Someone's In the Kitchen With Schmitty

This column originally appeared on Sept 10, 2010.

It felt downright odd standing there alone in the tiny kitchen on North Hanover Street in Pottstown, hearing the faint sounds of the Phillies’ game coming from the television in the other room, but seeing as though Jamie was letting me stay in his apartment for free while I got settled in southeastern Pennsylvania in September 1980 I figured I had an obligation to go along with his request.

At the time, you see, Jamie was a extremely fanatical Phillies supporter and was desperate to have them get to the National League playoffs, even though the last couple times they had done so his heart had most assuredly been broken, so ordering me to stand in the kitchen did not strike him as anything particularly unreasonable or out of the ordinary. Time has gone by since and things have changed in Jamie’s life, so at this point he is simply an enormously fanatical Phillies supporter and, I suppose, is content to merely suggest to the people he lives with that they go stand in the kitchen at certain junctures of important Phillies games. He’s matured that way.

Because to be an extremely fanatical supporter of the Phillies in September 1980 meant that everything in the known universe circled around making sure they won the National League Eastern Division and from there the National League pennant and from there the World Series. And because everything in the known universe circled around making sure they won, when something positive happened to the team during an important game it became crucial to make certain that whatever circumstances existed at that time be replicated as exactly as possible in the future.

Which is why I found myself standing alone in Jamie’s small kitchen on the third floor of the old house on North Hanover Street, where I had been sleeping on a thin mattress for the past few weeks. I had moved to Pottstown from Cincinnati, Ohio, via Union County, Kentucky, hoping to find fortune if not fame. Growing up in Cincinnati, I was certainly accustomed to baseball success, having followed the Cincinnati Reds during their glory years of the 1970s. But following the Cincinnati Reds as they won two World Series and five National League pennants did not prepare me for having to stand in a kitchen in Pottstown while a baseball game I had no rooting interest in was being played.

In Cincinnati, baseball fandom then tended to be more of a civic obligation than a passionate, overwhelming personal avocation. You went to the Opening Day Parade downtown, checked the standings in the paper every day, and rooted for the Reds come October for the same reason you voted in the November election: you were supposed to, whether you got a lot of enjoyment out of it or not. I recall being at a local amusement park with high school friends on Oct. 14, 1972, when the Reds opened the World Series against the Oakland As. Someone had a transistor radio and, checking the score at some point, noted that the Reds were losing, “OK,” I said. “I’m going to ride the Lost River with Susie Goldberg.”

The Reds lost the game that day and, ultimately, the series, but hey, I got to talk with Susie Goldberg for an afternoon. I did my duty. I knew the game score, felt appropriately aggrieved, and went forth with life knowing that the Reds would still be there when I checked in next April.

Jamie, on the other hand, had newspaper clippings from the Black Friday game the Phillies lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers on Oct. 7, 1977, posted in his apartment three years after the game was over. Jamie would watch the Phillies play on television, then listen to the rebroadcast of the game on KYM-AM, even though he knew how it ended. Once, when an announcer made the wrong call on a play in the field, during a game, Jamie picked up the telephone and tried to dial the network offices in New York City so he could speak with the broadcaster’s supervisor and request, politely but forcefully, that the man be taken off the air.

So there I was, watching a late season game in September 1980 with Jamie, who I had been living with for only a few weeks, when I got hungry and went to the kitchen to make a sandwich. The Phillies were at bat -- Jamie had a difficult time accepting that I could leave the room – and while I was putting meat on bread Mike Schmidt hit a home run. I went back to the game, finished my sandwich, and the next time that Schmidt came to bat, Jamie looked me straight in the eye and said, “Go to the kitchen. Now."

Which is where I went and stayed until Schmidt struck out and I was no longer responsible for the fate of the Phillies. And that is as I remain today

Nothing But BLue Skies Do I See

This column originally appeared on Sept. 26, 2010.

History tells us that heroes were initially demi-gods – part man, part deity – and that they gradually transformed downward from that into human characters who, under fire, show special courage and resourcefulness, mostly on the battlefield (think Achilles, Sir Galahad, Audie Murphy, etc.) where they end up slaughtering their foes like so many spring lambs.

Now, we’re pretty much left with sports figures like Roy Halladay as heroes, and despite what some might have wanted to see happen to the teenager who ran on the field at Citizens Bank Park last week in a red body suit, I don’t think the Phils’ ace pitcher would necessarily involve himself in a ritual disemboweling of that fellow simply to prove his mantle.

