4A • August 5, 2016 • Seaside Signal • seasidesignal.com
SignalViewpoints
TESS RUND WEARS CROWN
More cans
needed for an
‘uncanny’ city
Pageant trains girls for workplace, opportunities
O
n your marks! Runners gathered at the Prom and 12th Ave. on July 16, for the Seaside Beach
Run. The event encourages fi tness, promotes community spirit and showcases the North Ore-
gon Coast, providing more than 200 free youth gym memberships to Clatsop County middle
and high school students. Meet Miss North Coast, Tess Rund, 21, who provided child care and a smile at
the welcome tent on behalf of the Miss Oregon Scholarship Program.
What is your background?
I’m 21. I was raised in Knappa and graduated from Astoria
High School. I’m going to the University of Oregon. Leann
and Dave Rund are my parents. Teyl is my sister. She’s 25.
They’re my biggest supporters. They come to every event —
they’re awesome!
What was competing in the Miss Oregon Pageant like?
It’s been so rewarding. It was my fi rst time being in a
pageant. I met a lot of new, amazing, incredible women and I
learned a lot about myself and the world around me.
How is being a pageant contestant different from being
a regular student?
The biggest thing is the interview skills that come from it.
That will help us getting jobs in the future. And the scholar-
ship opportunities are super important to me. Being a junior
in college and going into senior year, that scholarship help is
really needed.
What are you studying in school?
My major is gender and women’s studies. I’m taking all
the classes to be an early education teacher, and I’ll go to grad
school after my senior year. I want to teach fi rst grade.
How does women and gender’s studies fi t in with your
beauty pageant experience?
My platform is “the ideal body is your own.” My goal is to
educate youth about positive image and self love. My onstage
question at the Miss Oregon contest — picked at random —
was, “Do you think pageants cause girls to have distorted self
image?”
My answer to that
was, at fi rst you think
it does, but honestly,
SEEN FROM SEASIDE
every woman and girl
R.J.
MARX
teen in the pageant has
their own way of being
healthy and beautiful.
It doesn’t matter what
your body type is.
Should female beauty contests accept transgender par-
ticipants?
That’s defi nitely been a topic of conversation. My per-
sonal opinion is that as long as they have fully transitioned,
they should be eligible to compete. Because it’s a pageant for
women.
If they haven’t, it kind of crosses the lines of privacy in the
dressing rooms, and it could be a religious issue.
Will you do future pageants?
Defi nitely. I’m planning on competing in Miss University
of Oregon or Miss Lane County county pageant, in February.
It’s been such an enriching experience.
What will you do to prepare for the February contest?
The biggest thing is staying up on current events in Oregon,
the country and the world. And the onstage competitions —
walking and the swimsuit — there’s a certain way to pose
yourself. I don’t have a coach. I kind of do it on my own in
front of a mirror.
I’m practicing my talent, which is dance. I don’t have a
dance for February, but I’ll make it up soon.
For interview skills, I like to talk with my friends. I have
this one particular friend who likes to test me. She asks me
interview questions.
Anything else you want to add?
If you don’t think a beauty pageant is for you, think again.
It’s much more than the glitz and glam and the showy part
T
he Fourth of July had so much happening that
I had pages of events written down. It’s old
stuff now and I have to let it go. There was
one element
in the parade,
though that
SCENE & HEARD
I’d like to
CLAIRE
LOVELL
mention. I
think it was
in the new
beach rescue
vehicle that a
white pit bull was riding shotgun and looking pret-
ty grumpy. If he does that another time, someone
should take a brush and dab some black paint in
spots over his body — so he is more authentic for
the fire trucks — more like a “bull-matian.”
I was also interested in a flag at the parade —
my first awareness of an emblem with a field of
stars but having dark blue stripes. About midway
— though I didn’t see it — was a lighter blue stripe
and my kid told me that represented “the thin blue
line” of police. It’s a nice idea for police to have
their own flag, though I think it should be of their
own design — not a copy of the stars and stripes.
There should be only one Old Glory and not any
corruptions for other groups. But what do I know?
Seaside may be becoming known as the most
“uncanny” city around. Vacationers as a class
perhaps need relief more often than the rest of
us, eating out, drinking lots of coffee, tea, pop,
milkshakes and the like. It’s a matter of fluid bal-
ance. We need more restrooms. The port-a-pots at
various locations are a good attempt to address the
problem. However, they don’t add much to the dé-
cor. Perhaps we could emulate the French and have
a “can” on every corner next to the garbage. I had
first used the French word but it looked too vulgar
for my sensitive remarks. Ha!
As far as I’m concerned, another expression due
for retirement is “thank you so much.” After many
thousands of repetitions, it begins to sound not
only phony and trite but gushing as well. A simple
“thank you” will do; at least that’s my view. (Oops,
another poem.)
I can’t seem to let dandelion season go by with-
out comment. They’re so beautiful when fields of
them are in bloom. I always feel a pang of regret
when some homeowners can no longer stand the
sight and mow them down. To each his own.
As you may have imagined, I’ve been watching
a lot of national election campaigns. I’m always
excited by and involved in politics, which may
result in an occasional opinionated takeoff. If
you’re lucky, you won’t run into any. At this writ-
ing, I wait for a final speech of the day. Evidently,
dancing on the floor is a tradition at conventions
when winding down. Looks like the heebie jeebies
to me. The democrats think the new choice for vice
president Tim Kaine is Abel. We shall see.
I was doing a crossword puzzle where the
question was “beach picnic” which turned out to be
“clambake.” I asked Gary how a beach picnic was
different from any other and he said, “It’s because
of the sandwiches there!”
