Correspondence

We welcome your opinions and letters – with name and address. We will edit when necessary. Include your name, address and phone number for verification. Mail them to Bay Weekly, 1629 Forest Drive, Annapolis, MD 21403 •E-mail them to [email protected]. or submit your letters on-line by clicking here.

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Avoid our Waterways? Unthinkable!

Dear Bay Weekly:

The recent front-page headline of an area newspaper read Chesapeake Bay Determined to be Unhealthy, and it was supported by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation as well as other organizations. About a week later, our daughter cut herself while participating in a crabbing summer camp. Our pediatrician advised us to discontinue the camp until our daughter healed.

Avoiding the waterways that make it so attractive to live and to work here … avoiding the water that brings tourists and tourism dollars to our economy … avoiding the water that surrounds us and provides a sanctuary for fishes of the sea to give birth and raise their young. It is unthinkable. It is unacceptable.

We need to get mad with ourselves, with our forefathers, with our neighbors and friends. We cannot allow this to continue, not for one more second. Get real. Get mad. Get involved with the solution.

–C. Bonney, Annapolis

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Lois Burton Thanks Bill’s Readers

Dear Bay Weekly:

I would like to thank all of the wonderful Bay Weekly readers for their letters and e-mails following the death of my husband Bill. Such caring and supportive friends have meant very much to our entire family. Bill loved writing for Bay Weekly, as he was always given the freedom to choose his topics and his method of communicating his message. The tributes to Bill written by the owners, editors, publisher and columnists show that the love and respect he had for them were absolutely reciprocated. We are all blessed by our association with Bay Weekly and the Chesapeake itself.

Bill always considered writing about his beliefs and opinions a great privilege, and I consider it my great privilege to have met and interacted with many of his readers.

–Lois Burton, Stoney Creek

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Bill’s Little Brother Remembers

Dear Bay Weekly:

Thanks for printing all the tributes and letters about my brother Bill. He would have loved them. My family and our friends especially liked the tribute by Alan Doelp. It made him so real and special. Others in my extended family as well as my friends will miss his column. I have a friend in Annapolis who was quite impressed when he learned Bill was my brother. He read his column regularly.

I also wish to thank you for featuring Bill as a columnist for Bay Weekly. He had a passion for the pen (or should we say keyboard?), and for all those years after retirement from The Sun he had a forum for his writing that not only improved his quality of life but also extended it. My siblings and I knew the end was near when he wrote his farewell column. Writing was his raison d’etre.

This does not mean that I will stop logging on to your newspaper. Bill may have been the newspaper writer in the family, but we are all newspaper readers. It has always been a family tradition to read the paper from the time you are old enough to unfold it.

Thanks again for all you have done for Bill and for putting up with his peculiarities all these years. And good luck to you, and may Bay Weekly have a long and profitable life.

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