This column originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 25, 2009.
Everyone has rules in life. Call your mother on Mother's Day. Take the shopping cart back to the cart corral. Never buy the first newspaper in the stack. Always park the car with the headlights facing out. Never buy a hamburger from a person dressed as a clown.
One of my rules is to always live near famous people. I've been at it for more than 50 years, and it's served me well.
These famous people may be dead at the current time, to quote "Perfesser" Casey Stengel, but frankly it's my rule and I can position the exception to it any way I darn well please, thank you very much. They need not even be famous at the current time, but as long as there was once a connection between them and the outside world that meant if you mentioned their name in polite conversation the other fellow would not look at you with a sense of bewilderment, I'm good.
Like my current neighbor, Smedley Darlington Butler.
I'll get to him more in a moment, but first I wanted to take you back to the early 1970s, when I first began propagating this rule. That was the time period when the family next door to our house in Cincinnati included a young girl who my sisters and I called Sarah and who you now call Sarah Jessica Parker.
Yes, that Sarah Jessica Parker. The "Sex and the City" star. The second "Annie" on Broadway Sarah Jessica Parker. And I'm talking about the Hollywood Sarah Parker, not the Chief Justice of the North Carolina State Supreme Court Sarah Parker. She and her family — three brothers, two sisters, a mother, stepfather and beat up old VW Microbus they never drove — lived next door to my family before she hit it big. (Trivia: SJP's first television appearance was in a local half-hour Christmas special of "The Little Match Girl." We watched it like it was Obama's inauguration. Not to spoil things for you, but her character dies in the end. Don't ask me why.) She moved to New York when I was in college, so I never got the chance to say goodbye.
It certainly should be obvious to the readers of this column that for more than a quarter century I lived in a house across the street from Buffalo Bill Cody and Claude Rains — although unlike my association with Sarah Jessica Parker, I never was afforded the opportunity of playing "Kick the Can" with either Messers. Cody or Rains. (More trivia: SJP was much better at "Cry Wolf" than "Kick the Can." Don't ask me why.) They had both long since shuffled off their mortal coils by the time I arrived in town. Cody wintered at the red brick mansion in the 300 block of South Church Street around the turn of the century while his Wild West Show played uptown, and Rains lived in the 400 block at the intersection with West Dean Street after his days of performing in films as the Invisible Man had come to a fortunate end.
To be sure, the selling point my new landlady pitched to me when she told me about the spot that was to become my new home had nothing to do with its nearness to fame. She was selling availability, not proximity. But for those of you without a proper sense of history, Smedley Darlington Butler was the Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf of his day.
He was born in West Chester to a prominent Quaker family and grew up to become one of the country's most decorated Marines. He served in China, Honduras, in World War I. He uncovered the alleged Business Plot to overthrow the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a military coup, and wrote a book called "War is a Racket." He had not one, but two nicknames, "Old Gimlet Eye" and "The Fighting Quaker." (Trivia: The nickname of my college basketball team was "The Hustling Quakers," although we lost games with stunning regularity. Don't ask me why.) He lived in the 200 block of West Miner Street and so, now, do I.
Thus, when I sit on the porch and gaze across the street I know I am looking not just at a red brick house with anonymous tenants, but at the concrete realization of my life's rule: make a neighbor of someone famous. So thanks for having been around, Smedley. (Trivia: SJP once starred in the movie "Dudley Do-right," the villain of which is named "Snidley." Don't ask me why.)
Monday, January 26, 2009
Monday, January 19, 2009
Exit Andy
This column originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 19, 20009
I had not been working at the Daily Local News for very long when the managing editor, Bob “Shoe” Shoemaker, handed me an assignment that struck me as impossible. I had to get in touch with Andrew Wyeth and record his comments on some or other award he was set to receive.
I looked at Shoe with the sort of look that reporters give their editors when their editors tell them to do something that any person with half a functioning brain should know is just not ever going to happen. “Get Sandra Day O’Connor on the phone and ask her how she’s going to rule in that anti-abortion case? Sure, chief, but first let me turn this lump of coal into the Hope Diamond. I’ll get back to you.”