But I thought about my own hero recently while mingling with the cars parked on Level Seven of the Chester County Justice Center Parking Garage and Smoking Lounge. Allow me to explain.

Harold Wallace Ross (1892-1951) was the originator and first editor of The New Yorker magazine, and an editor whose vision, wit, and outrageous temper I have admired over the years, to the point of apotheosis. If there is a book about Ross, I’ve read it, more than once, and have used the descriptions of him as inspiration, in my own small way. He once gave a colleague of his on The Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Army newspaper during World War I, a page of commas as a Christmas present, and that predilection towards punctuation, one might point out, is something for which I have more than a fleeting affection.

James Thurber, another of my literary heroes, said in his book, “The Years With Ross,” that the editor had ways of looking at people and things that would stick in one’s head forever. He looked at a portrait of a banker and said, “That’s not a banker. That’s a butler,” and so the man became. Ross, according to Thurber, once complained of a blue sky, “There was never a sky like that. It’s delft, or Alice, or some goddam shade,” even though Thurber allowed that only blues Ross probably could have known were light, sky, and Navy.

So I thought about Ross and delft and Alice as I stood looking out over the West Chester landscape one day this month as the blue sky surrounded me overhead. We have had a string of days of blue skies in September here in Chester County that strikes me as remarkable, and each day it seems to me the shade changes, but by bit. It’s the sun and the clouds and the time of day, I tell myself, but it’s also nature having fun with color.

Here are the shades of blue that are possible in our world, a few of them at least.

Steel blue. Tiffany blue. Indigo. Dark blue. Sky blue. Deep sky blue. Han. Iceberg. Federal. Midnight. Cornflower, Alice (yes, it is there). Teal. Carolina (no Nittany). Palatinate blue.

There’s Bleu de France. Bondi Blue. Tufts Blue. UCLA Blue. Air Force Blue. Iris. Powder, Prussian. Ultramarine. Yale Blue. Duke Blue (still no Nittany).

I am not certain whether all those blues have been seen when looking upwards, but I love imaging what a Cobalt Blue sky would look like. I think that the shade that exists out the window of my garret here on West Miner Street could be construed as Majorelle Blue, but given time and a change in the position of the sun you might also be able to describe it as Maya Blue in polite company.

I considered myself lucky to examine the shades of blue we’ve seen overhead from one of the best vantage points in the county, the parking garage, which I have noted in previous musings. Open only a few short years, it allows panoramas that were not seen in the hundreds of years that West Chester has been populated – letting one see the expanse of the county from an entirely unique point, and check off the blips on the horizon as the pop up like heartbeats on a cardiac monitor – there the Historic Courthouse clock tower, there the steeple of West Chester United Methodist, there the West Chester University water tower.

I know that the sky will change it’s shade of blue tomorrow, and into the winter, where we will be more apt to describe what is clearly Glaucous or Ceil blue as Dull gray. And simply to know that everything changes, including the color of the sky, is comforting in a way, because we no longer have to revere as heroes only the men whose swords are bloodiest.

Enter, Laughing

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Sept. 12, 2010

I don’t know whether it was Lowell Ganz or Balaboo Mandel, or both together, who wrote the following, but it doesn’t matter. If either of them never writes another worthwhile paragraph again they will nonetheless have entered the world of American letters.

(I am paraphrasing here for propriety’s sake, but this is a dressing down that Manager Jimmy Dugan gives a poor-performing player on his Rockford Peaches squad in the film, “A League of Their Own.”)

“Are you crying? Are you crying? Are you crying? There's no crying! There’s no crying in baseball! Rogers Hornsby was my manager, and he called me a talking pile of pig slop. And that was when my parents drove all the way down from Michigan to see me play the game. And did I cry? No! And do you know why? Because there's no crying in baseball. THERE'S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL! No crying!”

There is, however, crying in the courtroom.

If you spend enough time visiting courtrooms when criminal cases are being heard, you will see a lot of crying people. There are crying defendants, crying victims, and crying parents and siblings of defendants and victims. They cry tears of grief, tears of fear, tears of rage, and tears designed simply to win a favorable outcome in their case. There is a reason that every courtroom in the Chester County Justice Center comes equipped with a tipstaff and a box of tissues. People will cry, and someone needs to hand them the Kleenex.

