Back to the Future

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Oct. 7, 2007

Chester County, one of William Penn’s original land subdivisions, turns 325 this year.
The Chester County Courthouse – that amalgam of buildings that occupies the center of downtown West Chester turns, by measure of its different annexes, new wings and awkward additions, 161, 115, 43, and 26 this year, give or take.

On May 12, I celebrated my 50th birthday. And on Thursday of this week, I will commemorate 25 years working for the Daily Local News.

They say that home is where the heart is, but they don’t really stamp with that idiom with an image of what that home should looks like. For my money, home stands about five stories tall, is made of part Indiana limestone, part brick and part Nova Scotia Pictou stone, and has a doorway that reads, “Justitia” above it. It’s got a clock tower on its top and a frieze on its side that features not only Yankee Hall of Fame pitcher Herb Pennock but also the Marquis de Lafayette.

I started covering news as a reporter/drudge out of the courthouse in the late 1980s, and moved there on a semi-permanent basis in the 1990s.

If you want to count numbers, I composed an estimated 1,200 stories during the six years I was at the courthouse regularly, covered 15 murder trials, sat in three different press rooms, and received about 18 haircuts.

The latter may not have anything to do with the quality of the news accounts I was giving at the time in the overall scheme of things, but certainly concerned my employers at the time enough so that the publisher would make a point of coming into the newsroom expressly to comment on length of my hair when it had retreated to a space above my shirt collar.

I began falling in love with the courthouse when I began covering the courts beat – trials, pleas, filings, legal arguments, lawyerly foibles, Judge M. Joseph Melody, etc. After awhile, I learned the rabbit warren of back stairways and basement tunnels that allowed me to get places where the normal person wasn’t going, and used that knowledge to spend my time avoiding work as much as possible by gossiping with some of the most interesting people you’d ever want to meet – usually while they, too, were taking a break from their underpaid, overworked jobs.

I knew I’d found a home the first time a judge heard me yawning and said to one of the lawyers in front of him, “If you can’t keep him interested, what do you think you’re doing to me?”

I say all this because The Management at the Daily Local News has seen fit to ship me back to the courthouse, presumably to continue where I left off 11 years ago.

I know I will miss my post as news editor, as much I know as the newsroom callers who asked me to send a reporter to their daughter’s school play will miss my polite responses, but I am looking forward to the changes that I know I will find, and to seeing once again the old faces who still populate the courthouse’s hallways and courtrooms and back stairways.

I see it this way: Home may be where the heart is, but it is also where the Motion to Dismiss is filed.