| One Curmudgeon to Another
Dear Bay Weekly:
This is in response to Bill Burton’s column “The Great Storm of 2000: A Snow Job” [Feb. 3-9]. I like the over-the-back-fence chat each week, but this time I have to respond.
Bill quoted Robert Marshner, and seconded his opinion, that the coverage of the snowstorm of January 25, 2000, was a repetitious and boring event.
I submit the opposite and support it with observations that everyone I came in contact with that day or several succeeding days could talk of nothing else. It was a truly unusual event and hence deserved the title and coverage as news. The national programming tripe that Robert was so miffed about having interrupted is anything but interesting, and certainly not news. You yourself made my point by devoting your entire column to the very subject you so maligned.
From one curmudgeon to another,
—David Gauntt, Saint Leonard
No Frontier Here
Dear Bay Weekly:
In response to your editorial “In Deale Safeway Ruling, AA Citizens Win” [Jan. 27-Feb. 2], I must say living in Deale is hardly being condemned to “a frontier existence.” We are already practically a suburb, and this is one of the conditions supporters of controlled growth are rightfully resisting.
You call for a “cleanup of local businesses” as if the local supermarket has not done just that. My housemate and I have excellent reputations among our friends as gourmet cooks, and we got everything needed for our Christmas dinner locally (except for the main course, which we had to purchase at Eastern Market in D.C.). Furthermore, one of our dinner guests, a resident of Deale who is blind, has finally been able to solve her shopping problems because the local market delivers.
The guardians of the environment have to “hoot every proposed development out of town” if it will damage the environment. The environment here has been chipped at until there isn’t much left. There are reasons for preventing development in some areas. There should no longer even be a possibility of wavers. The Chesapeake is still very much endangered.
—Betty-Carol Sellen, Deale
Editor’s note: We stand by our frontier label. Like most of America, Deale has been developed under the frontier thinking of every man for himself and against nature, which has too often meant that everything beyond making a profit — including keeping a clean and tidy place of business or integrating your development to a community standard — has been dismissed as unnecessary sophistication. We don’t buy the argument that you’ve got to stay shabby to stay rural.
Copyright 2000
Bay Weekly
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