After an arduous six-year process, the much discussed Mercer Island Boys & Girls Club PEAK project will finally break ground next week. The official ceremony takes place on June 29, six years after the youth recreation facility and teen center was conceived.
The Mercer Island rooftops, cars, backyard barbecues and garden chairs looked like plastic miniatures — detailed enough to recognize but small enough to pinch together with tweezers and modeling glue. But it was not until I saw an Island mother, child on hip, stroll out of the South-end QFC behind a packed shopping cart that I realized how close we actually were to the living miniatures below. Seven hundred and sixty feet, actually. That is how close we were.
Robert Burnett was one of the first teenagers on Mercer Island to own a VCR. A self-proclaimed movie fanatic at age 13, the Island resident had the neighborhood kids lining up to watch “Smokey and the Bandit,” “Star Wars,” “The Exorcist” — or any of the hard-to-come-by movies released on VHS in the early ’80s — on his South-end living room couch. Movies, the Hollywood producer asserts today, were his calling.
Mercer Island High School graduate Cheryl Crow, currently an orientation specialist at the University of Washington Medical Center, won an honorable mention award in the UW’s first annual Pocketmedia Film Festival. The amateur film festival asked UW students, faculty and staff to submit a digital film — no more than 90 seconds long and shot with a camera small enough to fit in a pocket — answering the question “What do you do at the UW?”
The City Council has agreed on taking $135,000 from the city’s biennial budget to keep the Mercer Island School District’s Youth and Family Service (YFS) counseling program alive for one more year. This amount will be added to the $264,000 that the city already committed to the counseling program. Faced with serious budget woes, MISD announced earlier this year that it could not afford to continue paying for YFS counselors without an extra $135,000 from the city.
Ira Appelman is no stranger to Mercer Island politics. Tape recorder in hand, he has attended nearly every City Council meeting for the past 10 years. He sits in the front row, scrutinizing every word and action. He reads every page of the agenda packet. He reviews each meeting’s minutes. But at some point, Appelman grew tired of his front-row citizen seat. Last week, the Island resident decided to get involved himself.
Beloved QFC manager Takeshi “Tuk” Tada, 82, died on May 13, surrounded by his loving family.
He keeps the sewers of Mercer Island working by day. But once the weekend arrives, Tom Babcock is off into the wild, walking stick in hand, backpack stocked, ready to search for his personal treasure — agate rocks.
Three Mercer Island City Council members are running for re-election this November. Councilmember and Mayor Jim Pearman will be running for Position 4, incumbent Mike Grady will run for Position 6 and incumbent Dan Grausz will run for Position 2, competing with Island citizen Ira Appelman. The names were made official on June 5, the last day for King County candidates to file for office.
City Councilmember Mike Grady is, without a doubt, an environmentally conscious man. This is why, when it recently came to his attention that one of the Island’s four trees with eagle nests was in danger of being destroyed by real estate development, he stepped right in to asses the matter.
A roll-over accident occurred shortly after 8 a.m. on May 28 at the intersection of 86th Avenue S.E. and S.E. 44th Street when a white sedan T-boned a Nissan Pathfinder, flipping it over on impact.
The city of Mercer Island recently distributed its 2008 Water Quality Report, which once again assured residents that Mercer Island’s water quality is above standard. The annual report, conducted each year by the city and Seattle Public Utilities (SPU), quantifies the regulated substances in Island residents’ water. It is a legal requirement for the city to publicize this data annually.
Rina Shimizu, a freshman at Mercer Island High School, recently visited St. Petersburg, Russia, as part of a cultural study hosted by the International School of Classical Ballet in Kirkland. Shimizu has been a student at the school for one year.
