Are we “oldtimers” yet?
If not, we do feel a bit closer to the coveted status of credentialed Bainbridge local, having attended the premiere screening Friday evening of a new video on the history of Fort Ward.
The half-hour documentary, written and produced by neighborhood resident Gordon Black with videography by Lois Shelton, was produced over the past year with grant support from the city. The premiere brought a full house to the council chambers at city hall.
Filled with archival photos and footage, and interviews with residents past and present, the video traces the history of “Bean Point” from pre-Columbian times, through its decades as a military base, to the new and changing faces of a fast-growing neighborhood. One particularly moving interview recalls the Navy’s displacement of the Peterson family from their dairy farm on the eve of World War II, preserving for the first time family members’ oral account of that bitter event.
In a community that places considerable cache on length of residency, it occurs us that “newcomers” can hasten their progress to “oldtimer” status by becoming immersed in the local lore. The Fort Ward video is a fine place to start; Black tells us it will air on Bainbridge Island Broadcasting in the coming weeks, and will be available at the Bainbridge Library.
We urge readers to tune in to this fine production, and hear the stories of one of our island’s more colorful corners.
Cybernews
We concede that a newspaper can’t please all of the people all of the time. To wit, a recent correspondence that arrived by email:
“Comments: Why waste the bandwidth pretending you have a ‘news’ site when there is nothing here? The paper version is bad enough, but to waste our time with no news on your website I guess is par for the course. Keep up the bad work. (signed) not@public_disclosure.com”
The correspondent’s address turned out to be a fake, but we hope our response finds its way to them nonetheless:
Dear “not”: Thanks for your comments, but you are, as they say, on the wrong page…
Indeed, it’s been about 10 weeks since the Review launched a revamped online edition; to find it, readers should delete their old browser bookmarks, and make a new one at
www.bainbridgereview.com.
The new site reflects our commitment to the online medium, which our experience of the past two years suggests is highly popular with readers both in the community and out of state. Readers should find the new site (minus obituaries, which our “techies” are still working on) to be faster and easier on the eye, with a fair number of of links to sites maintained by government agencies, community groups and service organizations, as well as the Review’s sister publications. More improvements will be added over time.
Alas, as our peevish correspondent notes, the flotsam of the old site – abandoned and tragically bereft of news content – still drifts aimlessly in cyberspace. We’re given to understand that such hapless travelers as stumble across it will soon be redirected to the correct address, and that the old page will be zapped into silicon dust.
But “not,” er, notwithstanding, most readers seem to have found their way to the new site, which during the month of October recorded nearly 14,000 page views – about 1,750 per issue, or 500 per day.
We trust that at some point, “not” will catch up.
