(Editor's Note: As promised last week, Jerry Robinson recalls some of the highlights of over half a centuryof bringing readers the local news. He starts with the White Center News.)

Though main street on the county side of White Center in 1950 was only two lanes of paved road, cars parked in a series of deep puddles. Drivers hated it and women avoided it.

So the first crusade we embarked on was getting rid of the huge puddles.

Our editor was a great cartoonist and created a denizen named Gregory Groundhog, who resided in the deepest swamp.

Then we did a series of stories that embarrassed the county and one major businessman got mad at us and got up a petition to get the county street widened and paved to four lanes, He was Omar Schau, the White Center bakery owner who got mad at me and urged me to get out of town. But he also owned several properties and the local bakery. It would cost him a bundle but he formed a local improvement district and, voila, the county paved 16th SW all the way to Yerington's funeral home.

Our office was on Roxbury in a tiny building that now houses a dental office for the Velling brothers, Mike and Jerry. Built and occupied by their dentist father, Roy, now retired, who was also famous locally as community booster who raised the money to build a small park called Saraland. It was full of space age related equipment in a corner of what is the county owned Mel Olsen ballpark.

Roy also later badgered County Commissioner Ed Munro till he funded the handball court in the WNPA- built field house and even convinced county parks director George Wyse to donate a retired fighter plane to what now is named Steve Cox Park, in honor of the heroic police officer.

That plane later disappeared, given to some other city with never an explanation to the public.
With Roxbury Street serving as the southern city limits for Seattle, King County also shared the responsibility for maintaining half the busy road but did a lousy job and, one day, a careless driver hit a chuckhole and lost control of his car, which careened off the highway and killed 10-year-old Byron Kinghammer. The boy was walking on the unpaved shoulder of the county side.

That did it. The whole community, led by our newspaper, was enraged and demanded the governing entities improve the highway.

During our first ten years, beginning in 1950, White Center was a boomtown. We had a Kaiser- Frazer and a Volkswagen dealership, an A and P grocery, Safeway, Big Bear Grocery, Tradewell, Marketime, Mode 'oday, Food Basket IGA, Thrifty Drug, Albertson's, Thriftway, Wigwam, Goodyear Store, four TV and appliance stores, five or six doctors, four dentists, four drug stores, six taverns, ten restaurants, Coy's White Center Theatre, four appliance stores and three furniture stores, a men's shop, a bike shop and several cleaners, paint stores and seven eateries, including the famous Epicure where my present wife, Elsbeth served as hostess and favorite waitress.

More about Elsbeth later.