Thank You For 21 Years Of Making Me Look Good!
March 19, 2026
Bernie Marvin
This is my first-ever Letter from the Senior Writer/Photographer. I will keep it short, but I must offer a long-time Bridge Weekly staff member a sincere “Thank You” for making me look good on the pages of his newspaper in every issue for the past 21 years.
Peter and Shauna Kimball, who were responsible for putting together the initial pages of The Bridge Weekly back when it was first conceived and published, asked me at that time to write a local column about people, animals, or programs, or anything I thought worthy of writing about that would interest readers of their brand new community newspaper.
I don’t recall just what that first column was about, but it probably included the topic of preparing my woodpile for the coming season, or Polly and I being pushed off our front deck by Phoebe the phoebe and her new family, or it may have been about some of those confounded deer that chomped the bark off my young maples out front or even about my pal Spidey, a black spider as big as your fist that rode with me for two summers on the front seat of my Troy-Bilt tractor cab.
Whatever it was, Peter liked what I wrote. He received a few kind words from readers about the column, and I was pleased to have written a little something they liked or appreciated. That column prompted another, and on it went, every week, year in and year out, for the past 21 years. That amounts to more than 1,900 columns that have been published as Bernie’s Beat.
Adding to all that (also from the very beginning issue), I wrote and photographed over 3,000 other news and feature stories, each one receiving thoughtful layout and placement in past issues of The Bridge Weekly.
The guy who put the paper together each week, Peter Kimball, was entirely responsible for making my work look good and for ensuring the stories were arranged in an orderly fashion so readers could go through the paper front to back without confusion, rather than experience a jumbled mass of information, photos, and captions. The layouts were clean-cut and easy to read.
Each week for those 21 years, I would send stories, photographs and the Bernie’s Beat column to Peter’s email address, and he would perform his magic, making me look good each week, keeping layouts crisp and material laid out in a manner that readers looked forward to.
Since selling The Bridge Weekly to Josh Smith several months ago, Peter Kimball’s responsibilities at the paper have ended as of last week’s paper, March 12, 2026, he has retired and I want readers to know that it has been a delightful 21 years for me to send my material to Peter each week and be really pleased with the outcome for every issue.
I managed to capture the images in the camera and write the words on paper, but it was Peter Kimball who made those layouts so clean and good, and I sincerely thank him for all that he has done for me and The Bridge Weekly readers since the publication of the first issue.
Enjoy your retirement!
Respectfully,
Bernie Marvin
Senior Writer/
Photographer
The Bridge Weekly
Peter and Shauna Kimball, who were responsible for putting together the initial pages of The Bridge Weekly back when it was first conceived and published, asked me at that time to write a local column about people, animals, or programs, or anything I thought worthy of writing about that would interest readers of their brand new community newspaper.
I don’t recall just what that first column was about, but it probably included the topic of preparing my woodpile for the coming season, or Polly and I being pushed off our front deck by Phoebe the phoebe and her new family, or it may have been about some of those confounded deer that chomped the bark off my young maples out front or even about my pal Spidey, a black spider as big as your fist that rode with me for two summers on the front seat of my Troy-Bilt tractor cab.
Whatever it was, Peter liked what I wrote. He received a few kind words from readers about the column, and I was pleased to have written a little something they liked or appreciated. That column prompted another, and on it went, every week, year in and year out, for the past 21 years. That amounts to more than 1,900 columns that have been published as Bernie’s Beat.
Adding to all that (also from the very beginning issue), I wrote and photographed over 3,000 other news and feature stories, each one receiving thoughtful layout and placement in past issues of The Bridge Weekly.
The guy who put the paper together each week, Peter Kimball, was entirely responsible for making my work look good and for ensuring the stories were arranged in an orderly fashion so readers could go through the paper front to back without confusion, rather than experience a jumbled mass of information, photos, and captions. The layouts were clean-cut and easy to read.
Each week for those 21 years, I would send stories, photographs and the Bernie’s Beat column to Peter’s email address, and he would perform his magic, making me look good each week, keeping layouts crisp and material laid out in a manner that readers looked forward to.
Since selling The Bridge Weekly to Josh Smith several months ago, Peter Kimball’s responsibilities at the paper have ended as of last week’s paper, March 12, 2026, he has retired and I want readers to know that it has been a delightful 21 years for me to send my material to Peter each week and be really pleased with the outcome for every issue.
I managed to capture the images in the camera and write the words on paper, but it was Peter Kimball who made those layouts so clean and good, and I sincerely thank him for all that he has done for me and The Bridge Weekly readers since the publication of the first issue.
Enjoy your retirement!
Respectfully,
Bernie Marvin
Senior Writer/
Photographer
The Bridge Weekly
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