The recession drags on in the jobless numbers and the injured Padre Hotel manager begins to heal

  

* .. JOB LOSSES: This recession won't be over until unemployment eases, both locally and nationally. So it wasn't exactly easy reading when I saw a study saying Bakersfield had lost more than 5,000 private sector jobs from April 2009 to April of this year. That's a loss of about 3 percent of all jobs in the private sector, another indication that we are bumping along the bottom of this recession. Las Vegas suffered the sharpest year over year decline in percentage terms, losing 4.71 percent. Wichita, Kansas, was the next worst at 4.69 percent. Closer to home Fresno fared a tad better than us, losing 2.43 percent of his private sector workforce.

 * ... DAVIS NEWS: Heard from reader Adele Davis who said she too graduated from UC Santa Barbara in one of the first classes to attend the "new" campus in Goleta. She is the wife of Dr. Doug Davis, music professor at CSUB who is from Clinton, Tennessee. Add him to the list of local Tennessee transplants. He is takingn of leave of absence this year to work on some unfinished compositions and perhaps write some new material. She also told me that Matthias Kleinsasser, a merit scholar and graduate of Bakersfield High, just graduated from law school at the University of Texas at Austin. He was a viola player in high school who went to UC Irvine as a music major. His mother is Dr. Jeanne Harrie, chair of the history department at CSUB, and his father is Dr. Jerry Kleinsasser, a recently retired musicologist at CSUB.

 * ... HEALING: Good news from Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center in Las Vegas where Padre Hotel general manager Drew Hall is on the mend after a horrific jet ski accident. The 31-year-old was gravely injured last Tuesday when he fell off his jet ski in Lake Havasu and was run over by another ski. He suffered multiple skull fractures and may lose sight in one eye, but friends and colleagues say he is making a miraculous recovery. He is now in a private room, eating, getting out of bed and joking with nurses and his doctors. No word yet what kind of rehabilitation is in store but his co-workers at The Padre are anxious to get him back.

 * ... THIS IS SUMMER? Hard to believe we're in mid June and we continue to have these unseasonably mild weekends. Could not have asked for nicer weather for the annual Wine Fest, which was a huge hit, and all the restaurants around town seemed busy. Mild weather, water in the river, blue skies, not the time to be anywhere else than here.

 * ... PERFECT GIFT: Is there any better birthday gift for an empty nester than calls from your children? Knowing they are well and happy and hearing that familiar lift in their voices is all one needs.

 * ... BAKERSFIEDISM: You know you are from Bakersfield if "you drag raced on Acacia Avenue behind the cemetery."