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Jacques Brunisholz once completed a demanding 500-mile hike on the famed Pacific Crest Trail. Years before he trekked across much of the globe, including a stop in Afghanistan nearly a half century ago. But given his passion for public service it likely was harder for him to step away from the La Conner Town Council last week. Still, the retired La Conner High School foreign language and art teacher hardly broke stride in choosing to resign his long-held council seat, a tenure begun about 2008, during the town’s famed flap over the status of a...
Decisions, decisions. Perhaps none of late have been so scrutinized as whether to be vaccinated against COVID-19. In some cases, as for the state’s health care workers and emergency responders, it is less a choice than a mandate in the attempt to curb spread of the deadly virus, which has claimed nearly 630,000 American lives in a year and a half, 300 times more than the number of U.S. military members lost in two decades fighting in Afghanistan. This month has brought two major developments on the vaccine front. On Aug. 9, Gov. Jay Inslee p...
Rachel Cram has focused on local history this year, developing an in-depth anecdotal history and virtual tour of landmark La Conner downtown buildings. The La Conner High senior is also eyeing the future – her future. Cram, a 5’6” guard, has signed a letter of intent to attend and play basketball next year at Carroll College, a National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) school in Helena, Montana that boasts a strong women’s hoops tradition. The Fighting Saints won Front...
It seems like yesterday that the surprising La Conner High football team was securing an NW2B title with a season-ending four-game winning streak after three straight single victory years. And, in a way, it was yesterday as the upstart Braves and their league foes shifted traditional fall schedules to spring in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet much has changed in just four months. First-year La Conner head coach Jeff Scoma stepped down in June to lead the 3A Stanwood High grid program and has been replaced at the Braves helm by defensive...
On a fundamental level this preseason is no different for the La Conner High School volleyball team than any other during the 29-year tenure of hall of fame head coach Suzanne Marble. In other ways, however, it is a far different vibe now than last August. The team, which captured the 2018 and 2019 state 2B net crowns, is looking forward to a full fall season after having been limited to a short spring campaign due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “This year more than ever has been the season we have all looked forward to the most,” Marble told the...
A time came when Lorraine Loomis figured there was a better way to earn a living than toiling at double shifts as a fish processor. She was right. There was a better way. It just wasn’t easier. If anything, becoming a long tenured “salmon warrior” was much harder – but a career that Loomis embraced and now provides a legacy destined to have an impact for generations to come, due to her diligence and perseverance. The longtime director of the Swinomish Tribal Community Fisheries progr...
New La Conner School Superintendent Will Nelson cannot stress enough the value of doing one’s homework. That goes for him as well as the nearly 600 students he and school district staff will greet this fall as La Conner transitions from on-line and hybrid instructional models employed last year in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. School board members chose Nelson this past spring following a rigorous selection process to succeed Rich Stewart as the district’s lead administrator. Nelson had been director of equity and student success at Arl...
Every four years, Maggie Wilder finds herself weeping during the Olympics. “I’m moved by the glory of it and that I never won anything,” she said. “I always wonder what that would feel like.” Knowing that qualifying for the high hurdles was out of the question, Wilder suggested to her sister Georgia Johnson that they enter pies in the Skagit County Fair. “I wanted to win something in a friendly competitive way,” said Wilder, “and what could be friendlier than the fair?” When the judging was o...
An abnormally dry summer here didn’t stop the Pacific Northwest Rain from descending on the Valley of the Sun. The Rain, an area girls’ travel team, took top honors in their high school age division of the recent 2021 Summer Sizzle basketball tournament in Phoenix. Five La Conner High players – Juna Swanson, Rachel Cram, Sarah Cook, Ellie Marble and Josie Harper – were members of the tourney title winners, coached by former Mount Vernon High standout Tyler Amaya, who played col...
After sustaining heavy graduation losses from its NW2B football title team, La Conner High School will likely sport a youthful lineup this fall. It only made sense, then, that the school district would tap someone with past success developing young talent to succeed championship coach Jeff Scoma at the Braves helm when the season kicks off in a few weeks. Charlie Edwards, a longtime local youth sports coach and member of the Braves staff this past spring, has been promoted to fill the head coaching vacancy created when Scoma left La Conner in...
The Blue Heron Canoe Family camped at the former Maple Avenue ballfield in La Conner last week, a stop on their Healing Waters 2021 journey to Lummi Island. The Willapa Spirit canoe accompanied it. Swinomish tribal member Eric Day joined the journey in La Conner to help skipper the second canoe. The Snohomish tribe crew and supporters totaled 65 people, Karen Condos, director of Natives United Journey, told the Weekly News Thursday. Vehicles arrived at the ballfield site late Wednesday morning...
The two-time defending state champion La Conner High School volleyball team is already laying the foundation for a post-COVID fall net campaign. La Conner players did so by sweeping a traditional cornerstone event – the Burlington-Edison Invitational Summer Tournament – in late July. The Lady Braves, limited to a shortened, primarily NW2B spring schedule because of pandemic restrictions, made the most of their opportunity to match up at Burlington opposite teams from larger enrollment schools. La Conner defeated Nooksack Valley,...
La Conner High will remain the home of the Braves. The school district’s board of trustees on Monday formally approved a unanimous Swinomish Tribal Senate resolution supporting retention of the Braves name for La Conner athletic and academic teams. Board president Susie Deyo joined members Amanda Bourgeois, John Agen and Lynette Cram in approving the Senate measure. Board member J.J. Wilbur, who also serves on the Swinomish Senate, abstained. The joint tribal-school district action is in accordance with state legislation passed earlier this y...