I once saw a woman, who was called to testify in a trial against the man who attacked her at her home on her birthday in her bedroom, walk into Courtroom 7 in the Historic Courthouse already in full sob. She cried taking the witness stand, cried taking the oath, cried during her direct testimony, cried during the cross-examination, and cried as she left the room. The only time I didn’t see her cry in the courtroom was when her attacker was sent to state prison for his crime. But she wasn’t smiling, either.

You never get used to the crying, because so much of it comes from the heart. But you come to expect it and accept it for what it is.

So yes, there is crying in the courtroom. What there is not a lot of, however, is laughter. I was reminded of that last week.

Generally speaking, being in court is not a laughing matter. People who stand before a judge with a criminal defense attorney on their right and a prosecutor on their left, more or less, aren’t having a picnic. You don’t normally come to court because you’ve completed high school with perfect attendance. Jocularity is pretty much never on the docket.

The absence of humor is even more profound if you are appearing at your probation violation hearing from, say, SCI Greensburg. Incarceration at a state prison is, on the whole, a fairly good indication that whatever you were supposed to be doing to show probation officials you were living up to your end of the bargain, something was missing in the total effort. So what happened on Wednesday as Judge William P. Mahon was wrapping up a video VOP hearing with a man whose name and crime escapes me but whose image will remain in my memory for days, was remarkable in its own way.

Mahon is the only judge who makes it a regular habit to come down off his bench and shake the hands of defendants who have lived up to their part of the bargain, so he’s more used to relating to those in front of him on a one-to-one basis than others. As such, he was being about as pleasant as he could be with the fellow in SCI Greensburg, even though he’d given the fellow a few extra months to consider the wages of sin and/or civility.

“Thanks judge,” the inmate said. “Thanks.” Not at all, the judge responded. Just remember to keep away from those knuckleheads in the cellblock with you. They’ll only get you in deeper. “I’ll try, judge,” the prisoner responded. “I just want to get back on the right track.” The hearing done, Mahon started to move on to the next case on his list. Until the microphone in the video link, still live, picked up something from SCI Greensburg.

“I think I just got railroaded,” the aforementioned inmate remarked to a fellow prisoner next to him. “Did you get a load of that?”

The courtroom, full of probation officers, attorneys, defendants, sheriff deputies, exploded with laughter. For once, they had heard a defendant speak honestly, not just truthfully. Mahon, his Irish eyes wrinkled in delight, kindly cautioned the inmate not to take it any farther, and the fellow’s defense attorney quickly turned off the connection. The chuckles lasted a few minutes afterwards, and then the next case was called.

Trespassers W

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Aug. 29, 2010

Ssssh! I have a confession to make and I want to be very certain that we keep it between just us, OK? I may have perpetrated a technical violation of 18 Pa. C.S. or, as they like to say in Common Pleas Court, committed a crime. Don’t tell anyone, though. I may be able to get away with it.

It has been ages since I knowing engaged in any criminal activity, so I may not have been quite as adept at this sort of enterprise as I once was. Back in my crime-spree days, which I would place in a pre-President Jimmy Carter era, I was quite skillful at a specific type of criminal activity. I would say I violated the laws of the state of Ohio about once or twice a week at the time and would have done so even more often except I wasn’t allowed out of the house past dark.

The crime I was rather accomplished at is now referred to in legal terms as “retail theft” but when I was a teenager it was known by the more commonplace term, “I don’t get enough allowance.” Basically, I stole cigarettes. From dairy stores. From smoke shops. From grocery stores. From places that were known in Cincinnati, my hometown, as “pony kegs.” More or less, if you were a businessperson who sold cigarettes, I tried to steal them from you.

It may sound as if I am proud of this criminal history, but I am not. I get a cold sweat when I recall standing for what seemed hours aimlessly by the cash register at the local dairy store until the clerk had gone to give another customer a double-dip ice cream cone, and then swiping a pack of Vantage cigarettes. Or Parliament. Or whatever silly brand I was smoking at the time. I take no honor in my past, and so the fact that I found myself on Saturday afternoon walking down that wicked, felonious path is all the more unexplainable.

Don’t be horrified. My crime in the grand scheme of things doesn’t measure up to the sort of perfidy you may have grown used to reading about in the newspaper these days. I haven’t swindled anyone out of their hard earned retirement savings, or threatened to embarrass someone who would pass for a local celebrity in Chester County. In all, I am more like the character in Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” monologue who finds himself having to explain to other hardened criminals – “mother rapers, father stabbers, FATHER rapers!” – who he finds himself grouped with that his crime amounted to “litterin’.”

