This column originally appeared on Sunday, Feb. 22, 2009
Hello tourists! Welcome to Chester County, land of rolling hills, historic battlefields, stone barns, and the fresh scents emanating from various mushroom composting houses! We’re glad to have you!
We know you’ve been aching to see the sights that the Chester County Conference and Visitors Bureau described in its most recent propagand..., er, brochure, and we trust that at some point in your life you’ll get to see Longwood Gardens, the Brandywine River Museum, the Chester County Historic Courthouse and the QVC studios. But in the meantime we thought we would take you on a little tour of some of the out of the way or little noticed spots that make up our fair county.
Now, don’t worry. We’re not going to lead you to some dark and dank spot that you’ll end up writing about in your travel journals as “the worst place I ever imagined they would serve actual food in.” Those would be the aforementioned mushroom composting houses, and we promise we won’t take you there, although you’ll likely get a whiff of them as we stop by the first spot on the tour, the White Clary Creek Preserve.
The White Clay is one of our county’s most scenic waterways, but it gets short shrift in the public relations department because of all the attention paid by the national media to the Brandywine Creek. The White Clay’s relationship to the Brandywine is sort of the aquatic version of that between the Chicago White Sox and the Chicago Cubs; you get the sense that one team is richer, fuller, more die hard and truer in spirit than the other, but the other squad gets all the pub from yuppie outsiders just because of the ballpark.
I mean, put all those Wyeths in an old composting house on London Tract Road along the White Clay instead of an old mill at the River Museum, and you’d see documentaries on National Geographic TV about William Penn buying the White Clay Creek land from Chief Kekelappen 24/7. Trust me on this.
While we’re on our way back north from the White Clay we thought you’d like to stop on top of the hills south of Coatesville, the city which you may have heard so much about in the national media of late. Try to ignore that. We’d like you to pay particular attention to the view from Hilltop Road across what used to be the King Ranch and which is now part of the stunningly beautiful Laurels Preserve, which you are not technically allowed to look at, or even think about, unless your annual income approaches the mid-seven figures, but go ahead anyway because we’re not going to drop a dime on you.
The folks from Texas will recognize the name of the King Ranch as the largest cattle operation in the world, but you probably didn’t know that the King family bought about 17,000 acres here in Chester County to fatten the cattle with grass feed. You might want to imagine the manure-based compost produced by those longhorns, but we don’t, so we’ll move on.
We’re stopping finally at the corner of Market and Church streets in downtown West Chester because it’s the site of the former Mansion House Hotel and Restaurant. The place was built in 1846 as a temperance house, which we feel is particularly ironic since it’s where a memorable meal took place in the early 1970s. Seems a lawyer acquaintance of ours had just secured the release from jail of a few well, shall we say, fallen women, by promising a judge they’d be out of the county before nightfall, when he decided that it might not be such a bad idea to celebrate their freedom with some spirits across the street at the Mansion House. Several hours and as many bottles of wine later he had to call his wife to come pick him up, and in the meantime wondered if she’d like to meet his new clients.
We’re still uncertain if she got the joke, but we appreciate the humor in the situation nonetheless. We hope you did, too. The Mansion House is now a bank, by the way. Which we suppose is better than a mushroom composting house, but not by much.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life, At Last I've Found You....
This column originally appeared on Sunday, Feb. 8, 2009.
Constant Reader Ed of West Chester wants to know something, and he wants me to get the answer. What Constant Reader Ed from West Chester wants to know is, “Why is there no grape bubble gum for sale in West Chester?”
I will give you all a moment or two to ponder that, while I explain that everyone has their own particular Chester County mystery, and it is my lot in life that they usually ask me to solve their personal riddles. Other people I know are asked how their health is or how their car is running or how many hours they had to wait in line at the self-service car wash to rid their cars of the winter’s ubiquitous coating of salty brine residue when they greet an acquaintance. I get asked why there are no park benches in front of the Chester County Justice Center, or where the hell the grape bubble gum is.
The sorts of mysteries I refer to are not the Sherlock Holmes/Miss Marple/Nero Wolfe-type mystery. The mysteries I speak of are the unanswerable questions we ponder while waiting for the light to change. Such as, “Who decided we need another bank in this town?”
My personal mystery starts, and ends, in Exton. What, I ask myself on an almost hourly basis, is up with the West Whiteland Municipal Building?
No, not the old one on Route 100 that looks like a plantation house from northern Virginia circa 1776. I’m referring to the building on the oh-so-aptly named Commerce Drive in the Main Street at Exton “life-style mall” that looks like a post-modern, avant-garde, semi-psychotic architect’s nervous doodling brought to brick-and-mortar fruition.
