Your independent hometown award-winning newspaper
Your independent hometown award-winning newspaper
Sorted by date Results 551 - 575 of 735
For the artists hosting the 21 stops on this weekend’s NW Art Beat tour, there is no opportunity to see their colleagues work. That is exactly why artist Dee Doyle organized her three La Conner area colleagues for a preview tour open to the 30-plus Skagit Artists last Wednesday. Thirteen artists, spouses and interns took the Progressive Appetizers Tour, making the socializing better by enjoying provided snacks and beverages. The group started at Lynn Skordal’s, a paperwork artist on North First Street. Skordal’s work is slightly three dimen...
Known to many in the LaConner and Shelter Bay area, Betty (Diane Elizabeth) Spencer passed away peacefully surrounded by her large family on June 21, 2018 at Franciscan Hospice in University Place, WA. Born December 8, 1925 in Los Angeles, she was 92. As a toddler she was part of Hal Roach’s Our Gang comedies, later known as the Little Rascals. Betty grew up in Arizona and moved to West Seattle in 1954. She and her husband Willard also lived in Renton and La Conner. She was known as a fantastic cook, gardener and seamstress, and loved to e...
La Conner’s Fourth of July parade celebrated the nation’s founding in 1776, and was somewhat historic in its own right. People were united in wearing red, white and blue, though the shades, stripes, patterns and designs varied widely. Flags of all sizes, on and off sticks and poles, were waved and draped, respectively. The colorful downtown procession was by many accounts one of the best attended in the town’s recent history as crowds lined both sides of First Street on a picture-perfect day....
Jim Hernandez had no students aboard, but the La Conner school bus he drove Monday afternoon was filled to capacity nonetheless. With books, not students. At least for a while. His bus morphed into a local bookmobile for four fast-paced hours with stops at the Swinomish Gym and outdoor basketball courts, Shelter Bay Community Center and La Conner Regional Library. At each stop, students excitedly climbed into the bus to select from more than 3,000 donated books, a mission La Conner...
Their original summer camp venue fell through, but the beat goes on for members of the Seattle Cascades Drum & Bugle Corps. In La Conner, no less. The elite group of 150 musicians has been drilling on the La Conner Schools campus since mid-June and has scheduled a July 2, 7:30 p.m. send-off performance at Whittaker Field prior to embarking on a cross-country tour ending at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. Seattle Cascades is the Pacific Northwest’s oldest youth organization in the pageantry arts. Members, who range in age from 14 to 21, h...
I just wanted the LaConner people to know of the passing of Rod Falor. He passed away on May 5, 2018. We lived in Shelter Bay for eight to ten years. Rod enjoyed the great outdoors, whether on the water, sailing or on the snow, skiing. He was part of the Board of Directors for the Shelter Bay Community for a few years. We enjoyed the community activities and the terrific people. We re-located to Snohomish County for medical reasons. There will be a Memorial service on Saturday June 2 at the Shoreline Community center at 3:30 p.m. Carol...
Last week art, ceremony and truth telling were ongoing in our little town. Significant voices spoke on both sides of the Swinomish Channel. On the Reservation Thursday the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community welcomed everyone to a luncheon feast and then their Canoe Family, elders and four chosen youth led the gathering down to the water for the Blessing of the Fleet and the First Salmon Ceremony. In Maple Hall, students and audiences gathered Thursday through Saturday as poets seeped into La Conner’s reality. Friday it was students in w...
In a stirring and powerful presentation at the Shelter Bay clubhouse last Saturday, Matika Wilbur shared her vision and her ongoing quest “To Change the Way We See Native America” with over 80 people, primarily Shelter Bay residents and family friends. She has created Project 562, to “visit, engage and photograph all 562 plus Native American sovereign territories in the United States.” While showing photographs of her five years of traveling the country, visiting tribes and reservations, she told a deeply personal story, integrating her bio...
