Volunteer Staff
Dear Editor: Several days have passed since I last sent a letter thanking several of our ‘‘regular’’ volunteers, when I realized that there are additional highly skilled and motivated ‘‘regulars’’ who simply come and go so quietly, and do their jobs so ably, seldom needing our assistance, definitely need thanks not only from Kettleson staff, but the rest of the community who benefit from their ‘‘back of the house’’ labors.
Dorothy Orbison has continued the work on organizing the local history obituary records, as well as working on a full inventory of the C.L. Andrews collection with Gerry vonRekowski. Gerry vonRekowski was involved with the Andrews collection from the closing of Stratton Library and additionally brings great expertise to the map portion of the collection. Marilyn Hanson comes regularly to maintain our ‘‘clipping’’ file. Even in the days of digitized everything, we recently were able to pull out a file of articles on the Blue Lake Dam project for someone needing them for their own research project. While occasionally books are returned with wet or torn pages, DVDs come back with scratches, or puppies cut their teeth on magazines, volunteers like Jude Reis help mend those items and get them quickly back into circulation.
While ‘‘thank you’’ never seems sufficient, please take a moment when you see these folks to thank them for what they do for you. You never know when you might need to do a bit of genealogy work, locate some information about a local event, get to turn the pages of a rare book or peruse an old map. It is due to their volunteerism that those opportunities are available to you.
Sarah Bell
Kettleson Memorial Library
Annual Party
Dear Editor: Sitkans Against Family Violence’s Children’s Program would like to express our gratitude to all the businesses and individuals who contributed to making SAFV’s annual holiday party and holiday season a success.
For their delicious food donations, we would like to thank the Backdoor, the Bayview Restaurant and Pub, the Larkspur Café and Sea Mart Quality Foods. We would also like to thank the SAFV staff members and residents who helped prepare our holiday feast. Feeding over 60 people only happened with the kindness of the community!
We greatly appreciate the presents from all who generously donated to the Methodist Church Giving Tree and the Coast Guard Angel Tree. We’d like to thank Harry Race, the First National Bank of Alaska, and the Today Show Toy Drive for their additional gifts and wrapping paper. Also, thank you for all other generous gifts donated from the Sitka Community. Without them, we would not have had so many wonderful presents to distribute to families for their holiday season.
Thank you to the Mt. Edgecumbe students and staff for all of their hard work during the party.
Thank you to Michael LaGuire and the Knights of Columbus and the Boy Scouts for the beautiful Christmas trees.
Girl Scout Troop 4140 and the Salvation Army helped keep families warm this holiday season through their amazing donation of jackets, scarves, hats and gloves from their winter clothing drive.
The Sitka community was truly generous this holiday season. Thank you all for your support of SAFV and the families we work with!
Kate Frederic, Children’s Advocate,
Sitkans Against Family Violence