What it comes down to is that I took a nice hike at The Laurels preserve out Unionville way Saturday, without being an actual member of the Brandywine Conservancy. Which, if you check the rules in the handy brochure available at the trailhead, is not allowed. That’s it in a nutshell. The prosecutors from the Chester County District Attorney’s Office who look askance at me when I ask them how the police were able to catch such and such a criminal, as if they think I’m compiling a list of “dos” and “don’ts” for my own personal ultimate criminal enterprise, might refer to such behavior as “defiant trespass.”

In my defense, however, I would point out two things. First, it was a perfect day for a woodlands stroll on Saturday and that’s what you get out at The Laurels. The path passes along Buck Run, or Doe Run, I confuse the two, as it meanders along through pastures and woods that used to belong to the great King Ranch. In the 19870s, the conservancy was able to save more than 700 acres of the property that now makes up The Laurels and keep it in a natural, scenic and pristine state. There are quite a few hiking paths along the stream, and a stunningly beautiful ancient covered bridge. You walk though oaks, poplars, beech and ash, and when venturing into the open pasture can see all manner of hawks circling overhead. It’s a delightful, relaxing experience.

I thought someone might call me on my presence when I arrived and made plans for various subterfuges that would get me past the gate, but no one bothered me in the least. As I left, a woodsy looking fellow asked whether I was a member and I replied, as honestly as I could, “Not yet.”

Second, my plan is to actually become a member of the conservancy before my next visit to The Laurels and hope that my criminal past is overlooked. As least as far as arboreal statutes on the books go. Just keep this between us for now, though.

Making The Grocery List

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Aug. 22, 2010

Every year since 1998, Beloit College in Wisconsin has been issuing what its faculty refers to as the “mindset list.” Compiled on this list are touchstones that the older faculty and staff should take into account when considering the place where the incoming class of freshman is coming from, culturally speaking.

You might have run up against some of these yourselves when thinking about the 18-year-olds you encounter. You know, that they have never used, or perhaps even seen, a rotary telephone. That the phrase “don’t touch that dial” when it comes to a television has no meaning for them. That they’ve always lived their life in the shadow of AIDS, and that Bruce Springsteen has always been older than their parents.

This year’s list includes reminders that few in the Class of 2014 have ever written in cursive, and if they send mail it’s not through the U.S. Postal Service. To them, John McEnroe had never played professional tennis, and Korean cars are as commonplace as a VW. They have never known a nation called Czechoslovakia, and Vietnam has always been a place that sends shoes to the U.S.

Two things.

First, I had my chance to be a proud member of the Beloit College Class of 1979, but passed on that option to attend Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., instead, and that decision led me to meet people who grew up in Chester County, who suggested I move here after a year in Kentucky and get a job on a local newspaper which led, ultimately, to me writing this weekly column. Feeling blessed, are you?

Second, what strikes me about the way the world has changed since the days before the 1990s is not what’s gone, but what has arrived. And by that, I mean the things you find on grocery store shelves.

The members of the Class of 2014 have never known a time when there was not salsa on the shelves at their neighborhood supermarket. And not just salsa, but mild, medium, or hot salsa. Or Roasted Chipotle salsa. Or Roasted Tomato salsa. Or Roasted Sweet Pepper salsa. Garlic and Line, Santa Fe, Black Bean and Corn, all salsas -- and those are just the store brands.

To the freshman, there has always been a choice to make between reduced fat and natural peanut butter, honey roast or hazelnut (with skim milk and cocoa). They can get prune butter, maple butter or pumpkin butter, and no one is going to look askance at them in the checkout lane.

No world has existed for them when there were not 11 different types of baked beans on the shelf, or three different types of Spaghetti Os, one “plus calcium.” They have always been given the option of Jasmati, Texmati, Basmati, Arborio or brown rice -- that is if they were sick of buying couscous. They have always had 14 flavors of Rice-a-Roni, and could not care less that it is the “San Francisco Treat.”

