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.