Mustangs finish
season fifth in state
The Heppner Mustang basketball team with its fifth-place
trophy from the 2A state championship tournament. -Con-
tributed photo
50¢
VOL. 143
NO. 10 8 Pages
Wednesday, March 8, 2023
Morrow County, Heppner, Oregon
Key organizers honored as grand marshals
in Great Green Parade
By Andrea Di Salvo
This year’s Great Green
Parade will be led by not
one, not two, but eight indi-
viduals who have been key
in the Heppner St. Patrick’s
celebration.
In fact, it is “key orga-
nizers” Diana Ball, Dave
Sykes, Claudia Hughes,
Cara Osmin, Sheryll
Bates, Doris Brosnan,
Bill Hutchinson and Jud-
ie Laughlin who will be
honored at the Wee Bit O’
Ireland celebration for their
roles in both starting the
celebration and keeping it
going strong all these years.
According to the mem-
ories of some, the first rec-
ognition of St. Patrick’s
Day in Heppner was a stew
feed at the Catholic church.
Diana Fulleton Ball
Most consider the official
founder of the current cel-
ebration to be Jim Farley,
who started the ball rolling
with a KUMA Coffee Hour
at Farley Motor Company.
Farley was honored as a
grand marshal in a previous
parade.
Along the way, though,
it took some heavy lifting
by many dedicated indi-
viduals to fulfill the vision
of what St. Patrick’s Day
could really mean to Hep-
pner.
Some are life-long res-
idents, while some have
come and gone (and some-
times come back). Their
ages range from 66 to 79,
along with a “Really?”
and an age range between
16 and 100, “depending
on the day!” Almost all of
them have been involved
in some way since the very
beginning.
How they got started
Bill Hutchinson, now a
John Day resident, lived in
Heppner for seven years. He
may have gotten involved
because he’s a natural-born
leprechaun—almost. His
birthday is March 18.
“I just missed being a
leprechaun by one day,”
he says.
He got involved in St.
Patrick’s Day the second
year he was in Heppner.
He says he noticed the first
Bill “Hutch” Hutchinson be-
came a Heppner St. Patrick’s
A newspaper clipping of the first KUMA coffee hour at
Day icon in his leprechaun
Farley Motor Company 1981. -Contributed photo
outfit. -Contributed photo
year he was here that the
Catholic church had a stew
feed. The following year,
he decided to put a lucky
number contest in his Nick-
el-style paper.
“It was a promotion-
al thing,” he said. “I was
trying to promote the local
merchants.”
Hutchinson remembers
that Farley then started
with the KUMA Coffee
Hour. From there, he and
other key organizers started
a committee through the
chamber of commerce. He
was chairman of that com-
mittee until he moved away
40 years ago. By the time
he left, they’d increased the
celebration to three days
and included other events
like the parade the sheep
dog trials.
“We had a good thing
going, especially when you
know that I would one day
chair and co-chair the event
for some 15 years.”
David Sykes also got
involved soon after moving
to Heppner with his family
42 years ago. He says he
got involved the first year
of the KUMA Coffee Hour
because he knew Farley.
“He was a good guy
and I wanted to help him get
it going,” says Sykes.
Meanwhile, Diana Ful-
leton Ball, who worked as
a committee member for 19
years, blames Sykes for her
first involvement.
“I worked for David
Sykes at the Heppner Ga-
zette-Times,” she recalls.
“He was involved as chair-
man and very kindly ‘vol-
unteered’ me to ‘help.’ From
then on I was involved in
one way or another.”
She says he involve-
David Sykes
After moving outside
the city limits in 1991, Os-
min was no longer mayor,
but her involvement con-
tinued.
“Claudia Hughes was
the chamber director then,
and so we collaborated
with the effort,” she says.
Osmin took over the Coffee
Hour, which was then being
broadcast from its current
home at the Elk’s Lodge
the Saturday morning of the
celebration. “We had lots of
music, fun, jokes, laughter
and more music.”
Doris Brosnan
Doris Brosnan and her
husband were raised in
Heppner, gone for nearly 30
years, and then returned in
1994 after their retirement.
She says they attended the
celebration before they
moved back, and even have
a memory of a rarely warm
and sunny celebration in
Claudia Hughes (left) and Cara Osmin have been in the
which some of the cousins
thick of the Wee Bit O’ Ireland Celebration for years.
in the next Brosnan gener-
-Contributed photo
ation entered the bed race.