But Shoe was adamant. I needed to get Andy on the horn ASAP. How in the world was I ever to do that, I asked. “Look him up in the phone book. He’s listed,” Shoe told me.
No way. No how. Can’t be, were my first three reactions -- the only ones printable here in a family newspaper. This is the guy with his own museum, for pity sakes. This is the man who created “Christina’s World,” the masterwork that had hung on my wall as a teenager in
But I did what I was told and picked up the phone book and looked under the “W’s.” And there he was, in black type, Wyeth A, somewhere between “Wyerman” and “Wygent.” And so I picked up the phone and dialed (remember, this is the mid-1980s and the ever cost conscious DLN, and yes, we did still have rotary phones) his number. It rang, someone picked up the other end, I asked for Andrew Wyeth, and he said, “Speaking.”
I thought of that day and that call Friday, or course, when the news came that Andy died in his sleep at age 91. You might be excused for thinking it fitting for him to pass away in his sleep, since the “removal into dreams,” as one critic I read put it, had so much to do with his work. I think primarily of “Night Sleeper,” the wonderful study of Wyeth’s dog, Nell Gwyn, lying on a sofa, her head pressed against a pillow and the moonlit Brinton’s Mill in the background, a painting that he said had come to him on a nocturnal walk about his home.
Or “Master Bedroom,” another of a dog fast asleep, this time on a large bed with a white bedspread and a pale blue sky through an ancient window. And finally, “Spring,” the wonderful landscape of an old man lying in a field while the snow melts around him and brings him back to the world of the living. Sleep is where magic can occur in our everyday worlds as we remove ourselves into dreams, and the best of Wyeth’s works were nothing short of magic.
I am sorry that Andy had to die, but also a bit relieved that he did. I think his beloved world around Chadds Ford and the Brandywine Creek valley has lost a bit of the character he captured, and don’t know whether its move into the modern world disturbed him the way it disturbs me. I love the dry brush painting, “Roasted Chestnut,” but its view of a youth on a dirt road selling that particular treat does not strike me as a scene one would find along the back byways of Chester County today.
I once wrote that there must be a category somewhere in the register of Chester County Citizenship Requirements that dictates that you have to have at least one Andrew Wyeth Moment in your life if you are to truly count yourself among the truly blessed. That is, a time when you, or someone close to you, have a brush with the most famous painter ever to eat at Hank’s Place on Route One. I’ve had my share over the years, including the aforementioned telephone call, but my last one didn’t involve meeting or seeing or talking with Andy.
My friend Julia and I visited Andy’s family home, there off
I didn’t move to
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Being A Good Newspaperman
This column originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 11, 2009.
Like any good newspaperman, I have my share of secret sources, those people who call me on the telephone using hushed voices to relate information that otherwise would not see the light of day, leaving it up to me whether to investigate further in the cause of freedom and justice or to put the notes in a stack of press releases from the public relations firm that believes the next Pulitzer Prize-winning story is the one involving their client, the Roto-Tiller Cultural Institute and Dramatic Society, of Modena.
And like any good newspaperman, I keep the identities of those secret sources anonymous, refusing to tell anyone, even them, who they are, not even if compelled to by a court of law. New York Times scribe Judy Miller, who went to jail to protect someone who had actually told her it was all right with him to say his name in public, has nothing on me. I would gladly be incarcerated to protect the sanctity of the reporter-source relationship, especially because I am under the distinct impression my landlord will forgo any rent due while I am an official Guest of Her Majesty, as we like to say around the Chester County Justice Center.
So like any good newspaperman, I am not going to divulge the identity of the secret source who I spoke with last week and who informed me, somewhat breathlessly, that he had witnessed …
What? I thought. Official corruption? Bribes being passed between obscenely rich land developers and municipal codes enforcement officers? Text messages describing illicit encounters between high-profile county elected officials and certain cocktail waitresses who wore Dolly Parton-esque wigs? What was he spilling the beans about?
