A Ramblin' Guy Rambles On

This column, published Dec. 28, 2008, originally appeared as my annual Christms Letter, in slightly different form.

It goes without saying that I'm a rambling sort of guy, but I'm going to say it anyway: I'm a rambling sort of guy. And I don't mean my conversational style.

Always on the move, I am. Never comfortable staying in one place too long, me. A highway junkie, I need the ol' white line. My life's motto is, "A rolling stone gathers no moss." Or, as Publilius Syrus put it, from the original Latin: "People always moving, with no roots in one place, avoid responsibilities and cares." (He had quite a way with the words, that Publilius.)

So when I discovered recently that I had been living at the same address for 26 years, the news took me completely by surprise. Are you sure, I asked? Can you check those dates again, please, because I'm a rambling sort of guy and to stick around that long in one location would not fit my particular, well, idiom. But they looked and there it was in black and white: I'd been living at the same address on South Church Street (The Best Street in Chester County) in West Chester since December 1982. You know, back when the Soviet Union still existed and the use of tobacco was condoned in public buildings.

So of course I had to move, which I did last week. Goodbye South Church, hello West Miner.

I started living at the top of a beautiful brick building on South Church Street across from the well-known Buffalo Bill Cody home and had gradually been working my way down the staircase over the years, so it was fairly well assured that I'd be out the front door at some point. Now just seemed the perfect time to roll away, seeing as I've noticed some green bryophyta developing in the spaces between my toes.

I started in an apartment on the front of the third floor, in a two-room place with virtually no furniture, a kitchen stuck in a corner much like an afterthought, and a small bathroom with a sheet-metal shower stall. After a spell in a third-floor rear apartment that in the summer felt more like "The Box" that the prison guards send Paul Newman to in "Cool Hand Luke when he misbehaves ("What we have here is a failure to persperate") than any other place on Earth, I ended up on the second floor in a four-room apartment that contained more in the way of cultural artifacts than you would guess a man of my age and situation could reasonably be expected to have accumulated. Or, as my landlord once put it, "You got a lotta clutter."

There is a mystical sort of symmetry — which happens to be my favorite sort of symmetry — in the place I am moving to and the place I am moving from. My new home is a two-room apartment on the third floor with a small bathroom — perhaps even smaller than the one I brushed my teeth in back in 1982. But this time I'll have plenty of furniture, and not the kind that was created by placing wooden planks across the plastic milk cartons stolen from area convenience stores — the statute of limitations for, I might point out, have expired.

And although I've spent far too long in that old place on South Church Street for a rambling sort of guy like me, I have learned a few things in the years I spent there. Such as:

It can take 150 years to grow the perfect sugar maple tree, but only a day to take it down.

Parking spaces will appear magically when it is raining and you've got a load of groceries in the car. They will disappear, however, when the meter maid is on the prowl.

Most importantly, the electricity will always stay on in a summer thunderstorm, but only on the other side of the street.

I wish all of you happiness in your homes in the coming year, and hope that you will wander by and see my new place sometime. Don't wait too long, however, because, well, you know me …

Case Closed, Opened

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Dec. 21, 2008

For those of you keeping track, I've got one mystery solved and another opened.

Don't know what I'm talking about? I refer you to the question I raised last week about a great slab of stone that sits quietly on the east side of North High Street across from the West Chester Golf and Country Club. It had no obvious purpose, with the possible exception of annoying me because I had no idea what it was. I am, after all, as news editor of the hometown paper, expected to keep on top of local items of interest, such as the reason behind West Chester's designation as the "Athens of Pennsylvania" (two locations on Gay Street that serve souvlaki, for those of you keeping score) or what the "B" in "B. Reed Henderson High School" stands for (I'm not telling, for those of you inquiring.)

I mentioned last Sunday that I could not divine what the stone slab was all about, and as luck would have it the following day two things happened: my telephone rang, and I picked it up to hear the gentle and thoughtful voice of Dr. F. Peter Rohrmayer.

Dr. Rohrmeyer has lived in West Chester since 1939 and practiced medicine here so long that by the day in May 1980 when he retired he had actually become pretty darn good, if not perfect, at the whole "doctor" thing. Dr. R informed me in his gentle and thoughtful way that the stone slab was not a slab at all but in fact the remnants of a horse trough that had been built by the person who owned the property along North High Street back in the days when horses were a regular sight on West Chester streets. He said that in years past, it had even been decorated at Christmastime, and that occasionally it would be festooned with flowers in the years after horses became its primary interest.

It's function, thus, was similar to the stone fountain that stands outside the Historic Courthouse a few blocks to the south, quenching the thirst of beasts of burden, and thus accounting for another place that state Sen. Andy Dinniman could have taken his pet (a labradoodle, as far as I can tell, for those of you wanting to know) dog for a drink if he had actually been alive in the 1890s.

But what Dr. R. really had to tell me about the old trough and fountain had nothing to do with the thirst quenching business, and all to do with a mystery that has gone unsolved to this very day.

It seems that on the top of the fountain was a bronze statue of a boy and a dog (no obvious relation to the current state senator from the 16th Senatorial District of Pennsylvania, for those of you checking your Pennsylvania Manuals.) Dr. R. said he remembers seeing the statue even after horses disappeared from High Street, until one day sometime after the end of World War II. Suddenly, the statue was no longer there. Gone. Stolen. Unlawfully removed without permission of the rightful owner.

The good doc related that the conventional wisdom at the time was that some miscreant had wrenched the statue from its moorings to melt it down somehow and sell the metal for whatever bronze was selling for in post-1945 West Chester. But, he said, one day before he retired he had a patient sitting in his office who told him the real story behind the theft.

The man, who Dr. R. said was in the plumbing trade, told him that he had a friend who had the statue sitting in his garage, plain as day. Being the gentle, thoughtful and lawfully minded general practitioner that he is, Dr. R. urged the man to come clean and go to the police with the information so that the statue could be recovered and returned to its proper place. But the man demurred and passed away without letting the doctor know the name of his (presumably) thieving friend.

So there you have it.

Somewhere, in some corner of Chester County, perhaps, sits a statue of a boy and a dog in a garage on top of a stack of old National Geographic magazines. And the folks who move it out of the way every now and again to get at the badminton set it blocks probably don't even know where it came from.

And that's a shame, for those of you taking notice.

Arcana Mania

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Dec. 14, 2008

I know what you are thinking.

You are thinking that because I moved to West Chester 26 years ago to the month and have departed only occasionally to get a taste of Skyline Chili in Cincinnati, Ohio, I must know pretty much everything there is to know about West Chester.

You’re thinking that when it comes to West Chester, I’m the guru, the master, the Mr. Know It All. That because I can pick up the telephone and dial the number to the office of West Chester Borough Manager Ernie McNeely without even looking at the buttons on the phone, that I’ve got all the bases covered, West Chester-wise.

You’re thinking that since I’m one of the few people in the world of West Chester arcana who not only knows that Thomas U. Walter designed the Historic Chester County Courthouse on North High Street in West Chester, but also knows what the “U” in Thomas U. Walter stands for, and that it is Glen Osbourne, the East Coast Wrestling Association Hall of Fame member, Class of 1996, who was born in West Chester and not Glen Osborne, the New Zealand rugby player, I must be about the smartest person in the galaxy when it comes to West Cestrian knowledge.

You are thinking that, and you are thinking wrong.

There is a significant gap in my knowledge of West Chester that was made apparent just this past week, and I am not too big a man to admit it. Driving past the West Chester Golf and Country Club (est. 1898, 9-holes, par 35, 5,700 yards, slope rating 126, 111 W. Ashbridge St., 610-696-0150) on Thursday I noticed a large stone slab on the east side of North High Street that I must have driven past hundreds of times but paid no attention to.

But what the deuce is it? I asked myself. It stands front and center of a semi-circular stone wall and is about the size of an extra large steamer trunk. It has levels and mantles that suggest that there was some purpose to it that is no longer active. Made of granite or some other deep grey substance, I first thought it must have been an altar of some kind that was used when the folks who settled West Chester (orig. Turks Head, after Turks Head Inn, est. 1747, stagecoach stop, house specialty mutton, prop. Jack McFadden) conducted ritual human sacrifice.

Kidding. That’s Coatesville.

It made me think of the small stone fountain (erected 1869, one spigot for people, one for horses, a little trough at the bottom Andy Dinniman’s dog) in front of the county courthouse, but what would Senator Dinniman be doing walking his dog across from the golf club? His game is squash, after all. Was it a stone bench for the High Street ‘Dinky’ Trolley (est. Nov. 10, 1891, terminates West Chester Normal School, see John’s, Jimmy: Hot Dogs for replicate)? Was it akin to the stone obelisks in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” whose discovery signals man’s progress? It was clear I had I had more questions than answers.

I could have take this as a sign that I’d hit the wall when it comes to West Chester knowledge, but I’m a hard-headed sort of fellow and am taking this as a challenge. So some time in the coming quarter century when I find out what this stone mystery is about I will get back to you and let you know just what it is.

In the meantime, just for the record, it’s Thomas Ustick Walter.

This Is What It's All About

This originally appeared on Sunday, Dec. 7, 2008

If you are looking for a good way to spend your morning you might take my advice and stop by the West Chester Public Library on North Church Street.

