Spotlight: Teri Bowles-Atherton: President, Rose Festival Foundation
Check out this Fox 12 Oregon video featuring NEP's own Teri Bowles-Atherton. She shares some fond festival memories, especially of her family's historic connection to the Grand Floral Parade.
Gail V. Black says:
Thank you Teri Bowles-Atherton, for your warm and lovely Portland Rose Festival story on March 2, 2020. We look forward to the City of Roses recovering its former beauty after this terrible Covid-19 pandemic forced cancelation of the historic Festival and magnificent parades scheduled for this summer.
We’re also praying and hopeful that Portland can eventually regain its status as a stellar Pacific Northwest attraction, in the wake of the chaos and destruction created by the uninvited White anarchists who co-opted and ruined the peaceful protests on behalf of Black people’s rights, hampering and setting back the movement by decades. This, alongside the compounding damage inflicted by unidentifiable, uninvited, “jackbooted thug” federal agents, in total camouflage, who poured gasoline on the fires with their Gestapo tactics, has dealt an inestimable blow on Oregon’s crowning city.
I love you Portland – City of Roses, and I pray for your gradual recovery from the wounds and scars you now bear. May the healing rays of sunlight dispel the clouds of darkness and shine down upon you, and may the cleansing waters of your legendary rain wash and revive you. And, may you — in some not too distant spring, lift your head and bloom once again.
Gail V. Black
Native Oregonian, Former Portlander, & Annually Returning Summer Visitor