harvest jubilee poster

Add comment August 28th, 2007

western night camano country club bbq

Add comment August 28th, 2007

stanwood senior center auction/concert

Add comment August 28th, 2007

     The Band here was really nervous about being a part of the Stanwood Senior Center Roundup.  They thought maybe it was a senior recruitment drive.  Sign em up.  Give these old farts a rocker and a drool bucket.  Set em in front of a TV and take away the channel changer.
     I told em they were being overly paranoid for nothing.  Except for the no channel changer, nothing much would change in their lives. So they settled down and agreed to play today.  All I’m asking is, don’t auction off any channel changers….. although half the Band might bid the price up beyond anything you ever dreamed…..
     This next song is called Drool Bucket Blues….

arlington concert in the parks

Add comment August 28th, 2007

     Time was when Arlington was like Stanwood, off the beaten path a few miles.  Off the interstate anyway.  Used to be the two towns were connected.  You could run the steamers up from the Sound into the Stilly clear past Arlington.  Stanwood to Florence to Silvana to here.  There’s places now a kayak drags bottom.
     Arlington was a river town.  You got some parks here on the Stilly so you know.  Stanwood doesn’t.  Twin City Foods has a quarter mile wall 20 feet high that cuts off about the only view of the river.  Folks driving to Camano only see the sewer lagoon.  Now, you didn’t hear me say Stanwood’s a Sewer Town.
   
     Twin City Foods, in case you newcomers thought it was Arlington and Smokey Point, Twin City foods is Arlington and Stanwood.  Biggest independent frozen food company in America.  I hope that packing water isn’t coming from where I think it is.  I  hope it’s coming from the Stilly up here.
     Arlington – like every other town in Western Washington – is growing like a nettle in elephant manure.  No stopping it.  You even got suburbs now  —— Smokey Point, your very own Tijuana.  Smokey Point wasn’t a PLACE back when, it was an exit off I-5.  Van’s Bar, which was, for you newcomers, right where the Rite-Aid store sits now — and oh yeah, it was the smokiest bar I’ve ever been in.  So now you know why they called it Smokey Point.
     We used to come up to the Old Time Fiddlers night at the log shelter next to what’s now the new Museum.  Those were the hetdays of Arlington.  The Love Family.  The Olympic Theater.  The White Horse Tavern.  The Bluebird Café.  They’d play old time stuff and I thought, being a 30 year old beginning banjo player, I thought these old birds were Ancient.   Probably Arlington Pioneers.
     Now I think back on it fondly.  And they were younger’n us old coots, probably.  This next song they used to do.  Brand new then.  An old standard now.  Goes like this rightchere.

stanwood senior center benefit concert

Add comment August 28th, 2007

Good afternoon everybody.  We’re the South End String Band and it’s an honor to be here today to help you raise money to continue the great work the Stanwoodopolis Senior does day in and year out.   
 Now as you might have guessed,  the South End doesn’t have a Senior Center. …   unless you count sitting around the cracker barrel at Tyee Store listening to geezers who look like refugees from Andy of Mayberry about 50 years after the TV show was cancelled go on and on about the good old days.
     I guess the store owners figure the coffee the kibitzers buy is all the profit they need.  Now,   I can’t be saving everybody  down here.  You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him take a bath.  It’s a free country, especially down at the South End.  At least that’s what most of em expect to pay.  Which explains why we haven’t got a Senior Center, just a bunch of seniles lollygagging around like hounds on a warm blacktop.
     But  we were thinking maybe the time is right for a Center down our skinny chicken neck of the woods.  Some old barn we could remodel, turn the stalls into computer stations, the hayloft into shuffle boards, the milk house into administration offices.  We’d offer classes, poker mostly and blackjack card counting —– sort of a South End retirement investment seminar.
     We probably couldn’t afford a director.  If we could, we wouldn’t pay em anyway.  Actually might explain why we won’t ever have that Senile Center.  And Tyee Store will just have to do.  Beers on wheels.  Good enough down here.
    So we’re countin on you folks to pick up our slack.  Have fun today and bid high.  The economy’s goin to hell in a handbasket with this subprime mortgage debacle so it’s probably best to use your liquidities before they devalue.  Which, if you want to know the truth, is the star we steer by on the Depreciated South End.