My mother took my sisters and I shopping every Friday at the Keller’s IGA store on Ludlow Avenue in the Clifton neighborhood of Cincinnati and we came home each week with pizza in a box from Chef Boy-Ar-Dee. The kit could make two pies, one round and one rectangular, and we loved each and every slice of it. You go to a grocery store now and go to the pasta aisle and here is what you will find: Four Cheese, Roasted Garlic, Diavolo, Puttanesca, Bolognese, Tomato and Basil, Spicy Tomato and Basil, Traditional Sweet Basil, Vodka and Pomodoro tomato sauce. Not to mention fusilli, rotelle, rigatoni, mini-rigatoni, penne, penne rigate, farfalle, tortiglioni, cappellini, linguine, and regular and thin spaghetti. And if the class of 2014 walked in a store and didn’t see those pasta items in regular and organic whole wheat, they would wonder how in the world the store could possibly stay in business.

Don’t get me started on the olive bar.

This is not meant to be one of those tiresome “when I was a kid” rants about how much better things were when I was growing up. I thought about what my mother in 1965 would think if she were transported to the new Wegman’s Grocery Store in Great Valley and plopped down with her grocery list. She would likely faint.

I am happy to walk into a store with so much selection, even if I still walk out with a can of plain baked beans and a jar of creamy peanut butter. It’s the kind of change you can believe in.

But maybe I’m wrong. After all, the closet Wegman’s to Beloit is in Erie, 541 miles away.

Sarah and Eddie, Meet Carolyn

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Aug. 15, 2010.

I have a friend named Carolyn B. who lives in New Hampshire and who is, perhaps not coincidentally, the wife of my college roommate, senior year version. She is also the reason I have spent more time than necessary recently thinking about Butch Patrick.

Carolyn is a professional transcriber, which means that she can listen to two or more people talking and drum out their words on a keyboard as though she were orchestrating the conversation herself. I can type about 40 words a minute if I do not care too much that the words actually come out in the English language. Carolyn, by contrast, can type 4,000 words a minute, spelled correctly and with punctuation, all the while balancing her checkbook. She’s fast, she’s efficient, and she’s accurate. Which means that she has a lot of spare time on her hands during the day, time she uses to pursue her true calling in life, celebrity-watching.

The idea of celebrity has taken sort of a pounding in modern critical thinking these days because it has come to symbolize the diminishment of actual accomplishment. You have Lady Gaga on the one hand, and Greg Mortenson on the other, and who gets more press -- the one who wears pointed brassieres or the one who builds schools for girls in Afghanistan? Point?

But don’t run that one by Carolyn. She is as equally knowledgeable about both, and can discourse conversantly about not only the value of women’s education in a Taliban-controlled nation but also what the back story is behind the recent Lady Gaga-Katy Perry contretemps. (If you don’t know, you have to start reading the gossips mags in line at the Acme.)

Carolyn has a certain regard for me not only because I write for a daily newspaper and knew her husband before she did, but also because she knows that “Sex and the City” star Sarah Jessica Parker was my next-door neighbor in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the early and mid-1970s. That connection, however distant and tenuous, is for her the silver star atop my personal Christmas tree.

At the drop of a hat, Carolyn can recall in rich detail every brush with celebrity that she has had in her life, from the time she stalked Meryl Streep on the streets of London to the time that James Mason came to her parents’ house to inquire about trash recycling rules. She gets excited talking about celebrities that no one else knows about, like the actress that played the lead in the 1973 TV movie, “She Lives!” (Season Hubley) and the fact that a Downingtown singer songwriter (Jim Croce) not only wrote the movie’s theme song, “Time in a Bottle,” but also died eight days after the movie aired on ABC.

So I was not at all surprised when Carolyn breathlessly sent me the news this month that Butch Patrick had moved to West Chester. Patrick is better known, if he is known at all, as the actor who played Eddie Munster on the television show, “The Munsters,” which Carolyn presumably devoured as a young girl growing up in suburban New York.

You have likely read the news by now: a Chester County woman and former Philadelphia Eagles cheerleader connected with Patrick at a vampire convention in Pittsburgh some months ago, developed a relationship with him, and convinced him to move from his home in Los Angeles to the bright lights of West Goshen. Or East Bradford. Or Pocopson. Or whatever township comes with a West Chester address these days.

I was thankful to Carolyn for the news, because Patrick’s presence in my hometown now gives me another reason to explain why I live here when asked by semi-former acquaintances at college reunions (“I love the celebrities it attracts – Andrew Wyeth, Eddie Munster”). But I had no idea what Patrick looked like in his middle age and told Carolyn I regretted that I might pass him by in the aisle at the local Acme grocery store and not realize my own brush with fame.

