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.