… a Bald Eagle flying down Route 322 outside Downingtown.
I may have not gotten the story straight at this point, so forgive me if what I am reporting here today is not as accurate as I normally demand of my work. But frankly, I quit listening when it dawned on me that what he was giving up was about as much value in the world of high-powered investigative reporting as the worn Chuck Converse high-top sneakers I threw away last month. There’s Gov. Rod Blagojevich caught on tape selling U.S. Senate appointments like so many beef ‘n beer tickets, and then there’s the occasional avian sighting outside West Chester. Or Downingtown. Whatever.
Don’t get me wrong. I am all for stories about Bald Eagles. And American Eagles. And the occasional osprey. I once spent several hours of my working day chronicling the discovery outside the Daily Local News offices’ of an exotic cockatoo and the bird’s eventual reunion with its owner. Even though some readers have of late referred to me as “completely offensive, arrogant and disrespectful,” I feel I can relate to the public’s general sense of newsworthy fascination in finding sea gulls pecking at food crumbs in the parking lot of the Giant supermarket across the street from our offices.
I would even be willing to participate in a newspaper contest to name a parrot who saved a woman from burning in a house fire and who later turned out to be of a different gender than first assumed – as a certain unnamed publication once did.
But why, I wondered to myself, did I have to keep the source’s name a secret? Was the person someone involved in anti-Bald Eagle activities and wanted to keep their bias out of the paper? Would the person’s employers wonder what he, or she, was doing calling the media to report local raptor activity? Was the person flat out lying and not wanting to be caught misrepresenting what had been seen?
I halfway feel like outing my secret source, thus punishing him for bothering me with this scoop-less scoop. But that would be unethical, and possibly time consuming. So I did what I always do in these situations. I told him I’d “look into it,” and “get back to him” if necessary. And I considered what angle the folks at the Roto-Tiller Cultural Institute and Dramatic Society, of Modena, had in mind exactly. Like any good newspaperman would.
Like any good newspaperman, I have my share of secret sources, those people who call me on the telephone using hushed voices to relate information that otherwise would not see the light of day, leaving it up to me whether to investigate further in the cause of freedom and justice or to put the notes in a stack of press releases from the public relations firm that believes the next Pulitzer Prize-winning story is the one involving their client, the Roto-Tiller Cultural Institute and Dramatic Society, of Modena.
And like any good newspaperman, I keep the identities of those secret sources anonymous, refusing to tell anyone, even them, who they are, not even if compelled to by a court of law. New York Times scribe Judy Miller, who went to jail to protect someone who had actually told her it was all right with him to say his name in public, has nothing on me. I would gladly be incarcerated to protect the sanctity of the reporter-source relationship, especially because I am under the distinct impression my landlord will forgo any rent due while I am an official Guest of Her Majesty, as we like to say around the Chester County Justice Center.
So like any good newspaperman, I am not going to divulge the identity of the secret source who I spoke with last week and who informed me, somewhat breathlessly, that he had witnessed …
What? I thought. Official corruption? Bribes being passed between obscenely rich land developers and municipal codes enforcement officers? Text messages describing illicit encounters between high-profile county elected officials and certain cocktail waitresses who wore Dolly Parton-esque wigs? What was he spilling the beans about?
… a Bald Eagle flying down Route 322 outside Downingtown.
I may have not gotten the story straight at this point, so forgive me if what I am reporting here today is not as accurate as I normally demand of my work. But frankly, I quit listening when it dawned on me that what he was giving up was about as much value in the world of high-powered investigative reporting as the worn Chuck Converse high-top sneakers I threw away last month. There’s Gov. Rod Blagojevich caught on tape selling U.S. Senate appointments like so many beef ‘n beer tickets, and then there’s the occasional avian sighting outside West Chester. Or Downingtown. Whatever.
