Don’t expect the musical chairs of grocery stores at
2900 Wheaton Way to continue, Kyle Saar says. The general
manager of Saars Super Saver Foods believes the family-owned chain
of stores will be a permanent fixture in the Bremerton
community.
“We look at our stores as long term locations,” said Saar, whose
father, Greg, established their first in Oak Harbor in 1988. “We’re
fully stocked in Bremerton and ready to go.”
The East Bremerton
location, which Albertson’s began, Haggen floundered at and now,
is fully owned by the Saars, is once again buzzing with retail
life. On Wednesday, it will open for the first time. On Saturday,
it will hold a grand opening celebration.
The Bremerton location is the seventh store for the family-owned
business. Saars said their formula is simple: keep the prices low
and appeal to a diverse cross-section of consumers. There are large
sections of the store devoted to Asian and Hispanic foods; but
don’t count on an abundant selection of organics.
The store’s hours will be from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.
In celebration of their opening, the first 200 customers will
receive free paper towels at 8 a.m. Wednesday, a tradition that
will continue through the first weekend. And they’ll do the same
promotion next week, also Wednesday to Sunday.
“We’re looking forward to being a a part of this community,”
Saar said.
A former Army Ranger and private security
contractor who helped defend American lives during the Sept. 11,
2012 Benghazi attack will appear in Bremerton next
weekend.
Kris “Tanto” Paronto, whose actions that day have
been chronicled in the book “13
hours” by Mitchell Zuckoff and have since
been adapted into a big screen production
and directed by Michael Bay, will speak at the Kitsap Conference
Center Sept. 10.
Janet Christopherson, a Tracyton resident,
spearheaded efforts to bring Paronto to Bremerton after she saw him
in Green Valley, Arizona. She was struck by his harrowing
first-hand account and felt her hometown would be too. Tickets,
which are $55 for lunch and $100 for an opportunity to meet him
personally, have gone fast.
“It has really taken off,” Christopherson said.
The Benghazi attack ignited a political firestorm
that has continued into this year’s presidential
election. Christopherson and fellow members of the
Silverdale-Seabeck Republican Women are supporting the event.
Paronto himself has been critical of Democratic Presidential
Candidate Hillary Clinton. But she hopes that partisan politics
will give way to his riveting recounting of the events.
“You’re listening to this story, what happened that
day from beginning until the end,” she said of his Green Valley
presenation. “At the end you wonder, ‘Is this fiction?’
For tickets or more information, call (360) 509-0606 or email
SSRW2016@gmail.com. Sales will close at the end of the weekend.
Left to right: Lucan Catel, 15,
Piper Burke, 15, and Ellie Wade, 15, all Olympic High School, line
up early for the show.
Macklemore’s
Camping Trip tour has officially arrived in Bremerton.
But some fans aren’t waiting for the doors to swing open at 8 p.m.;
the diehards are already in line.
Willow Hudson, 16, and Ashleigh Klemetson, 23, actually started
the journey yesterday. The Seattleites boarded the 12:50 a.m. ferry
to Bremerton and got some shut-eye in their car across the street
from the iconic 1942-built venue. The two, who got in line just
after 6 a.m., have seen several shows along the current eight-stop
tour of small Washington theaters.
“If he’s playing a show in Washington, I’m going,” Hudson said.
“Unless I was dying or something.”
Just down the line from them were three Olympic High School
students. It’s the first concert ever for Lucan Catel, 15. “This
whole tour is super awesome,” Catel said, noting the hip hop artist
also known as Ben Haggerty is a “top three favorite” for him.
He and classmates Ellie Wade and Piper Burke have just one
problem: school starts tomorrow. That did not deter them from the
show, however.
“We’re gonna have bags under our eyes,” Burke said of Thursday’s
first day.
As of the morning, the line was a bit longer than one you might expect at El
Balcon for lunch, but it’s expected to get a whole lot bigger.
