Sweet's Funeral Home

Baker City at home, surrounded by his loving family. His memorial service will be Saturday, Feb. 23, at 2 p.m. at the Seventh-day Adventist Church, 42171 Chico Road in Baker City. Friends are invited to join the family for a potluck reception at the church following the service. Grover was born on Nov. 21, 1932, at Baker to Francis and Millie (Hall) Mann. He was raised in Baker and went to grade school at Churchill School then to junior high and on to Baker High School where he graduated in 1951. Grover met his lifelong love, Mary Jean Carter, in high school when he was 16 and she was 15. They connected completely and were married on June 29, 1952. Grover and Mary had three children, Dan, Dave and Sandy. Grover and his father, Francis, worked at their family’s business, Mann Plumbing, for 10 years before Grover took over the business himself. Grover ran the business until 1981 when he became a plumbing inspector for the State of Oregon and handed the business to his son, Dan, the third generation plumber in the family. Grover and Mary left Baker to pursue the inspector job in Newport. After three years there they moved to Corvallis, where they were the house parents at the Kappa Delta Sorority. Grover continued his inspection job and was the “house” maintenance man for seven years. Grover and Mary then retired to Lincoln City where Grover worked two days a week for the county as a plumbing inspector until his 80th year. Baker City was calling him to come home, so they packed up and came home! He loved going over to McDonald’s every morning and enjoying a cup of coffee with his buddies until his health failed him and he could no longer go. He belonged to the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Grover loved hunting, fishing, and being in the mountains. He was inventive and constantly doing something. Family was everything to Grover. Grover’s favorite catchphrases: “Sweets,” for his daughters and granddaughters; “Honey,&rd...

From this moment on, it’s going to be America first,” the new president said. “America will start winning again – winning like never before.” It was a strange speech, full of apocalyptic metaphors and odd assertions. Afterwards, Trump’s predecessor-but-one, George W Bush, was overheard saying: “That was some weird shit.” Earlier, on the podium, the now 72-year-old had struggled to put on his plastic rain poncho, ending up with it draped over his head. On the internet, this struggle and his comment on the speech were deemed to be “relatable”. The younger Bush provides an instructive lesson to other politicians: if you disappear from the scene, people will start to miss you. After leaving office in 2008, Bush retreated to Texas, where he painted saccharine portraits of terriers and took part in occasional charity fundraisers. In the absence of fresh outrages, and the presence of Trump, it was almost possible to become nostalgic for the Bush era. By last autumn, Bush Jr was getting positive headlines for passing Michelle Obama a cough sweet at John McCain’s funeral. Compared with the baroque godawfulness of Trump, he looked humane, civil and moderate. Notably, the McCain family did not invite Trump to the funeral. The two men began a long-running feud when Trump said the late Arizona senator, who had endured torture in Vietnam, was “not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.” (Trump got a deferment from serving in Vietnam because of bone spurs in his feet.) It was a typically sullen, mean-spirited comment from Trump. But Bush Jr, who gave a eulogy to McCain, committed offences against the late senator that were just as great, although further back in history. When the two men competed for the Republican party nomination in 2000, Bush’s strategist Karl Rove pioneered the concept of push polls. Under the guise of canvassing public opinion,...