The Slice: Misplaced bark had some bite

Once, on a day already filled with commotion, Bernadette Powers yelled at her mischief-making dog, asking “What the (salty language deleted) are you doing?”

A voice from the basement answered, “I’m just changing the soft water, lady.”

People are swell: Last weekend’s Slice item on boaters anchoring right next to people seeking solitude reminded Larry Seemann of something. “We have a handicap van with a wheelchair ramp on the right side. It has a decal on the side window that says: ‘Courtesy Requested. Please do not park within 8 feet.’

“In normal parking situations it is common for people to park right next to us, and we accepted long ago that most people just don’t see the sign. However, what really makes us wonder is when we park way out in the middle of a vacant parking lot and walk a long way to the store – just to avoid other cars – and when we come out someone has parked right next to us. And they always park on the right side.

“This has happened several times. I don’t have an explanation for it – must be the same as the anchored boat situation.”

Slice answer: “On the first day of possession of our new home, while showing our girls our new swimming pool, my then 4-year-old daughter fell in,” wrote Debbie Fore.

With her 18-month-old sister looking on, the child swam to the edge of the pool and was promptly fished out. “It ended up being the best teaching tool,” said Fore.

Today’s Slice question: Although rows and rows of B-52s would soon be stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, my late father’s bomber crew was the first to arrive in Ohio more than 50 years ago. To note this, there was a front-page picture of those men in one of the Dayton newspapers, the Journal Herald.

When my mother was “capped” after her training as a nurse at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia a few years before World War II, there was a photo of her in one of that city’s papers, the Public Ledger.

Both of those once-thriving newspapers went out of business decades ago. That made me wonder.

How many families have clippings in scrapbooks or cigar boxes from newspapers that no longer exist?