by Judy Wilkinson
Happy Birthday The Blind Californian! Take a look at the front cover volume and issue number: Volume 60, No. 1
That means that in some form, this magazine has been published for 59 years and is now beginning its 60th. From CCB's website you can download individual
issues from 2008 until the present, and zipped files for each year (containing all four issues) go back to 1986 (with the exceptions of 1991 and 1987).
Our Administrative Assistant Ed Branch tells me that somewhere buried in the back room of the CCB office are boxes of back issues, but he has no idea how
far back they go. He tells me that unearthing them would take hours and hours, and there is certainly more important work for him to be doing on behalf
of us all.
Over this next year, we plan to bring you a number of commemorative BC articles including interviews with previous editors, beginning with Linda Porelle's
with Winifred Downing. We will bring back guest appearances from favorite columns such as On The Lighter Side by Evelyn Drewry.
I took over as editor from Mike Keithley with the Summer 2010 issue, and since that date, I have taken my job extremely seriously, putting a great deal
of thought into my columns, some of which have proved very controversial. You will note in this issue as in all others on my watch, I have included extensive
introductory Editor's Notes in order to provide historical relevance for articles; this takes more time than you might think. Last year we welcomed Associate
Editor Susan Glass, and what an addition she has been. In an effort to fulfill the mandate of our Strategic Plan to reach out to chapters in a meaningful
way, we begin our second year of Susan's profiling individual chapters and their projects.
Fairly recently prior to my editorship, budgetary cuts mandated a Board decision to drastically cut the length of the publication to roughly half of what
it had been. At the very least, the magazine continues to be the organ of record for the doing of CCB. A couple of years ago, The Publications Committee
conducted a survey, and those who responded overwhelmingly requested that we maintain it as a quarterly publication. This raises ongoing challenges in
this electronic age as to what to include to keep the BC timely and relevant.
Rest assured that I will do my best to meet the mandate of timeliness and relevance, and I remind you that this publication belongs to all of us. The material
in this issue comes from contributors who have stepped up to the plate repeatedly. The publication needs new voices if it is to continue vibrantly into
the future. Let one of them be yours.
