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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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Am I proud to be an American? Yes. This is the country that gave my parents a wonderful place to live after they barely escaped from Nazi Germany. Am I happy with the direction this country is headed into? No. Politics have overruled governance. Turn on CNN or MSNBC or any national or local newscast and little of it is positive news that makes me proud to be an American. As a former newspaper reporter, I’m a news junkie and I am finding it very painful to see the direction our country is m...
As I drive around the Skagit Valley, I am blown away by the beautiful cloud formations I am seeing. If I am able to pull over in a safe place along the road, I stop and take a cloud photo. I am inviting my readers to do the same thing and share their pictures with me at [email protected] and we will publish the winning photo in next month's column....
Okay, are you sitting down? You are about to be very surprised by what this progressive liberal is about to say. I am very much in favor of the death penalty for murderers who are absolutely guilty of their crimes. Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon in 1980 as Lennon was walking into his apartment at The Dakota in Manhattan. Chapman remained at the scene reading J.D. Salinger’s novel “The Catcher in the Rye” until he was arrested by police. Chapman is still alive. He has been interviewed by...
Talk about mixed emotions: My close friend, Father William Treacy, died last week at the amazing age of 103, and I will miss him so much, but I will also join in the joyous celebrations of his incredible life. Several years ago, I was looking for a place to teach my film and acting classes and heard about a 200-acre property in Skagit County that had buildings that were vacant much of the year. When I got there, I found out that it was now the Treacy-Levine Center, a place where Palestinian...
Remember the Birdman of Alcatraz? I am introducing you to the Birdman of Shelter Bay. I'm buying a house in Shelter Bay with different feeding areas, including a bird watering hole. I'm converting one of my patios to a seed station. About 55 years ago, give or take, I was hired to work at a sleep-away camp in New Hampshire. It was a big deal because I was the only one of my friends who could not afford to be a camper, but now I was going as a counselor. The only opening was to be the rifle...
Being a caffeine addict, I was excited to welcome La Conner's new Beaver Tales Coffee & Tea and indigenous gift shop and what I found was so much more than another excellent local outlet to satisfy my addiction. The owners, Michelle Calvin and her mate Tony Cladoosby, roast coffee in small batches daily to ensure freshness. They are committed to bringing so much more to La Conner than a great cup of coffee. They are a diverse couple and they want to celebrate diversity in our town. Tony is a...
I was blown away this winter by the number of birds that I passed by as I drove all around Skagit Valley, including fields filled with snow geese and eagles in trees being photographed by many birdwatchers. Hooray, I thought, birds are making a comeback! I checked with my friend Libby Mills who is a leading bird expert and has been teaching people about birds for 50 years or so. Libby is a naturalist who is associated with the Padilla Bay Interpretive Center, the North Cascades Institute and a f...
