There’s a selfless person in our community that you should know about.

With the startup date for Pine Grove’s new Therapeutic Learning Center looming, the remodeled building was still in its unfinished drywall stages. With only a few days to go and little hope of opening on time, school board member and Pine Grove resident Mark Johnson stepped up and spent several days volunteering to finish the work.

Thanks, Mark. It looks great.

A park pleaser

Please let me commend Mike Schend, his crew, and the sponsors for another wonderful season of Families in the Park.

I have attended fairly regularly for several years and have enjoyed them all. Everyone had such fun, the weather was a treat, the park was packed and the music was absolutely superb!

Way to go, Hood River!

Iraq and you

You are terrified of having to go to an understaffed hospital or nursing home? Or, for lack of rural-urban transit, even being able to get there? You are living in noisy, unsafe housing (or no housing)? You can’t afford your medicines?

Hey, General Petraeus and President Bush/Cheney have the solution for terror, including yours: send more troops to kill innocents and die in Iraq, or perhaps Iran, maybe Pakistan.

The general’s numbers don’t add up; the surge is not “working” (for either us or the Iraqi people); the violence has only increased. Let’s bring our kids home safe, now.

No U.S. love lost

A friend of mine said, “Before we invaded Iraq we were loved around the world.” Oh, really? I remember dozens of hijackings and mid-air bombings of commercial airliners. I remember Leon Klinghoffer who was shot aboard the cruise ship Achille Lauro and he and his wheel chair were pushed overboard.

I remember our embassy in Tehran occupied for 444 days and two embassies in east Africa blown up.

I suppose if we had been at war, blowing up our Marine barracks in Beirut would have been reasonable. It would have, also, been reasonable to try to sink the U.S.S. Vincennes in the Persian Gulf and U.S.S. Cole in Yemen. Not to mention kidnapping that Marine colonel in Lebanon, Higgins I believe his name was, who was tortured, hung, shot and then dismembered. No mention of a wooden stake through his heart but that does not speak well of our Marines.

This brings me to the classic Jihadist-American love fest of Sept. 11, 2001. More than 3,000 of our fellow citizens died. I for one vote we keep returning that love in kind.

Soccer at HRV

Football is the cash cow, I get that. We have a very, very nice football field to play on. I also know this having played it a long, long time ago. Baseball is full with tradition at HRV, I also get that. We have one of the best — if not the best — baseball fields in the state.

But I would like to point out to the locals and anyone who reads the paper that for the last seven years or so, the HRV boys soccer squad, has almost secretly built themselves into a state powerhouse soccer program.

This year’s group looks to be one of the best during this period and that says a lot considering some of the teams that have competed as of late. Yet, these young men have had to display their play and frankly their dominance at Westside Elementary (no disrespect).

Not that there is a problem with that, the school has done a great job of maintaining the field they play on.

My question is: Why not let them play on the football field? Most other schools do this. It also allows for more spectators and adequate seating and rain cover for those rainy days. This above all else is what drives these kids, playing in front of big crowds, be it rain or shine. If nothing else, come to their matches and catch a glimpse of a pretty special team. I know I will! Hope to see you there.

Preserve our trees

I can’t tell you how disturbing and disappointing it was to see several 100-year old pine trees cut down at Rocky Road and May Street.

Don’t fault the developer; these trees were removed as a city requirement for the installation of road improvements (road widening, sidewalks, planter strips). At a time when global warming is becoming the number-one concern for the future of the planet, it is hard to think that cutting down trees that provide shade and carbon dioxide exchange, in the interest of heat-generating impervious pavement, is appropriate.

It sure would be nice to see some flexible, forward, out-of-the-box thinking by city officials in this regard. Not all our streets have to be widened to 60 feet, straight, and have sidewalks and planter strips.

Let’s see some master planning, creativity and variation from our engineers so we don’t end up looking like just another suburban town in America.