Here is Carolyn’s solution: “I think you should just repeat ‘Butch’ next time you’re at the Acme and see if anyone turns around. If not, at least people will talk about you, and like Gaga, the fun only starts after one gets noticed.”

Point.

A Lasting Encounter With EZ

This column originally appeared on Aug. 1, 2010

The memory of Elinor Z. Taylor that has stuck with me for all the years I knew her, wrote stories about her, answered angry telephone calls from her, and tried to explain her to others is the night she followed me into the men's room of West Chester Borough Hall.

It was Aug. 30, 1985, a sweltering hot evening made even stickier by the crowd of residents inside the Borough Council chambers on the ground floor of the old Borough Hall, a building that has gone to dust. The chambers was packed with angry neighbors of the Sartomer Co., a chemical processing company on the eastern edge of the borough that had long contributed to a foul stench that greeted motorists as they came into town on West Chester Pike.

Earlier that week, a chemical leak at the plant had forced the evacuation of several blocks surrounding the plant. No one was seriously hurt, as I recall, but the company was taken to task vociferously by neighbors because they had not been warned about the emergency. The neighbors had gathered in front of the borough council a few nights later to demand that the plant be shut down, and that proper emergency procedures be put in place. One of the neighbors told the council, "I would rather run than find out later, 'You're going to die.'" It was that kind of night.

The council meeting was on a Wednesday. Attending the session, in addition to the neighbors, were a crop of politicians and political players, including, not surprisingly, Taylor, who had served as a West Chester councilwoman herself, lived in the borough, and took a keen interest in how she could possibly help those affected by the leak. I don't remember if she said anything in particular that night, but I noted her attendance. I'd been covering the borough for a little more than a year, and had interviewed her a few times. We'd met.

A regular feature that ran Fridays in the Daily Local News at the time was a compilation of little noticed Chester County goings-on, inside jokes, and gentle pokes at area personalities. Reporters could contribute items anonymously to "Ham 'n Wry," to tease their favorite, or least favorite, news personalities. That Friday, I wrote something about how some politicians would use any crisis or tragedy to promote themselves, get their names out, and I named Taylor as one such miscreant.

So picture this: at a follow up session that day, the crowd has reassembled, the company executives are promising to suspend things, Taylor is there to read a statement from the state about an investigation into the leak, and the newspaper has been on the streets for six hours, give or take, the jibe at Taylor still inky fresh. The council takes a minute to break for informal discussions with the company folks, and I walk down the hall to the men's room to, well, wash my hands, shall we say.

As I walked in the door, suddenly who stood behind me but the Honorable State Representative Elinor Zimmerman Taylor, hair white, glasses on, eyes furious. "How dare you write such tripe about my motives?" she demanded. "Who did I think I was? What did the Daily Local mean trying to slam her?" I think she may have offered to readjust the nose on my face at no additional charge, but I may be wrong.

"Elinor," I said, interrupting her. "You're in the men's room."

She blinked. "So I am," she said. Then, without warning, she smiled, winked at me, slapped me on the chest, and walked out the door, telling me she'd talk to me later.

The people that I spoke with the day after Taylor died told me invariably that they'd had similar encounters with her, when she would confront them angrily and start heating up, only to settle down after a bit and leave them agreeably. When I remarked to one man that Taylor was certainly not a shrinking violet, he laughed a shuddering kind of laugh, remembering perhaps picking up the phone and hearing Taylor's voice bark out his name.

The last time I saw her was after she had announced her decision to leave the House of Representatives and was readying for her retirement. She was in the Chester County Book and Music Co., buying up a stack of books to give as holiday presents for friends. I said hello, and wondered how she was. She looked up at me from her purse, remembered who I was, and smiled.

Mr. Mawby You've Been On My Mind

This column originally appeared on July 18, 2010

Tredyffrin has been on my mind of late, and with Tredyffrin, Cincinnati.

Allow me to explain.

Some thirty years ago this month I was getting ready to pack up my 1971 Dodge Dart with almost every possession I had acquired to date and drive over the Allegheny mountains to Chester County, where friends from college offered a worldly paradise and the possibility of gainful employment in the news business.

I had been living the past year in Union County, Ky., in a town called Sturgis. If you Google Sturgis now, you will get a lot of websites that deal with motorcycles, but few that deal with the pork and coal capital of western Kentucky. Sturgis is where I got my start in the news dodge, and it prepared me for a lot of odd details of government life that have served me well.