Plastics dominated the Town Council’s May 8 session. The Council signaled its willingness to ban disposable plastic bags handed out at retail stores. Carol Sullivan of Mount Vernon, the “BAG Lady with Skagit BAG BANd Wagon,” made a lively, lengthy, power-less, pointed presentation, using poster board signs to start the meeting. She buried them with facts: in this plastic age 350 million tons are produced annually. One hundred billion bags are used annually. Half of all plastics are single use and then trashed. Sullivan said society has “fall...
The luthiers came to La Conner last weekend, setting up in Maple Hall for the second annual La Conner Guitar Festival. The bait set by festival organizers Shirley Makela and spouse Brent McElroy brought some 1,500 guitar playing enthusiasts from across the country for three days of workshops, cabarets, mini-concerts, concerts and an exhibit hall full of the finest hand crafted acoustic and electric guitars, harp guitars, mandolins and ukeleles made in North America. Luthiers make stringed...
Years before moving to La Conner, I remember my first reaction upon seeing the wood-sided building painted blue with white trim on Morris, signed “La Conner Regional Library.” What a statement about quality of life here, I thought, to have a library in a small community, a safe place that is open to everyone for exploring, learning, reading, discovery and inspiration. Not only was La Conner home to three unique museums, but it had a library located near the entrance to town, close to the schools, easy to walk to and on a bus line! What I did...
Shelter Bay welcomes nationally recognized artist and lecturer Matika Wilbur sharing an exhibit of her award-winning photography and a lecture in the Shelter Bay Clubhouse on May 19 at 4 p.m. Matika is a member of the Swinomish and Tulalip tribes and graduated from La Conner High School. The public is invited and admission is free. Wilbur is the creator and director of Project 562 and the only Native American photographer and social documentarian to be welcomed into each of the 562+ Native American sovereign territories in the United States....
Rhoda Hazel Claassen Lindstrom of Shelter Bay died Sunday, April 8th, 2018 at Island Hospital following a battle with heart failure. She was 95. Rhoda was born December 26, 1922, in Akron, Ohio to Arthur and Letha Claassen. In 1942 she married Edwin Eugene Lindstrom in Tacoma. She was married to Edwin Gene for 66 years. In 1985 Rhoda and Gene built their home in Shelter Bay where they enjoyed boating, fishing, RVing and camping. Most of Rhoda’s career was in Special Education. She worked at Renton Hospital, delivery and nursery, Lake City Fircr...
A little musing concerning your most resent musings. Please don’t tell me that my adversary during my two tours in Vietnam with the 101st Airborne Division was a “rag tag army of peasants wearing funny hats and sandals.” For, you see, in 1967 when I was shipped off to Vietnam by our peace loving president, LBJ, I was introduced to an enemy that was hardcore, battle tested and flat out in your face. They were the NVA regulars. We stood toe to toe with our enemy in places like Dak To, Quang Tri, Hue/Phu Bai and a place called the A Shau Valley wh...
Rhoda Hazel Claassen Lindstrom of Shelter Bay died Sunday, April 8th, 2018 at Island Hospital following a battle with heart failure. She was 95. Rhoda was born December 26, 1922, in Akron, Ohio to Arthur and Letha Claassen. In 1942 she married Edwin Eugene Lindstrom in Tacoma. She was married to Edwin Gene for 66 years. In 1985 Rhoda and Gene built their home in Shelter Bay where they enjoyed boating, fishing, RVing and camping. Most of Rhoda’s career was in Special Education. She worked at Renton Hospital, delivery and nursery, Lake City Fircr...
As usual, Charity Jordan spelled trouble for her rivals. For the judges she spelled everything else. Letter perfect, at that. The poised and humble La Conner eighth grader won her third straight regional Spelling Bee championship at Skagit Valley College in March. That secured her a spot in the Scripps National Spelling Bee in the Washington, D.C. area for a third consecutive spring. Charity will compete against the country’s top student spellers starting May 27 in National Harbor, MD. Yet her rare regional three-peat isn’t all that makes Cha...
