North Valley loses top-flight CEO
Inter Lake editorial
The Flathead Valley will say good-bye to North Valley Hospital Chief Executive Officer Craig Aasved next month when he leaves to take a job as chief operating officer at St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula.
North Valley accomplished a lot during Aasved's eight years at the helm. A new hospital and accompanying medical village are the tangible accomplishments of his leadership, but he's had his hand in many, many other improvements at the Whitefish hospital, from embracing the Planetree health-care model for patient-focused care to achieving critical-access status for the hospital.
Aasved has been a dedicated leader during a challenging time in the health-care industry. We wish him the best in his new endeavor.
Kudos to the crew at the Flathead County Election Department for the timely delivery of results during last Tuesdays' primary election.
Despite a strong voter turnout of 42 percent (more than 23,000 ballots cast), the election counting went smoothly, results were delivered efficiently and final tallies were available in a reasonable time.
This represents a vast improvement over the past several elections, when a combination of mechanical and human errors put the Flathead on the map as one of the last counties to tally its ballots.
Those snafus seem to have been resolved.
Since the primary is a crucial test run on the way to November's critical general election, the turnaround in election procedures bodes well for the next time we go to the polls.
Last year election officials promised to "keep working to get it right." We're glad to see that work has paid off.
AND FINALLY, the death of Jim McKay touched all of us who remember spending Saturday afternoons watching TV when TV was still magic and hearing his incantation of "The Thrill of Victory and the Agony of Defeat."
McKay's long tenure on "Wide World of Sports" resulted in a body of work as good as anything in the business, and yet McKay remained humble, happy and understated through it all. He clearly loved his work, and he truly helped educate the rest of us about sports as diverse as ski jumping and bowling, as beautiful as figure skating and as intense as demolition derby.
His depth of character and understanding was evident each week, but it was at the 1972 Munich Olympics when it was most needed. Palestinian terrorists took members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage and eventually killed 11 of them as well as a German police officer. McKay broke the news to the world eloquently: "Tonight our worst fears have been realized. They're all gone."
Sadly, now, at the age of 86, McKay is gone. He will be missed.