From reporter Kris Sherman:

There were no doorbusters. No get-this-for-a-pittance, get-that-for-a-song ads. No ringing cash registers. No smoking credit cards.

The lighting of Tacoma’s town Christmas tree was free to all comers Saturday night.

And in a rough economy, that price clearly appealed to the estimated 800 to 1,000 people who counted down from 10 with Santa Claus before the five-story evergreen erupted in a glow of red, white, blue and green lights.

It was a simple ceremony, perhaps just what many needed in complex times.

The crowd gathered as darkness descended, many trundling into the lobby of the Pantages Theater at South Ninth and Broadway for hot chocolate or apple cider.

An army brass quintet blew seasonal songs into the relatively balmy evening.

A number of sponsors brought about the event. They included downtown businesses, the Broadway Center, Life Center, Fort Lewis, which supplied the tree, and Tacoma power, police and fire crews, which played roles in hauling it to town and getting it decorated.

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It was pretty cold outside the South Hill Mall Target at 9:30 p.m. Thanksgiving, when Chris Leppell and his mom, Gail Leppell, showed up to wait for the doors to open on Black Friday.

Chris wanted an Xbox 360 enough to stand outside shivering all night. He’d earned half the early-morning sale price. His mom had come to shiver with him and cover the rest.

Things warmed up considerably at 1 a.m., when Terri Anderson and Tim Shortsleeve arrived with chairs, blankets, and a propane heater.

They settled in and refined their strategy for the pre-dawn assault on cash registers. One son deployed to Circuit City and another to Staples. A daughter stationed herself at Toys R Us. They’d divvied up responsibility for the toys, the GPS, the electronics.

“I have a whole big list,” Anderson said.

Actually, that list is smaller than the one for last year’s pre-dawn raids.

“I’ve already warned them that mother is not spending what she did last year,” she said. “Things are obviously tighter.”

Short funds were all the more reason to show up for the fun of staying out in the cold all night, warmed by the memory of turkey and the anticipation of good deals on board games, DVDs, electronics and all things Miley Cyrus.

Nick Lucara, 14, was about to own Guitar Hero, the reward for a summer of mowing lawns and saving allowance money. His buddy, Zach Bray, also 14, been saving, too, for video games. They’d camped out last year and had enough fun to do it again.

It was the third year for Alyssa Wendt, 16, who wrapped herself in a blanket and cuddled up with her grandmother, Nancy Wendt.

“This is a special time for us,” Nancy said. “It’s a tradition. We come and spend time together.

“And meet new people,” chimed in Polly Oeung, who, with her friends Sina Men and Myra Lopez-Chhour, had enjoyed getting to know the Wendts, as well as Linda Kalmbach and teen buddies Haley Poppleton and Kristen Herman-Haberly.

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The big rock that graced the old Mount Tahoma High School site for 43 years which is now the site of the new Gray Middle School was not left there by a glacier.

A story in Tuesday's edition about the rock said no one was sure where the rock came from but Tacoma school district officials thought it was found on the site.

Walt Dunlap, 79, said Wednesday he helped bring it to the old Mount Tahoma site in either 1958 or 1959 when the school was being built. The high school opened in 1961.

The rock was found just north of 56th Street by a Lige Dickson Co. crew clearing the Interstate 5 right of way in the late 1950s, he said. A sister rock slightly larger was found next to it, he said.

Dunlap said the Tacoma School District Board at the time thought it would be great to move one of the big rocks to the new Mount Tahoma school at 6229 S. Tyler St. But it was big and heavy, weighing perhaps 80 tons, he said.

“So Lige Dickson came up with a brilliant idea,” Dunlap said. “probably the first time it was ever used.”

He said they chained two low level heavy equipment trailers together and built a dirt ramp up on one side. A large D-9 bulldozer pushed the rock up onto the trailers.

Then early on a Sunday morning, the two trucks joined at the trailers headed west together up 56th Street and then south on Tyler Street to the school site. There was even a police escort, he said.

