• The Lawrence Fire Department has been awarded a $2650 grant by Answers for Autism to purchase new Project Lifesaver equipment. This equipment allows public safety officials to locate participating residents with disabilities who are at risk of wandering.
• The blustery, snowy, icy weather was handled very well by our friends and neighbors. Thank you to all the businesses and homeowners who cleared their sidewalks so that walkers didn’t have to walk in the street.
• A big thank you to everyone who has donated to the Gaia Works Toy Drive over the past few weeks. We’ve collected quite a few toys for needy kids in the community, plus warm gloves and hats for the little ones.
• A special end-of-year thank you to all our contributors, columnists, and writers for the Weekly View. We’re very fortunate to have such a great talent pool. Take a gander at the Page 2 masthead for a list of our regular contributors, as well as the many who have called in leads, sent in press releases, and faithfully sent stories.
Our newspaper delivery people are absolutely wonderful. We couldn’t ask for a better team of dedicated people who, every week in all sorts of crazy weather, are here to drop papers at over 500 points throughout 24 zip codes. It’s a difficult job, but they manage to do it. Thank you Mark, James and Shirley, Pauline, and Aaron and Rita, for doing such a great job for us.
The Weekly View cannot exist without our advertisers, who financially make this paper happen. We have the most loyal and fantastic advertisers — and we’d encourage each and every one of you reading this to patronize their businesses as often as possible.
The readers of the Weekly View . . . all 25,000 of you weekly and those who read us online . . . have shown us such loyalty over the past years, it is overwhelming. Not a week goes by that we don’t get a phone call or e-mail from our readers who say how much they like the paper. Some weeks, when the pressure is on and things aren’t going so well, those positive comments are what keep us going. You are why we keep on truckin’.
The Weekly View will be celebrating its 5th Anniversary in 2014. It’s hard to believe we began a business in the middle of the Great Recession, when everyone was predicting the end of newspapers was at hand. We continue to believe that there is a bright future for community newspapers, which deliver information and entertainment to thousands of people in a low-tech, hands-on format.
This is the last issue for 2013 — everyone at the Weekly View wishes our readers and advertisers a safe and happy holiday! See you on January 3 with a new issue of the Weekly View!