You want to time it just right, though, so you get there just about the time that the children’s reading group is breaking out in song. I cannot think of a better experience to put you in a good frame of mind than to sit at a table in the West Chester Public Library looking out on North Church Street while listening to children singing “The Hokey Pokey Song” in the next room, all the time surrounded by shelves and shelves of books.

Libraries occupy a special space in my memory, in the main because -- and I’m paraphrasing Willie Sutton here -- that’s where the books are. The Rellahan family had a reverence for books that was on par with the reverence some Italian families show for particular meatball recipes. A sketch my older sister (now a valued member of the library staff at the high school we both graduated from) drew once of our family shows a bunch of people sitting around a living room, faces stuck in open books. She was probably reading something while she drew it.

There was the Clifton Library at the corner of Ludlow and Ormond in Cincinnati where I got my first library card and paid my first overdue fine, and the library at Clifton Elementary School, which was located in the cafeteria and thus provided me the opportunity to nourish my stomach and mind at the same time.

The Clifton Library was a small affair, very similar to the community libraries here in Chester County, but when I was old enough to take the city bus downtown I made haste for the main Cincinnati library branch, a relatively massive, multi-storied building. School friends and I would make regular trips to the main desk there to request books that we knew were not on the shelves and would thus have to be delivered to us on a dumbwaiter-like affair up from the basement stacks., a particulary magical experience for an 11-year-old. Even now when I return to my hometown I am certain to stop at two places – the Skyline Chili parlor at Clifton and Ludlow and the used book store at the main library on Vine Street.

When I got my fist newspaper job in Sturgis, Ky., you could regularly find me killing time at the town library while I put off writing about the winner of the Miss Union County Fair contest or whatever the tops story of the week was. When I hooked on at the Suburban and Wayne Times in 1980 covering Tredyffrin, one of the first controversies I wrote about was whether to open a library branch in the (then) new Chesterbrook community. The supervisors ultimately decided not to, providing me with the first item in my ever-growing file of Stupid Political Decisions.

I find myself spending more and more time at the Exton Library these days, although fighting for space in the parking lot there is not unlike finding a seat at a Saturday matinee showing of “Twilight.” I also like the painting of barns that have been on display at the Hankin Library up north, and so I visit there occasionally even though it’s about a half an hour out of my way.

But the West Chester library remains my favorite of all. When I try to wonder why I find myself looking at the stained glass windows at the front of the century old building. There’s an inscription on one that shows faintly through the incoming sunlight. It’s from Bayard Taylor, Kennett Square’s famous poet, literary critic and -- oddly enough -- travel author.

“The healing of the world is in its nameless saints,” it reads. “Each separate star seems nothing, but a myriad scattered stars break up the night and make it beautiful.” I am not entirely sure I grasp its full meaning but, like the Hokey Pokey, I am fairy certain that that’s what it’s all about.

Thanks For Being An Adult

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Nov. 30, 2008.

Go ahead. Go ahead and be thankful for the bounty that has been laid on your table. Go ahead and be thankful for your family, friends and good neighbors. Go ahead and be thankful for your good health and the fact that that the sun still shines brightly and the grass is still green and the flowers at Longwood Gardens are still vibrant and colorful.

It is certainly all right with me if you want to give thanks for all those things. You have my absolute permission. I would not deny you your Pilgrim-given right to be thankful for those things, because they are fine things and worthy of gratitude.

But me, I am thankful for none of those things. I’m taking a pass on the bounty-family-friends-sun-grass-Longwood route. Me, I am thankful for Lawrence H. “Larry” Summers.

Yes, that Lawrence H. “Larry” Summers, the former secretary of the treasury, the former president of Harvard University, and, until recently, employed as the Charles W. Eliot Professor of Economics at the Kennedy School of Government. Mr. Summers made the papers this month when he was appointed chairman of the U.S. government’s National Economic Council by President-elect Barack Obama, and became a charter member of Obama’s team that will be given the task of pulling this great nation up by its bootstraps, financially speaking.

I am thankful for Mr. Summers and his appointment because of anything he believes in when it comes to economics. I have no sense of gratitude for whatever his past track record is, or whether he’s a supply-sider or flat-taxer or free market-supporter or trickle-up theorist. I am thankful for Mr. Summers because, frankly, he’s older than I am.

It was enough that I had to accept the fact that the man who’s going to be leading the free world in a couple of weeks just turned 47 in August. It was enough that I had to face the fact that the most powerful person on the planet not named Buffet (Warren or Jimmy) was going to be not only younger than me, but younger than my younger sister. It’s a little disconcerting to wake up to a world in which the guy they will be dedicating, “Hail to the Chief” to for the next four years is young enough that when he was in fourth grade I would have been perfectly willing, able, and justified in taking his lunch money.

But putting a guy in the Oval Office who’s younger than me by four years is the will of the people, and I stay out of arguments with the people, in the main, because there are so many more of them than me. But there I was looking at the bunch that was picked by Mr. 47-Years-Old to rescue my 401(k), and they were all post Baby Boomers. And that doesn't feel right.

If you are me, you don’t want a 47-year-old treasury secretary, like this Timothy Geither fellow. You don’t want a 49-year-old chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisors, like this Christina Romer person. You want someone who’s more grown up than you are, someone you can be certain knows how to balance a checkbook, someone like your Uncle Adrian who smokes a pipe and remembers rotary telephones. You want, frankly, an adult.

And that means they have to be older than you, or me, because you are well aware that you are not an adult. You are fairly sure that you are practically just out of college, for crying out loud, even though you recognize that most recent college graduates do not have gray hair or recent colonoscopies. You are certain that only adults know how to get countries out of economic meltdowns, and people who are younger than you are, sorry to say, not adults.

So I am thankful that Mr. Summers is there in Washington to let the kids know what they can and can’t do, and how best to save the country from utter bankruptcy.

And if you want to be thankful with me, go ahead and wish him a happy birthday. Because today Lawrence Summers turns 54.

Posted Monday, Nov. 24, 2008

No column this week, friends. Bumped by a series on guns, if you can believe it.

So instead, on to limericks!

There was once a man named O’Rourke
A much better lawyer than Bork
His greatest achievement
Beyond any believment
Was inventing wine bottles sans corks!


I knew an old woman named Sondra
Who had the most curious mantra
“You know you’re at peace,
When you’re covered in fleece,
And driving to work in a Honda.”


A college worker named Kate
Kept her friends’ favorite foods up to date
“Mickey D are all crooks,
So we’ll stick strictly to Brooks’,
And I’ll ship it to you if you’ll wait.”

There’s no one at all who is slicker
At getting in free than McVickar
“It so much more fun
When the payment is, ‘None”
And you still breeze by the turnstyle ticker

Feel free to join in at any time.

The Tribulations of Trials

This column originally appeared on November 16, 2008

There is a dirty little secret that we here at the Chester County Justice Center keep to ourselves, but one that I am afraid I can no longer contain. With the hope that my disclosure will not anger any of those in the criminal justice system that I pal around with -- to use a recent catchy urban slang phrase meaning, “having met once at a cocktail party” – I find myself wanting to come clean and share this confidence with you readers.

Trials are boring.

I have to tell you this because I’m tired of the lying. I’m tired of the deceit. I’m tired of agreeing with people who stop me in the street and ask, “Did you see that robbery trial the other day? Goodness, that must have been a thrill!” I’ve nodded and smiled and mumbled that it was the most excitement I’ve had since the Phillies won, when actually I’m thinking of my dentist saying, “Now this root canal may take a little time.”

Trials drag on too long, even when they are over the same day they start. Trials mean seemingly endless hours of sitting on uncomfortable pews and trying to strain an inch of drama out of whether the purse was in the woman’s left hand or right hand. Trials get in the way of a good story, as has often been said of the truth. Trials are, in their very essence, trials -- i.e., a state of pain or anguish that tests patience, endurance, or belief. (Thanks, Webster.)

I’m sorry to have to tell you this because I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking trials are the antithesis of boring. You’re guessing trials are to boring as McCain is to winner. “Trials are the most exciting, tense, mysterious, sexy thing to occur in the American jurisprudence orbit since the Magna Carta! I love trials! I’d watch them all day if I could. Give me your job!” you say.

Buster, you don’t want my job. The job you think I have is the one you dream of while sitting on the divan while watching one of the actors on “Law & Order” cross-examine Paris Hilton, the ne where you get all tingly as Atticus Finch delivers his summation to the jury in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” or tear up as Denzel Washington puts the screws to Jason Robards in “Philadelphia.” You want the job where you’re scribbling furiously as Tom Cruse tells Jack Nicholson he wants the truth and Nicholson howls, “You can’t handle the truth!”

You don’t want my job, because my job is scribbling lazily as a bright, motivated, articulate assistant district attorney asks Witness A if he or she can identify the contents of a manila folder labeled Commonwealth Exhibit 21-A and the witness drawls, “Yes, it’s a photograph taken of an empty parking lot with a White Castle sign in the background.” Thank you, sir. Now if you can turn your attention to the envelope that’s been marked as Commonwealth’s Exhibit 21-B…

The fun comes when one of the attorneys appearing in a courtroom decides he’s going to act like he or she is playing an attorney on television. “It’s acting!” you can almost hear them exclaim. They wave their arms and roll their eyes and speak directly to the jury during a witness’s testimony and ask questions like, “Do you remember where you were on the night of the 22nd?” They make things lively for about 15 minutes, until the judge in the case looks up at them and says, “Counsel, will you please turn off your television set?” Then, it’s Return to BoringTown.