The trip took an hour. Dunlap was in one of the pilot cars.

Fortunately the company had two of the best low level trailer drivers in the country, he said.

“It was kind of a fun experience,” he said. “It was a challenge. A couple people said we were crazy.”

The transport itself was pro-bono. “We didn’t make anything on it,” he said.

The rock became part of Mount Tahoma High School’s history. Gray Middle School has moved it a bit and painted it. It will become part of their history and tradition when the school opens Jan. 5.

And what happened to that sister rock? It still sits at the intersection of 56th Street and I-5 and gets a new coat of paint from youngsters ever year.

The Turkey Angels – Angie Sherman and Shari Crumbaker - are at it again this Thanksgiving.
The Pierce County real estate sales duo delivered $600 worth of holiday meal fixings Tuesday night to the Tacoma Rescue Mission after an evening of shopping at the Safeway store on Pearl Street.
Today they are returning to the mission with at least $260 worth of turkeys they are buying this morning.
The $860 for the Thanksgiving food was collected by them from friends and co-workers.
“It was incredible,” Sherman said. “Even with the economy, people are still willing to give.”
Last Thanksgiving, the two collected about the same amount of money and delivered more than 80 turkeys to the mission which hosts an annual community dinner on Thanksgiving Day.
Sherman said they started the holiday food project last year on the day before Thanksgiving. She had just returned from a mission trip to India where battling hunger is a daily chore and wanted to do something to help the community.
“It was very humbling to be there,” she said of the mission trip. “I woke up the next morning and said to my business partner, ‘Let’s do it!’ ”
In that one day they raised more than $800, she said.
“It’s just really a blessing seeing people helping each other out,” Sherman said.
The Turkey Ladies say they will be back next year.

Those First Creek Neighbors know how to sell a meeting.

Hauling people out of their comfy homes on a Wednesday evening so they can sign up for volunteer gigs picking up garbage and shooing away hookers, pimps and drug dealers is not as easy as you might think. But this group packs meetings to the standing room only point.

They start with impeccable manners in their announcement: “You are invited to attend the monthly neighborhood meeting of First Creek Neighbors Dec. 3. 2008, 6:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m., Portland Avenue Community Center, 3513 Portland Ave.”

No matter whether it’s delivered by e-mail, mail or flyer, it’s as gracious as an invitation to a tea dance.

Not that you’d get brass from the Tacoma and Puyallup Tribal Police departments and city Code Enforcement officers and Safe Streets at a tea dance. Those are the allies the neighbors have enlisted to help their East Tacoma neighborhood meet the Safe & Clean Initiative challenge of cutting crime by 50 percent and cleaning up Tacoma.

The partnerships are working out very nicely, thank you. So far, they’ve closed four drug houses and a meth lab, hauled away 25 tons of junk and 218 tires, routed illegal encampments, gotten the lights turned back on in Portland Avenue Park and parts of Portland Avenue, and organized a neighborhood patrol.

They are making life very uncomfortable for people who’d created a culture of lawlessness and blight in the area.

They intend to make them even more uncomfortable. They are keeping up the push-back against dealers, gangsters, drunks and hookers. They are fixing to sting the speed racers and the folks who don’t mind urinating and defecating in public. They’re having another community clean-up from 9 a.m. to noon Dec. 13, sprucing the neighborhood up for the holidays.

They’re all sweetness and light. They smile at known dealers. At every meeting, they give out free energy-saving bulbs for porch lights.

If you’d like to join them or see how they’re doing this, as the invitation says, “Your attendance would be most appreciated.”

The hundreds of people who packed the gymnasium cheered with each basket. They giggled when a player fell of a donkey, or if the animal decided it would run away from the basket. Cheerleaders lined both baselines. Spectators munched on cookies and slices of pizza.

The donkey basketball tournament might have been controversial, but few people seemed to care. Hundreds turned out for the event at Graham-Kapowsin High School, which raised money for the Bethel School District Foundation.

“This is an excellent time,” Debbie Waynick said. “Such a good time.”