To get those you who are still pondering the grape bubble gum query a chance to catch up, let me explain that the West Whiteland Municipal Building has stood largely finished but virtually unoccupied for months. How long has it been thus? Remember when the only obstacle that stood between Hillary Clinton and the White House was the issue of whether or not she knew how to measure the drapes for the Oval Office? Well, the building has been around since before then.
There it sits, unused, vacant, and surrounded by a chain link fence that screams, as only a chain link fence can scream, “Keep out!” Apparently, the notion that a building pretty much completed might actually be put to use is not one that I alone harbor. In fact, the matter has raised such a ruckus in West Whiteland that the township devoted a full page of its Fall 2008 newsletter to the matter.
The building isn’t being used, the anonymous author of the newsletter informs us, because it is waiting for the “fit out” to be completed. “These contracts are for installation of the walls, flooring, finishes, electrical fixtures, plumbing, and HVAC necessary for the proper functioning of the building,” the newsletter informs us cheerily. It’s like those neighbors of yours who built a fancy new home in the cul-de-sac but did not have exactly enough scratch to put actual furniture and carpeting and kitchen cabinets in the place, so they wind up eating dinner on the hood of the SUV in the garage. Except that the West Whiteland Municipal Building cost $16 million.
Ooops, sorry! I meant $16,347,503. But who’s counting?
Here’s my favorite part of the newsletter article about the building. “A fifth query” – can’t you just imagine the phone calls? – “we have been asked is, ‘When will the Township have the deed for this property?’ At present, we have a court order that allows us access to the property to construct our building. Unfortunately, the developer who holds the deed has refused to deliver it to the Township. Following lengthy, unsuccessful efforts to resolve this issue, the Township is now pursuing a legal resolution to this matter.” Folks, I’ve been a courthouse reporter since 1992, and when the answer to a question includes terms such as “court order” and “legal resolution” and “unfortunately,” there is only one response: “No good can come of this.”
Anyway, the whole thing is supposed to be taken care of by this summer, when the newsletter estimates the township will move into the building. This would reassure me except that I once read in Popular Mechanics magazine that in the summer of 2009 we would all drive flying cars when we weren’t riding monorails and eating freeze-dried Chicken a la King. So pardon me if I remain skeptical.
Oh, and to Constant Reader Ed from West Chester: The answer is, “It’s a mystery.”
Constant Reader Ed of West Chester wants to know something, and he wants me to get the answer. What Constant Reader Ed from West Chester wants to know is, “Why is there no grape bubble gum for sale in West Chester?”
I will give you all a moment or two to ponder that, while I explain that everyone has their own particular Chester County mystery, and it is my lot in life that they usually ask me to solve their personal riddles. Other people I know are asked how their health is or how their car is running or how many hours they had to wait in line at the self-service car wash to rid their cars of the winter’s ubiquitous coating of salty brine residue when they greet an acquaintance. I get asked why there are no park benches in front of the Chester County Justice Center, or where the hell the grape bubble gum is.
The sorts of mysteries I refer to are not the Sherlock Holmes/Miss Marple/Nero Wolfe-type mystery. The mysteries I speak of are the unanswerable questions we ponder while waiting for the light to change. Such as, “Who decided we need another bank in this town?”
My personal mystery starts, and ends, in Exton. What, I ask myself on an almost hourly basis, is up with the West Whiteland Municipal Building?
No, not the old one on Route 100 that looks like a plantation house from northern Virginia circa 1776. I’m referring to the building on the oh-so-aptly named Commerce Drive in the Main Street at Exton “life-style mall” that looks like a post-modern, avant-garde, semi-psychotic architect’s nervous doodling brought to brick-and-mortar fruition.
To get those you who are still pondering the grape bubble gum query a chance to catch up, let me explain that the West Whiteland Municipal Building has stood largely finished but virtually unoccupied for months. How long has it been thus? Remember when the only obstacle that stood between Hillary Clinton and the White House was the issue of whether or not she knew how to measure the drapes for the Oval Office? Well, the building has been around since before then.
There it sits, unused, vacant, and surrounded by a chain link fence that screams, as only a chain link fence can scream, “Keep out!” Apparently, the notion that a building pretty much completed might actually be put to use is not one that I alone harbor. In fact, the matter has raised such a ruckus in West Whiteland that the township devoted a full page of its Fall 2008 newsletter to the matter.
