“Who would hang an umbrella on a hat rack?” a set dresser grumbles as she shifts the collection of umbrellas and old-fashioned hats hanging in the entry of the Northwest Railway Museum depot in Snoqualmie.

She’s talking to herself, as she fusses with suitcases and furnishings in the depot, and there seems to be a lot of that going around Wednesday morning in Snoqualmie, as headset-wearing, clipboard-carrying creative types bustle around the depot and, kitty-corner across Railroad Avenue, an empty lot now overflowing with trailers and cars.

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Two boys in a stump, a three-dimensional animated hippopotamus and six Avengers will make Thursday, May 10, a full day for movie-goers in North Bend.

The boys and the hippo are the stars of two student-produced films that will run at the North Bend Theater before the showing of the long-awaited Marvel production, “The Avengers.” There are stars in the Avengers, too, but the real reason for the evening is to showcase the work of the filmmakers, all Mount Si High School students in the Wildcat Production Club.

The annual Wildcat Film Festival, as it’s called, “is our own little Snoqualmie Valley film festival,” said club advisor and video production teacher Joe Dockery.

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For the second year in a row, Snoqualmie Elementary School readers claimed the Battle of the Books championship and trophy.

The team of Emma Duim (captain), Vicky Copeland, Taylor Talbott, Abbigal Triou and Grace Wendlick bested the top teams from Cascade View, North Bend, Fall City, and Opstad in the annual district-wide contest, held Friday, April 27 at North Bend Elementary School.

As always, the final Battle was a tense affair, the culmination of months of dedicated reading and memorization, and multiple rounds of elimination at each elementary to designate a school champ.

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Whatever other titles he may hold, Marvin Kempf, a hereditary chief of the Snoqualmie Tribe, and the son of Snoqualmie Princess Roslyn Harvey Kempf, is a born storyteller. Creation, the monster of the mountain, and battling giants, are all easily-recalled legends from his culture, and ones he loves to share.

“I was thinking about another story,” he announced over lunch last Friday. It’s a story he learned from his elders, when he asked why his own people didn’t have beautiful creation tales like the Jewish tradition.

“They laughed and said ‘oh, that’s a young tribe,’” he said.

Then they told him their own story.

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Snoqualmie’s Police Department is ready to grow, was built for growth, in fact. Another six officers, the estimated hire needed for the department to police North Bend, wouldn’t even trigger an anticipated remodel of the 1998 building, says Jim Schaffer, Snoqualmie’s soon-to-retire chief.

The 13,000 square-foot police station on Douglas Avenue is home to 14 police officers and three civilian staff members, a handful of subletting State Highway Patrolmen, another handful of community meetings and programs, a firing range, two holding cells, a couple of dirtbikes for patrolling on trails, and a variety of special equipment.

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City government seems to be in Londi Lindell’s blood. An attorney who grew up in the Seattle area, enjoying the same name recognition as her well-respected attorney father, Lindell has practiced law, developed real estate and managed cities (Federal Way and Mercer Island) in her career, but she will soon return to city government.

She will be North Bend’s new city administrator as of May 1.

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Superstitions aside, the judge who refused to officiate at Charles Peterson and Carol Jones’ wedding ceremony Friday, April 13, 1962, had good reason for his reluctance.

“He was in uniform,” Carol said, pointing to her husband, Charles, a Snoqualmie City Councilman, “and (the judge) thought that I had just gotten into town and just met him, and he did not want to marry us on Friday the 13th!”

Judge John Malloy was half right. Carol had just arrived in Washington D.C.

She had come specifically to marry Charles, and begin the married life she’d been anticipating since she first met him three years earlier, at age 16.

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