Waynick, a teacher at Cedar Crest Junior High in Spanaway, had never before played donkey basketball, in which players ride the animals around the court. She finished scoreless but earned a few style points: She caught a rebound, but her donkey started to walk away from the basket, so she flipped the ball over her head. It spun around the rim and fell out, but the shot drew cheers from the crowd.

“It was an awesome, awesome time,” said Jim Warnke, a fourth-grade teacher at Elk Plain Elementary School. “The donkeys handled it very well. I see nothing wrong with it – but everyone’s entitled to their opinions.”

Three women, though, weren’t happy with the event – and they protested outside the gates to the school.

They worried people attending the donkey basketball games would see the event as harmless fun, and they had concerns about the animals’ welfare.

“We’re out here for the animals. This is just exploitation,” said Marilyn Wilfong of Graham. “Why don’t we go back to having bear wrestling or pit-bull dogfights?”

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Auburn and King County officials are talking about whether a guardrail or some other kind of safety measure on Green River Road might have helped stop a car from plunging into the Green River on Nov. 7 and drowning two youngsters.

“We are talking with the county now about what can be done there,” Auburn Mayor Pete Lewis said Friday.

He said he and some of the Auburn City Council members have been to the accident site just north of the Auburn Golf Course. The narrow two-lane road comes within 10-15 feet of the sloping river bank where the car went into the river.

There is no guardrail there, though a few hundred feet north of the accident site a quarter-mile of guardrail offers protection from the river.

Lewis said he doesn’t know if a guardrail is warranted or not. “That’s why we are communicating,” he said. “I don’t know exactly what happened out there. I want to see the investigator’s report" on the accident.

Linda Dougherty, head of the King County Road Services Division, said this week that they will await the results of a King County Sheriff's investigation of the accident before further reviewing the Green River Road where the accident occurred.

That investigation could take a couple months to complete, according to a King County Sheriff spokesman.

She said the investigation will help determine if there is anything about the road there that may have contributed to the accident.

The accident occurred when the 2007 Volkwagen Beetle driven by a 16-year-old student veered off the road into the rain-swollen river about 8:30 a.m. The two passengers inside, Hunter Beaupre, 2, and Austin Fuda, 13, drowned. The driver was able to escape.

It took four days for King County sheriff's divers to retrieve the car from fast-flowing river. Beaupre was found in his car seat. Fuda was not found in the car. A search of the river for his body has been postponed until the river returns to a safe level.

The road and right of way by the river where the accident occurred is owned by King County and is just outside the Auburn city limits. Use of the Green River Road had grown over the years. It is also a popular north-south commuter route between Auburn and Kent. Fishermen park along its length to access the river.

“This is one of those items where we don’t have a hammer (to require something be done) but we can talk,” Lewis said.

Dougherty said that until the accident the county never perceived a problem there and no one had called to complain about the area.

She said an engineer visited the site after the accident and didn’t see anything that indicated an immediate safety problem.

“We absolutely want to do the right thing,” she said, adding that “our hearts go out to the families.”

