By Dixon Bledsoe
Tiffany Kuenzi is at it again. And she is a step closer to making the big time. The Silverton songbird of the country persuasion recently opened for Montgomery Gentry; sang with Joe Nichols, Craig Cambell and Jerrod Nieman, and received an honorable mention at the The International Songwriters’ Competition, which is the world’s largest songwriting competition. The song she submitted was He Said, a soon-to-be hit that she penned and has performed many times in Oregon.
Is she ready to hit it big? “Absolutely,” the engaging crooner exclaimed as she was preparing to head to Nashville for perhaps her biggest opportunity yet. Those readers who are now hooked on the television hit “Nashville” are bound to know about the legendary Bluebird Café. Kuenzi is one of 16 songwriters invited to showcase their songs at the famous Nashville hangout where stars are made and wannabes crash and burn. Representatives of six publishing companies will listen to songs that might be of interest for their stars, and one of them represents country icon Keith Urban. Pretty heady stuff for a local gal whose hat size hasn’t changed.
There I was, sitting at my weekly Silverton Rotary meeting, when President Wes Craven said our lunchtime speaker had canceled. I assumed we would be getting out early and my mind started wandering back to business. Then the good executive informed the crowd of 20 some Rotarians that he was going to speak about birds. My first inclination was to run and spare myself the embarrassment of falling asleep after a great lunch and offending a very nice man. But wait! Ornithology is absolutely fascinating stuff and my new five-syllable word to drop at cocktail parties.
I was in awe of his pictures, his knowledge and his love of being a birder. Turkey vultures, Craven said, have “faces that only mothers could love.” Why are their heads red and without feathers? Because their talons are flimsy and relatively useless, leaving their heads to do all the dirty work eating carrion. Pigeons have magnetic material in their heads giving them a keen sense of direction, assumedly using magnetic north as a guide. A type of woodpecker we are all familiar with drills holes in trees horizontally and will come back later, after the sap runs out. But no! Sap isn’t a one-course meal. There are bugs in the sap, an appetizer to be served before the gooey entrée. Some swans have been seen flying higher than Mt. Everest’s 29,035 feet. He even answered my question about a new type of dove that distracts my every golf shot at Evergreen with its incessant “coo coo, coo cooing.” Pretty under normal circumstances, but not when one is in the middle of an already comical backswing. It is a Eurasian Collared Dove, which came to Oregon in 1988. They are big, melodic and prolific at reproduction, and have unceremoniously pushed aside the mourning doves many of us grew up. An incredible presentation that caught me totally off-guard. Kudos to the self-described “Bird Nerd.”
Silverton resident Dorothy Dahl was killed in an auto accident on Silverton Road on Oct. 5. Mrs. Dahl is going to be sorely missed by a loving family and many friends. Mrs. Dahl was a kind soul, a wonderful wife to Ray Dahl for so many years, and a doting mother and grandmother. I remember her best in two different circumstances – when I first interviewed Mr. Dahl about being a World War II pilot flying the Burma Hump over India and China, and she help fill in the gaps because she knew the story equally as well as her husband, and then when I saw her at nearly every basketball and football game her grandsons, Noah and Jonas, played in for Silverton High. She greatly loved all her family members.
In using the kind of gallows humor most appropriate at a time of such tragedy, two of her children, Randy and Karen, laughed when sharing that their early 80s mom would not be happy that another paper had listed her age as 92.
Her daughter, Valorie Johnson, was seriously injured in the crash, and I wish her a speedy recovery. Condolences to the entire Dahl family. Mrs. Dahl was one incredible woman.
