Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
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WAITSBURG -- Waitsburg voters, who elect their mayor and council members every year under the town's territorial charter, are expected to have some options on and off the ballot this April. Mayor Walt Gobel and four of the current five council members are running again after a caucus meeting at Larry and Deanne Johnson's house last week for the Truth & Trust slate that was first elected to office two years ago. Ballots for the election will go our Friday or Monday for the April 2 election. As...
WAITSBURG -- To bud as a musician, it helps to have good mentors. Ann Lehman and Daniel FitzSimmons had them. For Lehman, it was Rye Grass String Band guitarist Jon St. Hilaire. For FitzSimmons, it was Nashville musician Skylar Wilson and Old Crow Medicine Show member Cory Younts. But mentors merely plant the seed. The rest comes from within, fed by life stories and audiences that appreciate what they hear, as they do when Lehman and FitzSimmons take the stage as the duo DNA (short for Daniel &...
SPOKANE -- The Dayton Bulldogs themselves may not have registered how far they got into the Hardwood Classic Final 8 last weekend, but for their coach and hometown fans it certainly did register. After their 57-41 Saturday morning loss against the Wahkiakum Mules, the players were subdued and disappointed they didn't place higher. But their coaches and members of their community showed up in big numbers applauded them for being the best high school basketball team in a generation. They placed si...
WAITSBURG - The creation of a digital super highway through the Touchet Valley made some big strides this winter and the conduit for its fiber optics cable may be completed as soon as early spring. Crews have been trenching and boring their way from Walla Walla to Waitsburg through Dixie since the beginning of the year. This week, they are mobilizing to start in Dayton and head in the opposite direction to connect the route to Waitsburg, then on to Clarkston. If all goes well, the 1,600- mile...
DAYTON - If it shoots like a duck and dribbles like a duckhellip;it's a Fighting Duck. The Dayton Bulldogs will face a team from Toutle Lake at the Hardwood Classic in their first Final 8 game in Spokane on Thursday. This phase of the playoffs is double elimination. Even if they lose, the Dogs will face at least one more team at the arena on Friday. The Dayton players are still pinching themselves after putting away Riverside Christian in a convincing, 59-41, victory at Wa Hi Friday night, but...
WALLA WALLA - The Dayton Bulldogs are in the Final 8 in their 2B division after resoundingly beating Riverside Christian 59-41 at Wa Hi Friday night. quot;We worked hard since fifth grade and this was our goal,quot; Bulldog Joey Schlachter said. quot;It was a hard physical game.quot; At first, the Bulldogs seemed to have trouble outpacing the Crusaders from Yakima, but gained the upperhand through a 6-point run just before half time, boosting Dayton's confidence and spirits. Those never let up in the second half, which saw Riverside resorting...
WALLA WALLA -- The last time the Dayton boys basketball team won the district title, most of the current Bulldog globetrotters were still in diapers. The year was 1995. The 2012 team that beat the WP Cardinals by one point Monday night, 57-56, at Whitman College began to form almost that long ago when sports dads Dean Bickelhaupt, Greg Fullerton and Jeff Turner started dribbling with their sons Colton, Hayden and Garett in kindergarten. The likes of Kroft Sunderland, Joey Schlachter and Wyatt...
WALLA WALLA -- With a bit more than half a period left in the fourth quarter, the Lady Bulldogs came within six points of the lead in their game against the WP Cardinals. Then the margin grew again and The Dogs' hopes of un-seating the defending district title holders evaporated. The 2012 Cardinals defeated the Bulldogs, 45-33, in a feisty give-and-take, which the Waitsburg-Prescott team dominated for most of the evening. After all was said and done, the Cardinals remained as the top team of the district, but the second-place finishers' coach s...
WALLA WALLA - If a trey was worth four points, Cardinal Zach Bartlow's three-pointer that drained the net at the buzzer would have tied his team's game against the Dayton Bulldogs, forcing the battle over the district title into overtime. Instead, it fell one point short and the Bulldogs captured their first district crown in 17 years after beating their valley rivals, 57-56, at Whitman College on Monday. "Every time we play them (Cardinals), it's close," Dayton head coach Roy Ramirez said....
WAI T SBURG -- The genesis of Brian Seagraves' interest in cabinet making and wood working goes back to high school. When he was a junior at Nashua High School on the border between New Hampshire and Massachusetts, he took a shop class after getting burned out on being a drummer in the school band. "I had no background in running power tools," he said. But he soon learned he could be pretty meticulous with fine wood working projects that required precision. As a senior he won an Outstanding...
DAYTON -- The Dayton Chamber of Commerce, which serves businesses in Dayton and also has members in Waitsburg, has some new additions to its board, a development expected bring new energy and ideas to the organization. Scott Underwood, owner of PC Solutions on Main Street, and Stephanie Guettinger, manager at Columbia County Transportation, are replacing Dayton City Councilwoman Kathy Berg and Andie Holmberg from America West Bank. Both recently stepped down from the board. "Some new blood is going to really help," Claudia Nysoe, executive dire...
KITTITAS -- The WP Tigers' hopes for a showdown at the state wrestling tournament evaporated after they were knocked out of the regional competition in Kittitas last Friday, but by all measures the first-year program was a success, head coach Lanny Adams said after the big meet. "I couldn't be more proud of any of them," Adams said. "They gave it their best. Watch out next year. We're coming back with a vengeance." Wrestlers Gabe Escalante, Trent Kitselman and Dalton Larue participated in the re...
WAITSBURG -- Recalling the grace-under-pressure composure WP Cardinals Quarterback Zach Bartlow displayed in his team's climb to the title game last football season, it seems hard to believe that he was afraid of being a football player at one time. It was back in fifth grade. He was just a few days too old to stay with the Little Giants, the team he'd played for since third grade. So he became one of the youngest and smallest players on the Big Giants. "I was scared," he said, explaining that...
