Best of Ashland 2009 - People and Business

Edited by Curtis Hayden

It was 22 years ago that I single-handedly brought readers’ surveys to the Rogue Valley. I’d modeled the Sneak Preview after a weekly free paper in Denver, Westword, and their “Best of Denver” was an annual media event everyone looked forward to reading. I wanted to replicate that excitement.

I can still vividly remember the first “Best of the Rogue Valley” that the Sneak Preview conducted in Grants Pass in October 1987. The paper was a little over a year old, and I was wasn’t exactly sure how a ballot containing 70 different categories would be received.

The response was overwhelming, including one restaurant owner who walked into my office and handed me 200 xeroxed copies of a ballot in which he’d filled in the name of his establishment in every restaurant category. He then asked patrons to merely sign their names to the ballot.

It was so brazen I had to laugh, but it was also very dishonest. I grabbed one of the ballots and threw the rest in the wastebasket. “We’ll count this one,” I said. He got irate and threatened to stop advertising with me, but after an hour of philosophizing, I got him to recognize that his attempt at ballot stuffing was way over the line.

In January 1991, the Ashland Sneak Preview was only a couple of months old, and we published the first-ever “Best of Ashland.” Our readers responded favorably, and over the years it has grown exponentially.

This year’s response was over the top, as almost 400 readers sent in their ballots containing 144 categories. Why so many? Because we like to spread the wealth and recognize as many people and organizations as we can. Kudos to our readers for diligently filling in as many as they could.

While the results are a little subjective, we still employ our time-honored techniques to weed out obvious ballot stuffing. (Don’t ask us what those techniques are because if we told you, we’d have to kill you … or at least let you languish in Gitmo for ten years.)

Anyway, let’s get right into it … the Sneak Preview’s 19th annual readers’ survey, “The Best of Ashland.” Enjoy.