roy think the community would rally in the same way if something similar happened today?
“There weren’t as many people back then. We probably had 4,000, 4,500 people in town, so the population was low and communication was a heckuva lot different,” she said. “I think they probably would because when you see children that have a devastating illness the community pulls together and raises money. It’s a different form, but certainly I think that if somebody’s barn burned, they would help rebuild it. Or they’d have some sort of a fundraiser. I don’t know if they’d build a barn, but they probably would.”
Roy said she is sorry though that a lot of the people who were once active in town are no longer getting involved.
“I like Scarborough and I like to be part of where it is going. But I really feel that we need more people on boards and committees with some history. There are lots of people between 40 and 50, because that’s when people want to get active in the community. They’re the ones that volunteer,” Roy said. “But if you really care about where Scarborough is going and you’ve lived here a long time, you need to have your voice heard. You can’t do the best for the most with the least unless you have input.”
Roy said she’s calculated that the vast majority of those involved in town government live east of the Maine Turnpike.
“I researched all the people that are on boards and committees and there’s about 90-something from the east side and about 26 from the west side and maybe 10 that live between Route One and the turnpike,” she said.
Roy has lived all over town and knows there are some issues that cannot be solved without the attention and effort of people from all parts of Scarborough. She grew up on Beech Ridge Road and now lives in Green Acres, but in between she’s lived on the east side of town, in Dunstan and West Scarborough.
As such, she has a vision for the town’s future.
“I hope to see it continue to grow carefully, much like the Comprehensive Plan is designed to do. I think controlled growth is important. Scarborough is going to continue to grow, much to people’s dismay. Topography will control it to some degree, but we have to be careful not to disturb the ecosystem,” she said.
Roy may be a Scarborough native, but she welcomes the arrival of newcomers – provided that when it comes to new development they realize one thing.
“You can’t put a gate around the town. If we did that 10 years ago none of you would be here.”
Far too often, she thinks, people feel that once they move here the gangplank should be lifted.
“‘Now that I’m here, nobody else can come’? That’s not fair,” she said.