RRN Final Issue

This issue of Ridge Rider News marks the completion of our twelfth year of publication. It took a year or two of sporadic publications for RRN to settle into the weekly issue most readers have come to expect, regularly and consistently. As a newsletter, RRN has grown from a readership of less than a handful of individuals to now more than one hundred households.

In RRN’s infancy, we sought a means to vent some of the frustrations we were experiencing in several arenas of life. We admit the ability to "get things off ones chest," helped reduce our blood pressure, but RRN has always been more than a means to an end.

Almost from the onset, Ridge Rider News has been about leaving something behind for our descendants. We have never aspired to accumulate great wealth, and, from a young age, established personal financial goals, which we would describe simply as "making a comfortable living."

We recognize that at the time of our passing there will likely be very little money and perhaps not a great many possessions for our children to "squabble over" and for the grandchildren to eventually inherit.

However, short of some sort of natural disaster or cataclysmic event, there will be six hundred twenty-six issues of Ridge Rider News available for our grandchildren to peruse, use, or abuse. If they grow up to be materially minded, they’ll be sorely disappointed that all that we left them were the copies of this newsletter, and they may possibly cart off their inheritance to a dumpster or landfill.

We can’t control their responses, but we shall pass from this life believing they’ll find within the pages of Ridge Rider News the answers to a lot of the questions they will surely have about what things were like "back then," what sort of persons their grandparents were, and how it is they came to be so smart (smile).

Unless we are dead wrong about our grandchildren, Ridge Rider News will be seen by them as a window into the lives of their forbears, a window that’s always there for them to look through, if only they take the time to do so. Will this not be more precious to them than gold? Continue reading...