Tacoma

This is the fourth and final article featuring Richard Dorsett’s trip to Asia to distribute Foldscopes, the fully functional microscope, which users construct by origami principles. The Rotary Club of Tacoma #8 funded the Foldscopes for adventurer and hiking and biking enthusiast Richard Dorsett: Some years ago, I bought two microscopes from the Washington surplus […]

I love baked potatoes with butter, Parmesan cheese, chives, and sour cream. Unfortunately, if you start with a potato the size of high school boy’s basketball shoe, the calories could pile on the weight instead of the enjoyment. I like to use a combination of small reds and Yukon Golds. I throw six to eight […]

My friend Jim picked me up for lunch at 11:30 am. We drove to the North Proctor area in Tacoma. We parked directly across the street in what appeared to be the only available parking spot. This was well before noon on a Friday morning in January. We walked across the street and entered the […]

We kept talking about it . . . a friend kept suggesting it . . . we kept paying out good money every month for old movies and PBS. Finally, for Christmas our daughter gave my wife a Kindle and paid for a year’s subscription to Amazon Prime. At the same time, our daughter-in-law gave […]

This is the third article featuring Richard Dorsett’s trip to Asia to distribute Foldscopes, the fully functional microscope, which users construct by origami principles. The Rotary Club of Tacoma #8 funded the Foldscopes for adventurer and hiking and biking enthusiast Richard Dorsett: Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which […]

In my article about Ponders Corner (https://thesubtimes.com/2017/12/06/ponders-corner/) I mentioned buying a can of Beef Stroganoff from a small grocery store a couple hundred yards away from my parents’ motel when I was a teenager. All I had to do was boil up some noodles and open the can and add a little butter in a […]

In the seventh grade at Hudtloff Junior High School I signed up for an evening course in fencing. I had always loved stories of The Three Musketeers, pirates and duels of honor. I thought fencing would be fun. No one told me that it was a lot of work. All you need to start with […]

Sometimes a moment can go on for hours and on rare occurrences that’s not quite enough. My parents owned La Casa Motel (Spanish for home) in Ponders Corner. We lived there and we worked there. In a moment of teenage angst I once told my mother, “We don’t have a home. We have a motel.” […]

“The ASARCO plant site had nearly 100 years of history, beginning as the Ryan Smelter, a lead-refining company built by investor Dennis Ryan in 1888. Two years later it became the Tacoma Smelting and Refining Company, under the ownership of William Rust (1850-1928) who began modernizing and expanding the facility. Rust sold the plant for […]