From spitting and smoking lawmakers to the ‘mess’ voters made of…

Just a year out of college when he arrived at the State House in 1964 as a newly elected lawmaker from far northern Maine, John Martin entered a world quite different from the one newcomers find there today. The chamber still had spittoons and ashtrays on every member’s desk, he said, and from the podium you “couldn’t see legislators in the back row” because of all the smoke in the air.