The building isn’t being used, the anonymous author of the newsletter informs us, because it is waiting for the “fit out” to be completed. “These contracts are for installation of the walls, flooring, finishes, electrical fixtures, plumbing, and HVAC necessary for the proper functioning of the building,” the newsletter informs us cheerily. It’s like those neighbors of yours who built a fancy new home in the cul-de-sac but did not have exactly enough scratch to put actual furniture and carpeting and kitchen cabinets in the place, so they wind up eating dinner on the hood of the SUV in the garage. Except that the West Whiteland Municipal Building cost $16 million.
Ooops, sorry! I meant $16,347,503. But who’s counting?
Here’s my favorite part of the newsletter article about the building. “A fifth query” – can’t you just imagine the phone calls? – “we have been asked is, ‘When will the Township have the deed for this property?’ At present, we have a court order that allows us access to the property to construct our building. Unfortunately, the developer who holds the deed has refused to deliver it to the Township. Following lengthy, unsuccessful efforts to resolve this issue, the Township is now pursuing a legal resolution to this matter.” Folks, I’ve been a courthouse reporter since 1992, and when the answer to a question includes terms such as “court order” and “legal resolution” and “unfortunately,” there is only one response: “No good can come of this.”
Anyway, the whole thing is supposed to be taken care of by this summer, when the newsletter estimates the township will move into the building. This would reassure me except that I once read in Popular Mechanics magazine that in the summer of 2009 we would all drive flying cars when we weren’t riding monorails and eating freeze-dried Chicken a la King. So pardon me if I remain skeptical.
Oh, and to Constant Reader Ed from West Chester: The answer is, “It’s a mystery.”
Monday, February 02, 2009
Hearts for Megan Redux
This column originally appeared on Sunday, Feb. 1, 2009
Every life involves an amount of tragedy. The portion allotted to us may be larger or smaller – the loss of a home, say, versus a loss in the NFC Championship Game – but the time does come when it seems as though the world is falling apart around us.
The way in which we approach that inevitable tragedy, then, comes to mark us. Do we become bitter at life and bear the weight with scorn and vitriol, or do we reach within and pull some light out of our personal darkness?
I am sure that there are better ways to handle tragedy than the way Michael Bates, his ex-wife Kim Fellows, and their daughter Clare Bates have. But if theirs is not the best then at least it will do until the best shows up.
Their daughter and sister, Megan Bates, died in a traffic accident on Feb. 12, 2007, as she was on her way home from a night out in West Chester, where she was attending college. She was just 21. She died when the car she was a passenger in skidded off he road and into a utility pole. Making her death even more horrific was the fact that the driver was her boyfriend, and he was drunk.
I first encountered the Bates-Fellows family at the sentencing hearing for that young man, who would eventually be sent to state prison for the crash. I found it profoundly moving that rather than dwell on the anger and pain that this crime had brought their family, Megan Bates’ parents urged him to atone for his actions and make their daughter proud of his life.
“If she were here today, she would say to you, as she has said to me, to be strong,” Michael Bates told the young man as they stood in a courtroom filled with tears. Looking him in the eye, Bates also said he wanted something else from his daughter’s killer. “I want to hear from you. I want to hear that you’ve made your life better. I want you to do that to honor Megan.”
Some time later, I sat in Kim Fellows’ kitchen in West Whiteland and listened as the family talked about Megan, and what a remarkable force she had been in their lives.
She had a “desire for things to be perfect for everybody,” Fellows said, remarking that she could not remember setting out consciously to instill such values in her daughter . “She had such a strong sense of self, from a very, very early age.”
I was there to listen to the family’s plans to join with Megan’s friends and fellow workers at the Riverstone Cafe in Exton for an event, called Hearts for Megan, that would honor her life and at the same time raise money for the Mommy’s Light charity, which arranges for children who have lost their mother to have certain traditions carried on – such as baking Christmas cookies, playing Monopoly together, or simply going to the zoo on a summer day – as a way of helping to deal with the loss. Fellows said it as chosen because of Megan Bates' devotion to her own family traditions.
The event, organized by the Bates-Fellows family and Riverstone owner Nicholas Cacchione, was held last Feb. 13, and was a deep success, in more ways than the nearly $20,000 that went to Mommy’s Light at the end of the night. In Michael Bates’ words, “I stopped and looked around and all around there were nothing but smiles and people laughing.” It seems the tears had started to dry.
In extending her family's gratitude for those who participated in the event, Fellows related the Cherokee myth of the Good Wolf and the Bad Wolf. In it, a grandfather explains to his grandson that there is an ongoing struggle in all people between the Bad Wolf, which represents greed, envy, anger and jealousy, and the Good Wolf, which represents kindness, compassion and forgiveness.
