A great place to live, cheap

After a couple of weeks of teasing, that August issue of Family Circle magazine is now available. The folks at Publix tell me they've had a lot of people asking for it after hearing about Evans being named one of the nation's 10 best towns for families.

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Because I've lived in Evans for about 17 years, the community certainly has my personal recommendation. But then, so do Martinez, Appling and Winfield where I lived before.

It's sort of like I tell people about the schools here: While some of them might be better than others, or just different from others, you really won't go wrong with a school anywhere in Columbia County.

For that reason, the accolades from Family Circle really should apply to the whole county. Besides: Evans exists only as a series of routes and directions tacked up in back of the Evans post office. It isn't even a real town.

Sure, there have been attempts in the past few years to incorporate Evans - but even then the plan was to create a city just long enough to merge it with Columbia County so the county would, like Augusta-Richmond County, be both a city and a county.

But folks around here are suspicious of anything being run even remotely like Augusta, so that idea won't get off the ground. That's perfectly OK; we seem to have done just fine.

One tidbit I noticed in the Family Circle recognition is that of the 10 communities listed, Evans has the lowest median home price.

You can bet our community's real estate brokers are all over this one.

Jobs departing?

Meanwhile, we'd better hope our economic development officials are on this promotional bandwagon, too. We've seen some disturbing news in recent weeks about layoffs at area industries, including Club Car and Kennametal. And now the rumor is again flying that Electrolux is looking at moving its headquarters away from Martinez and up to Charlotte, N.C.

It's bad enough that we've got empty retail spaces all over Evans; we sure don't need empty manufacturing plants, too.

Greener pastures

Speaking of departures, we got the sad announcement last week that Jason Smith is leaving as publisher of our sister paper in Thomson, The McDuffie Mirror.

He's going to work as vice president for communication for Joseph M. Still Burn Centers Inc., which operates four burn centers in the region including the one at Doctors Hospital.

If you recall, Smith was the news editor for The News-Times and The Augusta Chronicle's Columbia County bureau chief for a couple of years before his promotion six years ago to start up the Mirror. He's done a great job in his hometown, and will be hard to replace.

Wrong again

Charles Lord in his column today spells out some of the history of the naming of Evans, including the Postal Service error that led to the name being spelled wrong for more than four decades.

As a result, I couldn't help but notice the menu for a new restaurant in Evans, located in the shopping center with Home Depot.

Angel Island Asian Cuisine produced a beautiful takeout menu with wonderful-sounding dishes.

But there, on the cover, the new restaurant lists its location as "Evens, Ga." Oops. I thought we fixed that problem 82 years ago.

Una nota final

A story the other day said Latino groups around the country are mobilizing a campaign to persuade Spanish-speaking immigrants to allow themselves to be counted when Census enumerators get to work next year.

I just hope the U.S. Census Bureau remembers to send the forms to Harlem in English.

For the 2000 Census, residents of Columbia County's smallest and oldest city were justifiably concerned when the federal agency dropped off stacks of census forms - and all of them were in Spanish.

(Barry L. Paschal is publisher of The Columbia County News-Times. E-mail barry.paschal@newstimesonline.com.)