Tag Archives: A Bird’s Eye View

Posted in opinion

ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO PRINT

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By Suzanne Sparrow Watson

Ely, NV

Downtown Ely

One of the joys of a long car trip is passing through towns that are barely on the map.  Such was the case on our journey up to Sun Valley, Idaho when we stopped for the night in Ely, Nevada.  Where, you ask?  Ely (pronounced EE-LEE) is smack dab in the middle of nowhere.  It is in the eastern part of the state on State Route 93, exactly 250 miles north of Las Vegas and 250 miles south of Twin Falls, Idaho.  This was not our first stop in Ely…it happens to be just a bit past the mid-point from our home up to Sun Valley so it’s a good place to rest for the night.  “Rest” being a relative term.

The nicest hotel in town is a La Quinta Inn that was built about five years ago.  It is pretty much what you would expect from a La Quinta  – the bare minimum of furniture in the room, cold bagels for breakfast, and people slamming doors at 2 am.  This trip we were delighted by people across the hall who left their baying hound alone in the room for five hours.  There are several casinos in town where, we assumed, the dog’s owners were on a hot streak.

However, as I stated at the beginning, I find a particular joy in going through small towns.  Having grown up in a town where everyone knew everyone else, I find it comforting to know that such places still exist.  A habit I picked up years ago is buying the local newspaper to get a flavor of what life is like in these small burbs.  In Ely, the local paper is called The Ely Times.  Clearly they didn’t spend a lot of time coming up with a catchy name.  On the other hand, I think simplicity is key in Ely.  My brother, Bob, has the same fascination with small town papers and we obviously came to that trait naturally since our parents owned our small town paper, the Novato Advance.  Or The Retreat, as some people took to calling it.

Mom and Dad in front of the Novato Advance

Mom and Dad in front of the Novato Advance

Regardless, the name of this blog is a tribute to a column that our mother wrote each week, “A Bird’s Eye View”, in which she regaled people with stories about local activities.  Her riveting articles chronicled such highlights as  “Mr. and Mrs. Tresch went into San Francisco for lunch on Thursday where they enjoyed a crab salad at Aliotos” or “Mr. and Mrs. J.J. Smith entertained their cousins from Modesto last week”.

So it was with some interest that I opened the Ely Times to see what constituted news in this small town of 4200 people.  Here were some of the major stories:

  • “The City Treasurer has been placed on a 90 day review for insubordination.  The Mayor asked her not to write a check to the Fire Chief, but she ignored his orders, asked the opinion of another council member, and then went ahead and wrote the check anyway.”
  • “Mrs. Zelma Brown died in February but the town will be celebrating her life at a memorial to be held at the Pool Park next Saturday.  Refreshments will be served but seating is limited so bring along a chair for yourself.“
  • “The Ruth Mining Days competitions will be held on June 21.  There will be a mill ball toss, rock hammer toss, tire roll and a tug-of-war over mud.  In addition, we will hold the annual Adult Mucking Competition.”
mucking

Mucking..or something like that.

Mucking competition???  I thought that was a skill held by scrappy newspaper reporters trying to “get the goods” on corrupt politicians.  But, being the intrepid reporter that I am, I did a little research and discovered this is a very serious competition, conceived to keep old-fashioned mining techniques alive.  There are seven events in the competition: Jackleg  drilling, gold panning, hand mucking, hand steeling, timber sawing, surveying and track stand. Points are assigned in each event and the lowest cumulative score at the end of all seven events is the overall winner.  I guess it’s sort of the decathlon of mining.

 

I was sorry that we had to miss all of the festivities…I’ve never been one to pass up a good mill ball toss.  Driving out of town the next morning we passed the new Dialysis Center.  I recalled there was an article in the paper about the local quilting guild that donated dozens of quilts for the comfort of the patients undergoing treatment there.  In Ely, if someone is in need, there is someone to help out.

I’m not sure I could live in a town that small again; I’ve grown accustomed to Costco, Starbucks and high-speed internet.  But I envy these people in ways that others envy the Kardashians.  They live life simply, they take care of their neighbors, and the only muckraking they care about has nothing to do with politicians.  I think they’re pretty darn lucky to live in Ely.

 

Posted in Holiday observations

Welcome to ‘A Bird’s Eye View’

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     Yes, you’re in the right place; you don’t have a virus; well, maybe you do, but that’s a whole different subject.  This is Morning News in Verse and you are either receiving this in your email (thank you subscribers, we love you) or are getting it through Facebook (we love you too, but it’s more like a puppy love).  Due to an increasingly diminishing number of requests, we’ve made a decision to change our format from mostly verse and some prose to mostly prose and some verse.  Our number of ‘hits’ tell us that it’s what you would prefer as well.

     We’ll still make fun of the Headlines, Money, Sports and Life, but only occasionally; rather, we’ll proffer samples of ‘A Bird’s Eye View’ of life-observations.  Sometimes our observations will be from the road, usually the one less traveled, and sometimes they will be from just around the corner.  Sometimes we’ll write about insignificant, Andy Rooney-kinds of things and other times we’ll offer observations on this process of growing older, but not necessarily up.

So let’s start with our new name, ‘A Bird’s Eye View’; it is, of course, a play on words of the name Sparrow, but it also has some family history to it.  In 1940 our parents moved to Novato, a small, northern California town, where our father, Jack (yes, Jack Sparrow, but no relation to Johnny Depp) bought the Novato Advance, a local, weekly newspaper, and at 26 became the youngest newspaper publisher in California.  It was truly a ‘Mom and Pop’ business – our dad hand-set the type and operated the printing presses while our mom, who could also operate a pretty mean linotype machine, attended the town meetings to gather the local gossip, or news as she called it.  She also spiced up the paper by chronicling the comings and goings of Novato’s social elite, such as they were.  Those familiar with small town newspapers know what we’re talking about.  Jim and Mabel Cranston were visited on Sunday by Mabel’s sister, Iris from Ukiah; she brought an apple pie – Jim had seconds.  Our mother originally called her column, A Little Bird Told Me and later changed it to A Bird’s Eye View.  When we recently asked her about why she changed the name, she first said, “Who are you two?”  At 93, we forgave her for not remembering the details of a newspaper column from nearly 70 years ago.  Our theory is this: etymologically speaking, ‘A Little Bird Told Me’ sounds like second-hand information, like we’re not sure if this is true, but we heard from someone that yadda, yadda, yadda. ‘A Bird’s Eye View’, on the other hand, seems to suggest more of a first-hand, optimum perspective of things.  Our mother could neither confirm nor deny our theory.

However the name came about, we’ve decided that it’s ours and we’re bringing it out of retirement.  We hope you enjoy our new direction.