Speaking of daffodils, this coming Saturday is our area's Puyallup Valley Daffodil Grand Floral Parade. At one time, the Daffodil Parade was the third largest floral parade in the whole country.
In last Sunday's newspaper, The News Tribune, there was a big front page article on "The Decline of the Daffodil Festival." Ironically, the biggest single reason for the decline of the Festival is The News Tribune.
In the 1980s, our local newspaper family sold the News Tribune to The McClatchy Company out of Sacramento, California. They immediatelly let it be known that they had no interest in being a Tacoma newspaper. Instead, they wanted to become a Puget Sound, or at the very least a South Sound newspaper. In an effort to accomplish that, one of the first things they did was to delete almost 95% of the coverage usually given over to the Festival. As the years went by, the entire Festival became smaller and less important to our area, because no one knew when the Festival was happening.
And now The News Tribune has the nerve to question the decline of the Festival!
