I know, I know.

It says, “Reading 100 Years of the Chinook Observer,” at the top of the page, so why am I telling you, friend reader, that after 80 years’ worth of stories this is the last of these columns?

“History is about stories that are over,” Ken Burns tells us, and many of the stories covered by the Observer in the last twenty-five years aren’t yet over. Compound that with the notable difficulty historians have in correctly viewing the ‘close past,’ plus the fact that since I moved here in 1978 I have come to know many of the people whose stories have been reported over those years, and you see the trouble–lack of distance and objectivity.

Accordingly, Matt Winters (who, as Virginia Holway put it about herself once, “is also a bit of a back number”) and I agreed several years ago to cease this series with 1980 and leave the rest of the telling, together with our best wishes, for historians to come.

I’ll miss this gorgeous project (which is finding its way into two bound volumes, one of which has already been published; the other is somewhere in the works) and I’ll miss talking to all of you.

Let me leave you with Miss Alice Holm’s comment when she retired from teaching grade school in Naselle in 1948: “It’s been a privilege, a grand experience, and something good to remember, but it’s time to quit. I’m off for adventure.”

Thanks so much! Take good care of yourselves.

Nancy Lloyd

Oysterville

April, 2004