The grandson thinks about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?" The old Cherokee replies simply: "The one you feed."
Fellows thanked those who came, “for feeding the Good Wolf.”
This year, Hearts for Megan will be held on Wednesday, Feb. 11, at the Riverstone, from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Fellows said that students from Downingtown West High School had become involved, and that the television personality Glenn Beck had also taken up the Mommy’s Light cause. “We’re trying to keep it ‘hometown,’ but it is really kind of exciting,” the way the event has grown, Fellows told me Friday.
We have had a lot of tragedy in our community in the past weeks and months, and people have lost things that can never be replaced. But if you want to see how love can fill the cup that has been emptied, you ought to stop by.
For more information, go to www.heartsformegan.com
Every life involves an amount of tragedy. The portion allotted to us may be larger or smaller – the loss of a home, say, versus a loss in the NFC Championship Game – but the time does come when it seems as though the world is falling apart around us.
The way in which we approach that inevitable tragedy, then, comes to mark us. Do we become bitter at life and bear the weight with scorn and vitriol, or do we reach within and pull some light out of our personal darkness?
I am sure that there are better ways to handle tragedy than the way Michael Bates, his ex-wife Kim Fellows, and their daughter Clare Bates have. But if theirs is not the best then at least it will do until the best shows up.
Their daughter and sister, Megan Bates, died in a traffic accident on Feb. 12, 2007, as she was on her way home from a night out in West Chester, where she was attending college. She was just 21. She died when the car she was a passenger in skidded off he road and into a utility pole. Making her death even more horrific was the fact that the driver was her boyfriend, and he was drunk.
I first encountered the Bates-Fellows family at the sentencing hearing for that young man, who would eventually be sent to state prison for the crash. I found it profoundly moving that rather than dwell on the anger and pain that this crime had brought their family, Megan Bates’ parents urged him to atone for his actions and make their daughter proud of his life.
“If she were here today, she would say to you, as she has said to me, to be strong,” Michael Bates told the young man as they stood in a courtroom filled with tears. Looking him in the eye, Bates also said he wanted something else from his daughter’s killer. “I want to hear from you. I want to hear that you’ve made your life better. I want you to do that to honor Megan.”
Some time later, I sat in Kim Fellows’ kitchen in West Whiteland and listened as the family talked about Megan, and what a remarkable force she had been in their lives.
She had a “desire for things to be perfect for everybody,” Fellows said, remarking that she could not remember setting out consciously to instill such values in her daughter . “She had such a strong sense of self, from a very, very early age.”
I was there to listen to the family’s plans to join with Megan’s friends and fellow workers at the Riverstone Cafe in Exton for an event, called Hearts for Megan, that would honor her life and at the same time raise money for the Mommy’s Light charity, which arranges for children who have lost their mother to have certain traditions carried on – such as baking Christmas cookies, playing Monopoly together, or simply going to the zoo on a summer day – as a way of helping to deal with the loss. Fellows said it as chosen because of Megan Bates' devotion to her own family traditions.
The event, organized by the Bates-Fellows family and Riverstone owner Nicholas Cacchione, was held last Feb. 13, and was a deep success, in more ways than the nearly $20,000 that went to Mommy’s Light at the end of the night. In Michael Bates’ words, “I stopped and looked around and all around there were nothing but smiles and people laughing.” It seems the tears had started to dry.
In extending her family's gratitude for those who participated in the event, Fellows related the Cherokee myth of the Good Wolf and the Bad Wolf. In it, a grandfather explains to his grandson that there is an ongoing struggle in all people between the Bad Wolf, which represents greed, envy, anger and jealousy, and the Good Wolf, which represents kindness, compassion and forgiveness.
The grandson thinks about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?" The old Cherokee replies simply: "The one you feed."
Fellows thanked those who came, “for feeding the Good Wolf.”
This year, Hearts for Megan will be held on Wednesday, Feb. 11, at the Riverstone, from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Fellows said that students from Downingtown West High School had become involved, and that the television personality Glenn Beck had also taken up the Mommy’s Light cause. “We’re trying to keep it ‘hometown,’ but it is really kind of exciting,” the way the event has grown, Fellows told me Friday.
We have had a lot of tragedy in our community in the past weeks and months, and people have lost things that can never be replaced. But if you want to see how love can fill the cup that has been emptied, you ought to stop by.
For more information, go to www.heartsformegan.com
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