A little bit about a lot of things:

• Column Left returns this week after a one-week hiatus, due largely to the volume of letters to the editor we received last week!

We have a standing invitation for our readers to share their thoughts in letters to the editor, and would love to have a page full of letters every week.

Last week’s letters were full of insight and new perspectives on a number of issues important to our communities, from a growth management measure going before Stanislaus County voters next week to a former trustee’s recollection of how the Newman-Crows Landing Unified School District handled the proceeds from a 2000 bond measure.

Opinions are just that, of course, but we believe sharing those thoughts helps foster community dialogue and awareness.

We also believe that everybody’s opinion counts, and we welcome input from all sides of issues.

Keep those letters coming!!!

• Super Sunday is on tap, perhaps the world’s most famous single sporting event.

It wasn’t always that way, though.

I recall in the early years of the Super Bowl when an “open gym” at our local high school was packed with players the same Sunday afternoon that the champions from the American Football League and National Football League were battling it out for Super Bowl honors.

There were a few comments about getting home in time to maybe catch part of the game on television, but it certainly played second fiddle to the importance of spending an afternoon hanging around the gym.

That was the afternoon nearly 40 years ago that “Broadway Joe” Namath made good on the promise that his team, the New York Jets, would defeat the powerful Baltimore Colts.....a defining moment that helped launch the Super Bowl toward the global popularity it enjoys today.

You wouldn’t catch many people spending Super Bowl Sunday shooting around open gym these days.

With football to watch, and “Super” commercials to enjoy and compare, most of us will be glued to the tube for hours, leaving the comfort of the easy chair only long enough to make a quick trip to the refrigerator for the requisite refreshments.....

• And don’t forget, Super Tuesday follows Super Bowl Sunday.

Californians will join voters in numerous other states hosting presidential primaries that day. In addition, two growth-related measures are on the Stanisalus County ballot, and statewide Californians will be deciding the fate of four controversial ballot measures authorizing a renegotiation of gambling compacts with Native American tribes.

This will be a busy year for California voters, who will go to the ballots again in June and November....

• Congratulations to Dave Larsen, the plant foreman at Bonita School, who represented the Newman-Crows Landing Unified School District in a countywide program honoring outstanding classified school employees.

Larsen is a familiar figure at Bonita, where he keeps the campus nice and tidy, fixes whatever might be broken and pretty much deals with whatever emergency the day might bring.

I believe they call it “multi-tasking,” and he does it with the best of them.

I have always had a healthy respect for school maintenance workers, ingrained from a few high school and college summers spent helping the staff at our small school.

Summer might mean vacation for students and teachers, but it meant plenty of work for the custodial workers who scrubbed and painted walls, stripped and waxed floors, moved this and fixed that....getting everything back into tip-top shape to greet students when they returned to school in the fall.

I still remember the sunburn after two straight summer days spent on an open tractor mowing the grounds, and the seemingly endless job of moving everything out of a recently-closed school the district was vacating - the library was the worst, box after box after box of books!

Make no mistake about it....that was not some cushy summer job!!!

Overall, every school district’s classified employees - the groundskeepers and maintenance workers, the clerical staff, cafeteria employees, bus drivers, campus supervisors, administrative assistants and others whose job classifications I am undoubtedly forgetting - are the people no school could function without.

They are all riching deserving of our appreciation for a job well done.

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