EDITORIAL

When Lightning Struck On Newsprint Pages

We hope you take your newspaper for granted.

You wake up with your daily paper as regularly as you do your husband or your wife.

You go out and get your New Bay Times as routinely as you shop for groceries.

With your paper right in there with the bananas and broccoli, you don't expect lightning to leap from its pages.

Change, when it comes from reading, is slow - in the same way that better health is a long way down the line from the point when you load your grocery cart with vegetables, fruits and whole grains instead of chips and Ding Dongs.

We all know that replacing fat and fluff with whole foods helps our veins and arteries run like uncongested highways. We're learning that vegetables and spices - especially certain ones, like broccoli or garlic - can even jump-start our cancer resistance. But that's not today or tomorrow. Good results are habitual.

Newspapers - New Bay Times among them, we like to think - put some whole food in your intellectual diet, and season it well for plenty of flavor. But we don't expect what we print overnight on Wednesday to change your life on Thursday.

Which is why we're extraordinarily pleased to report that lightning did flash in the mind of one NBT reader last month. As you'll see in Letters to the Editor, a North Beach reader saw in a flash of clarity and charity a good deed that needed doing.

Calvert Cliffs State Park, letter writers noted first on Jan. 15-21 and again on Jan. 29-Feb. 4, is maintained by volunteers. For six years, The Friends of Calvert Cliffs State Park have shouldered some of the burden Maryland Department of Natural Resources - which manages the park for all us Marylanders - said it could not afford to carry. Both writers, Friends Secretary Connie Darago and Senior Girl Scout Donnalyn Roxey, asked for help and contribution in keeping this state treasure open and agreeable to visit.

(If you don't know Calvert Cliffs State Park, make its acquaintance soon - even this weekend. It's Maryland's only park where fossils from our Miocene past millions of years ago - the teeth of ancient sharks, shells of ancient snails and scallops, bones of ancient mammals - are yours for the taking. But don't dig in the cliffs that are their burial ground. Pick up your treasures on the shore.)

The park's need must have struck hard, for within days, The Friends of Calvert Cliffs State Park received a check of more than three figures from the generous and modest North Beach Help Association.

That's a miracle we don't want to take for granted. We thought you'd want to know, too, so that all together we could give three cheers to Help.

Hip, Hip, Hooray!

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VolumeVI Number 9
March 5-11, 1998
New Bay Times

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