“I’m quitting today again,” said Monica Hall as she stood in front of the Great American Smokeout information table today in the Upgard Student Center at Tacoma Community College.
She was wearing a nicotine patch she had obtained free by calling the American Cancer Society Quit Line.
“They work really great,” the 43-year-old student and mother said, adding that her teenage children are “constantly on me” about quitting smoking. Quiting isn’t easy for some who has smoked for 21 years, she said.
But she was determined.
“I want to be a great role model,” she said.
Sitting behind the table was William Quaife, 44, also a TCC student and a Smokeout volunteer. He admitted he still smokes and knows the dangers after more than 30 years puffing away.
He plans to quit someday but not today. “It’s on my list,” he said.
The 32nd annual quit-smoking event got under way today, and there was help for cigarette smokers in Pierce County who wanted to join in.
Taking part sounds simple: give up smoking for the day. The goal is that one day may lead to two and then three and finally an end to an addiction that claims the lives of 47 million people nationwide or a little more than one in five adults and teenagers.
The good news in Pierce County, said George Hermosillo with the Tacoma Pierce County Health Department’s Tobacco Prevention Program, is that 55 percent of adults in the county have never smoked.
Another 25 percent, he said, or some 141,000 adults are former smokers in the sense that they have quit smoking forever.
But there are still around 112,000 adult smokers in the county – and many more join their ranks each year, he added. This works out to 20.8 percent adult smoking prevalence rate in 2006 – down from 22.4 percent in 2003, with the highest rate of 36% being among the age group of 18-29.
The unhealthy fact, he said is approximately half of those who smoke will die prematurely with tobacco-related diseases. On average 1,000 deaths in Pierce County are attributed to smoking each year – due to lung cancer, heart diseases, stroke, respiratory illness – among other diseases, he said.
Quitting isn’t easy, Hermosillo acknowledges.
A public service television advertisement from the Washington State Department of Health airing this week on local stations shows a woman staring from a second floor apartment down to the street where a man is smoking and then tosses a half-smoked butt away. Suddenly, the woman crashes through the glass window, drops onto the roof of a car below like a rag doll and jumps up to grab the still burning butt. She takes a puff. The walk- off line: We know it’s hard.
But there is help out there today, Hermosillo said. The Health Department teamed with MultiCare Health System to provide volunteers for smokers trying to quit or thinking about it to talk to.
From Western State Hospital in Steilacoom to Tacoma Community College and area MultiCare hospitals and clinics, the volunteers handed out quit-smoking kits and information on the health risks associated with smoking and support groups.
At TCC, respiratory care program student Karen Garcia, 33, was in charge of the two real, preserved lungs hanging from an air pipe. One was a smoker’s black and leathery lung; the other from a non-smoker pink and sponge-like lung.
She explained the difference to students and then asked if they wanted to touch them. She even offered a nylon glove. There weren’t a lot of takers.
“Some people get a little grossed out,” she said.
When she held up the jar of cigarette tar collected and a jar labeled Clem’s Phlegm, students backed away.
“I didn’t know (cigarettes) did that much damage,” Sarah Kaskins, 18, of Puyallup said. She said she had quit a couple months ago for other reasons: the threat of wrinkles on her face, bad breath, social stigma.
Brandon Campbell, 18, of Edgewood, who has asthma, said he doesn’t smoke and never will. But he said he has been trying to get his mother to quit for years. Perhaps she needs to see the lung, he said.
At Tacoma General Hospital, the Smokeout table sponsored by MultiCare’s Center for Better Living was set up in the middle of the cafeteria. The lunch-time crowd was heavy and the table was busy.
Besides handing out goodie bags, posters, pamphlets and pens, volunteers were signing up anyone who wanted to quit that day.
Among them was Jacob Morris, 18, a hospital valet who had been smoking for about a year but said he couldn’t quit.
“Cold turkey didn’t work out,” he said. “I guess I just needed some help. I’m addicted.”
In his goodie bag was a $30-off coupon for an oral drug called Chantik made by Pfizer. A company representative was there to discuss the short-term drug that she said was showing good results. Cost: about $120 per month.
Gail Downs, a supervisor for nutrition at Tacoma General, said the Smokeout gave her a chance to quit again. She had attended a support class for two years and was able to quit but then when her grandchild died 18 months ago she started again.
Smoking, she said, was attached to her “comfort things” but in the last couple of support classes she said she came to realize she didn’t like smoking.
For Terry Westling, of Tacoma, oral cancer helped prompted her to stop smoking last August with the help of a support group. She remembers throwing her last four cigarettes out the window of her car on Aug. 8, 2007. She said she is doing fine physically and hasn’t smoked since.
She now volunteers with the support group that meets Thursday evening at St. Joseph’s Medical Center. She volunteered for the Smokeout at Tacoma General, too
“You have to be there for other people,” she said. “I needed the support group.”