Don’t get me wrong. I am all for stories about Bald Eagles. And American Eagles. And the occasional osprey. I once spent several hours of my working day chronicling the discovery outside the Daily Local News offices’ of an exotic cockatoo and the bird’s eventual reunion with its owner. Even though some readers have of late referred to me as “completely offensive, arrogant and disrespectful,” I feel I can relate to the public’s general sense of newsworthy fascination in finding sea gulls pecking at food crumbs in the parking lot of the Giant supermarket across the street from our offices.
I would even be willing to participate in a newspaper contest to name a parrot who saved a woman from burning in a house fire and who later turned out to be of a different gender than first assumed – as a certain unnamed publication once did.
But why, I wondered to myself, did I have to keep the source’s name a secret? Was the person someone involved in anti-Bald Eagle activities and wanted to keep their bias out of the paper? Would the person’s employers wonder what he, or she, was doing calling the media to report local raptor activity? Was the person flat out lying and not wanting to be caught misrepresenting what had been seen?
I halfway feel like outing my secret source, thus punishing him for bothering me with this scoop-less scoop. But that would be unethical, and possibly time consuming. So I did what I always do in these situations. I told him I’d “look into it,” and “get back to him” if necessary. And I considered what angle the folks at the Roto-Tiller Cultural Institute and Dramatic Society, of Modena, had in mind exactly. Like any good newspaperman would.
Monday, January 05, 2009
Old County, New Map
This column originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 4, 2009
It's a new year, but it's the same old Chester County.
Call it a hangover from the hours I have spent recently arranging and then re-arranging furniture in my new apartment, or attribute my thoughts on the geographical makeup of Chester County to my lifelong appreciation of the work on Continental Drift by the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener (b.1880, d.1930, m. 1912 to Else Koppen, daughter of the "Grand Old Man of Meteorology," Wladimir Koppen), but I think it's high time we reconsidered the present layout of the 72 municipalities we have here.
The basic blueprint of Chester County was set back in 1789 when Delaware County was finally, and thankfully, excised from our borders, left to wallow in its own cheesesteak grease. The arrangement of the municipalities hasn't changed since the creation in 1921 of not only South Coatesville but also Modena — two places that frankly could be left off any road map of the county with few people the worse for wear, but there you have it. We've had 188 years of uninterrupted sameness in the county, and I say that as we near the centennial of the formation of South Coatesville and Modena in 2021 we put our collective minds together on moving things around so that they make a little more sense.
I know that some of you will ridicule me for thinking it possible to physically relocate a municipality from one place on the map to another seemingly overnight, but I would point out that there were those eminent geologists who ridiculed my hero Wegener when he first started talking about Continental Drift and the theory of Pangaea, and what did he do? He took off in a hot air balloon with his brother Kurt to win an international contest by staying aloft for 52 hours so he wouldn't have to listen to the geologists scoffing, of course. I have a distinct fear of heights so I'm not about to do that, but I can still suffer your arrow slings of outrageous derision, nonetheless.
Here are my initial suggestions for moving things around on the map. Feel free to submit your own.
Let's start with the jewel in the crown, West Chester. We're the county seat, the center of attention, the destination sensation of the Delaware Valley (as anyone who has dared to venture out toward Gay Street on Restaurant Festival Sunday is more than painfully aware) and yet we (a) have no riverfront and (2) are not the center of the county. So we obviously need to switch places with Downingtown. We get the East Branch of the Brandywine Creek, they get the Goose Creek Waste Water Treatment Plant. We get an easy drive to Wegmans, and they can have the entire campus of West Chester University, kegs included.
Next up of course is the inclusion of the township of Chadds Ford, which I have argued in this space for some months naturally deserves to be part of Chester County rather than (shudder) Delaware County. I see a perfect space for it wedged in the Tri-Township area of Pocopson, Newlin and East Marlborough. The cheese, tweed and horse dung crowd out in Unionville will of course have no cause to look down their noses at these new neighbors, as they're probably sharing recipes for coq au vin or arugula salad or whatever it is you have with wine and cheese these days. Plus, you've got the added opportunity to change the name of the fire company over there from Po-Mar-Lin to something resembling actual words.
