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Beech Creek Hotel an example of iconic local businesses

Best Wings This Side of Bridge, the sign says — an icon for many families vacationing at Bald Eagle State Park, to say nothing of the fiercely loyal citizens of Beech Creek. We write, of course, of the Beech Creek Hotel, which we recently featured in a page-one spread to celebrate the history of the business — but more importantly, to celebrate the passing of the torch to its fifth generation of local ownership, as Amy Heltman takes over. Vanishingly few small, local businesses — mom-and-pops, if you will — can continue to survive and thrive in today’s world. The deck ...

Daylight Savings Time should swap more often

But not actually. You see, to be clear, we don’t actually think this is a good idea. It’s April Fool’s Day — but if you’re reading this, we don’t think you’re a fool. What started as a few intentionally messed-up temperatures in the weather forecast years ago has taken on a life of its own, and we wanted to take the opportunity to make a gentle prank with this Our View — but the prank is not on you, the reader. This is, in fact, a gift to you. If you’d like, you can go to our Facebook page — Lock Haven Express — and react at the people who will likely show up ...

Transparency a worthy goal for local governments, school boards

Power corrupts. Most people have likely heard that phrase — as well as its attendant (absolute power corrupts absolutely). Relatively few, however, have seen the consequences of it first-hand. Power can take well-meaning, upstanding citizens and convince them that they can do great and terrible things. It can guide people down a twisted path one hesitant step at a time, whispering the entire time that, well, surely nobody would care about this one trivial ill deed. We think it is fair to say that while many local governments and school boards have their own brushes with ...

Yes, we’re biased; but not in the way you think

People love whipping out accusations of bias on social media. Curiously, it’s frequently that we are liberal or left-leaning — which is interesting to us because we also get phone calls accusing us of conservative bias. To us, this is a sign that we are doing things correctly. If everyone is mad at us, across the ideological spectrum, then, frankly, we are doing our jobs and telling people what they need to hear — the news — as opposed to what they want to hear. However, with how things have been lately, we want to confess that we do, in fact, have some biases. For one, we ...

Read beyond the headlines

One of the most eternal struggles we face as a newspaper is getting people to get past headlines. This is not a recent phenomenon, though we would be lying if we ignored the impact social media has had on it. For print journalism especially, we cannot fully express every detail you need to know on a subject in a headline — let alone a condensed headline that must fit in a somewhat reasonable manner on a physical layout. This happens incessantly. It happens with national stories. It happens with state-wide stories. It happens, most frustratingly, with local stories. We have noted ...

The ‘luck’ of the Irish

Happy St. Patty’s Day! While many of you are presumably going to be celebrating this evening reveling in the fine Irish tradition of bad alcohol and good company, we wanted to take the moment to remind — or educate — that the supposed luck of the Irish was not originally a good thing. There are a number of apocryphal tales about Irish luck — it is doubtful that the stereotype has any specific origin provable with modern techniques. But the supposed luck of the Irish is commonly associated with jokes such as, “well, they’re lucky to be alive!” or considered in light of ...