Ballard - Features

By Peggy Sturdivant

There are magicians who gather at work on Monday nights in Ballard. Their magic includes focusing otherwise twitchy teenage boys on the conductor’s baton and music on stands in front of them. It has brought professional…MORE

By Steven Garmanian

Walk into any bakery and the combination of sensory excitement and nostalgia pulls you under its spell. Memories of childhood, of parenthood, of morning walks with a friend, of delicious pastries from one’s past, are…MORE

By Katy Wilkens, MS, RD

I have many online sources for good information when it comes to salt – or rather, doing without salt, which is much healthier because too much will strain your heart and kidneys. My favorites cover a range of…MORE

By Peggy Sturdivant

Less than 24 hours after polls closed on the general election in November Catherine Weatbrook took her usual place at the monthly Ballard District Council meeting. Her seven-month campaign to represent Seattle City…MORE

By Pat Cashman from May 15, 2008

A few years ago, my wife and I were given the task of selling her parents’ home since they had moved out to enjoy the greater ease of assisted living. But Bert, my wife’s dad, wasn’t keen on the idea at…MORE

By Amanda Knox In sixth grade the best English teacher I’ve ever had—and the only one to ever make me cry—asked my class to memorize and recite Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” He may have thought it appropriate for us newly-middle-schoolers…MORE

The Ballard Smoke shop is an institution among longtime Ballardites. It’s no wonder that its staff would also have the respect and affection from fishing village residents and patrons from afar. Among the cooks, waitresses and bartenders, there…MORE

By Peggy Sturdivant

“Everything hurts,” is what the illustrator Jan Harvey-Smith was saying as I let her hide her cold-ravaged face behind the seasonal middle children’s book “Frankenstein Meets Santa” in the accompanying photo. Both…MORE

By Amanda Knox

I was fourteen when I first learned the word, “Casualty.” It was September 11th, 2001, I was a freshman in highschool, and that word, louder than “Tragedy” and “Terror,” rang out to me. I didn’t quite understand it at first…MORE

By Pat Cashman

I remember it to this day---the most disturbing film I’d ever seen as a kid.

It’s a science fiction movie that was playing at the local flick house---a movie so terrifying that I couldn’t sleep for three nights. And…MORE