One of Southwest Washington’s biggest benefactors, Ed Lynch, died Sunday evening after a period of declining health. He was 94 years old.
“Vancouver has lost a great friend and supporter,” said Lynch’s friend Royce Pollard, former Vancouver mayor and, like Lynch, a former recipient of the community’s First Citizen award.
“Ed and (his late wife) Dollie were models of what a committed and caring citizen should be,” said Pat Jollota, local historian and former Vancouver city councilwoman. “It was not just the monetary donations that they gave, it was the gift of themselves, of their knowledge, of their caring hearts.”
“He’s a cornerstone for the community,” said Jim Mains, Lynch’s friend, next-door neighbor and personal assistant. The Lynches supported many community causes over the years, including the PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center, Fort Vancouver National Trust, Identity Clark County and Columbia Springs Foundation, among other others.
About 2,500 teachers from the Evergreen, Camas, Washougal and Hockinson districts hit the streets Wednesday, leaving classes canceled for the day for some 38,000 students, nearly half the county’s public school students.
At midday, teachers wearing red shirts gathered at Esther Short Park to send a message to state legislators: It’s time to fully fund public schools.
Their acrimony stems from the Legislature’s failure to meet the demands of the McCleary decision, a 2012 Washington Supreme Court ruling calling on the state to amply fund K-12 education. Frustration boiled over this spring after legislators waffled over how to fulfill a demand to shrink class sizes after voters passed Initiative 1351 in November. Teachers are also frustrated that the Legislature has not provided cost-of-living pay increases since the recession.
As Darcy Haberl, a Heritage High School teacher, distributed lyrics to rally songs to fellow teachers, one of her students greeted her.
A Southwest Washington lawmaker who was determined to kill the Columbia River Crossing project is using the same resolve to revive Interstate 5 Bridge discussions — and not letting a lack of enthusiasm from across the river stop her.
Rep. Liz Pike, R-Camas, who is hoping to formalize work between Oregon and Washington on a bridge project, recently reached out to Oregon House Speaker Tina Kotek in a letter.
Pike received a response from the Portland Democrat this week.
Kotek’s parting line: “A bistate conversation regarding the I-5 corridor will have to wait for another day.”
Bonnie Brasure, owner of Bleu Door Bakery on Main Street in Vancouver, has a coffee mug emblazoned with words that nicely sum up her success in business: “She believed she could so she did.”
That’s not to say she’s done, though.
Hardly.
She’s taking her bakery shop, which makes fresh-from-scratch pastries, breads, desserts and sandwiches, among other confections, to its next logical step: expansion.
After securing a loan through the U.S. Small Business Administration, Brasure bought the building next door to her walk-up bakery and made several improvements to it.
The result: a lovely new space, lit up by sparkly chandeliers, in which customers will be able to sit down, peruse the menu and enjoy a bite to eat.
The telecommunications company Integra, which relocated headquarters and hundreds of employees to Vancouver in 2013, has laid off an undisclosed number of workers from its operations department, the company confirmed on Wednesday.
The company provided no details about the layoffs, which were first reported by The Oregonian. Robert Guth, the company’s interim president and CEO, issued the following statement:
“We’ve eliminated several positions in our operations department, with each affected employee offered a severance package based on position and tenure. Our industry is changing rapidly and we are evolving aggressively with it. We continue to work to best align our resources with the needs and desires of our customers, and we see significant progress in our overall business performance.”
Moms who hate hearing kids crack their knuckles aren’t going to like hearing this: Those threats that knuckle-cracking will cause arthritis just aren’t true.
Dr. Kevin deWeber, a sports and family medicine physician at Family Medicine of Southwest Washington, researched and debunked the myth after being asked countless times by knuckle-cracking patients if they were destined to develop osteoarthritis.
“I was actually a little surprised by what I found,” deWeber said. “There was a trend toward people who crack their knuckles having less arthritis, not the opposite way around, like moms always assumed.”
Anywhere between 25 percent and 54 percent of people crack their knuckles, depending on the population studied. It can become habitual because of the immediate joint tension release and increased range of motion, deWeber said.
While urban legend suggests that knuckle cracking will lead to arthritis, the claim has never been supported in medical literature.
