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Lillian Cushner Steinberg passed away peacefully on June 15, 2019, one week shy of her 92nd birthday. She was a well-known watercolor artist in La Conner, Washington, who exhibited her paintings at several local galleries, including Art in a Picklebarn at several annual Skagit Valley Tulip Festivals. She and her husband, Maynard Steinberg, lived in Shelter Bay, La Conner in their retirement. Some years after his death, Lillian moved to Portland Oregon to be near her youngest daughter, Emily Orth, her son-in-law Alan Orth, and grandson Benjamin...
La Conner has the funds to build a new library. The last $500,000 was approved by the Skagit County Board of Commissioners Monday, some 16 months after the state legislature appropriated the project’s first $500,000. The grant, to the Town of La Conner, is for economic development: job training and job creation. Commissioner Ron Wesen confirmed that in a Monday phone call, saying, “Community jobs in the future is what they are supposed to get done.” He referenced the many funding sources and t...
Nell Thorn is under new ownership. Seattle restaurateur Ted Furst and his wife Cathy Conner, with two partners, filed papers for the restaurant and property sale Monday. The restaurant, closed since Monday for staff training, reopens Friday. The deal’s details were worked out by now former owners Casey and Susan Schanen and the new owners in March, but assigning Department of Natural Resources leases for the state-owned aquatic lands beneath the building took the entire spring, delaying the s...
The format remains the same, but La Conner’s honoring America’s birthday never gets old. The town will again be scene of a full slate of Fourth of July festivities, starting with a 12 p.m. patriotic parade down First Street followed by children’s and family events at Pioneer Park. Join in the traditional afternoon holiday fun including three-legged races, a hot dog feed and watermelon-eating contest. And at that point the party’s just getting started. A beer and wine garden and food vendors...
Eagle Scouts rock, though none more so than La Conner’s Ian McCormick. Few can forget his stirring guitar solo of the Star-Spangled Banner before a La Conner High basketball game last winter. Now, six months later, there’s something else for which the 14-year-old incoming freshman will be long remembered. He has earned his Eagle badge before entering high school. Eagle is the highest rank attainable in the Boys Scouts of America program, and only about four per cent of its members reach that lev...
ART THAT MAKES YOU THINK – Pretty as a picture are the over 40 quilts in “Shifting Tides: Convergence in Cloth” at the Pacific Northwest Quilt & Fiber Arts Museum on Second Street. The artists in the Studio Art Quilt Association hail from the Pacific Rim, from Alaska down to California. The exhibit’s theme is Pacific Ocean damage from climate change and plastics. This piece by Alice Beasley is untitled. She writes of " worst case scenerio: my household disposables adrift in n ocean in th...
To all La Conner residents and in the environs, please increase your awareness of the homeless crisis in this country. I see and identify homeless persons on the streets of our neighboring cities. I’ve talked to some: They were/are lucid and able to speak clearly. One person lives in his car with his worldly belongings, two cats and a meaningful work history. Come on folks, let’s get after it. Gregory Kennedy La Conner...
Numbers tell stories. Here are some that tell mine. Two favorites are 104 and 105. Two more are two and three. And then there are these combinations: 6/26, 6/30 and 7/1, 7/5, not fractions but dates. This issue of the Weekly News you hold in your hands is the 105th published since I bought the paper two years ago. Just like that, 104 issues are behind me – us – and I am starting my third year in La Conner. I drove into town with all I possess on June 26, 2017. At week’s end, June 30th, Sandy Stokes, Cindy Vest and I signed papers a...
The Kirsch property has come back on the agenda for the Mayor and Council. This property has been on and off the agenda for several years now. There are several issues that surround this property that lead to significant misunderstandings. Its role in public access has changed over the years. It is important for everyone (who cares about it) to be honest about the importance of that property in context to its ownership. Some background on its purchase: Town acquired the property in July of 2001 for $350,000. Originally, the Kirsch property was...
Wow, it is done: The $3.74 million dollars to build a new library in La Conner has been raised. By the end of 2021 a new library will gleam from 520 Morris Street, anchoring the east end of town for decades to come. This is a very good thing. It is also a momentous accomplishment for a library district with a population of some 4,800 people. We are the little community that could, and we did. We did it, but it got done by the persistent, quiet leadership of the Library Foundation director, Susan Macek. She created a plan and she followed it to...
Forrest Eisen Jr. was born June 26, 1942 in Mount Vernon, Washington to Anita and Forrest Eisen Sr. He attended grade and high school in La Conner until his senior year. He joined the Army in 1961 and was medically discharged due to a shrapnel injury losing his left eye. He later moved to Oregon and worked in the logging industry. Later he moved to Bremerton. He attended an apprenticeship at the naval shipyard as an electrician. He worked 29+ years, then retired in 1989. Boating, fishing, camping, working in his yard kept him busy. He also...
Repertory theatre is abundant in Bellingham this summer. You don’t need a hotel room, but mark your calendar for repeated trips through August to the Sylvia Center for the Arts for, as their website states, “five plays based on the plays of Ancient Greece, presented in contemporary versions.” Three of them are free and outdoors, below the Whatcom Museum. “Ajax” opened last week. Rewritten from Sophocles play by Bryan Doerries, a military veteran, it recasts this Greek tragedy, war being a human constant for more than 2,500 years. In Homer’s e...
The Skagit County Historical Museum has partnered with San Juan Cruises to introduce narrative tours of both the North and South Swinomish Channel, launching from La Conner. Each is hosted by a local historian well versed in the history and the natural environment lining the Channel’s shores. “You’ve got someone there telling you what you’re seeing,” said Ann Maroney, the Museum’s office manager. Maroney said Museum staff approached San Juan Cruises to implement the tour after Whatcom County had success with a similar idea with the company. Th...
