| This Paper is Brought to You By Award-Winning Advertising
Bay Weekly brought home eight prizes for excellent advertising in the Maryland-Delaware-District of Columbia Press Association’s 1999 Advertising competition. T he spread was two firsts, five seconds and one honorable mention.
Betsy Kehne, production manager and ad designer, took a first in Classified Promotion for “Dreaming of Big Boats,” describing Bay Weekly’s $60 guaranteed ad for boats priced $5,001 and up.
“Nap time a bit restless?” reads the headline above an ocean liner plowing into the dreams of a man napping in a hammock.
Said the judges: “Focused on what you could find and where, clearly and effectively.”
Kehne also scored two seconds and one honorable mention. Her local retail campaign, “Early Birds” for advertiser Early Bird Wild Bird Supplies, was shared with ad executive Kathy Flaherty.
“We always do our best for our advertisers. Winning awards shows just how good our best is,” said Flaherty.
But, as Legusta “Gus” Floyd, president of the Press Association and publisher and editor of the 66-year-old weekly Prince George’s Post, told the awards celebration last week, “You can’t win unless you complete.”
General manager J. Alex Knoll took the other f irst for the post-card-sized invitation to the paper’s last year birthday party. “Colorful, bright, and card stock makes it different,” said the judges of the winner in the print promotion of newspaper category.
Bay Weekly swept that category, with Kehne’s second, “Sing It Loud” and honorable mention, “Summer Sizzle.” Both are single sheets summarizing for advertisers the benefits of the paper’s handy half-sized seasonal special supplements.
Knoll scored a big second for advertiser Herrington on the Bay with a big ad: Goombay Fest ’99 in the category Best Retail Ad half-page or larger.
Staff shared second place awards for last spring’s Home and Garden Guide and our series promoting Bill Burton’s Bay Weekly annual fall fishing expedition.
“When you own a small paper as I do,” Floyd told the awards celebration last week, “advertising is never far from your mind. Not a bill is paid, not a payroll is met without the revenue generated by advertising.”
This was the Association’s most competitive contest ever. A record 59 newpapers submitted a record 850 entries. Judges were ad executives from the Virginia Press Association. Judging rotates year by year through the various state press associations.
Swan Song: Will Too Many ‘Mutes’ Spoil the Bay?
You’ve probably seen them, perhaps in growing numbers, on your neighborhood pond or creek. The tip off is the bright orange cap at the base of their beaks.
We’re talking swans. Not the noisy migratory tundra swans who winter here and summer on Arctic tundras. They’ve been part of Chesapeake Country since time immemorial.
The mute swan — big white birds that stretch to five feet in length — was imported from Europe and is a snowballing problem in Chesapeake Country.
The mutes arrived in the 19th century to grace ponds and lakes. In 1 962, according to Maryland Department of Natural Resources, five captive swans escaped. In the wild, they’ve prospered. Just how much DNR’s bird counters discovered in their tri-annual aerial Bay survey this spring. Counted were 3,955 mute swans — nearly double the 2,700 swans counted three years earlier in the 1996 survey.
Maryland protects the swans as wetland game birds, but their increasing numbers may mean less to eat for native dabbling wildfowl — as well as the myriad other species, including crabs, that depend on submerged grasses for food and shelter. Coincidentally or not, since the mid-1970s, Maryland’s wintering migratory swan population has declined by about 30 percent.
Now, DNR has named a citizens advisory committee to advise on how to manage the big, hungry and very territorial birds.
Don’t expect a swan song anytime soon from the birds that, so legend has it, sing only once in life — upon their death.
And Then There Were Trees
Follow Jumpers Hole Road to Millersville, and you find Kinder Farm Park. Follow a winding road past gates and upward to the heart of the park. Soon, just to the left, a paved narrow hiker/biker trail wanders into the wilderness. Follow it first to the left, then to the right, until you see a tiny rusty, wood bridge. It sits alone in a grassy glade. No shady forest to comfort it.
And then there were trees.
Thanks to friends of Bay Weekly. You pitched in nearly $9,000 at last year’s Sixth Birthday Bash at Surfside 7 Restaurant & Dock Bar to help American Forests, the nation’s oldest conservation organization, plant a million trees around Chesapeake Bay.
Digging at Kinder Farm Park begins April 29. The next week, May 6, volunteers will plant 100 Bay Weekly trees at the second place to share in the bounty, the Academy of Natural Sciences Estuarine Research Center in Calvert County.
Kinder Farm Park gladly accepts the $1,528 grant from American Forest in the name of trees.
