Letters: Community needs to stop bickering over minor issue

I ran into a couple of oldtimers at the fair this week who do "Remember When?"

We got to kicking around all the controversy about Beachfront Park that is now headlining the news; one these oldtimers, a now-local forester that was here before the '64 flood and the famous tsunami, was relating how he used to sit on that cement block wall, now on Front Street, and stick his feet in the sand … apparently the sea wall before '64. He was saying how that used to be the beach and after the tragedy and before all the codes, laws, Costal Commissions, all the debris from anywhere and everywhere was placed in that area as fill … concrete, lumber, trash, a virtual landfill that has now become our Beachfront Park.

Of course, the now-in-question trees that exist must have been planted on top of all that fill and are trying to survive on imported soil and trash.

We do have a beautiful and useful, productive area for local and out-of-town activities that should be regulated to some degree. It produces revenue for tourism, which seems to be about all that is left for our local economy.

I, too, "remember when" we cleared the area for what is now Sutter Coast Hospital and the out-of-town architect that had native trees saved for landscaping … save the trees but with all the equipment, construction and as much as we attempted to not have any heavy equipment in the area of the root structures, where are those trees today? Chips in the local Hambro mill.

Hope we can all come together as a united community and move on to bigger and better things and stop majoring in minors.

John E. Vaughn

Fort Dick