Bernie and Hilary on the Same Ticket

Hillary Clinton will not pick Bernie Sanders as her running mate at the Democratic National Convention, but the pair of Bernie O’Malley and Hilary (one “L”) Emmer have teamed together and were named Vashon Island’s unofficial mayors for the 2016-17 term. Done obviously in fun, they capitalized on their ‘name recognition’ to run for the unofficial office and managed to raise $6,000 on the campaign trail on behalf of the Vashon Senior Center.

My wife and I were on the island visiting friends during the Vashon Island Strawberry Festival when the mayoral announcement was made. The festival celebrated its 107th year. The grand marshall of the parade was Mary Matsuda Grunewald, a former Vashon Island resident before she was evacuated in 1941 with 110,000 other Japanese Americans to internment camps. Her family raised strawberries on the island and made the fruit an important crop before the war.