Greetings to everyone visiting the North House Folk School Wooden Boat Show! Whether you’re someone who made the trek from far away or a local resident who enjoys heading to the waterfront, I hope you have a wonderful weekend checking out the meticulously crafted canoes, kayaks, skiffs, dinghies, rowboats, sculls, sailing vessels and more.
I hope that you are able to be in the crowd for the delightful, sometimes edgy, Summer Solstice Pageant on Saturday night. The Good Harbor Hill Players, in collaboration with the Magic Smelt Puppet Troupe, offer a show filled with colorful characters that give an entertaining look at North Shore life.
You never know what you’ll see in human-sized puppet form—there have been all sorts of fish, butterflies, birds, beaver, wolves, the Grand Marais lighthouse, ticks and lilac bushes. I was tickled one year to see the firewood that my dad had sold to North House used prominently as a prop. I took a picture of some of his beautiful birch logs “on stage”
I truly hope you’re not reading this Unorganized Territory after the Wooden Boat Show is over. That sometimes happens to readers as we are a weekly paper, published on Saturday. The Cook County News-Herald is available “early” on newsstands. Papers can be purchased at businesses all over the county on Friday.
Sometimes it’s great that the Cook County News-Herald is a weekly newspaper. There are weeks that I appreciate a little more time to research and write articles. Although no matter how well we prepare, more often than not something changes drastically on deadline and there is last minute writing and editing to be done. But overall, we have a little more time to call for details because we are a weekly paper.
But there are other times when it is frustrating to be a weekly. It is annoying when a big news announcement is made right after we’ve gone to press. It is really irritating when a disaster occurs and we have to wait a week to break the news. I console myself with the fact that we are recording history and history doesn’t care when the news arrived on the newsstands.
But history aside, it is difficult that the News-Herald is a weekly newspaper when we are helping spread the word about a community event. We advise advertisers to place ads a week in advance of an event and we run our upcoming events articles—and inserts like the Wooden Boat Show flyer—a week before.
That means the folks that receive the Cook County News- Herald this week will see little or no mention of the Wooden Boat Show. That is why I thought I’d give everyone a Wooden Boat Show welcome in Unorganized Territory this week. And that is also why our designer Laurie Johnson gives a nod to the Wooden Boat Show in our banner with the News-Herald bear plying the lake in the Herring Choker.
Our subscribers and the visitors who picked up last week’s News-Herald have a copy of the Wooden Boat Show flyer in hand. We also always provide extra copies to the organizers of events, so you may see some of our colorful and informationfilled Wooden Boat Show and Summer Solstice Pageant special issue at North House during the Wooden Boat Show.
Maybe I’ll see you there!
If a man must be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most. A small sailing craft is not only beautiful, it is seductive and full of strange promise and the hint of trouble.
E. B. White
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