Letterbox

Thank you very much to Editor Sally Hewitt, who retired this August after nine dedicated years of working with Whatcom Watch.

In addition to editing Whatcom Watch, Sally’s life experiences are many and varied. Born and raised in the Seattle area, she played on the Pacific Northwest amateur golf circuit from ages 11 to 17, winning her first tournament at age 11. She received a degree in English literature from the University of Washington and a fine arts degree from Western Washington University. Sally taught tennis and ski conditioning at the University of Washington and skiing at Mount Baker. She lived in Japan, Maine and California before moving back to Washington in 1980; while in California, she and her husband managed a catfish farm for five years.

From 1980 to 1988, Sally made a living with drawings and watercolor paintings. She moved to Bellingham in 1984, then to the Tetons in 1993, where she hiked and skied Teton Pass and Mount Glory almost daily and wrote articles for the Teton Valley Independent.

In 1997, Sally returned to her home in Bellingham and soon after joined the North Cascades Audubon Board. She wrote a two-part article for Whatcom Watch in early 2000 about the Sudden Valley sewer line, and began editing the paper in June of 2000. At that time the donor list on the back page included 21 donors — during her tenure, the number increased to 96. Sally also initiated and supervised changes to the cover and overall format of Whatcom Watch in 2003, and sold ads during her editorship.

Sally worked with many talented and gracious writers over the years, and often had more articles than available pages in Whatcom Watch.

Currently, Sally’s writing a screenplay and working on a novel as well. She’s very happy with her peaceful and creative life in the mountains, where she still hikes daily. In the near future, she plans on building an ecovillage in the Rockies with friends.

To the editor:

Having read and liked a library copy of Ron Chernov’s “Alexander Hamilton,” I’m not a fan of our past president and composer of our DOI Thomas Jefferson; ditto for the transcendentalists or Walt Whitman.

It is with this acknowledgment that I write you a letter regarding Alan Rhode’s review of “An American Gospel” in your August issue. Just because I do not like Walt Whitman or vote for our current president does not make me a homophobic racist.

Although I lived in Switzerland in the 1960s and garnered a fondness for anything European, I’ve reconsidered and now admire the United States; indeed it is our opportunity that I most admire. Sure, we’ve made plenty of mistakes, but to my way of thinking, ideology is what I most avoid because of its intrinsic coercion. That acknowledged, I choose to believe that ‘God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son’ and am grateful I can.