Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
Sorted by date Results 382 - 406 of 1333
Here at The Times, we have a love-hate relationship with crime stories. Under current management, we're trying to focus more on positive stories and less on negative ones. And anyway, we don't like the fact that crimes are happening around here any more than anyone else does. But reporting on crime, such as the recent rash of thefts from cars in Dayton, is important. Readers want to learn about these stories, and they need to. Besides, as most TV viewers would agree, the criminal mind is fascinating. Crime stories can be positive too. For...
Dear Editor, I am curious as to where our priorities lie, when a teacher in Waitsburg winning a National Teaching award is only ranked #10 by The Times instead of #1? She should be the #1 story in my way of thinking. We have great teachers here, let's say thank you to them. Rank them #1, not #10. Karl Newell Waitsburg...
One of the occupational hazards of being a wheat producer or landlord is that most of the time spent on analyzing wheat prices is focused on determination of "why the price should go UP." The problem is a kind of blindness to reasons why the price should go DOWN. The psychological basis for ignoring negatives is obvious, but it can cause a wheat marketer or trader to wait too long to sell. Then, often near the lows for the year, emphasis shifts to "damage control" instead of optimization. That period is at hand. Wheat prices are suffer- ing...
Ten Years Ago January 15, 2004 The Carnegie Art Center in Walla Walla opened January 13 featuring "The Artists of Columbia County," with a reception from 5-7 p.m. The show will run through February 21. Works featured will include bronze sculpture by Keith McMasters; pastel paints by Mon- ica Stobie; taxidermy by Roger Samples; pottery by Brian Manselle; glass by Joan Monteillet; watercolors by Paul Strohbehn, Jill Ingram and Jackie Penner; paintings by Iola Bramhall and Becky Leventis; mixed media pieces by Debbie Baxter and Anne Strode; and...
My goodness, it's the New Year al- ready! 2014. The year my little brother enters high school, my cousin and two of my best friends pass on to the netherworld known as "col- lege", and that ancient can of hominy tucked in the back of our pantry finally goes bad. It will be stamped on the prom invitations my class passes out this spring, and glitter-painted on the home- coming posters we plaster in the school hallways come fall. It will crouch in fifty- two weeks' worth of Times margins, over...
I don't know how to run a newspaper, Mr. Thatcher; I just try everything I can think of. ~Charles Foster Kane, from the movie "Citizen Kane" W hen Blue Mountain News stum- bled out of the gate in 2007, I noted in the first column I wrote there that my main qualification for the job of newspaper publisher was that I had been an avid reader of newspapers for a long time. (That, and I learned how to type in the ninth grade - on a typewriter.) Over the past seven years, I've thought of lots of ways...
A fter having served for four years as your publisher, where do I even start to sum up what this time has meant to me? Perhaps the easiest way to say it is: a lot! From the moment the Bakers took our photo in front of the old Linotype ma- chine in the back room when our purchase was announced just before Thanksgiving 2009 to the pictures I took at the last Hometown Christ- mas parade this December, my time at The Times has flown by as one big and fast- paced adventure. I'm melancholy closing thi...
Dear Editor, The Times has reported sparse attendance at local public school renovation and maintenance information meetings. Churches increasingly are dealing with the same thing: low attendance. Does it mean that no one cares? No, it doesn't. Some people really don't, but oth- ers simply are not following the conventional rules about civic participation, as was the case in past generations. This is not your grandmother's church nor your grandfa- ther's public school. This is not 1975. According to last week's Times story on Dayton High...
I t was love at first sight. When I saw it in a catalogue, I gave a little squeal. As Christmas ap- proached, I started hinting. It was simply too perfect - simply too me - to pass up. But even if I had an inkling it was coming my way, I never expected it to arrive in quite the manner it did. On Christmas morning, in the mad rush to exit our house and head to the larger family celebration, Mom sent me out to feed the chickens. I have three chickens - two hens, Mercy and Gin- ger, and a rooster,...
I t's distressing sometimes here in newspaperland when we have to report once again on a crime or other nega- tive story about our local schools and their students. This fall, especially it seems, the bad news has been com- ing regularly: A swastika burning at Dayton Schools, kids dressed up in KKK costumes for Halloween, a bomb scare, a sexual assault. But as 2013 comes to a close, we want to forget about all that and take a look at some of the good things our lo- cal students are doing. And they're very good indeed. For instance: Tackling...
