100 years ago (1916 — Oak Harbor News)
The paper’s news editor drove to the island’s south end and “found that a vast amount of work is needed to make (the roads) passable. If that Mukilteo ferry goes through, our county commissioners will be forced to get busy,” it said.
Though the Klondike Gold Rush (1896-99) was long over, “about 125 men wintered near Rude Creek, between Whitehorse and Dawson, in the Yukon,” a page-one story said. “Rude and Jensen took out 50 ounces of coarse gold last fall and expect to recover $20,000 to $25,000 this season.”
“There are two distinct ways of forming a dairy herd: buying or breeding, or those two methods may be combined,” read part of an item from a column titled “High School Department.”
100 pounds of barbed wire cost $4.75, and a pound of Schillings coffee cost 40 cents, at Shillings Goods.
Acorn Flour and Feed Mill, in Oak Harbor, offered acorn whole-wheat flour for sale, claiming it “makes the most wholesome and nutritious bread of any.”
75 years ago (1941 — Farm Bureau News)
The 1941 Whidbey Island Salmon Sweepstakes offered more than $500 in cash prizes.
Gerritt Wiedraayer took possession of the Red & White Grocery Store, which he bought from York Dyer. The business was to be operated under the name Gerrit’s Red & White Grocery.
Harry J. Ploegsma, a member of the board of Skagit County Dairymen’s Association, said the group was getting more than 600 cans of milk daily from Whidbey Island, all of which went to Burlington. The island is becoming “the Guernsey Island of America,” the story rhapsodized. Dairying was the single largest industry on the island, it said.
More peas, as well as more pork, dairy products, eggs, poultry, snap beans and corn, were necessary to ensure ample food supplies for the U.S., Great Britain “and other nations resisting aggression,” a page-one story said. Island County had 500 acres planted with peas, a crop that does not deplete the soil.
Low-income families and people connected with the Works Progress Administration could participate in a mattress-making program. The state extension service held demonstrations of how to make a mattress using government-supplied cotton, ticking and percale. It took two days for two people to make each mattress.
50 years ago (1966 — Whidbey News-Times)
Proposed low-income senior “villages” in Langley and Oak Harbor won federal approval.
Wayne Bartleson was named Oak Harbor’s citizen of the year for his civic-mindedness.
Oak Harbor’s Maple Leaf Cemetery was “being desecrated and vandalized by horses, dogs and people,” a page-one story said. Horses were knocking over gravestones, packs of dogs were “adding to the general untidiness” and people were removing potted plants and digging up planted trees and shrubs.
A fire closed the Oak Harbor Dairyland Freeze on Midway Boulevard.
The Whidbey Island Hospital Guilds decided to discontinue their annual Mardi Gras event because it took too much work.
Five pounds of Blue Bonnet margarine cost one dollar, and one pound of butter cost 69 cents, at the Payless in Freeland and Oak Harbor.
25 years ago (1991 — Whidbey News-Times)
A report from the Department of Defense showed it would cost $468 million to close Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, a page-one story said. Island officials scoured Navy documents for flaws and “debatable assumptions” in an effort to persuade the military not to close the base. The publisher put his editorial on Page One, alarmed that Oak Harbor might lost 58 percent of its employment. He opined that the government had “failed miserably” in arguing the base should be closed.
Broad View Elementary fifth-graders finished 25th nationally against 1,700 schools in the annual All-Star Academic Team National Competition.
Coupeville teachers voted to strike for the first time in the school district’s history, but only for one day. They were supporting 21,000 teachers statewide who talked off their jobs to protest the state legislature’s failure to fully fund basic education, including their salaries.
