Leader readers take charge

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Today, The Leader is your faithful follower.

Late this fall, we spread Readers Choice ballots far and wide, asking readers to name their favorite businesses and servers and meals countywide and in Port Townsend.

The ballots came back by the bushel, were tallied, and today’s paper is chock full of those answers. Not our judgement. Yours.

And while the listings of Readers Choice winners crowd out some of the weekly features you may be used to, the list accomplishes something important.

It brings together the many threads that bind this into a community, rather than a cluster of doorsteps for Amazon Prime deliveries.

Taking time to vote for your favorite milkshake, banker or volunteer, grocer or waiter gives a boost to those who do more than go through the motions. It signals that small business is still a big deal to those who rely on human contact to get the things we humans need.

It reminds us that if we want those human elements that make the town unique, we have to nourish them, whether by patronizing that favorite cafe or stopping to thank that banker or car mechanic for hanging in there with the rest of us.

William Allen White, the patron saint of small-town newspaper owners, wrote in 1916 that city folk needed to adjust their lenses when looking at country papers dedicated to local, local, local. “If you could take the clay from your eyes and read the little paper as it is written, you would find all of God’s beautiful sorrowing, struggling, aspiring world in it and what you saw would make you touch the little paper with reverent hands.”

Amen.

— Dean Miller

The Leader’s Editorials are the opinion of the Editorial Board: Publisher Lloyd Mullen; co-owner Louis Mullen; Editor Dean Miller and Leader readers who lobby The Leader. Each editorial is signed by the person who writes that editorial on behalf of the Editorial Board.