Give me a plea bargain any day. You get the facts in brief, a quick recitation of the defendants sorrow for having run over the neighbor’s rose bushes, and if you are lucky, the judge will give the defendant a colorful lecture that makes for the kind of snappy copy that editors love.

For example, last week I heard a judge ask a DUI defendant step back from the lectern and look at the ground. What did he see? “My sneakers,” the defendant replied. “That’s right. And that’s the only transportation you’re going to have for the next two years, do you understand?” the judge said. Copy boy!

Meanwhile, down the hall the witness in the trial was being directed to look at the envelope containing Commonwealth’s Exhibit 33-C. It was a Mars candy bar wrapper, slightly torn.

Doing Something New For A Change

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Nov. 9, 2008

In 1972, Robert Redford starred in a film called “The Candidate,” in which he was cast as idealistic lawyer Bill McKay, who fights for the little man.

A man of integrity and charisma, McKay runs for high public office against an apparently overpowering opponent, but does it on his own terms, his way. Incredibly, he wins -- just like a certain someone you might have read about recently.

Anyone who knows movies knows the famous last line of the film, in which Redford, huddled with his advisors just moments after he has been crowned the winner, looks at them and says, “What do we do now?”

With Barack Obama’s historic, perhaps unlikely, surely enthralling victory in the presidential race on Tuesday, there are a lot of people repeating that line over and over. But it’s not Obama that I’m worried about – he’s got plenty of people on hand to answer the question for him, if he asks it. The people on my mind are, frankly, us. Or as Barack would put it, you.

On Tuesday I stood in line waiting to vote with Constant Reader Linda From West Chester, who poured out her soul to me as we inched closer to the ballot booths. The deadline was coming, the election would soon be over, and she was going to have to find something else to occupy her time come Wednesday morning.

For more than two years, she’d been glued to the tube after dinner, wrapped up in the news, eyeballing every hidden nuance in the election that glimmered on the screen. She watched O’Reilly, Olbermann, Maddow, all the debates, Chris Matthews at West Chester University, every viral YouTube video she could get her hands on. The election coverage was like air: it enveloped her, gave her life, never let her down.

And now all that was being taken away. She looked as if someone had run over her favorite dog.

Linda is not alone. There is me, for instance. For months I have established a regular routine when I signed onto my computer at work (don’t tell The Management.) I checked my e-mail, filled out my Facebook status, and headed right to the bookmark labeled, “Political Stuff.” The next 30 minutes or so was a blur of jumping from one site to the next: Huffington Post, Real Clear Politics, Daily Kos, ElectoralVote.com, PolitikerPA, Political Irony, you name it. I didn’t feel complete until I had consumed all that there was to be had at each site. I was lifted up or shot down with every posting.

On Thursday, however, I sat at the computer and opened one of those sites and stared at the screen blankly. I realized that there was nothing of interest there for me anymore. I’d seen the movie’s end and had no use for the credits.

So here’s the answer to candidate McKay’s question. Here’s what we’re going to do now.

1) Check out the fall foliage. I have it on the highest authority that this year is the best in the past 50 for autumn colors in Chester County. Not only are there yellows and reds, but there are also oranges and pale greens and crimsons scatted all over the hills from Nottingham to Warwick. My suggestions for the best place to “leaf peep” are the hills above Coatesville on Oak Street, and the west window on the fifth floor of the Chester County Justice Center.

2) Volunteer for a day at a local agency. You don’t have to put in much time, but you’ve got a couple of hours a day on your hands now that Hannity & Colmes are as outdated as Currier & Ives. Call the folks at the United Way of Chester County for help in finding a place to work. They love to help.

3) When was the last time you went to the Brandywine River Museum? It’s still there, you know, and it is just as peaceful and inspiring as it was the last time you walked its floors. Plus, if the day is nice enough you can sit outside and watch the Brandywine Creek glide by, which is in many ways better than anything on Fox. Or CNN. Or MSNBC.

4) Don’t look at the calendar. 2012 is only 1,147 days away.

Spirited Young People Celebrate

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Nov. 2, 2008

So, anything unusual happen around here last week?

I mean, besides the fact that the authorities had to call police into West Chester from as far away as Kuala Lumpur to help calm the display of exuberance expressed by the folks in town who wanted to properly commemorate the World Series victory by the Phillies Wednesday night. I don’t know about you, but for me nothing says sporting achievement quite like the words “overturned car.”

What happens if something else exciting happens in the world of Philadelphia professional athletics? Animal sacrifice? Spontaneous human combustion? Cats and dogs living together? Democrats sweeping the Chester County Courthouse?

My neighbors and I could hear the crowds cheering the Phils from the front porch of our place on South Church Street and I briefly considered walking the few blocks to join in the celebration. Good thing I didn’t, because apparently part of the admission to the event was a predilection for removing street signs from their moorings, presumably because they make good wall art when you’re on a limited budget.

I did find the whole matter good light reading in the paper at breakfast in Penn’s Table Friday morning, however, after the dust had settled and West End Towing had cleared the streets of upside down motor vehicles. Our wise colleague Jennifer Miller described the going on in her perfectly understated way: “For the most part, the chaos involved spirited young people publicly expressing their joy for the major win, both outside bars on Market, High and Gay streets and in the 500 and 600 blocks of South Walnut Street, where many West Chester University students reside,” she wrote.

The emphasis here, obviously, is on the adjective “spirited.”

My friend and former colleague Sondra Roberto, who broke both stories and hearts when she covered the cops for the Local in the mid-1990s, was appalled by the news, but for her own particular reasons. "There was a time when the only drunks who frequented downtown West Chester were journalists and lawyers and cops,” she wrote after the news broke. “The college-aged fools stayed in their place across town."

Welcome to the new West Chester, Sondra -- the destination spot of southeastern Pennsylvania and the perfect place to visit when you want to pick a fight with a K-9 officer, as one “spirited young person” reportedly tried to do.

According to Jennifer’s story, West Chester Police Chief Scott Bohn said afterwards that his department “anticipated a crowd after the game but was hopeful illegal activity would not occur.

"You certainly plan, and we had expected there was going to be a number of people, but I'm disappointed in the destruction of property," Bohn said. "While you expect anything and everything, I was hopeful that none of that type of activity would occur."

Sort of like Gen. George Custer hoping the Cheyenne Nation just wanted to give a shout out to their homey, Sitting Bull. Bohn can take heart that no other municipal police department in Chester County reported any major disruption after the Phils won. West Chester, it seems, is where folks come when they want to be taken into custody.

When I moved to Pennsylvania in 1980 the Phillies won the World Series for their first time in their history, so I feel a certain affinity for them. My friend Jamie was, and remains, a major Phillies fan, and he taught me the essence of fanaticism during their stretch drive for the pennant and the championship. He takes a back seat to no one when it comes to being overcome with joy when the Phils do well, and morose when they don’t.

But unless I miss my guess, all of the cars on Jamie’s road in Chester Springs still remain grounded on their four tires and the stop signs are still attached to their poles. Family members in his household remain uncharged.

Oh, and for you officers from Kuala Lumpur just arriving: the specials at Penn’s Table are great.

DNA Rape Case Closed

I first wrote about this case in August, and I thought readers might be interested in the follow-up. This appeared on Thursday, Oct. 30, 2008


WEST CHESTER – A man who had been accused of the kidnapping and rape of a young West Chester area woman in 2003 after DNA tests tied him to the incident four years later entered pleas in the case moments after his trial opened Wednesday.

The combined no contest and guilty pleas will see Alex Villa sentenced to 15 to 30 years in prison, according to the terms of his agreement.

The prosecutor in the case had told the jury in his opening statement that the trial would not last long, but even he did not foresee that it would be over in less than an hour.

“I’m glad the victim was spared from testifying,” said Deputy District Attorney Stephen Kelly, who prosecuted the case. “But I didn’t conceded anything for that reason. We were prepared to go forward.”

Villa pleaded no contest to rape, but guilty to charges of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, kidnapping and robbery of a motor vehicle.

His attorney, Amparito Arriaga, said Villa had always maintained that he had neither raped the woman, nor had he forcibly stolen her car. But she said that as Kelly went to his office to bring the victim to the courtroom after her opening statement -- during which she conceded that he had forced himself into the car and made the woman perform oral sex on him -- he informed her that he wanted to enter the pleas. She said he did not indicate what had changed his mind.

“It was his decision,” Arriaga said. She said she reminded him of the possible prison sentence he could receive if he was found guilty at trial. “That was of great concern. I didn’t offer him any new advice. But I think it was a fair resolution for all involved.”

The victim, who was prepared to testify, left the courtroom while Kelly was reciting the facts of the case to Judge Anthony Sarcione, who was presiding over the abbreviated trial. She made no statement, but indicted she would speak when formal sentencing occurs in 90 days.

Villa also offered no statement to the court or the victim.

The sequence of events began around midnight on May 31, 2003.

According to Kelly in his opening, the then 20-year-old school teacher, who lived in West Goshen at the time, was driving home when she stopped at a red light at High and Market streets in front of the Chester County Courthouse.

“Little did she now she was about to embark on a journey that would forever change her life,” Kelly said in his opening.

