Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
Sorted by date Results 253 - 277 of 589
DAYTON - After five years on the Dayton City Council, Councilman and Mayor Pro Tem Merle Jackson announced he plans to retire before the end of the year. " I wa n t people to k n ow I ' m working toward full retirement," said Jackson, 66, who joined the council in 2006 after being appointed to a vacant seat following his professional retirement as a nuclear engineer. "It's time to get off the stage." Jackson said he wants to retire this fall, but will serve through Dec. 31 if necessary to ensure...
WAITSBURG - Getting tourists and travelers to the state, then across the mountains to eastern Washington will be one of the main goals for the state's new privatesector tourism alliance, its newly appointed director said Friday. "This corner of the world (and state) is a diamond in the rough," said Suzanne Fletcher, who was appointed earlier this summer as the head of the Washington Tourism Alliance. The state Legislature axed the last remaining funding for the government-run state tourism...
DAYTON - One look at the Asotin roster and it's easy to see why its volleyball team had at least one advantage in their threegame victory over the Bulldogs on Tuesday night. Senior Panthers JaLisa Jose and McKayla Swearingen are both 5' 11" and they were both hitting hard and shielding their own court at the net like ramparts on a fort. But that wasn't the only drive behind the Asotin's tough trouncing of Dayton's otherwise well-composed 2011 team. "Last year, they were league champs and we...
DAYTON - The WP Tigers won the seasonopening soccer jamboree in Dayton last Wednesday, but not as convincingly as last year. The friendly late-summer competition between the teams from Dayton, Waitsburg-Prescott and Walla Walla Valley Academy saw improved performances from the other two teams, though neither one managed to score against the 2011 Tigers in the 95-degree heat. The Tigers beat WWVA 3-0 and went 6-0 against Dayton, a team they beat 19-0 last season. The WWVA Knights beat Dayton 2-1...
DAYTON - With 11 minutes to go in the third quarter, it began to dawn on the players on the Bulldogs sideline that a second victory of the season might be possible. Garrett Turner had just caught a Dean Bickelhaupt pass on the 2-yard line and running back Hayden Fullerton punched it in for the touchdown, 19-14. It wasn't just that the Bulldogs were ahead. It had as much to do with the fact that Dayton scored less than one minute after the visiting Enterprise Outlaws made a breakthrough running...
WAITSBURG - Suzanne Fletcher, executive director of the newly formed Washington Tourism Alliance, will visit Waitsburg and Dayton on Friday afternoon. Her visit here is part of Fletcher's tour of the greater Walla Walla area that starts with a meeting with local tourism and hospitality industry leaders at the Walla Walla Regional Airport 9:30 - 11:30 a.m. that day. She is scheduled to meet with members of the Touchet Valley Tourism Alliance and other local business owners and government officials at 3 p.m. at the Coppei Coffee Co. on Main...
A few weeks ago, some 20 plus members of the local PEO chapter came in to have lunch at the Coppei Coffee shop. They enjoyed coffee, sandwiches and drinks from the shop's ever-growing menu, then lingered around their tables in the space behind the Times front office that functions as Waitsburg's community living room. Anita Baker, PEO member and wife of former Times publisher Tom Baker, was on hand to explain some of the equipment on display in the space: the Linotype machine from the 1920s,...
DAYTON - In the early hours of the morning last Thursday, Tia Gore was making her five-year-old daughter a birthday cake. Together with her eightyear old son, Gore and her daughter were planning to mark the occasion of her birth later that day. It was an easy day for the family to remember because it came shortly after they moved into their rental home at 1013 South Third just before the girl was born. As she was working on the cake, Gore suddenly heard a loud pop in the kitchen and the wall...
STANFIELD, Ore. - Cornerback Wyatt Frame clearly felt awkward being on the sideline watching his teammates take on the Stanfield Tigers without him and linebacker Joey Schlachter in the Dayton Bulldogs' first game of the season Friday. But the Bulldogs did well without the two injured starters, beating the Oregon team handily at home, 20-0, and chalking up its first seasonopening win in four years. "You always have your doubts when you don't have two of your starters," Bulldogs head coach Dean...
WAI T SBURG - I was behind the counter at the Coppei Coffee shop last week when he walked in. He donned a well-worn canvas hat, a big backpack and two sticks that looked like ski poles. With all that gear on, the diminutive elderly man stepped right up to the cash register and made his inquiry. He had heard someone at or near the coffee shop or the Times had rooms to rent and, having just walked from Dayton that morning, he was ready for some rest. It so happened I just set up the first two...
WAITSBURG - The Cardinals' cross-country running team may be down in the numbers this year, but when it comes to distance competition it's more about "quality than quantity," head coach Joanna Lanning believes. The WP running team is down to six runners - three high schoolers and three middle schoolers. The group has lost five seniors during the past two years, "which is a big hit," Lanning said. Last year, the team consisted of nine runners - seven high schoolers and two middle schoolers. But...
PRESCOTT - Times reporter/ photographer Tracy Daniel ventured to the practice field in Prescott to catch up on the 2011 Tigers soccer team and quickly discovered that the players have gotten a late start in preparing for their season. After becoming district champions and ending their season 18-1 last year, the Tigers have raised expectations going into this fall. But a lot has changed since then. Veteran coach Rick Hamilton left the district and former assistant coach Bart Baxter was passed up for his job. New head coach Mark Grimm, who has...
