Harry Caswell’s letter (“Go elsewhere than Dewey to sleep”) is offensive. He dismisses the entire town of Dewey Beach as an adjunct of the bars that are there and praises the bar owners for their sense of civic responsibility.   He lauds one businessman by name, and nickname, for “putting so much of his profit back to the community, along with other bar owners in Dewey.”

He fails to mention that the bar owners just successfully lobbied to prevent Dewey’s residents from voting on whether to add a small tax to these businesses to help pay for Dewey’s financial problems, the way the homeowners have agreed to a tax increase.  These financial problems, incidentally, were caused by these very businesses and their friends bogging the town down in lawsuit after lawsuit until it was financially unable to continue fighting them and gave in.

But most galling was his assertion that people come to Dewey only to drink. We have had a rental unit in Dewey for several years and not once has a prospect asked how close the cottage was to the bars and how many drinking opportunities there were. Quite the opposite; the question sometimes asked was how quiet our street is. Out-of-towners might like to drop into town to get plastered, but the people who live in Dewey do like their sleep.

If Mr. Caswell would care to publish his address we can gather outside his house when we feel like carousing and let him experience the problem firsthand.

Myron Beckenstein
Dewey Beach