Archive - Sep 2009
September 10th
Note: This is an expanded version of a story that appeared online on Saturday, Sept. 5.
VERGENNES — The Vergennes police chief and a junior police officer have resigned in the past week. Chief Mike Lowe resigned on Friday, Sept. 4, and City Manager Mel Hawley on Tuesday received officer Matt Roorda’s official letter of resignation.
ADDISON COUNTY — Every year in the United States, anywhere from five to 20 percent of the population gets the flu, and more than 200,000 individuals are hospitalized from complications from seasonal flu.
But the buzz this year isn’t about the seasonal flu. It’s about the flu caused by the H1N1 virus, which was first detected in individuals in the United States in April. In June the World Health Organization signaled that a pandemic of the novel H1N1 flu was under way.
ADDISON — Lee and Pat Kayhart have each slung a bucket or two during their 40 years of dairying at their farm in West Addison.
Now the couple is poised to retire, selling their business interests to their sons — but they are not done with buckets. Lee Kayhart has started crossing off items on his “bucket list,” an ambitious series of accomplishments he’d like to cross off before he is no longer able. Kayhart, 61, and a couple of his buddies recently crossed off a big one, in the form of a parachute jump not five miles from the Kayharts’ farm.
BRANDON — The Otter Valley Union High School football team scored touchdowns on eight of its first nine possessions and held visiting Mount Abraham to minus yardage through three periods on Saturday, when the Otters defeated the Eagles, 56-7, before more than 500 fans on the first football game at the newly rebuilt Markowski Field.
The victory on the new field made the day more meaningful, said junior OV quarterback Zakk Williams, who completed five of six attempts for four touchdowns and 115 yards.
My son Peter is 14 and in the ninth grade. He has decided to play football this year on the Middlebury Union High School freshman team. I hope he’s a better player than I was.
My dad, Peter’s Granpa, was a genuinely good football player, captain of the 1934 Bates College team, when football was king on college campuses and players were Big Men on Campus. He is a member of the Maine State Football Hall of Fame, among other gridiron honors, and still attends Bates’ games in the fall, at age 98, when the weather allows. He loved the hurly-burly of the game.
Give Vermont State Auditor Tom Salmon points in courage for bucking the majority and switching to the minority party, but Vermonters should be wary of his reasons.
First, he blames Vermont Democrats for a budget process that was “rife with deficiencies and dysfunction,” and second, he says the Republican Party’s grasp on the fiscal crisis facing the state is better anchored in reality.
MIDDLEBURY — The idea came to Amy Sheldon when she was living in Middlebury and walking to Chipman Hill each morning before coming to work. Sheldon noticed that, more often than not, she was the only person using the small stretch of trail in east Middlebury.
MIDDLEBURY – Plans are afoot to connect the Trail Around Middlebury (TAM) with other networks, and some of these plans could allow a neighborhood walk to turn into a cross-country trek.
Josh Phillips is the executive director of the Middlebury Area Land Trust, which maintains the TAM. Recently he contracted with the U.S. National Park Service to conduct a feasibility study for creating a trail through Addison Country. The trail would connect Crown Point, N.Y., with the Long Trail, linking the North Country National Scenic Trail with the Long Trail.
