Forks: Not As Scary As Tacoma

A list recently came out naming the most crime-filled places in Washington. Tacoma was voted the crimiest. This came as a complete shock to absolutely no one, with the exception of maybe some of the residents of Aberdeen who thought they had it in the bag this year. Aberdeen is scary, but not like Tacoma.

If you find yourself in Tacoma, keep your windows up, doors locked, look straight ahead and do not make eye contact with anyone. Most importantly, do not let your kids turn around and make faces at anyone. That’s how people get shot.

Or at least that’s what I heard when I was a kid anyway.

To their credit, the powers that be in Tacoma have been trying to work on their reputation. Unfortunately, as everyone from a small town knows, reputations do not go away easily. Statistically speaking (and there are lots of studies that back this up), Ebola is easier to get rid of than a reputation is … and sometimes more pleasant to have.

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This is depending on the specific reputation of course. Sometimes reputations are so thickly engrained that one must move far away and start fresh. The best chance that Tacoma has of being known as anything other than a crime-filled stink-hole would be to move far away from Tacoma and start over.

For the record, Forks didn’t make the top 50 list of crimiest places in Washington. This isn’t to say that we aren’t crimey. We just aren’t as scary as places like Tacoma.

By the way, that would be a fabulous marketing line. “Forks; not as scary as Tacoma!” Forks Visitors Center, feel free to steal that one. Aberdeen Visitor Center, you’re going to want to go with something like, “Aberdeen; slightly better than Tacoma, but we’re working on that!”

Though Forks didn’t make the top crime list, we did make another one.

Forks was listed as one of the top five small towns in Washington. So what does this mean? This means that Forks is indeed the same nice little town that it used to be, despite everyone saying, “Forks just isn’t the same nice little town that it used to be.” Forks is still a great town after all!

However, it seems that some of our residents wear rose-colored glasses to look back into the past. My grandma once told me that the teenagers in her day used to tip over outhouses. All I’m saying is that I’ve never known anyone in my time who did that … The fact that we don’t have outhouses is beside the point.

Clearly the youth of Forks in the 1940s and 1950s were a bunch of criminal hoodlums. They would have fit in better in Tacoma or at the very least, in Aberdeen.

Questions? Comments? More secrets about the youth in the 1940s and 1950s? E-mail me at christyrasmussen@yahoo.vom. I’ve got lots of dirt!