Try the Trader Joe’s in Bellingham. It’s been overflowing with visiting Canadians for years, but not any more.
“Canadians Are Staying Away,” read a recent front page …
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Try the Trader Joe’s in Bellingham. It’s been overflowing with visiting Canadians for years, but not any more.
“Canadians Are Staying Away,” read a recent front page headline in the Seattle Times above a story that featured the Washington border town prominently. The TJ’s in Bellingham has a mural on one wall with the American and Canadian flags waving together, a reminder of the store and city’s recent history of welcoming Canadians.
No more. At least not until Commander Bonespurs leaves office.
We had two sets of Canadian visitors last week, and they were concerned about entering a hostile U.S. Can’t blame them. My son, luckily, is a Canadian citizen, born in Montreal. Birthright citizenship, Canadian style.
If you’re going to Europe this summer, you might well want to get some Canadian flag patches for your outerware. Which is exactly what my wife and I did during the Vietnam war when we lived in Canada.
The ridiculous bleating from the current American president about Canada being a 51st state was not exactly welcome among our peaceable, classy northern neighbors.
The next Canadian prime minister might well be Christia Freeland, former deputy prime minister, because of her outspoken dislike of our very dislikable president.
I am ashamed of this country for electing the Mango Mussolini. Canadians are simply, and understandably, disgusted by this bloviating jerk.
I’ve always been a huge Canada fan, and wrote a book and a U.S. column about our great neighbor.
When Canadians don’t want to visit us, it speaks volumes about this country’s disrepair — and Canada’s respect for civilized behavior.
• Quick Work when you can see it: I tell myself to get a life whenever I do this, but I actually time how long it takes our garbage trucks with their ultra-efficient mechanical arms to pick up our trash. My latest clocking: six seconds. Not a misprint.
… Next: I’ll head down to Safeway to watch the trucks unload. Or ask my neighbor for a tour of her linen closet.
• New Mexico Mystery: I’ve recently been missing my old friend Baron Wolman, who died a couple of years ago. Wolman was Rolling Stone’s first head photographer, and I first knew him in Sonoma County where we copiloted his plane. Baron, who’d met and photographed many famous types, decamped from Sonoma and moved to Santa Fe. We visited him there, and one of the people he came to know there, and hung out with, was Gene Hackman. I miss Baron, a colorful guy, and I suspect he would have known something about Hackman and his wife’s puzzling deaths.
• Movie Recommendation: “Becoming Katherine Graham” is a first-rate doc about the first women to become publisher of a major U.S. daily, The Washington Post. She often found herself as the only woman in newsrooms and boardrooms, but she gamely persevered.
I am personally thankful to her. She hired Ben Bradlee as editor and two of Bradlee’s hires were Bob Maynard and Roy Aarons for whom I worked at the Pulitzer-winning Oakland Tribune. Maynard was my Trib publisher — and the first black publisher of a major U.S. daily. Aarons, his exec editor, founded the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists’ Association. These great journalists were, like Graham, trailblazers.
Reach Bill Mann is at Newsmann 9@gmail com.