The theater holds 999 people, and it appears the line will snake
down Fifth Street toward Park Avenue.
The show is among the most highly anticipated in recent memory
for the theater. Hometown favorites MxPx and
Death Cab for Cutie also played there in recent years, drawing
sell-outs as well.
First and second in line for
the Macklemore concert are Seattle residents Willow Hudson, 16, and
Ashleigh Klemetson, 23. (MEEGAN M. REID / KITSAP SUN)
Other notes about the show:
Tickets: If you were lucky and got them in the
first hour they went on sale, you can pick them up at the box
office. If not, this is about as sold out as a show gets. They can
only be picked up day-of, in an effort by Macklemore and Co. to
offer something special to fans (and not to scalpers).
When to queue? That’s up to you, my friend. It
is all general admission. The doors will open at 8 p.m. First of
two openers is at 8:40 p.m. Macklemore and Ryan Lewis are due
somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 and 10:30 p.m., and will play
until about midnight. One thing to know: there’s not a bad seat in
the house.
Street closed: Pacific Avenue, between 6th and
5th streets, shut down about 10:30 a.m. and is closed through the
entire concert.
Food and drink: Lots of spots locally but the
theater will have just concessions and drinks (both alcoholic and
non-alcoholic).
Macklemore and Ryan Lewis appearance outside:
Word is the pair will appear in the late afternoon outside the
theater, and sign a limited number of autographs for fans.
T-shirts: The Camping Trip tour includes
individualized t-shirts for each town they’re visiting, including
Bremerton. They’ll sell for $30, more than the $20 tickets for the
show, and while we all know you’ll get a better deal at a
thrift shop, these are once-in-a-lifetime mementos.
The Venue: The historic Admiral Theater opened
in 1942. It’s currently
raising money for a big remodel to occur on its 75th
anniversary.
Jennifer Heath, 23, of Federal
Way, sits in front of the sign adorned with Macklemore and Ryan
Lewis as she and fellow fans brave the rain and wait in line in
front of the Admiral Theatre in Bremerton on Wednesday, August 31,
2016. (MEEGAN M. REID / KITSAP SUN)
The show’s 999 tickets were purchased within an hour of going on
sale. Pacific Avenue out front of the theater will also close down
for the evening and rumor has it the hip hop artist himself will
sign autographs there in the late afternoon.
It’s been a busy week in Bremerton. Here’s the other things on
the beat blast video (above) this week:
The Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, long Kitsap’s largest employer,
turns 125 this coming month. (Stories to come this weekend in your
Kitsap Sun.)
The football season is upon us and I spent some time at the
Bremerton High School team’s practice (the Kitsap Sun’s prep
football guide is out Thursday.)
The Blackberry Festival is back Labor Day weekend for its 27th
year.
Questions? Comments? I love the feedback. Send it to
josh.farley@kitsapsun.com.
A cascade of oversized piano keys would run along the
sidewalks of both sides of Fourth Street near Pacific Avenue,
should plans for “Quincy Square” materialize.
As you may have read in my
story in Sunday’s Kitsap Sun, a bunch of volunteers calling
itself the “Fourth Street Action Group” has been meeting for about
two years in an effort to revitalize a largely vacant section of
the roadway between Washington and Pacific Avenues. I wanted you to
have a chance to see for yourself the designs that have
come out of those meetings, put together by Rice Fergus Miller
Architects.
As you can see from above, the piano keys would serve to tell
the story about how Jones, the icon, discovered his love of music
after
breaking into an armory one night in Bremerton about 70 years
ago. There would be a square for concerts and other events and
the roadway could be shut down to create a plaza around the
square.
This project is by no means a slam dunk, however. The group,
with the city as its advocate, will have to raise nearly $5 million
to complete it.
And what about Quincy Jones himself? City officials have yet to
talk with him about the plan and confirm he’d be willing to come to
Bremerton for any kind of festivities surrounding the plaza
project. Mayor Patty Lent has reached out to his staff, and has
vowed to also contact federal judge Richard Jones, a half brother of
the music icon based in Seattle.