TOBACCO CESSATION & PREVENTION RESOURCES
Tacoma Pierce County Health Department

Local

QuitSmart Classes: 1-800-485-0205
QuitTobacco FREE Support Groups: 253-403-1144
MultiCare Helpline: 253-223-7538
Tobacco Cessation Program: 253-459-6702
Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department:253.798.6001
Clean Air for kids: Asthma Prevention 253.798.2954
Puget Sound ESD: School-based Resources 1.800.664.4549

Washington State Quit Line

Toll-Free: 1-800 QUIT NOW
Spanish: 1-877 NO FUME
TTY: 1-877-777-6534

How to Get Involved

Tobacco Advisory Board of Pierce County – 1st Friday of the month, Allenmore Hospital, basement classroom, 9 to 11 a.m.

Pacific Police Chief John Calkins will need to stand trial in Bonney Lake Municipal Court on a DUI charge, a judge ruled today.

A trial has been set for Jan. 26.

In his ruling, Bonney Lake Municipal Court Judge Douglas Haake rejected motions from Calkins’ attorney that the Aug. 2 traffic stop and subsequent arrest and detainment were illegal and that all evidence collected as a result of those actions should be suppressed and the case dismissed.

Both Calkins, 54, and his attorney Ken Fornabai declined to comment on the ruling. Fornabai did say the case will now proceed to a jury trial.

Calkins is police chief of the small community that straddles the southern King and Pierce county line.

Contacted this afternoon, Pacific Mayor Rich Hildreth said he knew nothing about the ruling and until he did would have no comment on Calkins position with the city.

Calkins was arrested after a motorist called 911 to report that the 2007 Corvette that Calkins was driving was weaving on Highway 410 between Enumclaw and Bonney Lake. Bonney Lake police stopped the car and detained Calkins who told the officer he had been drinking.

Calkins refused to take field sobriety tests and later failed to produce a conclusive reading twice on a breathalyzer machine at the Bonney Lake Police Station. Calkins breathes through a stoma or hole in his throat due to cancer and testified at the Nov. 3 hearing that he can only blow air through his stoma.

"At no time did Mr. Calkins indicate that he could only provide a sample through his stoma, nor (did) he request to do so," Haake said in his written ruling.

Calkins also refused to take a blood alcohol test. Haake ruled that Calkins’ refusals to take sobriety tests are admissible at trial. He also ruled that the Bonney Lake police officer had sufficient reason to justify the arrest of Calkins.

Fornabai had argued that Calkins was not drunk when he was pulled over and the officer had no legal reason to make a traffic stop.

Haake also concluded that the Bonney Lake officer who stopped Calkins could rely on an informant's tip through 911 and police dispatch to make the traffic stop even if the officer did not see Calkins' car weaving on the highway.

Fprnabai also had argued that the 30 minutes form the timne of the traffic stop until Calkins arrest was legally too long.
"Mr Calkins contirnbuted to any delay by his aggressive, non-cooperative responses to attempts to further th einvestigation," Haake said in his ruling.

Eastsiders have come to love the sound of tow trucks in the morning.

They have been working with Tacoma Police Department Officer Don Williams to rid the neighborhood of illegal and decaying cars in all the wrong places.

They’ve alerted Williams to blocks clogged with cars on the planting strips, cars with grass growing in their wheel wells, cars with expired tabs, cars on lawns, cars on sidewalks, cars parked facing the wrong way. Williams checks off the pertinent violation on a form. He leaves the form on the windshield with a notice that, if the owner doesn’t move the car by a certain date, the city will do it, and send a bill.

The first time Williams went out, people thought it was a bluff.
Then big trucks towed 30-plus cars away.

The next few times around, owners dealt with the problem themselves, and the tow trucks hauled off half a dozen vehicles.
Now Tow Day is going city-wide.

Jeanie Peterson of Hilltop Action Coalition is inviting volunteers in Sector One, which includes Hilltop and the downtown, to get the training to hit the sidewalks for the program. The police will offer free training sessions the weekend of Dec. 6 and 7.

