Last modified: Tuesday, May 6, 2008 12:29 AM EDT FLANAGAN: Spaner's legacy Bill Spaner, whose death we reported on Wednesday's obituary page, helped people get into homes of their own. I was one of them. It was 1985. Our son and daughter, then 8 and 7, were getting too big to be sharing a bedroom. Growing even faster than the kids, though, were the prices of local homes. There was a phenomenon going on that came to be known as the Massachusetts Miracle. It didn't seem very miraculous to my wife and I when it kept the price of any acceptable home just out of our reach. But a hard-working real estate salesman named Doug Hayward wouldn't give up on a potential sale and found his way to Spaner's office with Community Development for Attleboro, then headquartered in the former superintendent's office on Sanford Street. Provided the house we were looking at needed a certain degree of repairs - and did it ever - Spaner had a program that would help with the mortgage. Months later, we were moving into a home we could call our own. I don't know how many other people have similar tales to tell, but I know there were plenty. And there are even more who have lived in local apartments that became attractive, or at least habitable, because of Spaner's work. One of his more outstanding efforts was to engineer the rehabilitation of an entire block of Pine Street, including an apartment house that had become known as "the crack hotel." Spaner's work on housing in the city started back in the administration of Mayor Raymond Macomber under what was called simply the Mayor's Home Improvement Loan Program. He stuck with it over the next 25 years as the program evolved into Community Development for Attleboro and Spaner was promoted to director. There were hints of personal problems as his career with the city came to an end in June 2005. He simply did not show up for work for two weeks, then left a voice mail at city hall, saying he was quitting, and citing stress as the reason. He was only 60 when he died Tuesday, and I don't know what he had been up to for the past three years, other than that he had recently been working at Bass Pro Shops. I do hope that he had taken an opportunity to stroll down Pine or Holman or innumerable other streets in the city and feel the pride that was duly his. He was a bureaucrat with a big heart. He helped make the city a better place, helped give people the decent roof over their heads that they deserve and lent a hand to others who might not have gotten onto the housing ladder without him. Fill this up I asked Bob Lipsett of North Attleboro, a retired truck driver, for his perspective on current fuel prices that have today's truckers ready to revolt. Here's his response. "My tractor was a 1975 brand new GMC (Good Mechanic Coming) it had a fuel capacity of 250 gallons, two saddle tanks that held 125 gallons each. The Detroit diesel engine was a 350 hp turbo-charged engine. "At the current rate of $4.49/gallon, that equals $1,125.50 at today's prices. Oh, did I mention that this engine that I was operating in the '70s only got 3.5 miles/gal. Today's trucks are about the same, if not higher than 3.5 miles/gal. In the late '60s I was paying anywhere from $.18/gal to $.28/gal. "Even now the R/V industry is hurting as those vehicles get 12 to 15 miles/gallons. Maybe... "The larger companies, such as UPS, FedEx, Roadway-Yellow, and others that have bulk rates pay less than the owner-operator as they have their own deals and storage tanks and fueling equipment. Many of the fleet carriers have arrangements with fuel stops such as T/A, Truck Stops of America, Petro and the large fuel stops that cater to the public for discount rates. "I never in my wildest dreams ever thought that gasoline would be cheaper than diesel." MARK FLANAGAN (mflanagan@thesunchronicle.com) is Opinion Page editor of The Sun Chronicle. He can be reached at 508-236-0335.