DAYTON - Just two years ago, the Bulldogs wouldn't have made it among any of the teams in the league to beat in the esteem of other coaches. But one year after Dean Bickelhaupt took over as head coach, Dayton immediately comes to the mind of his counterparts as a team they'll have to watch out for during the 2011 season. "Dayton's going to be a lot better," Cardinals' head coach Jeff Bartlow said. "They won games last year and they'll be in the top three." The Bulldogs won three games last...
WAI T SBURG - On the one hand, head Cardinals football coach Jeff Bartlow argues that it's good to come from a historic season that sent the team to the state playoffs. "The culture of winning is there," he said. "There's no doubt the kids believe in it." The Cardinals went an unprecedented 12-1 and made it to Pullman only to be edged out by Colfax and place third in state. But it also means having to defend a district championship title and being in a position to fend off challenges from...
WALLA WALLA - When it comes to people getting infections such as HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C, Waitsburg's Sharon Clinton believes it's the luck of the draw. With blood transfusions and contamination risks, contracting such infections can happen "to any of us," she said. It's the main reason that Clinton and her husband Larry attended a fundraising dinner in Walla Walla for Blue Mountain Heart To Heart, a non-profit organization that facilitates support groups, case management, education and...
WAITSBURG - Just as some residents in the Touchet Valley were watching the news about Hurricane Irene making landfall on the East Coast on Sunday, they were suddenly taken aback by a local weather event of their own. After late afternoon clouds gathered over Waitsburg, winds picked up out of nowhere and took huge clouds of dust from the dry fields with them, towering high over the city and surrounding countryside. The dust storm quickly reduced visibility to only a few hundred yards and whipped...
DAYTON - It was a bright day in early August. The National Guard helicopter hovered several hundred feet above the canyons in the Eckler Mountain area of the Umatilla National Forest when the spotter in the cockpit first noticed the pattern on the steep hill: a terraced slope with carefully spaced plants of a slightly darker color than the surrounding vegetation. It was just the beginning. Upon closer inspection, the spotter noticed more "grows" spread out along hundreds of yards on two...
WAITSBURG - Any Mexican food lover in the Walla Walla area knows the food the Reyes family puts out: authentic yet innovative Mexican fare. They may have never heard of Jose Reyes or his wife, Maria Espinoza, but the name of their Taco Wagons, La Monarca, will ring a bell. The wagons on Isaacs at East Gate and on Rose downtown, have been popular in Walla Walla for years, garnering the family Best Of The Best recognition under the Taco Wagon category for years, trading places with El Taco Loco....
Heart BEAT WAITSBURG - The first thing you see is a pan of the wheat fields, followed by a drive through town: the stately early-century homes, campus-like sidewalks and the downtown Main Street core. Then suddenly, Paul Gregutt and Karen Stanton Gregutt are greeting you from the kitchen aisle of their new Three Maples Cottage on Third and West. "You," that is, if you happened to be among the hundreds of guests attending the Auction of Washington Wines' Gala at Chateau Ste. Michelle in...
WAITSBURG - It was never Wyatt Withers' sole inspiration for going in the Navy, but once he had decided to join it certainly helped having a grandfather who had served in the same branch many decades ago. Choosing to be "seasick over digging a fox hole," longtime local farmer Jack McCaw went to amphibian training school in preparation of the Allied invasion of Japan when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He became part of Gen. Douglas MacArthur's occupation force in Japan...
DAYTON - A fire believed to have been sparked by a lawn mower threatened two homes and burned 250 acres near the county line off Whetstone Road north of the Touchet River valley Sunday. It destroyed a garden shed, scorched the side of a pickup truck and burned 50 acres of standing grain. It was the first serious fire of the summer in the territory covered by Walla Walla County Fire District 2 based in Waitsburg, even though the blaze started on the Columbia side of the county line. Dozens of...
The Times DAYTON - Law enforcement agents this week removed more than 28,000 marijuana plants from the Eckler Mountain and Hartsock areas of Columbia County and arrested two more Mexican nationals in what one local official calls the largest pot bust in the state this year. Columbia County Sheriff's deputies, U.S. Forest Service agents and Washington State Troopers seized 25,765 marijuana plants with a street value of about $25.7 million on Thursday after making two arrests and destroying 2,300...
WAI T SBURG - Seattle-area residents who tuned into their local National Public Radio affiliate this week were introduced to none other than Waitsburg's Bret Moser, Jim German, Claire Johnston and Jack Millar. Seattle- based KUOW focused on Waitsburg in a second segment about the so-called "Cascade Curtain," a physical, and some would say cultural and political, divide between the west and east sides of the Cascade Mountains. In his show "Waitsburg: When East Meets West," reporter Dominic Black...
WAITSBURG - In the arid summer back country of the Blue Mountains, Gary Lommasson had come across bones before - animal bones parching in the sun. As an elk hunter, Lommasson often hikes deep into the steep and rugged terrain of the Umatilla National Forest in search of a prized bull, which he hunts with a special tag using bow and arrow. But he knew what he saw during an elk scouting trip in the Deduct Pond area off Tiger Canyon on the morning of July 22 was different, very different. At the...
WALLA WALLA - Former Waitsburg resident Adam Hermanns, who pleaded guilty earlier this week to armed robbery and residential burglary, was sentenced to 13 ½ years in prison, the maximum term possible under state sentencing guidelines. A fierce protector of the idea that one's home is one's castle, Walla Walla County Superior Court Judge Donald W. Schacht said he took seriously victim impact statements, particularly from 81-year-old Dorothy Schneider, whose residence was invaded by Hermanns and...
