My Favorite Pennock

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Nov. 29, 2009

It probably has not occurred to you that I have one or two things in common with Joseph Pennock.

The reasons why it has not occurred to you that I have one or two, perhaps three, things in common with Joseph Pennock are, as a former college roommate of mine once said, varied. It could be that you are unfamiliar with me and my personally biographical history and idiosyncratic likes and dislikes, or it could be that you are unfamiliar with Joseph Pennock and his “back-story,” as they like to say in the theater.

I am guessing the latter since before Monday of last week, I had never heard of Joseph Pennock, either.

But Joseph Pennock came to the United States and, ultimately, West Marlborough, from County Tipperary in Ireland. It just so happens that not only have I been to Tipperary, but I was at one point in my life a fervent, if somewhat ill informed, supporter of the Tipperary Hurling Team, and could not only sing their fight song (“It’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way to go”) but also could at the drop of a hat sport a lapel badge that said, “Come on Tip!” So that is one commonality we share.

Another stems from this snippet of a sentence written by Joseph Pennock as he was contemplating the construction of a building that now stands as Primitive Hall in West Marlborough. "The 14th of the 9th 1738/ then my impostum brok and the Seme year I Bilt my nu Hous." What links Joseph Pennock to me in that statement is not that I have ever built a house, or had my impostum broken, or even bent I dare say, but that there are times when one or more of my editors has commented that my copy read like I was an unschooled inhabitant of the 18th century.

But I don’t want to talk about Joseph Pennock. I would rather talk about his distant cousin, Herb Pennock.

Herb Pennock was born in Kennett Square in 1894 and died there in 1948, just weeks before he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. He was elected to the baseball Hall of Fame for a variety of reasons, but for my mind mostly because he played in the major leagues for 21 seasons, starting from when he was just out of high school in 1914 to when he was just about washed up as a left-handed pitcher for the Boston Red Sox in 1934.

In between times he was a pitcher that, as Casey Stengel used o say, had been up and been down. He had a stellar opening season with the (almost) home town Philadelphia Athletics, then went south for a while until hooking up with the New York Yankees. He won five games in the World Series competed in, including four with the Yankees and along the way helped tone down the profane ebullience of one George Herman Ruth, known more familiarly as Babe.

Once when Babe and Herb were dining with their wives as a fancy restaurant, Ruth rose to excuse himself to go to the bathroom, explaining in no uncertain terms what it was he had to accomplish once there. Herb followed Babe to the washroom and counseled him that it was unnecessary, and perhaps a bit impolite, to explain exactly why he was excusing himself. Babe, embarrassed for once in his life, apologized to Herb and made his way back to the table. There, he sheepishly tried to make amends for his gaffe but saying he was sorry he said what he said, repeating it word for word, of course.

I also enjoy the story about the time that Herb and the Babe and some Yankee teammates made their way to a Kennett Square street fair and started knocking down milk bottles at a street both for prizes. It was no sweat for the pitchers to break the bank, and they did so by throwing curves with the light balls. The next morning, one of those pitchers woke to find his arm swollen from the curves and the light balls, and had to explain how he had hurt himself to the Yankee skipper, Miller Huggins.

That pitcher, as I remember, was Waite Hoyt, who in the early 1960s provided a young boy just returned from Ireland with a new team to root for as he broadcast games played by the Cincinnati Reds. For me, you see, it was hard to find the Tipperary box scores in the paper.

The Road to Corruption

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Nov. 22, 2009

It is easy to see why Tony Young coveted a place at the Unionville table so greatly that he went to swindling people he knew just to get his Chippendale chair there.

I attended the auction that was held recently at Young’s former home in West Marlborough, covering the event for the paper. I had driven by the place just once before out of curiosity, the allure of seeing a mansion that theft built drawing me there. I was left somewhat unimpressed by the place. No Xanadu of Citizen Kane, the mansion can be seen plainly from the road and strikes one as more nouveau riche splendor than classic grandeur.

But the drive to and from Young’s place was more than worth the trip. I have spent a wealth of time on the back roads of Chester County on my way to and from West Chester, but never have I been tempted to stop and stare in wonder at the landscape as often as I had on the trip west from Unionville out Route 82 as when I went in search of Young’s home.

What you see as East Marlborough melts into West is not picture-postcard beauty, or generic rolling hills landscape painting beauty, but a vista of quiet green elegance that extends across the horizon. The view that unfolds is like Chester County’s own Big Sky country, where the meadows and fields and stands of trees fill your eyes and the turns in the road bring new pleasures in an instant.

Driving that road I admit to feeling the pull to be a part of it, to wish that I could feel at home in it. Obviously those who have grown up in that slice of the county feel protective of their world, and try their best to ward off changes. I imagine as well that there is an insularity to the community because of the beauty that encompasses it. The betrayal that Young visited on those he called friends was exacerbated strictly because of he cast a cloud on the landscape they love, at least for some fleeting time.