“The only thing the park doesn’t offer is shade,” says 24-year-old park ranger Brian Campbell. He’s right.
The Kinder family farmed their first 40 acres, bought in 1898, raising fruits and vegetables. Over time, the family switched to cattle. The farm grew to over 1,100 acres, then dwindled.
The family’s last wish was that the final 288 acres, sold to Anne Arundel County in 1979, would become a park for the enjoyment of outdoor lovers.
Tha t wish was granted last year, with the opening of gates leading to horseback riding, hiking, biking and butterfly trails, four catch-and-release natural fishing ponds, athletic fields, 90 community garden plots, one big and two smaller playgrounds, several picnic areas and a birding park. All this scattered throughout woodlands and meadows still set in an old farm motif.
And that’s only phase one. Much more will be added educationally and recreationally, but today’s focus is trees. That’s where our dollars come in.
Come Saturday, 75 eastern redbuds, button bash, bayberry, pin oak, inkberry and American holly trees and shrubs will be planted alongside the lonesome bridge. All are Maryland natives.
As well as trees, our money pays for delivery and black tubing to protect young trees from wild animals.
“It’s an open grassy area right now,” says Campbell, who’s helped in five reforestations across the country. “With trees, it’s really going to be great.”
Farther south, on the grounds of Jefferson Patterson Park and on the banks of the Patuxent River and St. Leonards Creek, The Academy of Natural Sciences Estuarine Research Center explores the complex interrelationships between life on the water and life on land.
They, too, are turning farmland into new open uses. Replanting began with BayScapes: Demonstration gardens and environmentally sound landscapes filled with low-maintenance native plants that look good, provide food and habitat for wildlife and help safeguard the Bay.
The Academy is using $4,080 from Bay Weekly’s 1999 fundraiser to buy and maintain 100 native American elm, black gum, pin oak, sweet gum, white ash, dogwood, red maple and tulip popular trees and shrubs.
Kinder Farm Park and The Academy’s grants are so different, explains American Forest’s Karen Fedor, because “they’re different types of land situations.”
That means that county-owned Kinder Farm Park does not need to hire people to mow and look after the trees. “Over at the Academy, a little more site preparation is needed,” says Fedor. Plus, the private Academy has to hire all its work to be done. Tree shelters, land maintenance and operations of lab and staff fees for the non-profit are all included in their grant funding.
Bay Weekly’s trees will become part of the BayScapes reforestation at the Academy. “Right now it’s a mowed field about 30 to 50 yards from St. Leonards Creek,” says volunteer coordinator Sheila Hughes. “We’re trying to make the wooded section bigger.”
One hundred trees will sure help.
Both Kinder Park Farm and The Academy of Natural Sciences still need hands. Lend yours for a couple of hours for the good of Chesapeake Country. Show up at 9am Sat. April 29 at Kinder Park Farm. (On the left 1.5 miles north of Benfield Road on Jumper’s Hole Road.)
Lend a hand again at 9am Sat. May 6 at the Academy of Natural Science. (Rt. 2-4 to Broomes Island Road to Mackall Road to Jefferson Patterson Park nearly to the Patuxent River.)
You’ll know your money is making a difference as you party with us at our Seventh Birthday Bash May 7 — and hand over your cash for the good cause of South River Federation.
Way Downstream …
In the District of Columbia, the smell of French fries wafted through the Earth Day shebang last weekend. That’s because they got some power for microphones from generators fired by old cooking oil rather than from plugging into electricity from coal or nuclear power …
In Spokane, Wash., kiddies gamboling about at Easter Sunday festivities discovered more than eggs. A moose emerged from the woods to conduct her own hunt — for some leafy Easter vegetation, the Oregonian reported. Unfortunately for all, organizers shot the moose with a tranquilizer gun, called off the hunt and sent the egg-seekers home …
In California, a mysterious disease is killing a state symbol, the tanbark oak in Muir Woods. They’re calling the affliction “sudden death” because it causes trees to wilt and ooze dark red sap as they die …
Our Creature Feature comes from Portland, Maine, where, it seems to us, the pigeons are winning. The Audubon Society is getting phone calls from people complaining not only about the mess but also about all that cooing distracting people, the Boston Globe reports.
Mainers are fighting back with spikes and plastic owls on their roofs. Some people are reportedly so upset that they’re chasing pigeons in parks. At the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception belltower, where they hauled out over a ton of pigeon mess, they tried a more natural approach: cats. But the pigeons are outsmarting the priests, roosting higher in the tower and out of feline grasp.
Copyright 2000
Bay Weekly
|