She saw a man approach her car, Kelly said, but felt safe because her doors were locked. Unfortunately, her passenger window as rolled down, and the man reached in and unlocked the door and jumped in.

The man, who did not speak English, motioned for her to give him a ride. The woman, whose name is being withheld by the Daily Local News because of the nature of the crime, thought if she drove him someplace he would leave her alone.

But the man became more confrontational and eventually directed her to a cul-de-sac in outside the borough, where he tried to grope and kiss her, Kelly told the jury of five men and seven women. There, she ran form the car, but he grabbed her b the hair and dragged her back into the car.


“She knew this as not going to be good,” Kelly said. “Nothing good was going to come of this.”

The man took the wheel, and while driving around forced her to perform oral sex on him. At some point she was able to call 911 on her cell phone and cry for help, but the man broke the phone and threw it out the window.

He eventually parked the car, pinned her in the passenger seat and raped her, Kelly said.

But when the headlights of an oncoming car distracted him, the woman was able to free herself and run towards the car. The motorist, Dan Vietor of Thornbury, saw her running towards him, half naked, and pulled over to help. The man drove away in her car.

Kelly said the car was found in West Chester a few days later, and police found a cap that belonged to the assailant, as well as part of the broken cell phone.

Police were not able to identify the rapist, however, until a DNA match came in May 207 tying Villa to the case. Villa had been arrested in late 2006 for dealing drugs, and as part of his guilty plea in that matter gave a DNA sample. That matched DA taken from the brim of the cap found inside the car.

In June 2007, West Chester Sgt. Louis Deshullo and Detective Scott Whiteside then traveled to the prison at Camp Hill on June 22, 2007, where, using a court interpreter, they interviewed Villa. Deshullo said Villa acknowledged he had jumped into the woman’s car after drinking beer and wandering around West Chester.

“I asked her if she wanted to have sex,” police said Villa told them during the interview. “She said no and started hitting me.” I may have hit her as I was trying to get her to stop hitting me.”

In accepting Villa’s pleas, Sarcione said he was compelled to comment on the events described by Kelly.

“The violence that you inflicted on this victim is unspeakable,” the judge said. “What you did to this young lady is every woman’s nightmare.”

Villa, a Mexican national, will be evaluated by the state’s Sexual Offender Assessment Board for status as a sexually violent predator before his formal sentencing. A deportation detainer had been lodged against him, so that as soon as he is paroled on the rape sentence he will be returned to Mexico.

Dismissing the jurors around 12:30 p.m., less than three hours after they began listening to the attorneys’ opening statements, Sarcione thanked them for the relatively brief time they served, telling them the case had been resolved.

“I feel kind of bad, though,” he said. “We didn’t even give you lunch.”

What A Reporter Wants

This originally appeared on Sunday, Oct. 26, 2008

You readers might think that we in the news reporting dodge would fight like tigers over the chance to cover a story like a presidential candidate coming to a West Bradford youth athletic facility to deliver a rousing campaign speech -- at which the candidate stirred the passions of his audience by declaring, “I need your vote.”

You might think that such an assignment would rouse us from our normal “cops-‘n-councils” drudgery and motivate us with a sense of excitement and First Amendment-y awe to rival any scene in “All The President’s Men,” and that, in addition, we would actually look like Robert Redford or Dustin Hoffman while covering it.

You might think that we would approach the task of reporting such an event with the same seriousness of purpose as would a firefighter at the scene of a burning schoolhouse, a policeman running down an armed bank robber, or a Republican National Committee staffer shopping at Saks Fifth Ave. for that “just-so” perfect Valentino pants suit to add to Sarah Palin’s soon-to-be-donated-to-charity wardrobe.

You might think that, but you would be wrong.

Reporters do not like covering campaign events. We do not like standing in big rooms with crowds of sweaty people, being herded around like sheep, forced to write down meaningless phrases that someone else wrote, all the time wondering how we were going to be able to keep our eyes open at the computer while we re-type those same meaningless phrases into a story.

Reporters secretly envy the people who go to the campaign rallies to actually rally, instead of transcribe. We envy them because for them, when the rally is over, it’s over. They can go home, heat up a burrito, turn on “Dancing With the Stars,” and if someone asks them how the rally went they can say, “fine,” just like that, and no crusty old editor is ever going to look at them and shout, “I send you out there for three and a half hours with two photographers to fill six columns and a 72-point headline and all you’ve got for me is ‘fine?’ ”

No, we reporters like news stories such as the one that hit the wires last week, dateline Jackson, Mo.:

“A man who left about $1,000 in $20 bills in an unzipped vinyl bag on a desk at his home is expected to be reimbursed after mice mutilated the cash. The man left the cash on the desk, but misplaced it during severe weather in March. He eventually found the bag, and in August took it to First Missouri State Bank in Jackson in hopes of covering his losses. Bank manager Michelle Johns said Wednesday she and two staffers picked through rodent droppings and bird feathers in the bag and reassembled the bills.”

Give a reporter an assignment that includes the phrases “$1,000 in $20 bills” and “rodent droppings” and you’ve given him the greatest Christmas present Santa ever conceived.

October marks my 26th anniversary covering current events for the Daily Local News. I’ve covered presidential campaign rallies, Ku Klux Klan marches, murder trials, open space referendums and Coatesville City Council before it became dysfunctional. My favorite story, however, is none of the above.

My favorite story is the one about the guy from Phoenixville who got mad at his neighbor for calling the police about a loud beer party he had at his apartment. The next day, the neighbor confronted his accuser in the backyard and pointedly took off the t-shirt he was wearing. Tattooed un-mistakenly across his chest were two words that are commonly used to describe, in vulgar terms, the act of human reproduction -- one a verb, one a pronoun.

He got 90 days probation, a $50 fine, and a reporters’ undying affection.

Blue Book Special

This has never appeared anywhere in print.

Sorry, Constant Readers. No column this week due to unavailability.

I crashed the Class of 1978’s 30th reunion at Earlham College, at which a fine time was had by all, except those of us who were held captive for 45 insufferable minutes by the college president, whose name I promise I will never remember, not only because he tried to shame us into giving the school free range over our checkbooks and retirement funds and those of our children and our children’s children during a fundraising pitch, but also because at a reception later in the day he introduced himself to me not once but twice, obviously having forgotten my name or face in the intervening five minutes between our first and (hopefully) last encounters.

The highlight of the weekend (for me, that is, not for anyone else) came when I was walking into the decorated gymnasium, with its grainy black and white photos of Mike O’Rourke in his soccer shorts for said luncheon and felt someone grab my elbow. Turning, I was greeted by a 50-ish woman in a red dress who said, “Michael Rellahan, it is such a pleasure to read your columns every week in the Daily Local.” She was a West Chester person and apparently recognized me from the photo that goes with the Sunday column. Either that or she’s seen my mug on the Post Office wall, in its semi-permanent frame under the heading, “Parking Ticket Scofflaws.”

I didn’t tell anyone because (1) I was too startled to know that I cannot escape from my own fame, (b) no one I was with would believe me anyway and, (iii) I wanted to keep it a secret until I could share it with you, my Constant Readers.

So here is what we would call on the second floor of Carpenter Hall an “essay test.” “What would be the biggest thrill for you at your 30th reunion, depending on whether you have/or have had, one?” Give examples. Show work.

Until next week.

My Thoughts of Trains

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Oct. 12, 2008

I do not know why I’ve been thinking about passenger trains so much in the last week.

Strike that, as we like to say in court when we want to take something back. I actually do know why I’ve been thinking about passenger trains so much in the last week, but I’m not going to tell you. I initially thought I would use that earlier bit of obfuscation to distract you, but I checked with the editors and it turns out I am not allowed to lie in print. Unless, of course, I am writing about the new Coatesville city finance director’s qualifications, and then the sky’s the limit.

But I have indeed been thinking about passenger trains lately, mostly about how much I love them and how I haven’t had the pleasure of taking a trip on one in quite a while. It’s something that I miss.

My fist rain rides came early in life, when my mother would put my sisters and me on a train in Cincinnati for a trip to her family in little Batavia, Ill., an hour or so west of Chicago. The train was called the James Whitcomb Riley, after the once famous “Hoosier poet” who celebrated all sorts of Americana. (Did you know that he wrote a poem called “Little Orphand Annie” that was the inspiration for the carton character of the similar name, and that years later my one-time neighbor in Cinncinnati, Sarah Jessica Parker, of “Sex and the City” fame, played Annie on Broadway? I didn’t either.)

I loved the fact that the train we rode on to see my mother’s aunts and uncles was named after a person, even if I did not know who that person was. I loved that when you tried to walk on the train, you swaggered back and forth like you were three sheets to the wind, and nobody minded because they were lurching around as much as you. I loved the peculiar aroma that came from the dining car and the fact that the tables had tablecloths on them and the silver water pitchers had small beads of water perspiration on them.

I also loved the fact that when we got to Chicago, we had to walk across town from Central Station, where the Riley came in, to Union Station, where we would catch the Chicago & Northwestern commuter train to Geneva, Ill., which was just up the Fox River from Batavia. I loved the fact that the commuter trains had an upper seating area where you could look down on the heads of passengers who were taking the train home after a hard day of work in Chicago.

