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The result of the presidential election surprised me and put me into a funk. I considered moving back to Canada, where I worked as a TV and movie director for 16 years, but that was a difficult decision because I have so much family in the U.S. and I love writing this column. Then I heard that the governors of California and Washington state were not at all happy with Trump and they both declared that they would continue to support women’s rights to have abortions and continue to agree with m...
The Dodgers are playing the Yankees in the World Series, and this brings back wonderful memories. I was born in the Bronx, N.Y., where the Yankees were, and lived in upper Manhattan near where the Giants were. When I moved to Long Island, my Uncle Izzy from Brooklyn would always turn on Vin Scully covering the Brooklyn Dodgers games when he visited our house in Roslyn. Sandy Koufax was the Dodgers’ star pitcher and he was Jewish, so I became a Dodger fan. The Dodgers hadn’t won a World Ser...
Yes, it’s hard for me to believe but I just turned 78 years old and recently had my 60th high school reunion in Roslyn, Long Island, New York. Roslyn is a charming town that was first occupied by Dutch settlers hundreds of years ago. My father’s jewelry store was right next to an incredible clock tower that is hundreds of years old and the town has a boat launch heading out to the Long Island Sound on one side and a beautiful duck pond on the other side. I was captain of the football team and...
I have several addictions and they are increasing all of the time and the good news is that all of them are positive, not negative. I play Words With Friends on my cellphone, so I can take it with me wherever I go. It's a competitive crossword puzzle and I have several competitors and some of them use words I've never heard of even though I was an English major in college. It's a very healthy brain activity and the last thing I do before I go to sleep at night to use whatever brain cells I have...
No, my obsession is no longer Donald Trump or the Mariners or preparing to vote for the Oscars. My obsession is BIRDS. I sit in my hot tub at least twice a day and I am transfixed by the bird feeders that I have in my backyard. The birds scatter when I walk by but I settle down and don't move around at all and they come back in droves. I've also placed a feeder in my front yard that I can watch while I am sitting in front of the television in my living room. This has led to a very important...
I've always been a bird lover. I grew up with birds in cages in my house and now I have feeders in the front and the back of my house. My dog Rosie loves to sit by the window and watch the birds come and go. When you drive around Skagit County, you see many photographers holding cameras with very long lenses patiently waiting to get wonderful shots of birds. Bird populations have been decreasing on a regular basis, but lately I've noticed enormous numbers of white birds gathered in the fields...
It’s heartbreaking to be updated on how many homeless people there are in Skagit County. Fortunately, they are no longer camping out on sidewalks in our towns. I can no longer visit my friend in San Francisco who has a nightclub because it is so upsetting for me to see so many homeless people camped out in the most expensive parts of that city. Skagit County has provided very nice grassy areas for people to pitch their tents. Some of the homeless people have addictions to alcohol and drugs, b...
Rain rain, go away, come again some other day. No, rain please don’t go away, stay so I can breathe another day. We live in a place with a lot of rainfall, especially at this time of year. This month we’ve been surrounded by clouds and drenched with rainfall, but every few days the sun comes out and the cloud formations are breathtaking. As a movie and television director, I had to spend over 40 years based in Los Angeles, although we were filming in wonderful places like Amsterdam, Aus...
If you are heading towards Whatcom County or Canada and you are not in a hurry, Chuckanut Drive is a wonderful alternative route. Chuckanut is a winding road that goes along the Pacific coast and features beautiful forestry and spectacular views of the ocean and islands because at some points, it’s right at the edge of the continent. The southern part of the 20-mile drive features beautiful views of Mt. Baker in the distance and Blanchard Mountain nearby. You are surrounded by beautiful farmland...
Electric bikes are getting more popular and are getting strong support as a very healthy means of transportation. Washington Governor Jay Inslee is a strong advocate of electric bikes and the Washington state Legislature recently approved an appropriation up to $7 million in the next two years to support the purchase of e-bikes and create e-bike “lending libraries.” The incentive program provides e-bike buyers a $300 point of sale rebate regardless of their income and people with lower inc...
It’s been heartbreaking for me to follow what’s happening in Israel right now. My cousin Yossi Drory lives in Tel Aviv and the last time I saw him in person I was four years old and he was five and he visited me in New York. We’ve been in touch ever since and he speaks perfect English. When things started to get very violent recently, I texted him and told him to come stay with me here until things calmed down. Yossi replied “We are staying in Eilat the southernmost city of Israel, on the sho...
“The Mousetrap” is running through Saturday at the Anacortes Community Theatre and it has been selling out every show. It is a wonderful murder mystery by Agatha Christie, her first play. It opened in London’s West End in 1952 and has run successfully around the world since. Paul Fadoul is the director. He has worked around the country in Washington, D.C., New York, Los Angeles and Las Vegas and has happily settled into Shelter Bay with his husband after 25 years in film and television. He fi...