An American youth softball team playing in the Dominican Republic last week had an Edge against its competition. Make that two Edges. Twin sisters Alissa and Kelsey Edge were selected to play seven games in the Caribbean for a national team assembled through the American Based Sports Abroad organization. The Edge sisters are products of the Marysville-Pilchuck High School softball program, but their dad, Bernie Edge, is a La Conner alum who played baseball for the Braves. “It’s been a lot of fun watching them develop and play,” he told the W...
C.J. Woods represents the latest branch off a decades old Friday Harbor basketball coaching tree dating to the late Dean Turnbull, for whom the gymnasium at the island school is named. Woods is now looking forward to setting down roots in La Conner as the new Braves head hoops coach. The Friday Harbor and University of Idaho alum was chosen to succeed Todd Hinderman, an award-winning science teacher at La Conner Schools who guided the Braves to a State 2B sweet sixteen berth in 2019 and whose up...
On Friday, November 13, 2020, Marilyn Alice Frey, loving wife, mother, grandmother, sister and friend, passed away peacefully of natural causes at age 87. She was a resident of Serenity Assisted Living in Bellevue, Washington Marilyn was born on April 30, 1933, on San Juan Island to Roy and Mary Gresli. After graduating from Friday Harbor High School, Marilyn attended Western Washington State College (now WWU) in Bellingham, Washington, where she met her future husband, Stanley Frey. Married on...
The two-time defending state champion La Conner High School volleyball team has had few close calls in recent seasons. But a clothes call is part of the Lady Braves game plan this summer. La Conner players are serving up a five-week “Clean Out Your Closets” campaign, collecting clean and sellable clothes and household textiles as part of an eco-friendly team fundraiser. They are asking participants to place gently-used items in bags to be collected between now and the third week in August. “We would like everything by Aug. 20,” said head co...
La Conner High School teacher Daniel Castillo believes in giving his students all the tools they need for success. And thanks to a major building trades organization, he will be able to fill their toolboxes when classes resume in the fall. The Building Industries Association of Washington recently presented Castillo a check for $2,500 to purchase tools for a new introduction to residential carpentry class at La Conner that will be part of the school district’s expanded career and technology e...
Local moms are tackling a sport once blocked to young women. La Conner High School alum Bobbi Carlson Crawford and former La Conner business owner Liz Vargas have suited up several seasons for the Mount Vernon Warriors women’s football team, whose schedule this spring included a game against the semi-pro Seattle Spartans. The Skagit County team, launched four years ago as a fundraising vehicle for area youth sports, plays what can best be described as a tough brand of flag football. “We actually play in full pads and helmet,” Vargas, a team...
For years he was the face of the Pioneer Picnic, one that always bore a smile. Pat Good (1928-2008), whose forebears settled on Fir Island a century and a half ago, was a longtime mainstay at the annual picnic in La Conner’s Pioneer Park, where he prepared salmon as the main course of a luncheon that often drew more than 300 people. He did so gladly. Good was immensely proud of his Skagit heritage, part of which – a large part, in fact – was based on volunteerism and public service. “Nobody was more giving of himself,” says his s...
First there was the COVID-19 shutdown in 2020, then a hip injury this spring. But La Conner alum Matty Lagerwey, now a pre-med student at Western Washington University, remains on schedule to compete in national track and field trials within the next two years, she told the Weekly News July 5. Lagerwey, a multiple State 2B title winner while at La Conner High School, had improved her speed, recorded an 18’3” long jump, and posted a 35’-9 ¼” triple jump during her freshman indoor track season at WWU. Then came the pandemic. COVID-1...
Matika Wilbur’s fame continues to grow. The Swinomish Indian Tribal Community member and La Conner High School grad, one of the country’s leading photographers, was interviewed on national television Sunday in her role as co-host of a critically acclaimed podcast addressing key Native American issues. Wilbur appeared with Desi Small Rodriguez on a segment of the Yasmin Vossoughian Show on MSNBC. Wilbur and Rodriguez, a Northern Cheyenne tribal member, are hosts of the “All My Relations” podcast that explores contemporary and cultural Native...
July 1 started a new month and was the day Will Nelson was sworn in as La Conner’s new school superintendent at a school board meeting called for that purpose. Board chair Susie Deyo called it a very special day, “obviously,” for the school district and for Nelson. She asked Lynette Cram, the longest serving board member, to administer the oath to Nelson. “Excited” was the word most repeated Nelson said he was “super excited to be a part of the community here. I am excited to start the journey...
Recent La Conner High School graduates MacQuaid Hiller and Avery Sloniker enjoyed one last hurrah last week as they closed out their school careers here before taking the next step on their life’s journey. Hiller and Sloniker, graduated June 18 in commencement exercises at Whittaker Field, but were recognized by the school board June 28 for serving as student representatives during a year marked by on-line and hybrid instructional models employed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Board members expressed appreciation for Hiller’s and Slonike...
La Conner’s longtime field of dreams will soon become a field of memories, visible merely in the mind’s eye as the property becomes new housing and a yet to be defined public park covering a half-acre or so. Hedlin’s Ballfield, a youth sports hub here for decades, has heard its final cheers. But there is still more than a smattering of boos from those who lament loss of much of the revered rare green space along busy Maple Avenue. The Town purchased the property earlier this year and immediately...