Letters + Opinion

Editor: As regards "Mending Broken Hearts" (Feb. 12) — don’t get me started!  While I am glad St. Joseph Hospital is looking into improving patient care, these statistics are a great example of why we need not-for-profit health care. Leave it to the nurses to tell the truth about staffing overloads, medication error and patients […]

Editor: I’d like to respond to the advertisement for the state adoption office’s photo display of foster children ("Arts! Arcata," Feb. 12). Adoption isn’t always a beautiful experience, especially for the adoptee. When the children become adults, they will be discriminated against. I am an adult adoptee, born in the State of California in 1969. […]

Editor: I am writing this letter to commend your publication in general, and Ryan Burns in particular, for the outstanding article "Crossing Schools" (Feb. 5). I recently retired from the McKinleyville Union School District where I worked as a third-grade teacher and an assistant principal at Dow’s Prairie School for 21 years. I was one […]

Editor: Ryan Burns’ story "Crossing Schools" was a pleasant and welcome surprise in your Feb. 5 paper. I have taught at Dow’s Prairie School for 24 years and was expecting to see yet another hit-and-miss effort at understanding the reconfiguration controversy. Instead, Burns presented a well-researched, in-depth survey of the complexity of the issues and […]

Editor: Marcy Burstiner correctly notes that "here in Humboldt, we all seem to complain about the quality of our local newspapers" ("Dark Ages," Feb. 5). But when she lists the newspapers whose "hard-working reporters" without whose work "we wouldn’t have a clue as to what’s happening in our small, isolated world," she omits the Redwood […]

It’s a pleasure to see poetry, especially about birds, published in the North Coast Journal ("Foot of Del Norte Street," Feb. 5). However, the "grackles" in the poem are undoubtedly Brewer’s Blackbirds, as grackles have been sighted in Humboldt but a handful of times and "readle-cak" is a valid translation of the blackbird’s call.  We […]

Editor: I saw The Wild Guys last week and I must have been at a different play than your critic, William S. Kowinski ("Stage Matters," Feb. 5). First mistake is in the first sentence: Andy (Mike Halton) clearly states that he has only been in a men’s group for a few months and has never […]

Editor: The suggestion by Hank Sims that critics of the Headwaters Fund Board "tape their mouths shut or jump into the sea in shame" ("Town Dandy," Jan. 29) is a stunning reflection of the snow job perpetrated on Sims and the general media concerning the gift of $500,000 from the Headwaters Fund to the City […]

Editor: In your recent article “Hobart’s Children” (Jan. 29), you wrote: “Where did the current litigious battle for his legacy begin? Ellin Beltz suggests starting with Brown v. Humboldt Kinetic Association.” You also write that when the Humboldt Kinetic Association “… realized the race couldn’t turn a profit, they stopped payments and Hobart sued.” That’s […]