As a grown up, I’ve ridden trains to Washington, D.C., and home to Cincinnati. I’ve ridden trains to New York City and to Boston. I’ve ridden trains to Philadelphia and Trenton, N.J. I’ve ridden a train from Dublin, Ireland, to Galway and from Sligo back to Dublin. I rode a train home from Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1992 after personally witnessing state Sen. Andy Dinniman wearing a tuxedo. I rode a train back to Exton from Lancaster, where I heard uber-lawyer Richard Sprague argue a case on behalf of Judge James P. MacElree II in March 1997.

In the courtroom that day, I listened to the argument Sprague made and interviewed him afterwards, then walked a few blocks to the Lancaster train station and hopped the Amtrak Pennsylvanian in the late afternoon. I sat in a seat facing back towards Lancaster as the train rolled towards Chester County.

I thought about the story that I was going to have to write when I got back to the office, mapping out the lead paragraph and mentally going over what to include in the story and what to omit. I looked out the window of the train and saw the sun going down over the farm fields of western Chester County that were furrowed with the promise of the coming spring. I’ve ridden in a lot of cars and flown in a lot of planes in my life, but I’ve never enjoyed the peace of travel as I did that day.

Losing A Small Town Voice

This column originally appeared on Oct. 5, 2008

Two years ago this month, I traveled to Hobart, Indiana, to help celebrate the 50th birthday of an old college friend.

Dan and his wife Sandy have known one another since high school, and together have raised three near-perfect children (daughter Lisa tends to go a little heavy on the cell phone calls to Mom, but what are you going to do?) The kids all go to the same school that Dan and Sandy graduated from, and where Dan, who I met the first day of my college career, played football. When I arrived that Friday in October, in fact, everyone was anxiously anticipating the playoff showdown between the Hobart High “Brickies” and their cross-county rivals.

The game (which the Brickes won, by the way) was broadcast on the local radio station, WEFM-FM. While we sat in Dan and Sandy’s living room and caught up with one another that evening, Sandy made regular trips to the kitchen to tune in for the score and then touch base with various family members by phone, generally seeing who could voice the biggest distaste for the opposing squad and its hated head coach. The scene struck me as a slice of small town American life that we sometimes think no longer exists, but really does.

I’m telling you this because up until last week, that same scenario regularly played itself out in living rooms and kitchens across Chester County on Friday nights or Saturday afternoons (except the part about me being present.) High school football fans tuned in to West Chester-based WCOJ-AM and caught the action in Ches-Mont games, as broadcast by Bill Mason and John Aberley, cheering on their alma maters and heaping scorn on the opposition.

It is unlikely that will happen anymore, now that WCOJ has been sold, down the river, to a religious programming radio system that intends to air Catholic-oriented shows. Holy Spirit Radio laid off all the employees of WCOJ on Tuesday, and has not indicated that it intends to keep any of the current programs, including the football broadcasts.

Truth be told, I didn’t listen to WCOJ very much. I appeared on broadcasts a couple of times, discussing court stories with Steve Karp and current events on “Circle in the Square.” I didn’t tune in to the Ches-Mont broadcasts because, frankly, I don’t have a dog in that fight. But I know my friend Nick swore by WCOJ’s Phillies broadcasts, and that the folks at the D K Diner viewed it as an invaluable resource for finding news stories to argue about over eggs and sausage.

And it made me feel good about the community I live in, knowing that WCOJ was out there touching people’s lives from Pottstown to Oxford with information from the sublime (Ron’s Swap Shop) to the ridiculous (The Paranormal Café). Say what you will about the county’s last remaining local radio station, WCHE-AM, but it certainly lacks the geographic reach and broadcast signal of its former neighboring rival.

The loss of WCOJ’s local programming isn’t going to be a topic of discussion at the next presidential debate, but I would like it to be. I would like to tell the candidates how the little chips at our sense of community eventually add up to a large feeling of displacement and loss. I would like to make sure they know how important it is to our small world to hear the voice of the local morning broadcaster let you know what the weather was like outside your very own window and whether school was going to be canceled because of it.

Mostly, I would like to tell them that being able to catch up on the Downingtown East versus Downingtown West score at halftime is just as valuable as listening to someone deliver a sermon.

It's not Just Us At The Justice Center

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Sept. 28, 2008

The Chester County Justice Center has only been open two weeks now and I can report that one thing is clear: The place appears haunted.

Let me rephrase that: The place has a disembodied voice, eerie optical effects, and long, cavernous hallways that remind you of the corridors leading to Room 237 at the Overlook Hotel in the movie version of Stephen King’s “The Shining.” So while it might not be technically haunted, it does have some extra features the commissioners didn’t figure on when they ponied up $100 million plus for the place – much like getting the 10th anniversary DVD edition of “The Big Lebowski” wrapped up in a bowling bag.

Not to worry, though. There are many buildings in Chester County with worse poltergeistian problems than those we are discovering at the Justice Center. At least the howls of prisoners haven’t started plaguing the building, as they do on the full moon at Pennhurst State Hospital. But we can live in hope.

Now, some may say that there are perfectly reasonable explanations for the parapsychological phenomena we’ve noticed at the building, but as for me I tend to brush such reasonable explanations aside. I would much rather think of the place as existing on a supernatural plane. It’s so much easier to explain to my bosses why I haven’t gotten anything done today if I can refer to “the haunting.” They normally don’t have a quick reply for that.

So first, the disembodied voice.

It was initially heard in Courtroom 12, the home of Judge Anthony Sarcione and, coincidentally, the first courtroom to open for business in the new building. I was not there, but I am told that as a defense attorney and court translator were going over a guilty plea with a defendant who didn’t speak English, a voice could clearly be heard coming from the bench -- even though Sarcione was in his chambers and his chair was empty

“Madam, could you please button your shirt,” the voice intoned.

Not exactly, “Redrum, redrum,” or a foreboding howl from Jacob Marley, but starling nonetheless.

You may want to believe that the voice as actually that of Judge William Mahon, who occupies the courtroom directly a floor above from Sarcione’s and who regularly uses a wireless microphone to make his voice heard in the far reaches of his domain. And you may want believe that said wireless is – oops! - programmed to the same frequency as the speakers in Sarcione’s courtroom. And you may even want to believe that at the time the voice was heard Mahon was, in point of fact, telling a slightly disheveled defendant that a view of her décolletage was not helping him decide her case.

I would never begrudge you a pathetic clutch at the rational. We who have a broader mindset, however, are comfortable accepting the presence of the paranormal in our everyday lives.

What you will not be able to deny, however, is the spooky view of the historic courthouse clock tower as seen from the Justice Center’s sixth floor.

Stand in the middle of the hallway outside Judge John Hall’s courtroom and look east. The clock tower appears to fill the edges of the window. Now start to walk towards the window. As you do, the clock tower actually grows smaller as you approach – receding from view as you draw nearer. Try it for yourself the next time you find yourself waiting to throw yourself at the mercy of the court and see.

You may cry “reverse perspective,” but I prefer “demonic possession” to explain the illusion.

And don’t get me started on Courtroom 13.

Honey Just Allow Me, To Give You One More Chance

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Sept. 21, 2008

I know what you're thinking. I know that you're thinking that this is the last Sunday of the summer, that autumn officially starts tomorrow, and that the calendar thus indicates that this must be the date of the ever popular-slash-dreaded West Chester Restaurant Festival.

And you are also thinking that I am going to lecture you about how much we "real" West Chester folks — as opposed to those pikers who walk around town wearing "Dub-C" T-shirts — really don't like the restaurant festival and consider it an event more endured than enjoyed. Sort of an open-air colonoscopy, with crab cakes and crowds.

You are thinking that I am going to tell you how I would rather sit and listen to state Sen. Andy Dinniman describe the machinations of the state budget process, without bathroom breaks, than try to walk down Gay Street today after noon, when the festival is in full swing. That you would no more find me at the festival than you would find a wild elk in Elk Township. That I'm going to hunker down someplace as far away from West Chester as possible without spending more than $50 on gas until the crowds of soon-to-be unemployed Lehman Brothers executives have gone back to MortgageForeclosureLand.

But dear readers, that was then and this is now.

It is the season for change. I know that this is the season for change because every time I turn on the television and listen to the radio, a junior U.S. senator from Illinois or a senior U.S. senator from Arizona is telling me that. Change is no longer something you dump in a bowl with your car keys, but something you have to embrace, something you have to hope for, something you have to accept like it was a birthday card from your Aunt Louise.

So change we must.

This year, I'm going to give the restaurant festival another chance, even though I'm not certain it really deserves it. I am going to open my heart and take the festival back in, like a ex-girlfriend who dumped me on my birthday and now finds that she needs a ride to the airport. I'm going to allow it to make up for past transgressions, and to look for the shining pearl in the center of the grimy oyster.

Who knows? Maybe I will find that the restaurant festival isn't really all that bad. Maybe it will be the same as when I got tired of eating Indian food and vowed that I would never eat it again, that Indian food was the worst food on the planet, that I would no more eat Indian food than I would ask a Lehman Brothers executive for a sub-prime mortgage -- only to find years later that I really like Indian food, and could you pass the chicken tikka, please?

I am, after all, capable of changing. I am not so stuck in my ways that I would avoid going to the restaurant festival just because I ridiculed it in the past. After all, if John McCain is capable of embracing tax cuts that he once denounced, and if Barack Obama is capable of backing off a pledge to take public financing, than I am certainly capable of standing in line for 35 minutes to order a crab cake the size of an iPod Mini and paying $7.50 for the privilege, and enjoying myself in the process.

