Peninsula Clarion
Sterling Senior Center breakfast
3/27/19
A cosmopolitan St. Patrick’s Day on the peninsula
The Sterling Senior Center will be serving breakfast on Saturday, March 30 from 9 a.m. to noon. The menu includes sausage, bacon, ham, scrambled eggs, pancakes and biscuits and gravy. $10 for Adults, $5 for children. Everyone is welcome. All proceeds benefit the center. For further information call 262-6808.
The KPC Showcase presents: An Alaskan Doctor’s Perspectives on Antarctica with Dr. Kristin Mitchell
The Seward Fish & Game Advisory Committee will hold an election meeting on Thursday, April 4 at 7 p.m. at the City Council Chambers, located at 410 Adams Street in Seward. Agenda will also include a review of the BOF meeting, discussion of BOF Cook Inlet proposals to submit, and any other items of business that may properly come before the committee. For more information contact Jim McCracken at 362-3701.
LeeShore Center monthly board meeting The LeeShore Center will be holding its monthly board meeting at The LeeShore Center on Wednesday, March 28. The meeting is open to the public and begins at 6 p.m. For further information call 2839479.
Twenty eight years ago, Soldotna Chamber of Commerce member Mike Sweeney launched the first St. Patrick’s Day parade. “We wanted an early event to get people out and shopping locally,” said Sweeney, who is the founder of “the working man’s store” in Soldotna. “We had about six or seven guys on the committee and we thought, ‘Why not?’ Everybody got behind it and it has become the only St. Patrick’s Parade in Alaska and has grown every,” said Swee-
ney. Candy is an incentive for the hundreds of families that line the Kenai Spur Highway, but participants are more likely to hand out the candy rather than throw it from floats and cars — to keep it out of the mud and slush, said Sweeney. From unseasonably warm days that have had folks marching in shorts and flip flops to some of the worst winter storms, weather patterns have always been precarious for the early spring parade,
but that has never deterred participants. “About three years ago we probably had one of the biggest storms of the year. It just happens but we always have a great time and celebrate the wearing of the green,” Sweeney said. This year, the luck of the Irish prevailed with Mother Nature clearing the skies by mid-afternoon and turning the snow berms to slush. “Sure, I’ll take credit for the weather. I got up this morning and said, ‘Let’s have a nice day’ and
we did,” laughed Sweeney, as the parade got underway. He estimated about 400 folks participated in the parade with hundreds more watching and collecting candy along the parade route. VFW Post 10046 led the parade — followed by the Order of the Purple Heart. “This is the first parade of the year and I really enjoy this one. It’s a kickoff for family fun. And look at all these kids running around. It’s beautiful,”
said past post commander Mike Meredith. The Redmond family has marched in green Irish attire for each of the 28 parades. This year three generations of the family splashed in the slush and handed out candy. Now in their teens, members of the third generation have been in every parade since they were born. The Sterling community joined the St. Patrick’s Day weekend celebration by hosting their first dinner and music fundraising See PARADE, page A2
Creating a Tyrannosaurus Rex from egg cartons at Redoubt The kids in Tammy Flanders’ structured elementary classroom grades K-4 at Redoubt Elementary School may have created the first Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever made from egg cartons. “Our group was very creative and we decided to have them figure out a way to make a huge dinosaur out of found or recycled material. In our supply room we had a lot of egg cartons, so they painted and cut up the cartons to look like the bones of a dinosaur,” Flanders told the Dispatch in an interview. “Each child was assigned a different dinosaur to research and write
a report (on), and then as a culminating project they all worked together on the T-rex. The teachers sort of chose the T-rex so that there wouldn’t be any arguing if it wasn’t the dinosaur they researched. We then printed out photos of a T-rex skeleton and every day for about a week our students laid down those egg cartons, mapped out the dinosaur bones and every day they picked it up without gluing it down and then the next day would lay them down in a different way. And finally about the fifth or sixth day they came up with the final design, which we glued down, and is what is See REX, page A2
Anchorage Funeral Funeral Anchorage Home & & Crematory Crematory Home 1-800-478-3353 • • 907-345-2244 1-800-478-3353 907-345-2244
See EVENTS, page A2 Brian Lervold JeffH. Creech Funeral Director Director Funeral
Timothy Wisniewski Wisniewski T. T. Grant Grant Wisniewski Wisniewski Timothy
Owner-Funeral Director Director Owner-Funeral
Tammy Flanders’ structured elementary class shows a T-Rex dinosaur students created from egg cartons.
Funeral Director Director Funeral
Photo credit: The Surfjack Hotel & Swim Club
Seward Fish & Game Advisory Committee election meeting
C&C Stables ride green in their first parade of the year.
Photo credit: The Surfjack Hotel & Swim Club
Dr. Kristin Mitchell will present An Alaskan Doctor’s Perspectives on Antarctica on Thursday, April 4 at 6:30 p.m. in the McLane Commons, Kenai Peninsula College. Mitchell recently visited Antarctica as part of the Homeward Bound initiative. She was one of 80 women hailing from 23 different nationalities that were a part of this program, with each of them specializing in various fields of science, engineering, technology and mathematics.
B.J. Elder B.J. Elder
Funeral Director Director Funeral
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