TACOMA — When Noah Cuzzetto took his shot at a third title, Union’s Junior Godinho was ready.
The result was a special finish for the Titan senior and for his father, Union wrestling coach John Godinho.
Junior Godinho scored a takedown in overtime to beat Cuzzetto and claim the championship at 132 pounds on Saturday in the Class 4A tournament at Mat Classic.
Union’s Alex Berfanger also won a state title at the Tacoma Dome, capturing the 170-pound crown as the Titans earned a third-place team trophy.
A retired Episcopalian priest who moved to Vancouver from Columbus, Ohio, a dozen years ago, Don Greenwood has found a second calling.
Greenwood, the parent of a son with a mental illness, has become a successful advocate for mentally ill inmates in Clark County.
Pushing for change in a facility as rigid as a jail has required the patience you’d expect from a retired priest, as well as persistence. There’s still a lot of stigma about mental illness, Greenwood said, and it has taken a long time to convince jail administrators that changes really need to be made.
Nevertheless, Thursday will mark a year since United Grain Corp. at the Port of Vancouver locked out up to 44 union dockworkers after a simmering contract dispute came to a boil.
The fallout was extensive. Some of the impacts have ended or are quieter. Others, including legal proceedings, continue to ripple.
In October, the standoff appeared to ease when the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the Pacific Northwest Grain Handlers Association publicly said they’d renewed negotiations over a labor contract and that the talks had been productive.
As the one-year anniversary of the lockout nears, neither party will comment in detail about the status of their negotiations.
“There are still meetings occurring,” Pat McCormick, spokesman for the Grain Handlers Association — whose membership includes United Grain — said last week.
Jennifer Sargent, spokeswoman for the ILWU, confirmed that discussions continue.
The conflict has gutted the pay of some Vancouver dockworkers and left them scrambling to find work at other ports — often a fruitless search. “It’s been quite a strain on my family,” said longshore worker Marcel DeBord, 61.
Volunteers on bicycles maneuvered tree-laden trailers down neighborhood streets as part of a tree-planting event Saturday in west Vancouver.
“It seemed like a more worthwhile way to spend a Saturday than anything I would do at home,” said volunteer Vicki Nier. “It’s a good way to get out and be part of the community, and it allows me to be on a bike.”
The volunteers, some pedaling bicycles, others driving trucks, added about 150 trees Saturday to Vancouver’s tree canopy.
Portland-based nonprofit Friends of Trees organized Saturday’s tree-planting expedition as part of an ongoing effort to help the city accomplish its goal of 28 percent tree canopy in the city by 2030, said Ian Bonham, a Friends of Trees volunteer outreach coordinator.
The city currently has about 18 percent tree canopy, compared with about 30 percent in Portland, according to a city-commissioned study in 2011.
For more than 30 years, Bob Bradley and his life partner, Sherry Mowatt, have collected art. One glance at their yard in the Hough neighborhood and you will spot myriad pieces, all which make them say, “There’s a funny story behind that.”
“What makes them so dear to us is the stories,” Mowatt said.
But when they woke up on the morning of Feb. 1, the couple found as many as 15 pieces of their yard art had been stolen.
“I am absolutely devastated,” Bradley said. “This is stuff that has taken a lifetime to collect. To me, it had great emotional and philosophical importance.”
Half of the treasures they bought, they found at the Recycled Arts Festival.
“A lot of what I collect is old or trivial in nature,” he said. “But you manipulate it just slightly and give it new meaning.”
All of the stolen items were made of metal: adozen brass Buddhist bells, a large cast-iron Chinese lantern, modern fused-metal statues. When they visited City Bark & Recycling in Vancouver, staff told them about stopmetaltheft.com, where they reported their missing items. The site can be searched, acting as a reference for recycling companies.
They estimate the monetary loss at $5,000. Though most of the money they lost is covered under their homeowners insurance, a lot of what they lost is measured in terms of their own value.