Bremerton’s Harborside Fountain Park will be
a decade old in 2017. Unfortunately, that’s also the next
time the submarine sail-shaped spouts will operate again.
City officials made the call this week to forgo
attempts to get the fountains back up and running in time for this
year’s summer season.
Regulatory hoops and repairs, to make the park safe for water
waders, will eat up the entire year, Bremerton Mayor Patty Lent
said Thursday.
“It’s very disappointing,” Lent lamented. “On the hot
days, those fountains draw so many people downtown. And our
downtown couldn’t look prettier.”
The fountains will be dry ’til
2017. Parks director Jeff Elevado pictured. Photos by Meegan M.
Reid.
As a consolation, the city will fire up the
sprinklers from noon to 3 p.m. Friday (Aug. 26) at Evergreen-Rotary
Park, Lent said. There could be more sprinkler outings on
subsequent hot days.
Under Lent’s watch, the fountains have turned on each
year in March (former Mayor Cary Bozeman would run them year round,
but Lent thought it a prudent cost savings measure to turn them off
in winter). Not this year. The city’s parks department,
which maintains them, has grown increasingly concerned that the
mechanisms keeping them going are failing.
The $20 million fountain park, formerly a rather
unsightly lay-down yard within the shipyard, was not meant to be a
swimming pool. But treating them as such has taken a toll. So city
officials have authorized up to $100,000 in Real
Estate Excise Tax funds to reconstruct filtration, control
systems and upgrade plumbing. The goal is to ensure the water’s
safe for human contact.
But the fountains also caught the eye of both the
state and county’s health departments. The city had to apply for
permitting to make the fountain park a recreational water facility.
That took several months earlier this year. Even now, with
approval, a bunch of parts needed for the repairs remain on back
order.
Lent said that even once the repairs are done, the
state and county health departments will want to conduct testing to
ensure the water is safe. That’s going to take time, and sadly,
that means Bremerton’s fountain park will be fully fountainless
through 2016.
“We are all one, under the sun.” That’s what
Bailey Tupai told me this morning at Evergreen-Rotary Park, the
site of this Bremerton’s first ever Pacific
Islander Festival this Saturday. Thousands are expected to
attend the event, which will highlight and celebrate the cultures
of islands all over the Pacific.
Elsewhere in this week’s Bremerton Beat Blast, you’ll learn:
A packed Bremerton National
Airport Saturday. Photo by Pilot Scott Kuznicki.
History was made this weekend at Bremerton National
Airport this weekend. Almost 700 aircraft were joined by
1,000 cars and 4,000 people for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots
Association‘s Bremerton fly-in Friday and Saturday.
“I thought it was awesome,” Fred Salisbury, the
airport’s director, was quoted as
saying on AOPA’s web site. “That back runway probably hasn’t
seen aircraft for fifty years and it was packed with parked
airplanes all the way down.”
I spent some time Saturday morning just perusing the planes. It
was like a massive vintage car show except all the vehicles had
wings and took to the skies with great frequency. I found aircraft
made all over the world, to include everything from classic
biplanes to modern private jets.
Sun Reporter Tad Sooter wrote
recently of the economic impacts the fly-in, one of four the
AOPA holds each year around the nation, would have on Bremerton and
Kitsap County. Seems likely those expectations were eclipsed.
And finally, the cutest story you will hear all week: a Kitsap
Humane Society volunteer has been bringing shelter dogs to
Starbucks,
and photographing the results.
Questions? Comments? Send ’em my way at
josh.farley@kitsapsun.com. Thanks for watching!
The East Bremerton
location, which Albertson’s began, Haggen floundered at and now,
is fully owned by the Saars, is once again buzzing with retail
life. On Wednesday, it will open for the first time. On Saturday,
it will hold a grand opening celebration.
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