These days news is often shared via platforms and messaging networks that are ephemeral in nature.

Think Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter, as examples. They are literally here today, gone tomorrow formats.

But there is still room – on bookshelves and elsewhere – for time-honored means of sharing and preserving news, such as journals, clipbooks, and scrapbooks.

The thick collection of news accounts from the pages of the Puget Sound Mail compiled 50 years ago by late La Conner business leader and Rotary Club officer Paul Thompson is a prime example.

The half-century old binder, shared with the Weekly News by Thompson’s son, Rick, is in near mint condition. And many of the clippings inside, most of them accounts of La Conner Rotary Club meetings written by editor Pat O’Leary, remain topical.

Guest speakers who addressed La Conner Rotarians during 1969 and 1970 meetings at the old Lighthouse Inn Restaurant dealt with such pressing issues as a presidential transition (from Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon), crime (burglary rates were rising in rural areas), economic development (the need to strike a balance between small town life and benefits of drawing light industry to town) and solutions to potential future energy demands (Kiket Island, four miles northwest of La Conner, was being eyed as the site of a nuclear power plant).

La Conner Rotary also hosted speakers who discussed agricultural use of pesticides, school finance, drug abuse, abortion and the status of First Street.

On the latter topic, Fred Martin, the town’s longtime pharmacist and who would in the decade following become one of its most influential mayors, told fellow club members that people mentioned to him they had passed up shopping downtown due to traffic and parking congestion.

O’Leary, who also wrote the club bulletin, reported in the Mail that a visitor from California had remarked that with its historic architecture First Street would be ideal as a pedestrian mall.

In a town then characterized as sleepy and laid-back, there was much going on here at the time, the O’Leary articles reveal.

The Shelter Bay residential community and Port of Skagit County La Conner Marina developments were under way. Fishtown, just outside town near the mouth of the North Fork of the Skagit River, was site of a major archaeological dig indicating that Native Americans had camped there more than 2,000 years earlier. The club’s “World’s Only Smelt Derby” was garnering national and international media attention.

Rotary meetings here, much as they do now, drew notable guests to La Conner in the late 1960s and onset of the 1970s, Rick Thompson said.

U.S. Rep. Lloyd Meeds, D-Everett, was a guest speaker. So, too, was Seattle environmental attorney Jerry Hillis, a foe of the proposed Kiket Island nuclear power plant and who O’Leary pointed out was associated with lawyer John Ehrlichman before Ehrlichman went to Washington, D.C. to join the Nixon Administration.

Dr. James Monroe, of Skagit Valley College, and author of a widely used biology textbook, keynoted a La Conner Rotary meeting. Boeing executive James Blue was invited to speak about the company’s development of the 747 jumbo jet.

Dr. Willard Bill, later a University of Washington lecturer and state Director of Indian Education, was a Rotary guest speaker as well.

Local talent likewise served as headliners.

Bulb grower and La Conner Rotarian Bill Roozen recounted his decision to leave Holland for the United States after World War II. Roozen shared with club members how upon arrival he slept in New York City subways as no hotel rooms were available with so many troops returning from war ravaged Europe. O’Leary wrote that Roozen was told by an older Hollander that if he stayed in Washington state more than six weeks he would stay for good, a remark that proved prophetic.

La Conner business owner George Kastner, a Rotarian who was also a published author – he penned a book of Western poems and a study of Revolutionary War general Benedict Arnold – told members of his experiences while stationed in France with an artillery unit during World War I.

During the period highlighted by Paul Thompson, the La Conner Rotary Club – then approaching its silver anniversary – welcomed its 8,000th visitor.

In 1969, the year Thompson was club president, members donated money for La Conner Youth League baseball players to attend the Seattle Pilots Bat Day Game at Sick’s Stadium. It was near the end of the Pilots’ only season in Seattle, prior to the team’s relocation to Milwaukee.

La Conner High students and exchange students from other countries were frequent La Conner Rotary guests. O’Leary took note of a visit by Dave Hedlin, then a senior nearing graduation who had joined with his La Conner classmates in counting down the days to graduation.

According to O’Leary, Rotarians counseled Hedlin and the class to “treasure those days because in adulthood they would look back at their high school years as the happiest and most carefree of their lives.”

It was advice, much like Paul Thompson’s clipbook, that has repeatedly stood the test of time.