An editorial by Jackson Frolic
It was the best of times, it was the least of times.
If that doesn’t summarize 2014 in Bass Lake, I need to find a new line of work — or I should quit trying to adapt excerpts from Dickens.
2014 was filled with good moments — albeit uninspiring, for the most part — and sporadic periods of human foible.
In 2014, our town witnessed the resignation of a mayor and demotion of a police chief, two things that had never happened in the same year during the entire history of Bass Lake. In fact, not once had either happened within a single stretch of 12 consecutive months since 1966, when Paul P. Paulsen stepped down as mayor “for reasons only I deserve to know,” according to the Beacon archives.
So we managed to set a precedent. We can take pride in that. It was bound to happen sometime and, when it finally did, we were here to see it.
The year was humming along on routine cruise-control until a council decision that indirectly initiated the double-whammy milestone mentioned above. But minor negative news happened here and there. First, there was winter, which somehow managed to come full-force in January, surprising everyone. That same month, Bass Lake University football coach Flip Alabama resigned.
Were there positives in ’14? Certainly. Vin Diagram, flavor-of-the-year local basketball standout, signed with BLU as an athlete-student. It was a memorable, yet unsurprising, state of affairs.
(Aside: I like young Mr. Diagram, but let’s be frank, his high school “career” pales in comparison to Frank Nedson. I digress.)
I nearly forgot: An old structure fell apart. That was both good and bad news, depending on which side of street you stood.
All of that is iceberg-tipping. I don’t have time to produce an extensive retrospective. I hire reporters to do that.
Typically, I’m no fan of the cultural obsession wherein people compile an “annual summary of events.” We at the Beacon are in the documentation business, of course, but attempting to condense 365 days of life into 1,000 words or less does history no justice.
That’s why I encourage you, the reader, to sift through the look-back yourself, and re-experience 2014 however you please.
- January 2014
- February 2014
- March 2014
- April 2014
- May 2014
- June 2014
- July 2014
- August 2014
- September 2014
- October 2014
- November 2014
- December 2014 — Not over yet.
Happy holidays, and such. We’ll be here for you in 2015. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a plane to catch.
Jackson Frolic is senior editor at the Beacon. That much is established.
Bass Lake Beacon 