July 12th was a bright, warm, sunny day for a special awards ceremony at the Boat House at Washington Park. Gerri and I were the guests of Denny and Melanie Dressman as Denny was to be honored with the 25-Year Lifetime Achievement Award from the prestigious Colorado Authors League.
Dressman is a career journalist, writer, former sports editor for The Rocky Mountain News, and a Past President of the Colorado Press Association. He has authored 17 books and writes a column every week in The Villager entitled “Under Further Review” with his wide-ranging knowledge of sporting events and athletes.
The Colorado Authors League gives out awards every year to veteran and newbie authors who have published books during the year. Denny was described as a “Renaissance Man” and past president of (CAL) and a longtime board member of this historic author’s group.
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The Villager is a longtime member of The Colorado Press Association and The National Newspaper Association and therefore the recipient of various exchange weekly newspapers from across the nation. One of my favorites is the Oberlin Herald, published by some Colorado friends who left the San Luis Valley several decades ago to purchase a chain of Kansas newspapers. Both are columnists, they have traveled the world and have a summer home in Creede, C0. Steve is a talented editorial writer and does a weekly column. His wife Cynthia also writes a column, and I read both faithfully every week. I especially like their travel stories; they love riding the rails. An item in his recent column, dated July 2, 2025, struck my interest level. They live in Kansas wheat country and Steve wrote a long column about Kansas wheat going around the globe to feed hungry people called, ”Food for Peace,” started decades ago by the Kansas Farm Bureau linked to Senator Bob Dole and George McGovern in a farm bill in 2002. The program is still ongoing and amounted to $240 million last year and according to Steve from a hearing it is on the cutting block with Musk “feeding it to the wood shredder.” Long story short, the new Secretary of Agriculture, Brook Rollins, has some doubts about the program. Steve relates, “While expressing continued interest in McGovern-Dole, she outlined the program’s budget, noting that it doesn’t really spend a lot of money on American farm produce. She relates… “Of $240 million spent in 2023, only $37 million went to agriculture. Nearly five times that amount went for other expenses, including ocean shipping, ($ll million) and administration $132 million. According to the report, roughly $200 million out of the $240 million disappeared into the ‘maw’ of the department’s huge bureaucracy, while $37 million went to feed hungry people. Steve concludes, as a Kansas editor, President Trump is right to examine each and every government program that taxpayer’s finance, making up for a bloated federal budget. Those Kansas folks are pretty smart farmers and news hounds.