02/06/2021
THE NOTICER
1/30/2021
VOLUME 8
This will be the last issue of this little publication, which I did explain is only intended as a placeholder until the announcement could be made.
BIG NEWS FOR A LITTLE CITY……..A NEWSPAPER WILL MAKE ITS DEBUT, TARGETED FOR THE FIRST EDITION THE 1ST OF MARCH!!!
This is such exciting news. Oakridge will have a newspaper once again, fully staffed, with a remarkable Editor, many contributors, interesting local news and events, articles on many subjects to inform, entertain, advertise, educate, and showcase important happenings on the Highway 58 corridor.
The newspaper office will locate in the storefront building on the Highway at 47581 Hwy 58, last known as Salon 58. All are invited to visit, participate, take opportunity to advertise, showcase your businesses, and your opinions. There will be a printed version and an online version. A Board of Directors has been selected from seasoned journalists, authors, and others associated with the publishing business. More will be revealed as we get closer to the BIG DAY!
Just thinking.. FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS are complex, often querulous, petty, jealous, and angry. They are also loving, playful, happy, exuberant, and, above all, protective. Families
circle the wagons. I would like to begin a dialog on family relationships in order to learn, explore possible solutions, help to strengthen family ties through hearing one another and perhaps in doing so examine our own family dynamics for improvement. We do not want to name names or specifics. Those of you who wish to enter into discussion, state the bones of the problem. Describe briefly the general issue you would like to find a solution to. Stick to the topic, Give it a name. Anger, jealousy, friendship, love, forgiveness….etc. and let’s help one another to a better understanding. These conversations can be interesting and rewarding when we learn from them. A kind of Dear Abby column for our new paper with local participation?
I LOST A FRIEND
You know what it’s like to lose a friend. It is a sad time and a very all alone feeling. She let me live in her house for almost 19 years. She loved me without question, tolerated my bad habits and placidly slept through my spells of absence and neglect. She tucked me in every night and stayed around till I went to sleep.
She did ask me to cook for her. I really didn’t do much more than open a can and fill a dish.
Lately she has been telling me that she would have to leave me. I begged and pleaded to no avail, then finally let her go. Her first stop was the veterinary hospital in Pleasant Hill, then on to the veterinarian school at the U of O to see if she may be able to help other kitties, from there she would be off to chase butterflies in heaven. It’s a lonesome world without her, but, she left me the house.
Now on another note……..
Many have noticed a young man standing along E.1st St. waving an American Flag for hours at a time, day after day. This has been going on since last Summer. I have been curious about him and his motivation to choose this activity when most kids his age are skateboarding, shooting hoops, amusing themselves with TV or playing video games. I stopped a couple of times and asked him if I could ask his parents for permission to take his photo and visit with him to write about it, but he was reluctant, shy and…..a bit suspicious. Today, I drove by him with his flag held high, standing on the sidewalk at the Elementary School with a chalked message in yellow on the street in front of him, “Trump is a Traitor.”
I braked. He remembered me from my stops last year and told me his name is Ben. I asked Ben to call his Mother. He did, and she gave me permission to interview and photograph Ben who was then eager to tell me why he is doing this. Ben says, “I am standing up for America.” After the riots in Seattle, Portland, and other cities throughout the country, Ben decided that he would find a way to express his love of country, his patriotism, and his support for President Trump. He says he doesn’t want to “See America destroyed.!”
Ben is getting a great deal of support in the community. Cars toot their horns, rev their motors, drivers give him a thumbs up, a cheer, or wave. Passersby greet Ben positively. He told me he does have one abuser who disagrees by calling him “Racist, Fascist,” and tells him to “Rot in Hell,” or, yells angry expletives. That adult person has his right to disagree with the sentiment of Ben’s patriotism and support for the former President, but it is not necessary to do so in a cruel confrontive disagreeable manner, especially with an earnest young person.
Ben is the son of Steve and Priscilla Davidson. (This is the hard part for me) Ben’s Mom, Priscilla, who, I happen to be acquainted with, not knowing Ben was her son, answered the call from the hospital in Eugene where her Mother is a patient. The Doctors had just informed her that her Mother could not survive the pneumonia she is suffering as a result of being infected with Covid. Priscilla was inconsolable. She would have to tell the medics to let her Mother go and she was so conflicted and overwhelmed with grief, it was difficult for her to talk. I listened, but words are hard to find at a time like this, so I just listened. We only get one Mother. Priscilla and her family are going through a heartbreak just now. Ben is waving his flag for his “Nana” today. See Photo of Ben with his flag at the bottom.
Disc Golf Tourney Raises Needed Funds For Veterans
Jason Nehmer, President of the Oakridge Disc Golf Club, and John Bongiorno, a disc golf enthusiast, organized the event. The course is a Par 60 and encompasses a good portion of the 22 acres at the Oakridge Industrial Park, that were recently designated parks and open spaces. Each "hole" is sponsored and has a name and a historical write up, all referencing local history.
The fundraising tournament was held on Friday, the 15th, at the new disc golf course
Over 50 items were donated and raffled off at the game, including a beautiful quilt donated by city Councilor Bobbie Whitney. As a result, David Evans, Commander of
the Oakridge Chapter of The American Legion, post 64, accepted a belated “Christmas in January” gift in the form of a check for $1,100 from funds raised at the event. The Post members are planning a special meeting to determine how to best utilize these funds. Other officers of the Post on hand at the presentation were, Skip Baker, John Milandin, and George Custer. Bobbie Whitney remained for the presentation as well.
