Snow Bound, Mysteriously

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Dec. 20, 2009


The good folks at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public life last week reported that 49 percent of Americans say they have had a mystical experience in their lives, a number up sharply from 1962, when only 22 percent of Americans said they'd had such an awakening. So I don't feel alone.

That is, I don't feel that I've been singled out for having a mystical experience, which the Pew folks don't fully define but which I will refer to as one of those times when you want to tap the nearest person on the shoulder and say, "You know what just happened to me?"

On Friday, I was cleaning some of the clutter from my cubicle at the Daily Local News (old press releases, assorted office supplies, envelopes whose return address reads, "Chester County Prison," "The Simpsons" Magic 8-Ball — answer "Well, duh," etc.) and came across a stack of old and faded news clippings of stories with my byline. On top was a story I had written in February 1983 carrying the headline, "Storm among county's biggest."

You remember Feb. 11, 1983, don't you? That was the Friday when 22 inches of snow fell on Chester County. It was my first snow fall as a staff reporter for the Daily Local, and one I have never forgotten. And now I sit at my desk looking out the office window at double-digit snow accumulation and wanting to tap someone on the shoulder and say, "You know what just happened to me?"

The snow started falling in the late afternoon that day 26 years ago, and my friend Jamie called and said he was staying over at the apartment I had moved in to only weeks before because he didn't think he would make the drive up Route 100 to his parent's home in West Vincent. I said he'd be welcome to sleep on the soda, my repayment for having slept on the floor of his Pottstown apartment for several months when I moved to Pennsylvania in 1980. We had a wonderful time that evening running around in the snow and drinking schnapps at the Rat on South High Street, although I do not believe that either of us would remember it as a mystical experience. Then the telephone rang on Saturday morning and my editor told me that she had made it to the office and thus I had no excuse for not showing up for work.

My assignment that Saturday was to go back through past issues of the paper and find other blizzards that left the county under deep blankets of snow. And from my research came the story that sits on my desk now, making me want to tap someone on the shoulder and say, "You know what just happened to me?"

I am struck today at the revolutionary changes that have occurred since I wrote that story. To research past snowstorms today you type the phrase "snow storms past Chester County" into Google and you get 32,700 references in 0.29 seconds. To research past snow storms in 1983, I had to wrestle open the grey filing cabinet drawer in the clip library, and wade thought the "Weather" files that had been loving created by the late Jeanette "Bring That Back When You're Finished!" Davis, staff librarian, who insisted on putting clips about worldwide earthquakes in the "Weather" files. The exercise took me the better part of the morning before deadline.

But it also introduced me to Chester County in a way I had not yet experienced, mystically or otherwise. I got to read about the history of the county from an everyday perspective. Not tales of George Washington or Mad Anthony Wayne or William Penn or Buffalo Bill Cody, but of the woman in southern Chester County who found herself stranded in the snow and needed for help. "Please! Milk for two babies" she wrote in the snow in front of her home. Helicopters dropped off a load and she was able to keep the family going.

That was in 1958, when 32 inches of snow fell in March, only weeks after an earlier storm had left 17 inches on the ground. I wrote in my story about how Chester County Hospital was without power during the storm, and that only one doctor had been able to make it to work. About how the wet snow made a porch roof in Coatesville collapse and kill a man who had been standing underneath it. About how the Pennsylvania Turnpike was closed from Harrisburg to the New Jersey border, and how Downingtown Burgess Creston I. Shoemaker declared a state of emergency and pressed otherwise unoccupied citizens into service directing traffic in the borough.

I wrote about how Kennett Square was "thrown 50 years into the past. There was no light, no heat, no telephone service, no water outside the borough and impassable roads. I wrote how 30,000 homes from Coatesville to West Grove were without power, and how the roof at the Esco Cabinet Co. a "milk cooling-unit manufacturer on Chestnut Street in West Chester" caved in.

All that writing helped me learn about the place I had moved to, and begin the journey to today, when I actually know where West Grove is.

Consider yourself tapped, shoulder wise.

