Letters to the Editor
Meaningful to Environmentalists
Dear Bay Weekly:
Bay Weekly is always well edited and inspiring, but the issue of January 16 was especially meaningful to us environmentalists. Gary Pendleton’s cover and Earth Journal Piece [In Season: Otter] were of special interest, and I appreciate the credit given to Gov. Parris Glendening for his work in preserving natural areas. Hunters and gun-owners voted against their own interests when they opposed him. Without natural areas, they would have neither a place to hunt nor a quarry to seek.
—John W. Taylor, Edgewater
Seeking a Motto for North Beach
Dear Bay Weekly:
Plummeting temperatures lured North Beach Mayor Mark Frazer and his partner Mary Mattingly up to Annapolis Harbour Center where they by chance sat down next to me in the theater to see About Schmidt.
Frazer and I are both native Washingtonians who made our way down to the Bay, my own parents as early as the 1930s on the train. While Frazer searched for his missing glasses, his partner mused about the North Beach of old and the new visions for the future. “I think our town should have a motto,” she said.
Which made me think. What about Nice and Breezy, a take-off on the local business Nice and Fleazy?
About the Bay, wouldn’t be bad, it’s true, and a lot better than the movie about Schmidt. Way back, Wesley Stinnett had a motto about his family restaurant “Limp in, leap out.” I’ll have to think about that. Stinnett, of course, was thinking of customers leaving his establishment refreshed. Come to think of it, that was and is true after a day on the Bay at North Beach.
Maybe Bay Weekly readers can help. Send us your ideas for a motto for North Beach. We’ll send them along to the mayor to read, if he ever finds his glasses.
— M.L. Faunce, Churchton
In Praise of Burton and Diners
Dear Bay Weekly:
Thanks to Bill Burton for his praise of diners [Vol. XI, No. 5, Jan. 30]. If you ever travel down U.S. 13 on the Delmarva Peninsula, swing off the bypass onto the main drag through Exmore, Virginia. There you’ll find an authentic old diner (unsurprisingly, the Exmore Diner) serving traditional diner fare plus such local specialties as drum ribs. Good people, good place.
—Al McKegg • [email protected]; Bowie
Dear Bay Weekly:
I have studied the various speeches made by Gov. Robert Ehrlich and find that the governor almost always talks about attacking the “drug and alcohol problem” and frequently refers to his three-year-old son. If Ehrlich is serious, I suggest he fight the drug problem from its roots starting with tobacco, the most deadly addictive drug of all. Tobacco kills more Maryland residents each year than heroin, cocaine, marijuana, alcohol, automobiles, suicides and homicides combined. In addition, tobacco is recognized by the National Institute on Drug Abuse as being a gateway drug to the use of illegal drugs.
If Ehrlich is truly concerned about his son, I suggest he distance himself from the tobacco industry because it surely has his son in their crosshairs already. Those who doubt this statement should visit the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library at the University of California at http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu. This site contains thousands of previously secret tobacco industry documents the courts forced the tobacco cartel to release during trials.
The cartel says they don’t target kids. However, R.J. Reynolds was recently fined $20 million by the courts for violating that portion of the 1998 master settlement agreement dealing with advertising to kids. This is the fourth time the courts have fined the cartel in the last two years for breaking such laws.
Ways that the governor can protect kids, as well as adults, are to support tobacco tax increases and a total ban on smoking in all public places, including restaurants and bars. It is time to treat tobacco like we treat other toxic substances.
—John H. O’Hara, Bowie
We welcome your letters and opinions. We will edit when necessary. Include your name, address and phone number for verification. Mail them to Bay Weekly, P.O. Box 358, Deale, MD 20751 • E-mail them to us at [email protected].