A spur-of-the-moment idea to have a downtown parade here during the Tulip Festival still has legs more than three decades later. The 32nd annual “Not-So-Impromptu” Kiwanis Tulip Parade, sponsored by US Bank, is set for 2 p.m. April 14 on First Street. This year’s parade Grand Marshal is recently retired Town Administrator John Doyle, who for a decade during his tenure at Town Hall managed to juggle both planning and managerial duties. His parade role shouldn’t be nearly as taxing, given the event’s well-established focus on fun. “All I ha...
In a quietly, lawyerly way, the issue of the Town of La Conner’s replacing its broken water main with a 16-inch pipe heated up last week. Mayor Ramon Hayes, in his March 13 report to Town Council, informed them that “Shelter Bay put it in writing: ‘we plan to leave the system in three to five years.’“ Hayes said his response was clear: “That will be a violation of the contract with the Town of La Conner. The contract is in perpetuity.” He explained that term was put in the 2011 Water Agreement at Shelter Bay’s request. “Termination is...
Why do smart and successful and experienced people set themselves up for heartache, strife and failure – and pain? A journalist in Akron, Ohio titled a book of essays about his people “The Hard Way On Purpose.” That’s the Akron of LeBron James and the Cleveland Indians and the Cleveland Browns, the rust bowl region where defeat gets snatched from victory year after year. Here, in our corner of the world, there’s a skeleton board of trustees at MoNA and across the channel a board of directors running the Shelter Bay Community. Each gr...
La Conner Middle and High School students walked out of their classrooms Wednesday morning, taking the first steps toward what many vow will be a lifetime commitment to civic involvement. They organized a march down Sixth Street from the local campus to Morris Street to protest gun violence and promote school safety. The La Conner march was one of hundreds that took place across the country a month to the day after 17 Florida high school students and teachers were killed by a teen gunman armed...
One Saturday evening not long ago, the distressed cries of a cat could be heard coming from our neighbor’s 70-foot-high tree. Closer examination with binoculars revealed that is was indeed a kitty stuck about five feet from the top. Throughout the next day, neighbors up and down our street visited the tree – all worried for the cat’s safety. One person placed a can of cat food at the base of the tree, and drove to the Fire Department for help. We learned that the Fire Department does not have the equipment nor ability to rescue treed cat...
The Town of La Conner’s decision to install a single 16-inch pipe when it replaces the broken water main along La Conner Whitney Road this year provides excess capacity of 18 million gallons annually beyond what the Shelter Bay Community uses. The Community may decide it doesn’t want water from the Town at all. Board of Directors President Anne Hays told the Weekly News that its March 2 response to the Town “stated the community is talking with the Swinomish Tribe to provide water from their system, which is much closer to the Community and c...
All’s well that ends well! A call to Shelter Bay staff Saturday reported that a group of children were seen playing in the water around Martha’s Beach when the tide was out on Saturday, but were not seen returning after the tide had come in later in the day. Fears were compounded by the fact that a bicycle and children’s clothing and personal belongings were left behind at the beach. The call was relayed to 911 by Shelter Bay staff. Emergency responders arrived right away, immediately set up a command post and started systematically searc...
Bob was born in Los Angeles, CA to Wayman G. Cushman and Ruth Johnson Cushman. He grew up in San Dimas, CA in the family business, Cushman Hardware. Bob attended Cal Poly Pomona where he was very involved in student government and was Rose Parade float chairman. During this time, he was assigned to chaperone Patti Hamilton, cheerleader, and his future wife. Bob and Pat were married August 12, 1961 at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in La Habra, CA. In January of 1962, the family relocated Cushman Hardware to Payette, ID. While in Idaho, three...
The Shelter Bay Community Board of Directors chose to not make a decision on participating in the Town of La Conner’s phase I planning of its water main replacement project at its February 14 meeting. Instead, Board President Anne Hays sent Mayor Ramon Hayes a series of questions on two topics in a February 16 letter: Fire flow and Phase I planning for the replacement of the transmission main under La Conner Whitney Road. The Town government asked for a decision on participation throughout 2017. Shelter Bay board and staff have responded to e...