Young, pardon the interruption, is the boyish looking investment financier who swindled people he knew in the equestrian community of greater Unionville for millions and millions of dollars. According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, he used the money he funneled from those who invested in his investment firm for the specific purposes of living as they did – with horses and polo silks and mahogany furniture and Audubon prints and foxhunting ephemera and – most striking for me -- a classic Triumph TR-3 convertible. I assume that Young took rides in that car with the top down, imagining himself an English landowner sporting his way across the fox hunting hills and valleys of that countryside the fields of Unionville are so reminiscent of. I assume that he loved the fact that he could buy fifty boxes of shotgun shells and just leave them in the storeroom for whatever time he wanted to go shoot at skeet or trap or pheasants or quail of whatever it is they shoot at out there in the land beyond the Po-Mar-Lin Fire Co. firehouse.

A silver-haired man I spoke with at the auction told me he thought the piles of possessions that were for sale spoke to him of one thing – guilt. Young spent the money he stole on whatever he fancied at the moment because for him there was no future to save for. He must have known, the man said, that it was only a matter of time before the truth would close in on him like a pen, and so why not acquire as much as he could beforehand?

Just a few days before the auction took place, an article on Young appeared in Fortune magazine, and was a topic of conversation at the event among those who knew Young and knew those who trusted him with their cash. One man I spoke with expressed relief that the scheme had been laid bare in detail as an explanation for those who wondered at the crassness of it all, but another had a more bitter reaction to it. “Why,” he wondered, “did the article have to paint all of the people in the community as possible criminals?”

To explain that I turn to Wendy, a writer and colleague who is wiser in the ways of that world than me.

"It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience,” she wrote to me after hearing of my visit to the Young auction, quoting Sherlock Holmes at his most arch, “that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside."

Chastised

I have been chastised for not including the name of the former reporter to whom I gave the Jake's t-shirt. She's Jill Nawrocki and she's about to leave Namibia after two years of tremendous, awe-inspiring work. You can catch her accomplishments at http://jillnawrocki.blogspot.com

Sorry, Jill! Hurry home!

That's Just Jake('s) With Me

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Nov. 1, 2009.

My friend Tom McKee, the keyboardist for the band Brothers Past and chief music director at the Paul Green School of Rock in Downingtown, was the person who introduced me to the way that Chester County seems to envelope the entire globe at times through cheap t-shirts.

Go virtually anywhere, he told me some years back when we were trying to avoid doing real work at the Daily Local’s news desk, and you are sure to come across a Jake’s t-shirt. Jake’s as in Jake’s Bar, the cozy little dive on South Matlack Street hard by the West Chester University campus.

He said he had heard stories about people getting off the London Underground at the Marble Arch Station and being confronted with a passenger getting on the tube wearing a shirt from Jake’s. I suppose that I might have even contributed to this phenomenon by giving a former DLN reporter who was on her way to serve a two-year stint in the Peace Corps one of the navy tees with the overflowing beer mug on the front as she made her way out the door. Perhaps the folks in Khorixas, Namibia, where she is stationed, now dream about the possibility of immigrating to the United States and making a scared pilgrimage to the bar that serves 50-cent drafts and has a shuffleboard game handy.

It’s not just that Jakes t-shirts rule the globe. I also may point to a photo I have seen hanging from a certain sandwich place in West Chester which clearly shows the back of a t-shirt proclaiming the wonders of Penn’s Table to the mountains of Machu Picchu in Peru. Can’t say what the Inca ancestors might think of William Penn’s image, but I’m sure they would go for the chicken salad club.

So I should not have been surprised this past weekend when I found myself surrounded by Chester County residents I far away Richmond, Ind. The possibility of coming across someone who knows the difference between Toughkenamon and Landenberg is always around the corner.

I was seated in the dining room of the Richmond Holiday Inn scarfing down the complimentary buffet breakfast Saturday morning when I heard conversation from a group of friendly characters at a booth in the corner. “I just left the car parked in Parkesburg,” said one affable woman. “It’s so much easier than driving to Exton.” Being the fearless reporter that I am, I scooted over and introduced myself. The woman was one Jane Hutton, a research librarian at West Chester University who happened to know my friend Anne Herzog, a professor at the school, and who was in Richmond for the 40^th anniversary of her graduating class at Earlham College. She didn’t look a day over 45.

Which, truth to tell, is what I was doing in Richmond. The good folks at Earlham handed me my diploma and sent me out into the world 30 years ago, in May 1979, and I had ventured back there to meet up with others who had similarly been loosed on an unsuspecting populace. There isn’t just a happenstance connection between Chester County and Earlham, since Westtown Friends School is sort of a feeder institution to the college, which has a long history as a bastion of Quaker education. One of the alums that I had dinner with at the school not only had family from West Chester, but who also had taught at Westtown for a few years after graduation.

I thought about the similarities between my home in West Chester and my four-year former home in Richmond as I gazed across the central courtyard of the college campus from atop one of the classroom buildings. I thought especially how students at Earlham and students at West Chester University are likely to be too busy sometimes while crossing the campus to notice how beautiful the fall leaves can be, how perfect the architecture fits in with the landscape, and how lucky they are to have months and months and months in which they are only required to learn and not make money or raise a family of pay the cable bill.

And as I watched one student struggle against a cold wind on his way from the dormitory where I had spent the last days of my college career I thought I recognized sometime of myself in him, on his way to the library or to the student union or to the dining hall. I thought how similar I must have looked in October 1975 when I first showed up at school. I thought how much he might look like me when he turns 50. I thought we had a lot in common, but, in reality, it was probably just the t-shirt from Jake’s.