No matter what you think.

Courthouse Memories, The Final Chapter

This column originally appeared on Sept. 14, 2008


The deputies were taking Bruce Johnston Sr. from the courtroom to a waiting van outside the courthouse to take him back to state prison. He’d just sat through another in the seemingly endless series of hearings on his appeals over his six murder convictions, and my editor at the Daily Local News had sent me over with a spare camera to try to get a picture of the infamous killer.

I spotted the group on the second floor making their way to a set of back stairs that no one used. I had just enough time to run down the front marble staircase and scurry down the hall, fumbling with the camera to get it out of its case. Seeing their heads disappear down the stairway, I leaned over the railing above them and shouted, “Hey, Bruce!”

Handcuffed and in a prison jacket, he looked straight up at me on the landing above, and I snapped one shot.

The picture appeared in the paper the next day. It was grainy and not entirely in focus, but the light above him left two shining white dots in his eyes as he stared directly into the lens. He looked exactly the way you would think a man who would order the shooting of his own son to look: demonic and scary.

That’s my first and best memory of my years in the historic Chester County Courthouse, which I’ve covered off and on since the late 1980s. In case you hadn’t heard, they’re moving the courts to a new county Justice Center (Motto: “It’s Not The County Prison, But You Can See It From Here”) down the street. The movers took all the stuff from the courtrooms Thursday, leaving only an eerie ghost town-like vibe to the place. Which, I suppose, is why memories came flooding back as I waited out my last jury in the courthouse Friday afternoon.

I remember standing outside the magnificent confines of Courtroom One near the end of the first Andrew Byrne trial in March 1992. Pat Carmody, the lead prosecutor in the highly publicized case, was getting ready to deliver his closing argument, in which he would try to convince the jury that John Duffy, the attorney representing Byrne and one of the county’s most gifted closers, had got it wrong. Every seat in the courtroom was taken, with people lining the sides and rear or the room. Carmody was pacing nervously and with a sigh looked over at me.

“I knew I should have been a film critic,” he said. The jury found Byrne guilty.

I remember some choice comments from the bench, sometimes directed at me. Although judges have largely gotten used to seeing me come and go from their courtrooms, some wonder why I choose to visit them. “Slow news day?” Judge James P. MacElree II usually inquires when he sees me sitting in the front row with only a DUI or two on the docket. “Is there something going on here that I should know about?” Judge Phyllis Streitel asked me the other day as I settled into a seat in her courtroom.

Once, a lawyer had been giving Judge Robert Shenkin a not-very-brief recounting of his view of the law and I kept ducking in and out to see if the next case, the one I was interested in, had begun. “Look,” Shenkin told the attorney in mid-sentence, “if you’re boring the press, what do you think you’re doing to me?”

On Friday, I snuck into a hallway from Courtroom Six’s jury room to the courtroom itself, and poked my head into the half-dark emptiness. It was a view I’d never seen before -- from the bench towards the gallery – and is what a juror sees when he or she is about to render a verdict on another human being. It is a picture I’ll keep in my head for a long while.

All Things Must Pass

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Sept. 7, 2008

Judge Anthony Sarcione’s chambers were a bit of a mess last week when a visitor stopped by to say hello. Dead smack in the middle of one trial and getting ready for another one, he was in the process of packing boxes for the move down to 201 West Market Street and his new digs in the soon-to-be-occupied county Justice Center.

Sarcione wasn’t too busy, however, to display for his guest one of the marvels of his chambers he would be leaving behind: a ceiling-high bookcase crammed with legal texts dating from the earliest days of the Chester County Courthouse. Taking one leather-bound volume down from the top shelf, he opened it to the title page where the signature of Judge William Butler (1822-1909) was scribbled alongside a date from the 1860s. Sarcione, and his guest, stood in awe of the way history always catches up with you around here.

But that does not mean times – and judges – have gone unchanged at the corner of High and Markets in West Chester. That thought struck me Tuesday as I stood outside the front steps of the historic courthouse and watched a gathering of judges and attorneys pose for a farewell picture.

The last time anyone took such a photo was in 1967. In that black and white shot, only one woman is present – Helen Wade Parke, standing crowded between two male colleagues in one of the back rows. In the group assembled Tuesday, there were four women judges – including the front and center figure of President Judge Paula Francisco Ott, the first person with two X chromosones given the pleasure of riding herd over our Common Pleas Court.

There were lots of female attorneys standing there too, including the head of the county Bar Association, in that second group, and people of color as well, something not found at all in the 1967 assembly. And although there are familiar faces in both shots – I counted eight who appear in both 1967 and 2008 versions – the hair they display is of a different shade.

It is not, however, simply the gender or the hair color of the judges who serve today, but the way they carry out their duties. The jurists in the 1960s were men who focused their sights largely on the letter of the law and the way it applied to those who came before them. Human nature was not generally their concern. If you were guilty, you went to jail; if that didn’t straighten you out, well, you went to jail for even longer.

Not any more.

On Thursday, as evidence of this, I sat in Judge William Mahon’s courtroom for a session of Drug Court, the intense program that attempts to prevent non-violent drug users and alcohol abusers from becoming dead-end criminals. In one case, a young man from Downingtown arrested for drug possession fought mightily against having to go into an in-patient treatment program, saying he could do better on the street, on his own.

Mahon was having none of it, and spoke to the defendant like a cross between a stern uncle and a licensed addictions counselor. He sought the help and participation from the young man’s frustrated and emotional parents, who stood up and lay open their family pain as if on the set of an episode of “Oprah,” but without commercial breaks or tidy endings. In the end, the young man agreed to go into treatment instead of risk a trip to prison, and Mahon thanked the parents and they thanked him.

In 1967, I thought, that no more would have happened in a Chester County courtroom than a chicken would have driven the sheriff’s van back to the prison. And as much as I am sure Mahon values his law degree, I’ll bet he wishes he’d taken a few more psychology courses at Fordham.

The books in Sarcione’s chambers are going back to what may have been their original home, the judge’s chambers in Courtroom One, first open for business in 1848. There they will stay preserved, as impressive today as they are irrelevant.

The Lady On The Sign

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Aug. 31, 2008

Not many people ride in my car.

It’s not that I‘m a bad driver. I am a good driver, despite the complaints of some of my fellow motorists who simply haven’t gotten used to the fact that single lane roads can at times handle the presence of two cars going in the same direction at the same time in approximately the same location, the laws of physics notwithstanding.

It’s mostly my personal situation, being a single father of none, that keeps my car in the passenger free zone. The soccer moms out there who probably keep an extra kid or two hanging around in the stockroom just in case they have to get in the minivan and their actual children are not anywhere to be found may not understand this, but some of us are just naturaly unaccompanied when we jump behind the wheel.

It is not that I don’t want to have someone else in the car. I wouldn’t mind having someone else in the car, keeping me company, so long as they kept their paws off the iPod and their comments to themselves when I start singing along to Tom Waits and drumming the steering wheel like John Bonham of Led Zepplin. Because, after all, there are times when we want a human connection alongside us as we motor from place to place.

And that, I should explain, is how I became enchanted with the Lady on the Hospital Signs.

You, of course, know the one I’m talking about if you’ve been driving anywhere in the Chester County area in the past two years. She’s the smiling doctor/nurse/medical technician who looks out from behind the message, “Ahead of the curve. And just around the corner.” She has been smiling at us from advertising billboards and road signs, enticing us with her seemingly refreshed, breezy bedside manner and just exuding this air of professional healthiness.

The first time I spotted her over there on East Marshall Street in West Chester, I knew exactly where I wanted to go when, or if, I got sick. By the third or fourth time I saw her, I had started making plans on how to get just ill enough to be admitted into her presence, but not so out-of-sorts that I couldn’t throw off some charming witticisms that would impress her oh-so-healthy heart.

There I was, hoping to make come human connection as I drove along alone in my Subaru Outback, and there she was, waiting to welcome me to the emergency room or the surgery room or the ambulatory care unit or wherever it is that she worked. We were made for one another.

What captivated me was the whole casualness of her. In the photo, she just stands there, arms crossed and stethoscope slung jauntily around her neck, telling us with her big dark eyes that she doesn’t make judgments about how badly we might have been taking care of our bodies, that she’s just there to be a friend, a healer, a caregiver. And to make sure we don’t feel too intimidated by the fact that she’s a dozen times smarter and healthier and better paid than we are, her hair is sort of mussed up, as if she’s too down to earth to constantly check her coif in the mirror.

Hey, you have to have something to occupy your imagination while you’re driving alone. Some people dream of winning the Daytona 500; I’ve got the Lady on the Hospital Signs.

So recently I figured I would call over the hospital and find out what floor she worked on so I could arrange to be admitted there with some non-life threatening ailment and begin the process of chatting her up.

And didn’t I learn the cruel truth? That the object of my adoration is not a doctor at the hospital, not a nurse at the hospital, not a med tech or a rehab specialist or an EMT or an occupational therapist, but a standard issue model who was paid to pose for that photo.

My dreams were dashed, my hopes quashed, my plans for the future disposed of like a used latex glove. The passenger seat in my heart was, once again, empty.

Behind Cloak Number One Is ...

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Aug. 24, 2008

Shall we recap? We shall.