“The first training class for the 6th will begin at noon at the Sector One Substation, South 16th Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way, and other trainings will happen throughout the day,” she said.
Tow Day will come to Sector One in time for the holidays, then cycle through Sectors Two and Three, then back to Four.

Don't plan on using Broadway between Second and Sixth in Tacoma on Thursday -- unless it's raining. Crews are planning to pave the street as part of the big make-over of the area. Here's the press release from the city:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Nov. 18, 2008

MEDIA CONTACTS
Karrie Spitzer, Community Relations, karrie.spitzer@cityoftacoma.org, (253) 591-5790
Mark Henry, Public Works, mark.henry@cityoftacoma.org, (253) 591-5771

Broadway paving scheduled for Nov. 20
Broadway, from 2nd to 6 streets, is scheduled to be paved on Thursday, Nov. 20, from 6 a.m. until 6 p.m. No access will be allowed on Broadway while the paving is underway. The parking areas along Broadway, from 2nd to 6th, will remain closed until all paving for this area is complete; the paving is scheduled to be done on Tuesday, Nov. 25.

This work, which is weather dependent, is part of phase one of the Broadway Local Improvement District (BLID) project.

The Broadway LID includes portions of Market Street and St. Helens Avenue, between South 9th and South 7th streets, together with portions of Broadway from South 9th Street northward towards South 2nd Street. Over the next year, the area will continue to undergo: reconstruction and repair of sidewalks; the addition of ornamental street lighting and landscaping; construction of surface water, wastewater and water main utility replacement and the undergrounding of overhead utility wires.

For more information about the project, visit www.cityoftacoma.org/BroadwayLID.

Standing in his front yard on the levee next to the Carbon River, Don Heins recalled the sound of the Veterans Day storm last week ripping at the levee.

"It was about 1:30 or 2 in the morning," he said this morning as he watched the jaws of a big excavator pull trees from the levee. "I thought it was big boulders going downstream."

When he got up last Thursday morning, he saw what happened. The river had torn out about 25 feet of levee bank. The large rocks that held the levee were gone, swept away by the rain swollen river. In their place was a vertical wall of dirt, about 5 feet tall.

If he had known that was happening, he said he would have got out of there in the night. He said he is used to big rocks rolling down the river "shaking the ground."

"It's the first time that has happened," he said of the washout since he moved next to the river south of Orting in 1977.

The excavator was part of a Pierce County Surface Water Management crew repairing the 300-foot-long cut in the levee. A second levee gash about a quarter-mile downstream also threatened the Foothills Trail.

Work on the Foothills Trail repair is expected to start Wednesday, according to Mike Dacca, who is overseeing the repairs there for Pierce County.

He said the trail will have to be shut down for perhaps a week and half at milepost 4.3 to do the work.

Those repairs are among at least 10 active repair sites that will be under way in the next few days in the Orting area along the Puyallup and Carbon rivers. There are more than 30 sites that need work, though not all are an emergency, according to Tony Fantello, maintenance and operations manager for the county's Surface Water Management.

Fantello said it appears the weather will give them enough time to get the most vulnerable sites repaired before the next heavy rains.

“We’d be more worried if we had another storm of equal magnitude on its way,” he said.

Besides the work on the Carbon River levee at 186th Street East, repair work in winding down on the Carbon River levee south of Orting along 177th Street East (the Alward County Road). Emergency work started there last Thursday, according to Dacca.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is also finishing up flood repair work on the Puyallup River along Neadham Road south of Orting. Repairs there have been under way 24/7 since last Wednesday.

Fantello said the county is finishing up assessing public damage from last week’s flooding and will prioritize the repairs that must be done.
He estimated river repairs cost $3.5 million a year.

The Veterans Day Storm filled area rivers and led to evacuation of homes in areas south of Orting, South Prairie and Sumner.

The state's Voights Creek Fish Hatchery south of Orting was flooded last week, too, by the creek.

Hatchery manager Jill Phillips said today they are still trying to clear water intake pipes from Voights Creek to the hatchery. A tracked excavator was almost in the creek pulling gravel out and dumping it into waiting trucks.