Keep Your 3-Way, Gimme a Batty Hattie

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Dec. 13, 2009

There is a restaurant in New York City’s Tribeca neighborhood named Edward’s, where once a month the owner, Edward (naturally) Youkilis puts out a spread of food specialties from his native Cincinnati, Ohio. It is a popular event among other ex-Queen City-ers, most probably because Youkilis serves up heaping plates of Skyline Chili.

Youkilis, at 62, is older than I am, so I will avoid making any disrespectful remarks about him or his culinary offerings except to say I disagree with them completely. I understand Youkilis’ desire to bring the taste of his youth to those who have not had the chance to savor it, as well as to those who have had that opportunity and find the pleasure of digging into a heaping plate of Skyline Chili missing from their soul, like a cactus longing for a drop of rain in the desert.

But if you are a restaurant owner in Chester County and think that you will be able to entice me once a month to patronize your eatery by putting out a spread of foodstuffs from my hometown that includes heaping plates of Skyline Chili, here’s a note of caution: Don’t waste your time.

To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen’s remark to Dan Quayle about Jack Kennedy, I know Skyline Chili and -- no matter how much spirit Youkilis and his ilk put into recreating the Skyline experience -- that’s not Skyline Chili. It is not possible to transport a chili parlor to the East Coast, and believe me I‘ve tried. Perhaps later in life than I would care to admit, I have come to realize that there are incandescent pleasures in life you cannot recreate just because you find yourself missing them. Your first kiss, your first World Series championship, your first heaping plate of Skyline Chili -- all remain eternally unattainable a second time.

At heart, Youkilis recognizes this, I believe, although the impetus for his continued attempts to put together a Skyline Chili experience are apparent: he serves twice as many meals at his restaurant on a Monday Cincinnati Night than other Monday night of the month. The restaurant owner told a writer for The New Yorker magazine, where the tale of his adventures in Skylining appeared last week, that there were key details of a normal heaping plate of Skyline Chili that he just could not match.

“The authentic shredded cheese, which is a fluorescent yellow, travels poorly, so Edward’s must grate its own,” the story states. “The Skyline company also refuses to sell (Youkilis) the intentionally tasteless franks (to keep the focus on the chili) for (hot-dog, chili, and cheese) Coneys, so he buys a local substitute.” I might also add that you can’t find the right oval-shaped serving plates used at Skyline outside the Queen City, and the oyster-style crackers available east of Cleveland are more suited to clam chowder than a heaping plate of Skyline Chili.

Skyline Chili is available nationally in cans. I have two or three in the cupboard right now. But my attempts at recreating the Skyline Chili experience have fallen so far short of expectations that they serve only to make me want to jump on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and head straight for the parlor at Clifton and Ludlow avenues where I first tasted ambrosia with a grated cheese topping. It just doesn’t translate well, like former President George Bush’s syntax.

But it also strikes me that it is just plain wrong try to transfer our hometown treasures out of their natural element. Like putting an Eskimo in Florida, they are soon to shrivel and wilt.

An all-too-sad fact of 21st Century America is that there are fewer and fewer regional differences between where we grow up and where we live after we have grown up and moved away. I recently began thinking about television shows that I watched as a child in Cincinnati. There were TV hosts named Uncle Al and Skipper Ryle and Batty Hattie from Cincinnati and Bob Shreve and Nick “Father of George” Clooney. If you did not grow up in the area to which the broadcast signals of their home stations reached, you did not know who in the world they were. They were no better, probably worse, than the TV hosts in Chicago or New York City or Philadelphia, but they were yours and you loved them for the Cincinnati-ness.

My friends Trevor McVickar, age 9, and Emma McVickar, age 6, live in Chester Springs, and they love their TV heroes and savor the moments when they can watch SpongeBob Squarepants enter his pineapple home under the sea. But when they grow up and go away to college, they are not going to be able to regale their new comrades with strange tales of SpongeBob, because everyone they will meet already know who he is. He’s not Batty Hattie, he’s homogenous. He’s Wal-Mart, he’s Hostess Twinkies, he’s – dare I say it -- McDonald’s.

And no matter how tempting it may be, I never want to order a heaping plate of Skyline Chili at McDonalds.

Carrying A Porch

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Dec. 6, 2009

(Editor's Note: The West Chester Old Fashioned Christmas Parade this year became corporately sponsored by Flavia, Inc., a division of Mars, Inc., and is now known as the Flavia Old Fashioned Christmas Parade.)