Earlier this month we posited that the leaders of West Chester had, and we put this as gently as we possibly could, lost their emphatically qualified marbles. That instead of staying straight on the Reality Expressway, they had taken the first available exit for Non Compos Mentisville. That they had collectively started dressing up as the Emperor Napoleon and were anxiously planning a late summer vacation to the Funny Farm.

That is, they’d gone crazy.

Why? Because of their decision to join the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission’s effort to promote places like Bristol, Collingswood, N.J., and Lansdowne as “Classic Towns.” It’s billed as a way of marketing the borough as a place to live, getting its name out there in the public’s eye so that it does not fall off the map. Sort of like Jessica Simpson appearing in ads for that beer in Dallas, except without the blonde curls and shiny teeth.

I argued — quite convincingly, I might add — that the last thing West Chester needs, besides Jessica Simpson bringing the freshmen at West Chester University a couple dozen six packs, is more people. People we’ve got. People, check. Adequate parking spaces, convenient Cincinnati chili parlors and nearby public swimming pools, no; people, yes.

What I wanted, I wrote, was for the good folks at the DVRPC to devise a strategy for keeping people away from West Chester, possibly using some sort of cloaking device that would render the borough invisible so newcomers to the area, driving south of King of Prussia on Route 202 looking for a good place to spend the rest of their lives, would end up buying real estate in Modena.

Ask, sayeth the Lord, and ye shall receive.

The same day that my thoughts appeared in this space, the Associated Press reported that scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, announced that they were a step closer to developing materials that could render people and objects invisible.

“Researchers have demonstrated for the first time that they were able to cloak three-dimensional objects using artificially engineered materials that redirect light around the objects,” the AP said. “Previously, they only have been able to cloak very thin two-dimensional objects, like Jessica Simpson’s summer reading list.”

OK, I added that last part. But it is clear that researchers are well on their way to providing the technology that would allow us to keep West Chester more to ourselves than the “Classic Towns” folks would have it. This is great news, because heretofore I understood that the soonest the cloaking technology was going to be available was sometime in the mid-23rd century, and then it was going to be used exclusively by the Romulans to hide their Battle Cruisers until they were ready to fire their Plasma Torpedoes at the starship Enterprise. Or some such thing.

Think of it. Gone would be the need for another tedious version of “Landscapes” to protect our open spaces. When suburban sprawlers came knocking, we just wouldn’t be home. And there would be other uses that we could put the cloaking device to, I’m sure. Flip the switch and — blink! — there goes that unsightly new condo development across the street. Crank the handle and — whizzo! — gone are those annoying political signs left along the roadside. Fire that puppy up and — shazzam! — no more having to look at the line of cars stretching out before you on Route 202 on your way to work.

And more to the point, one turn of the knob and — presto chango! — goodbye Jessica Simpson.

As The Sun Sets Over the Courthouse...

This column originaly appeared on Sunday, Aug. 17, 2008

As the summer comes near its close, we look at the symbolic winter of the Chester County Courthouse. Within weeks of this writing, the halls here will be empty, the courtrooms vacant, the prisoners' lock-up void of its normal inhabitants. By the time we celebrate Halloween, our daily quarters will be blocks away and years ahead. The Justice Center awaits, shiny and new, unexplored territory.

In the meantime, the quest for justice in the old building moves on.

Or at least most of the time.

Over in Courtroom Five, Judge Thomas G. Gavin has just noticed an old familiar face sitting in the pews. It’s veteran defense attorney Paul Rubino, looking harried. “Why aren’t you off somewhere working on your tan?” Gavin wants to know.

“Not me,” Rubino sighs wearily. “Everyone else at the office is on vacation, and I’m left to slave like a dog.”

“Oh my. Poor you,” Gavin commiserates, the barest hint of sarcasm dripping from his voice. Rubino wants to know when he can squeeze in a guilty plea on Gavin’s trial schedule for a client he just picked up. Not next week, Gavin warns him; the judge will be away.

“I’ve got to work on my tan,” he smiles.

In Courtroom Three, however, there is real work to be done – at least while everyone waits for the deputies to bring up the next prisoner. The task at hand today is complex, but timely: a critique of the best event so far in the Beijing Olympics. One attorney picks the synchronized diving; another chooses the on-going Michael Phelps medal saga. But Judge James P. MacElree II knows what it is he really wants to see.

“How about synchronized belly-flops?” he opines from the bench.

Imagine two great oxen of Olympians jumping off the diving platform in tandem, twirling their way ever downward side-by-side, and flat-lining on their bellies on the calm surface of the pool at the exact same moment, MacElree says dreamily. No penalties for a big splash in that contest. In fact, the Japanese team would likely score winning rounds every time just by putting their top sumo wrestlers on the squad, he predicts.

The judge is rolling now. It would be, he says, like a skit from “Saturday Night Live” with John Belushi as the contestant. You could get defensive linemen from the NFL and power forwards from the NBA to compete in a Dream Team of belly busters to bring back the gold from Tokyo. Points would be added if your trunks came off and …

Oops, there’s a defendant shuffling into the courtroom.

“What is your name sir?” MacElree instantly intones, his voice now a model of judicial decorum. “Have you had adequate time to speak with your able counsel?”

Meanwhile, in the semi-stately, oak-paneled confines of Courtroom Two, Judge David Bortner has some serious business to discuss with his two assistant district attorneys, Andrea Cardamone and Cristin Kubacke. There’s a open week coming up for Courtroom One this month and if they put together at least one trial there’s the possibility they might get to try the last case in that stately space before the move to the new digs.

It would be a historic “last,” said the rookie jurist who was sworn in just eight months ago in that same courtroom. But we have competition, he advises the pair; Judge Ronald Nagle might have a trial and he could also put in a claim on the space.

And so it comes down to which of the two newest judges on the bench will have the last go round on the county’s grandest bench.

Don’t push it, Bortner counsels the prosecutors, If you’re going to get a guilty plea, take it, even though a plea can come in any of the shoeboxes they call courtrooms around here. History would be nice, but...

“The pursuit of justice comes first,” Bortner concludes.

Contrary To Ordinary

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Aug. 10, 2008

I do not mean to be a contrarian.

My aim in life is not to be contrary. When I have an idle moment, I do not plot out ways to be contrary. When I was 8 years old and I was hanging out with the guys in my second grade class and we were discussing what we wanted to be when we grew up – fireman, policeman, white collar criminal -- I did not offer up the notion that no matter what the other aspects of my eventual career – spiffy uniform, cool company car, fat pension benefits, five weeks paid vacation, etc. – I wanted to make certain I would be able to get in arguments with people at the drop of an opinion.

So please do not take what I am about to say as the ranting of someone who just wants to take the opposing position, no matter what. It just comes natural with me.

Are the people who run West Chester crazy?

Last month, West Chester Borough Council Vice President Charles A. “Chuck” Christy got together in a room with a guy dressed up like Benjamin Franklin and signed a “Declaration of Classic Towns” to launch a regional marketing campaign developed to spotlight 11 communities across the Delaware Valley as “desirable places to live, work, play and prosper.”

I have few hard and fast rules in life: Always over-tip. Always pick the Phillies to lose. Never buy a hamburger from someone dressed as a clown. And never involve yourself in an event at which there is a man dressed up as Ben Franklin. It can only lead to no good.

So with Ben in the picture, immediately I had my reservations about this “Classic Towns” effort. As I understand it, some folks in the borough are going to pay the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission good money to go out and talk up West Chester so that more people come and live and work and play and prosper here. "Every year hundreds of thousands of people relocate and choose where they will live," said Barry Seymour, executive director of the DVRPC. The “Classic Towns” program "will help the communities market themselves (and) become the communities of choice."

To which I rejoined, “And that’s a good thing?”

For the life of me, I have not noticed that West Chester faces a shortage of people choosing to live here, or work here, or – and the folks who listen fondly to the wolves howling on High Street after midnight on weekends will bear me out on this – play here. I have not noticed that there are gaping holes in the retail market here. I have not noticed that the borough’s landscape resembles that of a ghost town.

As far as I can tell, we’re fine. We really don’t need any help in letting people know that we’re on the map. If we did, we’d only have to turn to Brandon “Bam” Margera, who would gladly go on national cable television and vomit on the “Welcome to West Chester” sign, or whatever, and we’d have free marketing for a year.

Here’s what I want. I want to create a regional marketing campaign to get people to stay away from West Chester. I want to keep them from coming into the borough at all hours of the day and night, clogging up the streets, begging for parking meter quarters, jamming the lines at the Growers Market on Saturday mornings, and driving up the high cost of locally produced beer. I want the DVRPC to devise a way of cloaking West Chester so that people driving south on Route 202 looking for good places to spend the rest of their lives end up buying real estate in Modena.

Some people say this sort of attitude is close minded, chauvinistic and small. I say: “To the contrary.”

DNA "Hit" Identifies Rape Suspectz

This story originally appeared on Monday, Aug. 4, 2008

WEST CHESTER -- The crime is a woman’s worst nightmare: to be abducted by a stranger at night while driving home alone and then to be repeatedly sexually assaulted.

But the way police began solving the case was law enforcement’s modern dream come true: to get a “hit” on a convicted felon’s DNA sample in the state police database.