A resounding thanks to Jason Nehmer, John Bongiorno, and all the volunteers who helped to organize this special occasion that was so much fun and did so much good
If you head over to the course on a sunny day to toss the frisbee around, for free, by the way, you'll probably run into some Club members who will gladly tour their championship level course with you.
Thanks to George Custer for submitting this item to The Noticer.
The gang at the Disc Golf Course Event photo below
Sandra Binns has contributed her research on Covid-19!
Sandra Binns 01/30/2021
COVID IN OAKRIDGE!
Hardly news, but what’s happening now?
As of January 26, 2021, sixty-four people from the 97463 zip code have tested positive for COVID-19. Westfir’s zip code data is listed as “n/a” which I take to mean that either there are no positive COVID tests for anyone living there, or their data is being reported to Oakridge’s zip code. Of the 113 deaths due to COVID in Lane County, 20% were people from outside of the Eugene/Springfield metro area. I couldn’t find any deaths reported in the official record, but at least one person i spoke with knows someone from here who died of COVID. Current data can be retrieved from the Lane County Public Health (LCPH) site at www.lanecounty.org/coronavirus.
Interviews with Orchid Health and Nova Health report local experience consistent with the data available from Lane County Public Health.
How do I get my vaccine?
Nova Health (formerly Five Rivers Family Practice) is not making appointments for vaccination, Orchid Health is making appointments from a waiting list. At this point, neither clinic can predict when they will have vaccine for their patients. The best way to know when you are eligible to receive a vaccination is to check the LCPH site noted above, or if you are a patient at either Orchid or Nova, check their website.
The Lane County Public Health site invites any of us to sign up for their online vaccination newsletter so that you can follow daily progress toward your own specific group. Residents are put into groups according to a combination of risk factors for serious illness such as age, pre-existing conditions and living in group housing; and risk for exposure due to the essential nature of their work. For example, Oregon state has prioritized getting schools open with minimal risk to students and staff and the families they go home to. Therefore, pre-K through 12th grade educators and staff are being vaccinated ahead of the general population of 65 year-olds and older who live in their own homes.
Our two medical clinics here in Oakridge - Orchid and Nova - both received vaccine and have distributed it according to very specific Oregon Health Authority (OHA) guidelines, which is to say to health care providers. OHA has very specific guidelines and regulations which the clinics are following. Orchid Health was asked to follow up with our school teachers and staff in order to meet the state priority of getting students back into the classroom full time.
What is happening with the schools?
In addition to the home packets and online classes called Comprehensive Distant Learning involving all students (and their families!) our schools are also providing Limited In Person Instruction (LIPI) which involves groups of no more than 10 students for up to 2 hours per day, 2 days per week. Kindergarten, first grades and as of 01/28/21 fifth graders; and students with particular special needs currently have the choice of participating in LIPI. The landscape of regulatory guidance and practical implementation continues to change rapidly for staff and families, particularly with our state’s priority to return to in-person learning.
Breakfast and lunch meals continues to be available to all Oakridge and Westfir children 0-18 years old, students or not, through bus line delivery, and all students are on a bus route. In addition, our schools have a food pantry available to students and their families. Superintendent Doland asked to express the district’s appreciation to the community’s stepping up during this unprecedented challenge!
The food pantry in Oakridge has been busy, and is well supported by our community. Numbers just in - 700-715 households and 1,500 people were served by the Food Box in 2020! Volunteers have kept up, distributing (via drive-through service) almost 200 Christmas boxes this year.
So we’re fine, right?
The small number of positive test results in our zip code might give a false sense of security to those of us living up here in paradise. We have made so many changes to our daily life, our schools have done so much to continue to provide education and meals to our community, people who never imagined they would reach out to the food pantry have come forward, our clinics have been there for testing and personal guidance, and now there’s a vaccine! We have much to be grateful for living here with a community that steps up to take care of each other. It would be easy to let our guard down now.
But this disease is far from tamed. Like all viruses, it will continue to evolve, and its doing so quickly when it has so many opportunities to replicate in every person who catches it. We already can see a more contagious variation dubbed the UK strain likely to become the dominant strain in the United States by March.
One advantage of the vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer is that this quality of viruses was anticipated and so far these vaccines seem to be effective for the current variations, but we have experience around the world now to prove that the most effective means of preventing the spread of this illness is to follow the public health guidelines worked out over centuries of epidemics.
For COVID-19 what really saves lives is faithful mask-wearing when around anyone you don’t live with, social distancing so that the air has a chance to blow any particles away, and hand hygiene because touching our faces - especially around the eyes and nose - is the main way that the virus gets into our bodies. Masks need to cover our nose because that’s where the highest concentration of the virus is found.
I recommend visiting the Lane County Public Health site (www.lanecounty.org/coronavirus) to see how much information is available with relative ease for anyone accustomed to using online tools for information. The Oregon Health Authority is very transparent in that the information needed by all the health care providers and educators and all other decision-makers is available on line and accessible to all of us. Let’s keep taking care of each other, and a year from now we can look back on this time and tell each other our stories face to face!
Thank you all so much for the encouragement I have received in my endeavors. Joy Kingsbury
EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!!!