DAYTON - The best word to describe the Lady Bulldogs' playoff victory over Tri Cities Prep Tuesday night? Convincing. Dayton beat the Jaguars, 61-42, and will face Asotin in the districts semifinals at Whitman College in Walla Walla at 5 p.m. on Saturday. " It's a privilege to be where we are," freshman Lexie Ramirez said, crediting her coaches, Clayton Strong and Nikki Fullerton, with the team's extraordinary growth. "It's the best feeling in the world." The Lady Bulldogs are now 6-7 in league...
WALLA WALLA -- The way divo Morgan James sees it, putting four big guys with big voices and big egos on a stage together can be a recipe for disaster. But it doesn't have to be. It wasn't for the three classic opera tenors - Placido Domingo, Jose Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti. And it isn't for the Four Tenors who are currently stealing the limelight at the Powerhouse Theater, James said. "We complement each other," he said. "We're very much a group of four strong individual singers. Everyone...
DAYTON - A Dayton High School freshman who was reportedly expelled last fall for carrying a pocket knife to school after allegedly making a threat to another student has been allowed to return to campus. The school district itself is tight-lipped about the incident and about the student's return at the start of this semester, citing privacy laws. But the freshman's renewed presence on campus has created concerns and discomfort among some students and parents who say he should not have been allowed to return. One family has decided to transfer...
WAITSBURG - Zach Bartlow, the 2012 WP Cardinals quarterback who took his team to Tacoma to win the state football title, has signed up to play the same position for the college team of Eastern Oregon University in La Grande on a football scholarship. quot;We're pretty happy with it,quot; Bartlow's dad and Cardinals head coach Jeff Bartlow said in a telephone interview Thursday night. quot;That's what he wanted.quot; The coach said the Waitsburg senior was recruited heavily by another school in the same Frontier Conference, a National Athletic...
DAYTON - A transient man who is suspected of breaking into a Dayton church preschool and may also have broken into several homes in town during the past two months is in custody. Daniel Baxter, a 34-year-old drifter with ties to Montana, California and Pennsylvania, was arrested by Columbia County Sheriff's deputies late Thursday afternoon after the officers discovered his hiding place in the basement of an empty home owned by Dayton's Community Bible Church on South Second. quot;Baxter is the primary suspect in the ongoing investigation of a...
DAYTON - After the Lady Bulldogs' game against the TCP Jaguars was over last Tuesday, one of the Blue Mountain League referees came up to head coach Clayton Strong in the boys' locker room and told the Dayton coach what was already on everyone's mind. "They've made an immense improvement since I saw them earlier in the season," the ref told Strong. After beating TCP, 47-37, Tuesday night, the girls went 5-6 in league and 7-12 overall - not a record many observers would have expected at the...
DAYTON - Shaken up a bit after their loss against the Cardinals last week, it took the Bulldogs a couple of games to regain their footing. But Tuesday night's resounding, 73-28, defeat of the Jaguars team that came within two points of beating Dayton last Wednesday shows the Dogs have found their mojo again. "Things are coming back together," senior Bulldog Colton Bickelhaupt said. "We had a tough stretch there with WP and TCP. But tonight we played better defense, we pushed the ball up the...
WARDEN -- All four WP wrestlers did well enough at the qualifying meet in Warden last weekend to advance to the regional competition in Kittitas starting on Friday. The accomplishment was unexpected for the first-year program and underscores the effort each Tiger has put in to get better and wrestle with intensity, head coach Lanny Adams said. "I'm on cloud nine," Adams said. "It's a very successful year for the kids. It was the kids who did it, not me. Hopefully, we'll come back with some...
WAITSBURG - In one of the liveliest Touchet Valley rivalry games in recent memory, the WP Cardinals handed the Dayton Bulldogs their first loss of the season at a packed Kison Court Monday night. Despite reaching deep to preserve their undefeated status, the visiting Bulldogs fell, 51-44, to the home team. A fourth-quarter rally brought Dayton within five points of evening the score, but it wasn't enough to catch up with the Cardinals, who were much improved since the two teams met in Dayton earlier in the season. "We worked our butts off,"...
DAYTON -- First Wind, a Portland-based wind energy company, is preparing to erect 58 wind turbines in Whitman County and it's looking for contractors to help with the construction, according regional economic development officials. The company has $210 million in private financing and will start to clear for roads and the construction of an operations center to service the wind farm, which has been four years in the making, said Marshall Doak, director of the Southeast Washington Economic Development Association that includes Columbia County....
ASOTIN - During the first half of the Bulldogs' game against Asotin, it appeared as though their undefeated status might be at risk. At one point during the second quarter, the Panthers had a three-point lead, 21- 18. But Dayton came roaring back after the break, outscoring Asotin, 19-2, in the third quarter and 16-14 in the fourth to win the game, 62-39. After winning their game against Walla Walla Valley Academy with a comfortable 27-point margin, 68-41, the Bulldogs went, 15-0, for the season before their encounter with the muchimproved WP...
WAITSBURG - Unseating the Asotin Panthers from their top spot in the league this weekend gave the WP Cardinals the momentum to beat the Lady Bulldogs Monday night, 55-35. Dayton lost against the Panthers last Friday. "We went cold," Bulldog head coach Clayton Strong said. "They made a run and we never recovered." Hailey Goenen opened the Cardinals' scoring drive with a trey, followed by several WP lay ups that quickly put her team ahead, 9-2. With lay ups from Nicole Lambert and Shelby Smith,...