It took more than four years to the day of the crime, but in July 2007, police arrested drug dealer and part-time landscape laborer Alex Villa and charged him with rape, kidnapping and other offenses.

Villa, 26, who lived in West Chester before his conviction on drug charges and is now an inmate at the State Correctional Institution in Camp Hill, had been scheduled to go on trial in front of Judge Anthony Sarcione today. His case was continued until September, when his attorney said she expects the case to come to a conclusion.

“I’m not sure how it is going to be resolved, but it is going to be resolved (next month),” said West Chester criminal defense attorney Amparito Arriaga.

Although not predicting the outcome of the case, the lead prosecutor said in comments before the case was continued (because of medical issues that the alleged victim is dealing with) that he felt confident as well that it would be resolved.

“This is the first time I’ve had a case with a DNA hit,” said Deputy District Attorney Stephen Kelly. “I was very happy to see technology work in this case.”

The sequence of events began around midnight on May 31, 2003.

According to court documents, West Chester police say the victim — a 21-year-old school teacher, who lived in West Goshen at the time — was driving home, when she stopped at a red light at High and Market streets, in front of the Chester County Courthouse.

There, a man she did not know forced his way into the car and asked her to give him a ride. She refused and tried to call 911 on her cell phone, but the man overpowered her and broke the phone, throwing it out the window.

Over the next several hours, the man forced her to drive outside West Chester, making threatening gestures that he would kill her. He repeatedly attempted to forc her to perform oral sex on him. After no success, he eventually forced her to have sexual intercourse.

The victim told police she was finally able to get away from her attacker and run from her car. Partially clothed, she flagged down a passing motorist who found her on Route 926, several miles from the site of her abduction.

The next day, police found two things — the car the victim had been driving at the time of her abduction and, inside it, a baseball cap the woman said her attacker had been carrying with him when he jumped into her car.

As part of their investigation, the investigators, led by Sgt. Louis Deshullo of the West Chester police, cut an area on the brim of the hat and sent it to the Pennsylvania State Police’s Bureau of Forensic Services DNA Laboratory in Greensburg, where it was assigned to lab number L03-02489-1.

Four years went by.

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In January 2005, law enforcement authorities began collecting DNA samples from each person convicted of a felony in the state. Prior to that, only sex offenders were required to give up DNA samples.

According to the county’s deputy director of Adult Probation, Jody Carlini, in Chester County, DNA samples are taken either by probation officers or corrections officers at Chester County Prison or, in some cases, staff of the state Department of Corrections.

The samples used to be secured by drawing blood from the offender, but that process caused concern about blood-born diseases, and the probation department routinely called in staff from the county health department to get the samples.

State police now supply DNA sample kits that are easy to handle. The kits contain a fingerprint card, an identification form for the offender’s name, Social Security number and other personal data, as well as two sealed buccal, cheek, swabs.

The offender is directed to open the swab — which looks similar to a home pregnancy tester — and put it inside his or her mouth, next to the cheek. The offender then drags the swab against the soft inside of his or her mouth eight times on one side, then with another swab eight times on the other side.

The swabs are then sealed in a polyethylene evidence bag and sent with all accompanying information to the Greensburg DNA lab. If the felony offender refuses to do the test, those taking he sample are authorized to use force to retrieve it, Carlini said.

Don Blosser, the director of scientific services at the state police DNA lab, said last week that since police began collecting DNA samples in 1996, there have been thousands and thousands submitted for storage and recording. Every month, more come in; every month, there are more tests to see whether the samples match any DNA taken from a crime scene throughout the United States. The system by which all the samples are collected and compared is called CODIS — the Combined DNA Index System, and it is run by the FBI.

The process of ordering DNA samples has become a staple of any formal sentencing in Common Pleas Court, either in the case of someone who has pleaded guilty to a felony or who has been found guilty at trial. The DNA order is so commonplace that it sometimes is signed by a judge almost as an afterthought.

It was just such a boilerplate order that Assistant District Attorney Michelle Frei submitted to Judge Howard F. Riley Jr. on March 6, 2007, in the case of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania vs. Alex Villa, CR-4633-06.

Villa was pleading guilty to two counts of possession with intent to deliver a controlled substance. The case against him was remarkable if only because of its ordinariness: Villa had twice sold crack cocaine in April 2006 from his apartment in the 200 block of West Chestnut Street in West Chester to an undercover police officer working with the Chester County Municipal Drug Task Force.

Because the weight of the drugs in one of those sales exceeded a certain measure, the case against him was classified a felony — even though the crack was only worth $100. Villa, an illegal immigrant with an eighth-grade education, who could not speak or write English, was sentenced to two to four years in state prison; afterward, he would likely have been deported.

The DNA samples were taken by the staff at Chester County Prison and submitted to the state police lab.

In mid-May, 2007, the state police lab prepared lab report L03-02849-2 and forward it to Deshullo, who was still investigating the rape case from May 2003. What the state police report showed, Deshullo states in an arrest affidavit, was that the unidentified DNA profile he submitted four years earlier from the brim of the cap found in the victim’s car after the alleged rape “was found to be consistent with the DNA profile of a convicted offender from the state of Pennsylvania, to wit, Alex Villa, alias Alejandro Blaques.

Police, finally, had a suspect in the rape.

XXXXXXX

The “hit” was a major break in the case, Deshullo said, but not the only piece of evidence used to charge Villa.

“It is a start on building a case,” Deshullo said last week. “But you’ve still got to be able to show the motive and the criminal action. Just because there is DNA at a crime scene doesn’t mean you committed a crime.”

Police were able to obtain other physical evidence, including a photograph of Villa wearing the cap found in the car.

Deshullo and Detective Scott Whiteside then traveled to the prison at Camp Hill on June 22, 2007, where, using a court interpreter, they interviewed Villa.

In his arrest warrant, Deshullo said Villa acknowledged he had jumped into the woman’s car after drinking beer and wandering around West Chester.

“I asked her if she wanted to have sex,” police said Villa told them during the interview. “She said no and started hitting me.” I may have hit her as I was trying to get her to stop hitting me."

At some point when the victim tried to escape, Villa said he was able to drag her back into the car and take the wheel. “I made her give me oral sex,” Villa continued. He said the victim kept yelling and hitting him the entire time they drove around. At some point, he said, when he stopped to have sex with her, she ran from the car and flagged a motorists down, so he drove away.

On July 12, 2007, Deshullo asked for a warrant for Villa’s arrest.

“It’s a great database,” Deshullo, a veteran West Chester police officer, said of the DNA lab. “But when you get a hit that doesn’t end things. That just allows you to start.”

"Crossing" A Bad Bridge

This column originally appeared on Aug. 3, 2008

It was old, corrupt Noah Cross who laid down the law (in the film “Chinatown”) on how detestable things can grow more accepted over time when he told private investigator Jake Gittes, “ 'Course I’m respectable. I’m old. Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”

But I don’t think that any amount of time is going to help the new bridge over the Brandywine Creek on South Creek Road in Cossart.

The new bridge was erected — and when I say erected I mean it in the most bureaucratic, industrial sense of the word imaginable — to replace the old Pylesville Twin Bridge. The Pylesville span was nothing remarkable, and it was certainly crumbling. If there ever was a bridge in Pennsylvania that deserved the classification “structurally unsound,” the Pylesville bridge would certainly be the Barack Obama of bridges: a leading candidate.

But it had its own certain charm, probably because it had, as Cross put it, lasted long enough. It was built in 1925, when guys with first names like Harris and Coulson were county commissioners. It had none of the rural grandeur of the nearby Smithsbridge Covered Bridge, but from a distance it fit in with the surrounding scenery, and it looked at home rising over the Brandywine. I’m guessing it was named after Howard Pyle, the artist who introduced his student N.C. Wyeth to the Chadds Ford area.

I don’t know if the new bridge has a name. It shouldn’t have a proper name. It is too ugly to deserve a name, and certainly not one given in memory of a famed American illustrator. It should be referred to solely as “County Bridge No. 83,” like No. 6 in “The Prisoner.”

When I say ugly, I do not mean ugly like some architect had an idea for a new span that just didn’t pan out, an idea borne of an overdose of chicken tikka and brussels sprouts. I mean ugly like being devoid of any thought of beauty whatsoever, there only to serve the function of keeping the cars passing over it from plunging over the edge of the road into the tranquil waters of the Brandywine below.

The bridge looks for all the world like the cement barriers dividing the lanes on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

That is a tough inspiration to live up to, but the bridge does have one thing going for it: It makes a lovely tabula rasa for graffiti. Which is nice, because when tourists come to Chadds Ford to explore the Wyeth milieu, the one thing we want to make sure they see enough of is spray paint on concrete. “Oh look, Martha, it’s like ‘Evening at Kuerners!’ With gang tags!”

I am hoping that this is all just temporary, and that the real new bridge will be built now that Gov. Rendell has decided to spend billions of dollars for bridge replacement and let the commuters on Route 202 rot in hell, or the weekday rush-hour traffic jam, whichever is worse. The real new bridge, I’m hoping, will be designed by a true architect and will make all the surviving Wyeths weep with pleasure.

And it will be a pleasure once again to drive over the Brandywine on South Creek Road, making your way to SIW Vegetables (“Open 7 Days 10-6; Saving the world one ear at a time”), where they still sell the county’s best sweet corn and let you sign an IOU for your produce if you accidentally left your wallet at home.