"What do we do with Coatesville?" I hear you ask. Not a problem. I say move the Steel City lock, stock and uncertified police chief to the 19301 ZIP code, right smack between Paoli and Berwyn on the Upper Main Line. The advantages of this are that the city residents will be able to look at a functioning community and decide to stop shooting one another, and that District Attorney Joe Carroll won't have to wear a bulletproof vest while walking the dog. I had thought of scrunching Coatesville in beside the other old aging steel town, Phoenixville, but that borough seems to be making a rise from the ashes and we wouldn't want to drag it down.
And as for Oxford? I say move it back to Mountain City, Tenn., where it apparently came from in the first place.
It's a new year, but it's the same old Chester County.
Call it a hangover from the hours I have spent recently arranging and then re-arranging furniture in my new apartment, or attribute my thoughts on the geographical makeup of Chester County to my lifelong appreciation of the work on Continental Drift by the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener (b.1880, d.1930, m. 1912 to Else Koppen, daughter of the "Grand Old Man of Meteorology," Wladimir Koppen), but I think it's high time we reconsidered the present layout of the 72 municipalities we have here.
The basic blueprint of Chester County was set back in 1789 when Delaware County was finally, and thankfully, excised from our borders, left to wallow in its own cheesesteak grease. The arrangement of the municipalities hasn't changed since the creation in 1921 of not only South Coatesville but also Modena — two places that frankly could be left off any road map of the county with few people the worse for wear, but there you have it. We've had 188 years of uninterrupted sameness in the county, and I say that as we near the centennial of the formation of South Coatesville and Modena in 2021 we put our collective minds together on moving things around so that they make a little more sense.
I know that some of you will ridicule me for thinking it possible to physically relocate a municipality from one place on the map to another seemingly overnight, but I would point out that there were those eminent geologists who ridiculed my hero Wegener when he first started talking about Continental Drift and the theory of Pangaea, and what did he do? He took off in a hot air balloon with his brother Kurt to win an international contest by staying aloft for 52 hours so he wouldn't have to listen to the geologists scoffing, of course. I have a distinct fear of heights so I'm not about to do that, but I can still suffer your arrow slings of outrageous derision, nonetheless.
Here are my initial suggestions for moving things around on the map. Feel free to submit your own.
Let's start with the jewel in the crown, West Chester. We're the county seat, the center of attention, the destination sensation of the Delaware Valley (as anyone who has dared to venture out toward Gay Street on Restaurant Festival Sunday is more than painfully aware) and yet we (a) have no riverfront and (2) are not the center of the county. So we obviously need to switch places with Downingtown. We get the East Branch of the Brandywine Creek, they get the Goose Creek Waste Water Treatment Plant. We get an easy drive to Wegmans, and they can have the entire campus of West Chester University, kegs included.
Next up of course is the inclusion of the township of Chadds Ford, which I have argued in this space for some months naturally deserves to be part of Chester County rather than (shudder) Delaware County. I see a perfect space for it wedged in the Tri-Township area of Pocopson, Newlin and East Marlborough. The cheese, tweed and horse dung crowd out in Unionville will of course have no cause to look down their noses at these new neighbors, as they're probably sharing recipes for coq au vin or arugula salad or whatever it is you have with wine and cheese these days. Plus, you've got the added opportunity to change the name of the fire company over there from Po-Mar-Lin to something resembling actual words.
"What do we do with Coatesville?" I hear you ask. Not a problem. I say move the Steel City lock, stock and uncertified police chief to the 19301 ZIP code, right smack between Paoli and Berwyn on the Upper Main Line. The advantages of this are that the city residents will be able to look at a functioning community and decide to stop shooting one another, and that District Attorney Joe Carroll won't have to wear a bulletproof vest while walking the dog. I had thought of scrunching Coatesville in beside the other old aging steel town, Phoenixville, but that borough seems to be making a rise from the ashes and we wouldn't want to drag it down.
And as for Oxford? I say move it back to Mountain City, Tenn., where it apparently came from in the first place.
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