A Shout Out to the Kress Pavilion

We send these papers digitally on Wednesdays by 5 pm to Madison where they’re printed. They return by truck to Door County late Thursday afternoons for distribution, circulated largely on Fridays.

We do this 52 Wednesdays a year, never missing a week no matter what the week brings. Nothing stops us, “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night,” to borrow from the informal motto of the U.S. Postal Service, which is in turn a phrase from Charles W. Eliot’s poem, “The Letter.”

This sometimes means we all do what we do from remote locations around the county. That happened this week when that slushy snow storm blew through upon high winds Tuesday into Wednesday. Most of us lost power at our homes and the next morning, the day the paper is sent out, there was no power at our Baileys Harbor office. 

We lost power at our Sevastopol home at 6:32 pm Tuesday, and we, like thousands of others, still didn’t have power on Wednesday. Because we also don’t have cell coverage where we live, I didn’t learn until I made the trip to the office Wednesday morning that we didn’t have power there. So off to the Kress Pavilion in Egg Harbor I went – which is always my go-to when storms knock out power. 

There was the time during a bad summer thunderstorm when I lost power at home on a Wednesday during the pandemic and finished off reading the final proofs of the paper in the parking lot of the Kress because the building was closed. This time, they were open all day, providing a warm and light space with good internet – even as the storm continued outside.

I was living out of county when this building was proposed and built, but I want to thank the visionaries who knew the community would need a space like this in a rural area. I’m sure exactly no one said, “You know, if the Peninsula Pulse is ever knocked out of commission by a storm, they’re going to need a place to finish the paper.” Probably no one even mentioned it could be used for yoga classes, which is the thing that most regularly brings me to the Donald and Carol Kress Pavilion. 

That’s the thing about ideas – you can’t possibly envision all the ways a good one will be used. And this was definitely a good one.

Thanks for helping us get the paper out this week – with a special thanks to Jeanine Brennan, the Egg Harbor Library branch manager.