“I was targeted by
figure we started out with a ment varied from chairman
stew feed,” he said.
to running the Coffee Hour -Continued to PAGE EIGHT
Claudia Hughes says to sheep dog assistant.
her first experience with
“Running from one end
Heppner’s St. Pat’s cele- of the town to the other,” she
bration was in Jim Farley’s says, “and I wouldn’t have
showroom around 1980, traded it for the world.”
when he invited Ted Smith
Cara Osmin says her
and Joe McLaughlin to involvement started after
bring KUMA to Heppner. she became Heppner Mayor
She remembers that the in 1986.
early Irish families whose
“As mayor, I was able to
ancestors arrived in the make many friends around
mid- to late-1800s were the state and really talked
invited to attend. Her hus- up our St. Pat’s time,” she
band’s father and aunt, Ebb says. In fact, she became
Hughes and Anita Lutcher, a good friend of Estacada
were interviewed about Mayor Tom Nelson. The
their Irish roots along with two towns became “sister
several other Irish families. cities” and started the tra-
“I was hooked then!” dition of attending each
says Hughes. “Little did I other’s celebrations.
The Heppner Mus-
tang boys basketball team
finished its season with a
fifth-place trophy at the
OSAA 2A State Basketball
Tournament this past week-
end. The Mustangs finished
the season with a 21-7 re-
cord. The team also brought
home the highly-coveted
sportsmanship award and
trophy from the tourna-
ment. The team, band, fans
and large student cheering
section can all be proud of
that accomplishment.
Heppner started the
tournament by playing
the number-one team in
the state, the Mannahouse
Academy Lions of Port-
land, who had a record of
25-2 coming into the tour-
nament. Both teams started
out slowly and the game
was tied 7-7 at the end of
the first quarter. Manna-
house outscored the Mus-
tangs in the second quarter
to lead 19-15 at halftime.
A close third quarter
By Andrea Di Salvo
The future of transit in
Morrow County may have
hit a bump in the road last
week when the Morrow
County Board of Com-
missioners learned of new
requirements for an FTA
grant being sought to help
fund the project.
Morrow County Tran-
sit/The Loop Manager
Benjamin Tucker and con-
sultant Nick Ducote of Du-
cote Consulting had been
working together to write a
grant application for a Fed-
eral Transit Administration
5339 funding for planned
buses and bus facilities in
Morrow County but told
the board last Wednesday
that they hit a snag when
they learned of new grant
requirements.
Ducote explained that
the 5339 grant opportunity
comes out on a cycle once
every 12 to 18 months.
The grant provides oppor-
tunities for equipment, fa-
cilities, passenger shelters,
signs and vehicle expansion
projects.
“Each time it comes
out, the executive branch
and the legislature of the
federal government set dif-
ferent priorities of what
they may want this money
to focus on,” Ducote said.
“Or, really, what it comes
down to, is extra require-
ments to put on the county
in making its application.”
In this case, Ducote
said, neither he nor Tucker
was aware that the FTA
wants the county to have
a zero-emission vehicle
transition plan for new
buses and bus facilities. Du-
cote said it looked like that
conversation hasn’t even
started at the county level.
“So we were a bit
stumped by how to tackle
that and move forward
given that application mate-
rials are due in seven work-
ing days, and we found out
about it yesterday evening,”
he said.
“Essentially, if we sub-
mit the application as we
currently have it without
that plan in place,” added
Tucker, “they’re not even
going to review it.”
Tucker said the deeper
conversation needed to be
what a low- or no-emissions
vehicle scenario would look
like and how it would play
into this county and region.
“It is just a plan on how
you intend to transition,”
Tucker said. He said first
steps could include con-
sulting or demonstrations
of electric vehicles. He said
it wasn’t specified that ve-
hicles be electric as long as
they were low- or no-emis-
sions, but electric seemed to
be the big push right now.
There is also no set timeline
for when the plan needs to
take effect.
Otherwise, they said,
they have done the cost
analysis of building The
Loop facility, and that does
include a lot of “green”
aspects, such as electric
vehicle chargers for the
park-and-ride and solar
panels for the facility. The
planned facility will include
a bus barn with two to three
bays, one bay for washing
buses and office space for
drivers and dispatchers.
The project also in-
cludes a transit center for
passengers to connect to
other transit providers.
The cost of construc-
tion currently comes in
at $5.1 million. With the
required 10 percent match
by the county, the coun-
ty would have a cost of
$514,100 and would ask
for a grant of $4.6 million.
Tucker had been plan-
ning to bring the application
before the board for approv-
al before getting the news
-Continued to PAGE SEVEN
County transit plans
may hit speed bump
with new FTA grant
requirements
-Continued to PAGE SEVEN
CALL
541-989-8221
ext 204
for more
information