News : The Sappy Note and Heartfelt Thanks For the continued support

Kurt and his favorite gal Lu

Wesley, the brains of this operation

On our last day on this magical site, and before we move to the NEW Website found at www.VintonToday.com, we wanted to take a few minutes to thank the men who without a dream and the know-how could not have made Vinton Today possible.

I know Kurt and Lu Karr just hate it when we say…if it wasn’t for your dream…well we’d still be stuck with old fashioned print.

And then without our dear Wesley, that had the brainpower to pull this off, I shiver at where we’d be.

Over the years Kurt’s referred to our relationship with the Karrs as the most unlikely of all and “loosey goosey.”

Politically we think the other couple is a little wackadoodle. Which has also been interesting. There’s nothing more fun than a fun political discussion between some ultra conservatives and liberal democrats. Trust me, we do it without name calling and so far no furniture has been harmed in these political discussions. But who knew that eventually we’d all agree on one thing, Trump..are you kidding me???

Trust me, we have learned so much from the Karrs over the last 6 years.

They introduced the idea that we need to do something to help the community.

As former newspaper employees, we felt that we were always too broke to help anyone, we were trying to keep our head above water, and finding for the most part it wasn’t possible.

But then we realized that wasn’t what he was talking about per se.

What Kurt meant when he said that was to bring the community together, get word out quickly about events, needs, etc.

Talk about weird. That was the first I think that we ever thought that we could do that as news people.

This guy HAD to be nuts. That’s not how it’s done…or is it?

I mean come on, we’re just a couple that can string sentences together, and take pictures and have a heart.

Who knew that’s all we needed to have for this new job?

We had never run a business before. Never aspired to that. Never went to business school, never even ever thought about how to do that. But suddenly here we were.

The only thing that kept me from totally freaking at the thought of this, was that we were sitting across from another couple who calmly explained that we are going to be alongside you on this insane adventure and they acted like it was no big deal.

So ya know, you don’t want to totally freak out and say, “BUT, but, but…what? We’ve never run a business! We are going to run this show? Are you SURE you know what you’re doing??”

Then I realized after a couple years, I could relax. Kurt and Lu had pulled it off with Monkeytown and they were making a living maybe we didn’t need to keep looking over our shoulder for the caped monster called Fate that ALWAYS seemed to yank the rug out from under us JUST when we got comfortable where we were.

We soon found the joy of lending a hand to others rewarding. We found out pretty quickly that people were reading. And they cared what we said. And they took us seriously.

We discovered that when the power is out, we break records for hits to our site. The first time that happened, we were sure there would be no one reading the site. But we were setting records.

We found out the people that live here, the people that used to live here, the people that had family and friends here all found Vinton Today and knew we’d have the answers.

We had our loosey goosey club meeting with the Karrs and I remember we all just sat and grinned like we had just pulled something off that even WE didn’t expect.

But through it all, Kurt and Lu have been the steady hand that kept me from falling apart at times, and the calm across the table when we didn’t know what to do, or how to handle something. Their years of business experience has been so important to this adventure.

Then there was Wes. Now he flew the coop a few years ago and so again we were biting our nails with the what ifs like the big one, “what if the site crashed?” He’s the only guy we know that can fix it!

A few times we had to frantically flag him down for a glitch or two, but nothing at all like we had feared. We found again, we could simply relax and just do our job.

But trust me, there have been hundreds of time, we have thanked God for Wes’s knowledge and the ability and talent that he had in designing this site.

There are so many times I remember how awful days used to be after a long day, sometimes emotional days depending on the story, that Dean would walk in the door and it was not a pretty sight.

Now when those bad stories happen, Dean has the ability to just worry about getting the story out, and informing the community without a dozen layers of being told how to do it.

And we know that it all thanks to Kurt and Wes, and in no small part Lu.

See, I was supposed to just write about the nuts and bolts of our new site, but I can’t just leave this site sitting here without stepping back as we close the door and saying again, “Thank you Kurt, Lu and Wes. You have been the best thing that could have happened to us. Thanks for taking the risk, sharing your talents and resources and we hope we can some day pass it on to another new business, maybe even a couple that has no idea what they are doing!”

And to this community, I kid you not, if I were the crying type, I’d be all choked up right here as I think about you. Trust me, it’s just allergy season and you guys have nothing to do with the tears in my eye as I think about how you just threw your doors open and said, “Come on in, let me get the coffee, now let’s chat.”

I cannot imagine trying to pull this off in other towns we have lived in.

You’re the best.

And on a personal note, thanks to our kids who have endured our crazy lives, I wish we could have had this opportunity when you were young!