R.J. MARX/SEASIDE SIGNAL
Tess Rund at the Seaside Beach Run, one of the volunteer
activities she participates in as Miss North Coast.
Laugh Lines
of it. It provides so many scholarship opportunities — talent,
evening gown, marketing scholarships —and develops com-
munications skills. Just one week of spring pageant camp is
worth a million dollars.
Q: Why do Annie Okay’s stockings have holes
in them?
A: So she can get her feet in.
Additional tools on Visitors Bureau website
B
ack in early February, the City of
Seaside Visitors Bureau unveiled
a redesigned website (located at
SeasideOR.com, in case you haven’t
checked it out or just need a refresher).
The changes incorporated our new brand
creative that has quickly become the
fabric of how we promote Seaside, while
also re-imagining how we could tell the
story of Seaside.
The fi rst reveal encompassed the core
attributes that visitors have long looked
for when coming to our website. We
knew this because we dug deep into fi ve
years’ worth of web analytics to deter-
mine what exactly the most important
content was. In April, a few more items
were added and now six months later
we’ve unleashed the fi nal pieces to help
us promote Seaside, while also giving
visitors the insights needed to navigate
our beach community.
Do you remember the last time you
moved from one home to another? Is
there still a box or two that got packed up
but never was unpacked? Often times we
change some of our habits once moving
into a new environment and over time that
old box isn’t worth as much to us as it was
in the old place. That’s been a little bit of
the process for us at the Visitors Bureau
over the past several months. The website
has changed dramatically, but the old box-
es have remained in storage in the form of
old content we’ve been wading through to
PUBLISHER
EDITOR
Steve Forrester
R.J. Marx
SIDE RAIL
JOHN RAHL
decide if we’d move it to our new website
or if we’d send it to the recycle center.
Some of the content was unpacked,
re-purposed and placed on our new site.
The rest of it went to the digital recycle
center, likely to never be seen again.
SUBMITTED PHOTO
To be more specifi c, we had close to
200 blog posts that talked about how to
experience Seaside as well as more than
fi ve dozen posts on the history of Seaside.
About 50 percent of those posts were
no longer relevant (because they may
have referenced a business that no longer
remains) or they simply didn’t align with
the content that is most important to our
new website. Rather, we now have 100
refi ned blog posts from the latest update
with better imagery. They tell a collection
of stories that help us with search engine
optimization and represent the very best
content we have on Seaside. The com-
plete set of historical blog posts remain
too, but also refi ned and presented in a
cleaner fashion.
The site also now pulls in TripAdvi-
sor ratings for every business or lodging
establishment in Seaside that has been
rated by TripAdvisor. This gives us a lev-
el of transparency and peer review that
consumers have come to expect from
destination websites like ours.
This new website development has
been a long process but we’re fi nally to
a point we envisioned when we started
this overhaul back in December of 2015.
I’ve told many people that a travel web-
site is never complete. We’ll continue
adding fresh content, updating our event
calendar and monitoring our analytics
to make sure we are making things easy
for our visitors. However, I can say
that through the great assistance of our
web developer, Weld, we’ve created a
website that feels classic and nostalgic
in appearance but is easy to use and
represents the very best of what Seaside
has to offer. I hope you check it out.
Have a thought or a question about
tourism in Seaside? Drop me an email at
jrahl@cityofseaside.us. Jon Rahl is the
director of tourism for the Seaside Visitors
Bureau and assistant general manager of
the Seaside Civic & Convention Center.
ADVERTISING
MANAGER
PRODUCTION
MANAGER
CONTRIBUTING
WRITERS
Katherine Lacaze
Claire Lovell
Eve Marx
Esther Moberg
Jon Rahl
Susan Romersa
Betty Smith
John D. Bruijn
CIRCULATION
MANAGER
SYSTEMS
MANAGER
Heather
Ramsdell
Carl Earl
ADVERTISING
SALES
Brandy Stewart
LETTERS
Expand design review
throughout Clatsop County
I think that every community in Clatsop County
should have their own design review committees.
There should be one for Olney, Elsie, Jewell, Lewis
& Clark, Burnside, Svensen, Knappa, Brownsmead,
Surf Pines, The Highlands, Sunset Beach, Cullaby Lake,
Tolovana Park, Pinehurst, Smith Lake, Clatsop Plains,
Delmoor Loop and probably a few more that I forgot.
This would only be fair, because, after all the peo-
ple in Arch Cape are no more special and deserving of
their own committee than the rest of us.
Hugh McKenna
Warrenton
Help is available
Help with heating and cooling is available. To let all
our Clatsop County residents know: Clatsop Commu-
nity Action’s Energy Assistance Program has funding
under the state’s Oregon Energy Assistance Program
for those who are in danger of having their electrical
service disconnected due to home heating costs. CCA
also has some additional new funding resources this
year that may help with cooling your home.
Please call or come into CCA to see if you might
be eligible for these great low-income programs at 364
Ninth St. The phone number is 503-325-1400, and the
hours are 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday,
and 9 a.m. to noon Friday.
Elaine Bruce
Executive director,
Clatsop Community Action
Astoria
Seaside Signal
Letter policy
The Seaside Signal
is published every
other week by
EO Media Group,
1555 N. Roosevelt,
Seaside, OR 97138.
503-738-5561
seasidesignal.com
The Seaside Signal welcomes letters to the
editor. The deadline is noon Monday prior to
publication. Letters must be 400 words or less
and must be signed by the author and include a
phone number for verifi cation. We also request
that submissions be limited to one letter per
month. Send to 1555 N. Roosevelt Drive,
Seaside, OR 97138, drop them off at 1555 N.
Roosevelt Drive or fax to 503-738-9285.
Or email rmarx@seasidesignal.com
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