This country is going to hell in a hand-basket, and I know why.

Actually, I don’t know why, but the punditocracy of the current media conglomeration requires that pretend to, and have at least three easily relatable reasons why this country is going to hell in a hand-basket at any given moment. Columnists such as I are statutorily obligated to pontificate on hand-baskets, hell-bound, in re: This Country. Fail to deliver an occasional sermon on the collapse of America’s foundations at least once in a fortnight gets you an official reprimand signed by Rupert Murdoch and Warren Buffet, and a robo-call featuring a voice that sounds suspiciously like Bill O’Reilly, with Jon Stewart egging him on in the background.

Remember the “Bowling Alone” phenomenon? That’s the sort of hand-basket, hand wringing that can catch some attention, and helped me formulate my most recent explanation for the ills that beset our nation. A fellow named Robert D. Putnam back in the mid-1990s noticed that although the number of Americans who bowled on any given night was increasing annually, the number of those bowlers who participated in bowling leagues was steadily declining. “If people bowl alone, they do not participate in social interaction and civic discussions that might occur in a league environment,” the proposition went. And therewith forms the start of the decline in democracy and the dissolution of the social compact. So you look at the characters who bowl in leagues like the one in the movie “The Big Lebowski” and you don’t see ne’er do well losers, one-step-from-over-the-edge psychopaths, and the occasional Latino pederast, but the very foundation of American society.

But I’m not here to talk about bowling. I’m here to talk about porches.

It occurred to me as I watched the stream of cars rolling down West Miner Street past my home in West Chester during Friday’s coffee-and-candy-bars-themed Old Fashioned Christmas parade (soon to be sponsored by Hy-Tech Mushroom Compost of West Grove, or Enron) that the time spent sitting on a porch contributed real value to American society in the past, a value that has been eroded by the trends in new home construction that see (one), new homes constructed where people heretofore have not actually lived and (two), new homes constructed with backyard decks.

Note to residents of DevelopmentLand: Backyard decks are not porches. To be a porch, a portion of the construction needs to be at the front of the home or at least visible from the front of the home, so you can see and be seen by your neighbors. To be a deck, the construction has to be completely hidden from view, so homeowners can cook steaks on the Webber in their sleeveless t-shirts and ratty gym shorts. Porches are what bring us together as a community, America-wise. Decks drive us apart, and lead to a fractured social consensus, a decline in voter participation, and a growth in those holiday yard displays that feature vinyl blow-up Pilgrim and Frosty the Snowman dolls. Which is de facto evidence, needless to say, that this country is going to hell in a hand-basket.

I am not only a great believer in porches and porch sitting; I am also a proud practitioner in porch sitting. I am even responsible, in part, for the use of the word “porch” as a verb in the West Chester community, starting circa 1984. “Let’s porch,” I used to say to my friends and neighbors of a summer’s eve. “We could have dinner and then porch awhile,” I’d suggest to a date I wanted to impress. “I’m going to be porching tonight, so come on over and let’s seal the social compact,” I’d tell others, who I knew had college degrees and could, therefore, understand the varied meaning of the word “compact.”

Porches help you make friends; they help you understand what is going on in your neighborhood; they serve as a perfect way of getting fresh air; and occasionally they can help you stay cool when the power goes out in the summer and the inside of your home heats up like a toaster oven in a steam bath. There was a reason why George Washington included a porch on the front of his home at Mt. Vernon, and why the White House has a porch that the president can sit on with world leaders from around the globe when the power goes out in the summer. The reason is that porches helped make America strong and good and solid and the sort of place where a Christmas parade didn’t need a corporate sponsor, which is apparently where the country is today.

If you drive through West Chester or Kennett Square or Downingtown or even Modena, for pity sakes, you will see porches. And outdoor furniture placed there for the specific purpose of sitting outside and chatting with people who walk by. If you drive past the West Marlborough home of noted financial wizard and indicted Ponzi swindler Donald Anthony Walker “Tony” Young, you will see an outdoor pool, a driveway suitable for 13 cars, two chimneys, a tennis court, and a horse stable. What you will not see is a porch.

I think I’ve made my point. Now get off my back, Rupert.