‘Court” can mean one thing to a basketball coach and something else to a judge.
And as a local judge observed, people in her line of work also have a unique definition for another word that popped up during a recent community event.
Clark County Superior Court Judge Barbara Johnson moderated the April 16 panel discussion on the Columbia River Crossing project held at the Clark County Historical Museum. One of the panelists Johnson introduced was Washington State University Vancouver professor Steve Fountain.
Their differing definitions of the word in question might be about as far apart as “Carnegie” and “car thief.”
Fountain is a history professor, and he was right in his element since the museum was built more than a century ago as Vancouver’s Carnegie library.
Usually when Judge Johnson presides over a public event, the gathering includes at least one defendant.
So when judges use the word “history” in their professional duties, Johnson said: “We think of criminal history.”
Raider remembered
A Vancouver veteran who died in 1997 was among the men saluted a week ago at a reunion of the Doolittle Raiders.
Wayne Bissell was one of 80 airmen who bombed Japan 69 years ago, when President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to retaliate for the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Sixteen B-25 bombers flew off the USS Hornet on April 18, 1942. Bissell was the bombardier on the “Whirling Dervish.” His navigator, Tom Griffin, was one of the five survivors honored on the 69th anniversary in Lincoln, Neb.
In a 1995 story, Bissell said he saw the Imperial Palace on the way to the target, but mission commander Lt. Col Jimmy Doolittle had ordered them not to bomb the emperor’s home.
The 1937 Vancouver High graduate dropped four bombs on the Tokyo Gas and Electric complex. Bissell, Griffin and the other three crewmen bailed out over China when the “Whirling Dervish” ran out of fuel.
“We were so far back in the mountains it took us two days to get to a road,” Griffin, now 93, told The Columbian in 1995.
They were surprised to find Distinguished Flying Crosses waiting for them.
“We thought we had really messed it up. When you lose all your planes, you don’t think you’re much of a hero,” Griffin said. “We found the American people took it differently.”
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