She said they have kept water flowing to more than 1/5 million salmon and steelhead fry and another 2 million eggs using generators. If the water stops flowing, the fry and eggs will die, she said.

"We need to get the gravel out of the intakes," Phillips said.

Back at 186th Street East, Dacca said the crew was looking at at least a week of work.

After building a small diversion dam upstream of the washed-out levee to keep the repair area as dry as possible, Dacca explained that a toe-hold 4 feet deep by 10 feet wide will be dug in the river channel next to what remains of the levee. It will be filled with large "six-man rocks" weighing 4,000 to 6,000 pounds each.

Some 2,000 cubic feet of dirt and smaller rocks will be dumped and compressed to reconstruct the levee.

There will continue to a lot of truck traffic around Orting, Dacca said.

The repairing of river levees is a constant job, Dacca said. Each flood season, the rivers flow back and forth down their channels and attack different spots on the levees.

What exactly causes various points on levees to tear away isn't completely understood, Fantello said, but said the receding floodwaters tend to cause the most damage. The falling water releases pressures on the levees and can scour the channel.

Last week's flood resulted in only a handful of severe washouts, he said.

"I think we fared pretty well," he said.

The hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours South Sounders invested in Tacoma's 2008 Tall Ships Festival paid off for the second time Saturday.

Mike McLeod of Tall Ships Tacoma's Board of Directors, accepted the award at the International Sail Training and Tall Ships Conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Tacoma has taken part in the festival only twice, in 2005 and 2008. Both times it has won Port of the Year. This year, it outdid the cities of Victoria and Port Alberni in British Columbia and San Francisco, Oxnard, Los Angeles, San Diego and Dana Point in California. In 2005, it also bested Vancouver, B.C.

The Tall Ships Challenge cycles between the east and west coasts and the Great Lakes each three years.

Captains and crew members have the biggest say in who wins Port of the Year.

It matters to them that the city of Tacoma arranged to have their bilges pumped, that union electrical workers had safe power strung to their ships and that volunteers kept crowds controlled and docks secure. It matters to them that shoreside folks welcome them with warm smiles, shopping specials, and free internet service.

McLeod believes that Youth on Board, a program pioneered by Tall Ships and Metro Parks, impressed ASTA and the skippers. That program trained young people in seamanship and placed them on Tall Ships for the sail from Victoria to Tacoma. Later in the summer, half a dozen of those young people went to California to sail aboard USCG Barque Eagle.

"We were one of the few ports that really embraced the sail training opportunity," McLeod said. "I'm told that ASTA is using the program we developed as a model."

While Port of the Year is an honor, the volunteers' first payoff was a well-run festival that drew crowds of 400,000 to the Foss in July.

Organizers estimated that 2,000 volunteers invested tens of thousands of hours in the festival. They built docks, gathered sponsors, picked up trash, directed crowds, catered to crews, and after all the ships had sailed, they left the Thea Foss Waterway with about $1.5 to $2 million worth of improvements.

Protests in support of gay marriage came to downtown Tacoma on Saturday.

About 150 people assembled at the rally at First United Methodist Church. They chanted slogans, held placards and waved flags as they marched between the church and nearby Wright Park.

Sherrie Orlob, a 57-year-old University Place resident, believes the passage of Proposition 8 two weeks ago in California is a setback in a larger struggle for equal rights for the gay and lesbian community.

Orlob, active with the group Old Lesbians Organizing for Change, was disheartened by Proposition 8’s passage; she has been waiting for years for the opportunity to marry her partner.

“It was quite surprising, maybe shocking. I really thought the country had come further – especially in California, which is a fairly liberal state,” she said. “For me, I never thought this would happen in my lifetime anyway. Every step we take is a step forward. This was a minor step backwards.”

Brita Barry lives in Athens, Ga., and visiting friends in Tacoma. She felt the need to come out and support the gay community.

