La Conner Weekly News - Your independent hometown award-winning newspaper

Numbers tell stories. Here are some that tell mine.

Two favorites are 104 and 105. Two more are two and three. And then there are these combinations: 6/26, 6/30 and 7/1, 7/5, not fractions but dates.

This issue of the Weekly News you hold in your hands is the 105th published since I bought the paper two years ago. Just like that, 104 issues are behind me – us – and I am starting my third year in La Conner. I drove into town with all I possess on June 26, 2017. At week’s end, June 30th, Sandy Stokes, Cindy Vest and I signed papers and I handed over a check for purchase of the Weekly News. They gave me the keys to the office and I owned everything inside it.

July 1, 2017 was my first full day as publisher. July 5th, after an evening of fireworks celebrating more than one momentous event, my number one issue, shepherded by Sandy and Cindy, was published. The adventure had begun.

Two years! It seems like two days, not even two weeks, much less two months.

Thank you for reading the Weekly News week after week, and for reading newspapers published in La Conner not only for decades but for over a century. Thank you for subscribing and buying single issues at shops and red boxes around town. Thank you for re-subscribing, renewing not only a year early, but two and three and five and six and to the one wonderful person who reupped for 10 years.

My effort has been to be honest, accurate, complete and to pay attention to this community, of which newspapers are an essential part of the fabric. Yes, I have made mistakes, not fake news but errors, being wrong. That happens, owning a newspaper or not.

Thank you for letting me be myself and for taking the paper into your homes and my view into your heads and perhaps once in a while into your hearts.

Last set of numbers; These are telling: 2, 4, 51, 1.

In the past two years, the most days I have taken off are four, which I did four times in 2018, including for a wedding and getting together with my siblings. So, in 2020 the Weekly News will publish 51 weeks, going silent the first week of January so staff can have a full week-plus off to count their blessings.

I am very lucky to be able to count mine and share them with you.