The Down East Seniors Club held its March 23 meeting at the Blind Center of North Carolina in Washington. President Ed Hamrick led the meeting. Jim Hackney played for the singing of “God Bless America,” and Ed Bolen gave the invocation. Dick Paul provided humor.

Bill Cheshire introduced Brownie Futrell, publisher emeritus of the Washington Daily News. Futrell related the events that led up to the 1989 discovery by WDN staff that the city water supply contained an excessive amount of a cancer-causing material. Even though city officials had known about this for a few years, they had not done anything about it because the water met existing regulations for cities of less than 10,000 population. As a result of the publicity from the newspaper articles, the U.S. EPA changed their regulations to cover cities of less than 10,000. There were 40,000 of these communities across the country. The newspaper won a North Carolina Press Association award for best public service reporting because of these articles, so they decided to enter them in the 1990 Pulitzer Prize competition. They were awarded the Pulitzer in 1990 and were the smallest newspaper to receive the award. They also received three other national awards for this reporting.

Bob Diefendorf won the 50/50 drawing.