The idea of revoking civil rights was morally objectionable, she said. Barry left West Germany in 1970 and worries about parallels between her native country’s past and the passage of Proposition 8.

“I left my country because it had such and dangerous and evil past,” she said. “I come to this country, and I find the same bigotry. And it horrifies me.”

The church at 621 Tacoma Ave. S. was decorated with rainbow flags and displays. Mike Collier, the chairman of the church’s social justice ministry, said it encourages members of the homosexual community to participate and take leadership roles in the congregation.

Collier said Saturday’s protests were “something tangible” the church could do to take a stand.

“We’re coming from a moral standpoint,” he said. “We have a responsibility to affirm the dignity of all human life. We want to make sure that our friends that it is our goal to be welcoming and affirming.

“So often, you hear the negative of the connotations coming from fundamental churches, so it’s our joy and our responsibility to talk about this.”

Rebuilding Together South Sound has left its neighborly mark all over the South Sound. Since 2001 the non-profit has sent skilled volunteers out to help low-income home-owners tackle repairs.

Its crews have completed 152 projects, including 10 new roofs, eight wheelchair ramps and 19 grab-bar and handrail installations last year.
Stores, non-profits and individuals round up the money, supplies, brains and muscle for the jobs.

If you need help, you have to own your home, have an income below 50 percent of the median income, be unable to do the whole job yourself, be disabled or senior or have children in the family. You have to agree to cooperate with the volunteers and pitch in as much as you and your family are able.

December 1 is the deadline for applications, which you can get by logging onto www.rebuildingtogetherss.org, or calling Program Coordinator Chelsea Muller at (253)722-5850.

As Tacomans spiff up the city through the Safe and Clean Initiative, some neighborhood activists are hearing from people whose homes have fallen into disrepair, but who do not have the means to fix them. Rebuilding Together South Sound is a great resource, a terrific community partner.

Tacoma Rescue Mission and Need-A-Break Services have merged, a move they say will save them money and make it easier to deliver help to needy people.

Need-A-Break, a relative newcomer to the local philanthropy scene, jumps in to help needy people with car and home repairs. The aim is to solve problems before they snowball into disasters. Car repairs, for example, could make it possible for a person to get to work on time, and keep a job.

With the merger, Need-A-Break will move from a site south of S.R. 512 to the New Life Center campus on South Tacoma Way. The new home has more storage, and is closer to partner agencies, including NW Furniture Bank.

Mission clients who are working toward productive lives will be able to walk across a courtyard to volunteer with Need-A-Break, sorting donations, working on home repairs and fixing cars.

We'll stop by later this week to see how missions fit together, and what clients think of the switch.

Right. Any time is a bad time to deal drugs anywhere, but that has not stopped a band of low-life entrepreneurs from taking over whole corners of the 3000 blocks of Portland Avenue.

The law-abiding majority has had enough. In the summer,they organized themselves as First Creek Neighbors. They forged a partnership with their police community liaison officers, city building inspectors and public works crews. Together, they've busted half a dozen drug houses, hauled away tons of trash and gotten scores of junk and illegally parked cars off the streets.

Now they want to do the same with the dealers.

So they invited Jeanie Peterson, Tacoma's Queen of Taking Back the Streets, to their monthly meeting at Portland Avenue Community Center.

Peterson is the rock star, barefoot Strategist in Chief for ordinary people mobilizing against criminals. She did not disappoint the 50-plus activists and novices who packed the meeting.

=> Read more!

When City Manager Eric Anderson announced the ambitious "Tacoma Safe and Clean" program in April, some thought it was a little too ambitious: The goals were to reduce crime by 50 percent in 14 months and rid the streets of junk and debris.

But 22 teams around the city started working, and they've made progress. So much progress, in fact, that the city has created a Web site to allow you to track progress and volunteer opportunities daily. Go
here for a look.

Oh, and those teams are cleaning up the streets within the city's current budget by partnering with the communities.

We'll have a story in tomorrow's paper. In the meantime, have you noticed anything in your corner of Tacoma?