"A wide net catches the most Ð ish." That was 23-year old Jordan McCandless's approach to fÐinding a job. He claimed job-hunting as a 40-hour per week com- mitment after graduating from Whitworth Univer- sity in Spokane. And after countless applications and interviews, he still had no luck fÐinding a job. Jordan described his dreams of one day becom- ing a U.S. Senator, and was willing to work any sort of job or internship to get his foot in the door. He said, "My main concern is mak- ing su...
The holidays are winding down. Your living room floor is littered with shards of wrapping pa- per and crushed cellophane bows. The trash can out the back door is sixty-five percent full of cardboard; the other thirty-five consists of crumbled styrofoam and hacked-open plastic clam- shells. The new toys were fun, but after a while Junior's remote control gizmo will suffer a fatal one-vehicle collision with Cousin Ellie's leg, and that twenty-seven- in-one screwdriver ding- dong you got Uncle...
Whether an accurate reflection or not, a community is often judged based on its school system. For a relocating couple with children, the quality of the school district in which a house is located will often be as much a deciding factor in buying a home as the size of the living room. Entire websites are devoted to ranking school districts by test scores, student/teacher ratios, ethnic makeup and more. A positive accomplishment reflects well on us all. Last week, as reported on Page 1, Waitsburg Kindergarten teacher Pamela Nolan-Beasley...
[Editor's note: The following bit of verse was originally published in a small-town newspaper called the Troy Sen- tinal, in Troy, N.Y., on December 23, 1823. At the time, the author was anonymous. His name, in fact, was Clement Clarke Moore, and his poem is often considered the most famous poem in history, at least by an American. Moore's poem is responsible, more than anything else, for our mod- ern concept of Santa Claus and children receiving gifts at Christmas. It is also responsible for the reindeer drawing Santa's sleigh, though Rudolf...
My goodness, it's only a week until Christmas! I have this weird "thing" about Christmas presents - I try to make as many of them by hand as I can. Sometimes that's as simple as baking a batch of cookies and lov- ingly packing them in a tin with some cheesy winter motif on the front. And sometimes it's a smidge morehellip;shall we sayhellip;interesting. Take the table behind me, for instance. I'm knitting my aunt a scarf out of some of that fun new yarn that has two-inch-long loops on it. With...
For many of us, writing is part of our jobs. And for a few of us, it's the main part. (Sometimes, for us, it's like digging ditches with our fingertips, but most of the time it's pretty rewarding.) For many others among us though, writing is something that's done only on rare occasions. One of those occasions is Christmas. Christmas is the time when many adults sit down, with pen or keyboard, and recount the highlights of the past year - often in excruciating detail. Others just scratch out a few words of greeting and well-wishes at the bottom...
[Editor's note: Congress- woman Cathy McMorris Rodgers provided the follow- ing Statement for the Record at a recent Oversight Field Hearing held by the House Natural Resources Commit- tee in Pasco on December 9. The subject of the hear- ing was: "The future of the US-Canada Columbia River Treaty-Building on 60 years of Coordinated Power Gen- eration and Flood Control"] I appreciate the opportunity to submit a statement before the House Natural Resources Committee regarding the importance of the United States-Canada Columbia River Treaty and it...
Dear Editor, Congress is considering renewing subsidies to wind companies. It's time to end wind subsidies. BPA has been forced to pay for wind power that wasn't needed due to adequate production of hydro power which Wash- ington State does not recog- nize as a renewable energy source. How asinine! Power bills are rising in our state due to the requirement to increase use of "renewable" power, which wa- ter is not considered to be. Ridiculous! Wind power has been giv- en enough of a head start. It's time for them to stand on existing towers or...
A h, December. In no other month does so much joy rub shoulders with so much stress. I spend all fall looking forward to the former, and every year - without fail - the latter hits me like a Mack truck. One of these years, I'll see it coming, but it probably won't be anytime soon. Sometimes, when faced with the emotional para- doxes the holiday season brings, it helps me to make a list and separate the pros from the cons: - School gets out for two weeks! - In two weeks. - I'm finally going to...
Last week the Columbia County Board of Commis- sioners voted not to proceed with a planned renova- tion of the youth building at the Columbia County Fairgrounds. We think that was a prudent move, for three reasons: First, as Commissioners Talbott and Robanske both pointed out at the time of the vote, no plan was in place to cover the cost of maintenance of the building once it was upgraded. The cost of the renovation would be too high to not be committed to keeping the building in top shape afterwards. Second, Dayton and the Touchet Valley...
