YACOLT — When Bruce Music opened the hood of a gray sedan in the auto shop, students wearing khaki pants and shirts gathered around and peered under the hood. Music, a Clark College automotive instructor, talked about the significance of the serpentine belt.
“Remember, if the belt fails, everything fails,” he told his automotive services students. “When you get out, you can Google the belt-routing information,” he said.
But these men are not out. They are in. Solidly in.
They are incarcerated at Larch Corrections Center, a minimum-security prison in the remote, wooded eastern edge of Clark County, about 10 miles north of downtown Camas.
Some clues suggest this is not an ordinary college auto shop. Tools are secured with heavy-duty padlocks. Outside the shop, high concrete walls topped with barbed concertina wire remind the students that they are prisoners.
But sometime in the next four years, they’ll be free men. That’s why they are among the offenders across the state enrolled in the Community Colleges Correctional Education Program. The educational programs at Larch Corrections Center are run by Clark College. Just like the classes at Clark College’s main campus, the courses at the prison run 10 weeks. Classes focus on preparing inmates to be successful when they are released, to find jobs, and to stay out of prison.
Washington spent $15.4 million on education programs in its 12 adult prisons in 2013-2014, including $284,050 at Larch Corrections Center. Most of the money comes from the state government. No federal money is used. Any associate’s degree programs are paid for by private grants.
Sharon Allison was last seen alive on the morning of May 8 talking to an unidentified man in the hallway of her Columbia House apartment building. The next day, police found her body in a large blue recycling bin inside her apartment, dead from what police have called homicidal violence.
Nearly a month after Allison’s death, homicide detectives are still searching for her killer. Now the family of the 66-year-old Vancouver woman is pleading for anyone with information to come forward.
“I am madder than you could imagine,” said Linda Haley, Allison’s daughter. “I’m very, very mad that someone would take advantage and hurt a disabled person who could not defend herself, that they would hurt a good woman.”
In 1984, Allison was the victim of an assault that left her with head trauma. Years later, Allison suffered an aneurysm and stroke that surgeons said was a delayed effect from the injury, said Allison’s sister, Betty Minor. A man named James Mitchell Cunningham was arrested for aggravated assault in that case.
“She did not know a stranger; she was just kind,” Minor said. “Some of it got her in trouble, being too kind, and she let the wrong people possibly into her life.”
“It’s devastating. This is a hideous crime and it’s unfortunate because we’ve gone through this already, thinking we’d lost Sharon,” Minor said. “No one should have to go through this once, let alone twice, feeling the loss of somebody.”
The lead detective on the case, Lawrence Zapata of the Vancouver Police Department, said that investigators are still developing leads but have not yet identified a suspect.
Detectives have not said exactly how Allison died, but Zapata said that her body was intact. Zapata said it is too early to say whether Allison’s killer was a person she knew or a stranger. The only door to Allison’s apartment leads into the indoor hallway, and police have not said if there was any sign of forced entry. Nor has a motive been established.
Decades after patrolling the Mekong Delta, the Gamewardens are back on the river.
This time it’s the Willamette, where a group of veterans and their restored patrol boat are taking part in the Portland Rose Festival. Their mission includes welcoming U.S. Navy, Coast Guard and Royal Canadian navy ships as they arrive for Fleet Week.
Members of the Gamewardens Association were part of the “brown-water navy” during the Vietnam War. The fleet of PBRs (Patrol Boat River) cut Viet Cong supply lines in the Mekong Delta and disrupted enemy operations on the river. It was dubbed Operation Game Warden, which inspired the name of the association.
Several Vancouver-area “riverine” veterans are members of the Northwest association, including Larry Bissonnette, Bob Cook and John Lundy. Bissonnette is on the Gamewardens’ national board.
Bissonnette and Puget Sound-area member Heinz Hickethier were instrumental in acquiring their boat through a Navy heritage center in 2005, said Bob Brower, president of the Northwest chapter.
“The boat was in San Diego at a Navy monument and had been neglected,” Brower said. “We’ve put about $40,000 of our own money into the boat. The boat is now fully operational. We’ve worked on it hard to get it ready for the Rose Festival.”