When I became a columnist many years ago for this newspaper, I borrowed the title “If I Ran The Zoo” from a delightful book by Dr. Seuss. For me, it was just the perfect title for a column in which I could express my views on anything and everything. Well, Seuss Enterprises, still run by his descendants, has just removed “If I Ran The Zoo” and five other books from publication due to controversy surrounding racist images within these books. In a 1988 biography of Seuss, Ruth K. MacDona...
Shopping at Trader Joe's in Bellingham recently, I ran into two young men who I could tell from their wardrobe were ultra-Orthodox Jews. We chatted briefly and they told me that a rabbi from Brooklyn was headed this way to start a Chabad in Skagit County. A Chabad is a congregation organized by members of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Hasidic dynasty that was founded in 1775 by Rabbi Shneur Zalman in Lithuania. Chabad is a worldwide Hasidic movement known for its outreach activities. It is a system...
When you drive around Skagit County, you see lots of animals: horses, cows, goats and more. One small farm on Best Road that immediately caught my attention has a sign stating JF Miniature Donkeys. The owners are Julie and Todd Jones and they gave me a tour of the property that enabled me to interact with many of the donkeys, who it turns out are very friendly, much more like pet dogs than horses or cows. My question as a reporter was, "What do you do with all of these donkeys?" The answer was...
I love birds. I have feeders in the front and the back of my house and my office and I refill them every day so that I can continually enjoy watching them in large numbers. Which brings me to a very sad fact that the numbers of birds are severely decreasing. Since the 1500s, birds have been declining both in terms of species numbers (by about 500 species) and numbers of individuals (by about 20-25%). The numbers are staggering – three years after 3 billion birds were lost, America’s birds are...
Pickleball started nearby on Bainbridge Island as a sport for kids in 1965. It has evolved into an extremely popular sport that bridges the generation gap, with many older participants. Last year the state legislature made it the official sport of Washington. Shelter Bay has tennis courts across from its administration building on Shoshone Drive that can be tightened up with a lower net and lines moved so there is less ground to cover. The tennis court further south on Shelter Bay Drive is being...
I just turned 77 years old, and as I write this, I feel older and wiser. Well, wiser in some ways as we can always learn from our own experiences, but also facing the challenges of short-term memory loss. As the son of Holocaust survivors, I thank God for every moment I have on this planet and when I sit in my rooftop hot tub and look out at the vast Universe, I thank God that humans are an incredible and extremely rare species. I was very close to Father William Treacy and he gave me a column t...
If you often drive over the Rainbow Bridge between La Conner and Shelter Bay, you are likely to have seen a man pushing a disabled tribal member in a wheelchair and they both seem to be very comfortable. Bob Grace has spent his life being a caregiver. In 2013 he connected with Francis Sylvester, whose mother is a member of the Swinomish Tribe. As bystanders, we witness one of the most positive challenges of Grace's caretaking responsibilities, pushing Sylvester across the bridge to La Conner, bu...
Women, women everywhere. I noticed more women recently in places where we hadn’t seen them before, such as covering men’s sporting events on television and serving as governors and in the police and military. You can even watch all-women’s basketball on television – or attend and watch them play live. This gave me hope that we were making good progress in gender equality until I looked it up and found that the experts predict equality in gender will not be achieved for another 137 years....
The Mount Vernon High School debate team debated about the positive and negative effects of social media May 15. Also on stage were Jason Miller, publisher of the Concrete Herald, Ron Judd, executive editor of Cascadia Daily News, Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times and my editor, Ken Stern. The evening, “The Future of Local Journalism: Is It Important to Our Democracy?” was organized by the League of Women Voters of Skagit County. This is a particularly interesting subject matter because the stu...
The Lincoln Theatre joined with the Skagit River Poetry Foundation to host an informative and inspirational evening with the Valley premiere of the film, "The Healing Heart of Lushootseed" last Friday. This is a personal story, in part, of the extraordinary life of Vi Hilbert, a dynamic elder of the Upper Skagit Tribe and her quest for 83-year-olds "to heal a sick world" through music, her response to the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001. It is directed and produced by Jill K. La Pointe,...
Believe it or not, I was a star athlete in high school. My senior year I was an all-county linebacker, an undefeated wrestler and a catcher in baseball who batted .517. There were scouts at all of my baseball games but I decided instead to go to Colgate University on a football scholarship but only played freshman year because I was 5’ 8” tall and weighed 175 pounds. Now at age 76, I play golf and tennis and pickleball and work out twice weekly in a gym with very healthy equipment. As a resident...
These are tough times that will definitely be noted in our history books. Crime and violence are at all time highs (which can be seen as big lows). Many small businesses have shut down and many big businesses have scaled down. COVID-19 will go down in our history books as an extremely challenging event. These are especially trying times for highly overactive people like myself who hate looking at the calendar in their phones and finding not much scheduled. But contemplation can have an upside,...
It has been absolutely heartbreaking to follow the news of the devastating effects of the recent earthquake in Turkey and Syria. The number of deaths is nearing 44,000 as I write this column and will definitely be higher when it runs in the paper Wednesday. I’m wondering what we can learn from this. Apparently there is only a short warning period, something like 20 seconds, which is shocking to me considering how advanced we have come in technology. All you can do if you get that warning is d...
