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Rotary Club Helps Out at Henderson Park
Ashley Roberts Lesley Francis and Wendy Bolton
Ashley Roberts, Lesley Francis, and Wendy Bolton help put handicap access in a Henderson Park July 3. - photo by Photo provided.

Members of the Rotary Club of Richmond Hill worked hard to celebrate the ground breaking of the new handicapped accessible path at the De Vaul Henderson Park and to help clear land for the construction of the Bryan County Bark Park July 3. 

The club secured a district grant of $2,500 to help build the path in conjunction with the Bryan County Bark Park.

The path will provide handicap and stroller acces to the softball fields, urban trail system and the upcoming dog park.

It is a requirement by Bryan County and has added $20,00 to the fundraising targets of the Bryan County Bark Park.

The Rotary grant was used to fund drainage and land preparation for the path.

“Rotary is all about serving our community," Byron Atkinson, rotary club director and chair of district grant said, "our club has worked hard to qualify for this District Grant and it was great to see so many Rotarians and their families give their time on a Saturday morning to physically work at the park.” 

Wendy Bolton, President of the Bryan County Bark Park commented “Every day we are asked when the Bark Park will open.  We are working very hard to make our vision of a wonderful facility for everybody in our community to become a reality sooner rather than later. We are very grateful to the Rotary Club of Richmond Hill with their assistance with the ADA compliant path as the land allocated by the county for the Bark Park has already required a significant investment of time and resources to clear and prepare”.

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Later yall, its been fun
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This is among the last pieces I’ll ever write for the Bryan County News.

Friday is my last day with the paper, and come June 1 I’m headed back to my native Michigan.

I moved here in 2015 from the Great Lake State due to my wife’s job. It’s amicable, but she has since moved on to a different life in a different state, and it’s time for me to do the same.

My son Thomas, an RHHS grad as of Saturday, also is headed back to Michigan to play basketball for a small school near Ann Arbor called Concordia University. My daughter, Erin, is in law school at University of Toledo. She had already begun her college volleyball career at Lourdes University in Ohio when we moved down here and had no desire to leave the Midwest.

With both of them and the rest of my family up north, there’s no reason for me to stay here. I haven’t missed winter one bit, but I’m sure I won’t miss the sand gnats, either.

Shortly after we arrived here in 2015, I got a job in communications with a certain art school in Savannah for a few short months. It was both personally and professionally toxic and I’ll leave it at that.

In March 2016 I signed on with the Bryan County News as assistant editor and I’ve loved every minute of it. My “first” newspaper career, in the late 80s and early 90s, was great. But when I left it to work in politics and later with a free-market think tank, I never pictured myself as an ink-stained wretch again.

Like they say, never say never.

During my time here at the News, I’ve covered everything that came along. That’s one big difference between working for a weekly as opposed to a daily paper. Reporters at a daily paper have a “beat” to cover. At a weekly paper like this, you cover … life. Sports, features, government meetings, crime, fundraisers, parades, festivals, successes, failures and everything in between. Oh, and hurricanes. Two of them. I’ll take a winter blizzard over that any day.

Along the way I’ve met a lot of great people. Volunteers, business owners, pastors, students, athletes, teachers, coaches, co-workers, first responders, veterans, soldiers and yes, even some politicians.

And I learned that the same adrenalin rush from covering “breaking news” that I experienced right out of college is still just as exciting nearly 30 years later.

With as much as I’ve written about the population increase and traffic problems, at least for a few short minutes my departure means there will be one less vehicle clogging up local roads. At least until I pass three or four moving vans headed this way as I get on northbound I-95.

The hub-bub over growth here can be humorous, unintentional and ironic all at once. We often get comments on our Facebook page that go something like this: “I’ve lived here for (usually less than five years) and the growth is out of control! We need a moratorium on new construction.”

It’s like people who move into phase I of “Walden Woods” subdivision after all the trees are cleared out and then complain about trees being cut down for phase II.

Bryan County will always hold a special place in my heart and I definitely plan on visiting again someday. My hope is that my boss, Jeff Whitten (one of the best I’ve ever had), will let me continue to be part of the Pembroke Mafia Football League from afar. If the Corleone family could expand to Vegas, there’s no reason the PMFL can’t expand to Michigan.

But the main reason I want to return someday is about that traffic issue. After all, I’ll need to see it with my own eyes before I’ll believe that Highway 144 actually got widened.

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