The Fleet Week activity has been a big goal, Brower said, because, “It’s an on-the-water operation.”
That gives PBR 750 the chance to be in its natural element, not just serve as a floating military display tied to a dock or as a trailer-borne parade float.
A letter carrier saved the mail in her truck after it caught fire Friday morning in north Clark County.
The female United States Postal Service worker was driving along her route north of Battle Ground when she noticed smoke coming from the hood of the vehicle, said Clark County Fire & Rescue Battalion Chief Mike Jackson.
She pulled over in the 31000 block of Northeast 95th Avenue and called 911 before getting all of the mail out of the truck.
“So, there was no mail damaged or destroyed,” said Peter Hass, spokesman for the USPS.
Firefighters arrived to find the vehicle engulfed in flames. The letter carrier, whose name was not released, was not injured. She got another vehicle and resumed her route, Hass said.
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The truck, otherwise known as a Long Life Vehicle, was destroyed by fire, Jackson said.
In cases where mail is singed but the address is still legible, the mail will be delivered in a plastic bag with a note apologizing for the damage, Hass said.
Sheila Walsh Guenther gladly sold furniture for less. But her commitment to justice for women and a quality community for everyone never got marked down.
Guenther, a Vancouver businesswoman, advertising executive and community booster, died on June 3 at age 81. She had suffered years of health problems and a recent series of strokes, according to her son Kurt, who had moved her to Seattle for closer family care — and then back to Vancouver so friends could visit her at the end, he said.
Guenther worked for 20 years, the 1970s through the 1990s, with Allan Weinstein at Vancouver Furniture Company, a local pioneer of name familiarity through big, infectious advertising campaigns. No matter where its storefront was, Vancouver Furniture was known as the homey hometown shop with a huge selection and good prices.
Guenther was the author of the store’s famous slogan: “We simply sell for less.” Those words were even spelled out in gargantuan letters on the side of the building at 1101 Broadway for years — until the city decided its hugeness violated city sign code. The store fought back, gently, by naming sale items after members of the city council.
But Guenther’s talent for marketing didn’t just serve business. She was also deeply concerned about Clark County and about justice and equal rights for women and the disadvantaged. She was a key figure at the YWCA Clark County and a co-founder, with Weinstein and others, of Southwest Washington Independent Forward Thrust, or SWIFT — an umbrella charity that was a precursor of today’s Community Foundation for Southwest Washington.
“She stood loudly and proudly for people who weren’t fancy,” her friend Jane Jacobsen remembered. “We need more like her.”
That work was serious but Guenther’s approach was always fun, Jacobson added. “We laughed so hard, we got into trouble,” Jacobsen said. “She had an uncanny dry sense of humor and fabulous wit.”
These are good times for air travelers, with airlines expanding their nonstop flights between Portland International Airport and new domestic and international destinations for the summer travel season and beyond.
The service expansions come at a time when Portland International Airport is on the cusp of a significant change in status among its peers.
The airport expects for the first time to draw more than 16 million passengers, a threshold that will change its designation from midsize to large airport, said Kama Simonds, aviation media relations manager at the Port of Portland, owner and operator of the airport. The change does not affect the airport’s operations or finances; it is a recognition of the airport’s importance in the constellation of air travel. Its large volume is particularly noteworthy, Simonds said, due to the fact that PDX is an “origin and destination” airport, with about 85 percent of departing passengers coming from the Oregon-Washington service area, rather than a “hub” airport where many people are departing only after a flight transfer.
The new nonstop routes that promise to draw more people to the region are good news for local hospitality and tourism businesses, as more people from other regions and nations take advantage of growing access to the Northwest. In 2014, visitors to Clark County spent $420 million, including $302 million for overnight stays and $118 million for other travel expenses, according to the latest Dean Runyan Associates report.
PDX for years has struggled to attract and then retain international service. Its international travel peaked with more than 600,000 passengers in 2008, but the recession and other factors spelled an end to Lufthansa’s service to Frankfurt, Germany, and Alaska’s seasonal flights to several destinations in Mexico.
Portland now is in an enviable position of being one of the smallest airports to offer both trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic service, the Port of Portland’s Simonds said.
