Sunday is the last day of May and this has been an outstanding month for weather.
So far this month we haven’t had a temperature over 100 degrees in Fountain Hills (It reached the 100 degree mark in Phoenix one day), and we have had 1.68 inches of rain.
The temperatures for May have been, for the most part, very comfortable.
The month started off very warm with a 97 degree reading on May 1. Contrast that to the 72 on May 16, A high that low is almost unheard of in recent years for mid-May. And we had a low of just 51 on May 9.
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When I came back to the office on Friday, May 22, after my hospital episode, I began checking my e-mails and found some very sad news.
My good friend, Vana Tidwell, wife of Hood County News Publisher Jerry Tidwell, passed away in her home on Thursday, May 14. Diane and I met the Tidwells at a National Newspaper Association convention in the late 1990s.
We hit it off so well that we took a weekend vacation together to San Antonio, Texas, one year. We visited the Alamo and dined together on the Riverwalk.
The Hood County News is a twice-a-week newspaper in Granbury, Texas.
Vana and Jerry were married on June 3, 1966, after the two had been friends since elementary school. Vana worked for many years at the newspaper. She was a one-person bookkeeping, billing and accounts payable department doing the job of three or four people. She retired in 2000.
One year that we did not attend the national convention in Milwaukee, she fell at a Milwaukee Brewers baseball game and severely hurt her back.
She had gone to the doctor for her back problems on the day before she died. Jerry heard a noise the next morning at 3 a.m. and noticed she wasn’t in bed. He found her on the floor next to her favorite chair. She died of a heart attack.
“We had just returned from a week’s vacation in the Big Bend country (along the south Texas border) and she seemed fine,” Jerry told me. “I feel so empty, Alan. She’s always been there for me.”
We’re all going to miss her, Jerry. Our thoughts and prayers are with you.
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Watching the last David Letterman show last week, I couldn’t help but think back to the days when daughter Holly was a Broadway dancer. For several years she was a member of the Letterman Late Night Dancers.
The nights she was to appear, she would get a call about 2 p.m. to report to the theater at 3 p.m. The four girls who were members usually had about two hours to determine what they should do during the three to five minutes they were on the air. And there were times when they didn’t go on after getting ready all afternoon.
The show was taped at 5 at p.m. Holly would call me to give me advance warning to record her.
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Another Fountain Hills resident has become a member of the local Deep Brain Stimulation “club.”
Beth Sinclair had successful surgery on May 12
at Barrows Neurological Center in Phoenix. I plan to talk to Beth and write about her experience in a future column. She said there have been some exciting changes to the procedure since I had it done four years ago.