First, the paper required me to refer to the town mayor as “Dr.” So-and-so, even though the man was not an actual holder of a medical doctor’s license but rather a chiropractor. Second, the mayor’s brother was a county judge, but not a judge in the legal sense. County judges are more like Kentucky’s version of our county commissioners. It escapes me what they called their Common Pleas court judges; they might have been magistrates or justices for all I can recall. Lastly, the mayor’s brother’s first name was Durwood, and he raised pigs. I have never met another person named Durwood, and I have never forgotten the smell of his farm on a hot July afternoon.

I digress.

After moving to Pennsylvania and finding an apartment in Devon at the old Sugartown Mews apartment complex (where the roaches checked in and never checked out), I hooked on at the Suburban and Wayne Times, a venerable weekly newspaper whose editor made friends with his readers by showing no sympathy at the death of John Lennon. The managing editor who hired me sent me to Tredyffrin, a township on the Upper Main Line outside Philadelphia, to cover the Board of Supervisors on the basis that I knew what the difference was between a “zoning variance” and a “special exception.” I have since forgotten what that difference is, and would not like to be reminded, thank you very much.

Tredyffrin was a change from covering the city council in Sturgis, primarily because of the nature of the people who lived there -- preppy lawyers rather than coal miners -- and the place that it found itself demographically in 1980. The stories I covered included innumerable requests for approval of the housing developments that are now populated by people who consider any new subdivision an infringement on their rights to a quiet suburban existence; the coming of a cable television franchise to the township (anybody remember Harron Cable TV?) and the ordinance that went with it; and the debate over whether the township should take the offer of free library space at the Chesterbrook Shopping Center. For some reason, the Pulitzer Committee did not take notice.

In the center off all this whirling hoopla was Tredyffrin’s township manager, a clever and occasionally approachable fellow named Norman Mawby, who answered my questions about special exceptions and variances with a patience that could have been undeserved. There are many things that stick out in my mind about Mr. Mawby, but I will tell you three things that won’t embarrass him. First, he continually wore what I came to refer to as the Main Line Uniform – button-down blue dress shirt, dress khakis, tweed sport coat, unassuming tie, brown loafers. Sometimes the coat was a blue blazer, but not often. Second, he was not a chiropractor. Third, his brother, if he had one, was not a pig farmer.

I lost touch with Mr. Mawby when I started covering West Chester, but reconnected with him recently when he wrote a book about the people behind the scenes at Citizens Bank Park after the Phillies had won the 2008 World Series, and I interview him about it. I recognized his voice right away on the phone, although I cannot vouch for whether his wardrobe has changed.

I thought of Tredyffrin and Mr. Mawby on Friday when an envelope appeared underneath my door at the Chester County Justice Center. In it, I found a thank you card in a starling shade of lime green. I opened it, and saw the line scores of the weekend series from the visit my hometown Cincinnati Reds paid to Citizens Bank Park last weekend. They read, “July 8 PHL 4 CIN 3; July 9 PHL 9 CIN 7; July 10 PHL 1 CIN 0; July 11 PHL 1 CIN 0. Thanks for the favor. Norm.”

You are welcome, Mr. Mawby. Or, should I say, Durwood.

Sorry If I Miscommunicate This, But...

This column originally appeared on July 11, 2010.

When I tell you in advance that I am sorry for the subject of this column, it is not simply a matter of diffusing any negative reaction that you, as readers, may have when finished with it. I tell you that I am sorry at the outset because this column, a semi-diatribe against corporate customer service, is neither original nor inspiring – two attributes that I aspire to each time I sit down to compose my weekly thoughts on paper – and also because my apology serves as an ironic counterpoint to the column’s subject itself.

Last month I ordered telephone, Internet, and cable television service from a well known local provider of such technology, whose name will escape mention here but whose identity one could hazard a guess at with a passing glance at the Philadelphia skyline. The price was right, the Phillies still seemed interesting at the time, and change is always a good thing – or so I’m told.

Installation of my new services went swimmingly. The friendly fellow who trundled up the steps to my third floor garret got the task finished in good time, and even complimented me on having a very nice hassock fan that kept him cool while he installed things.

But problems developed soon after he left. For reasons I will not tire you with, my telephone service was incomplete. That is, I could make calls from my phone, but not receive them. Over the next two weeks, I would grapple with the company’s customer service representatives, both on line and over the phone, until all was successfully completed and I became one with the universe once again.

The facet of my mano-e-mano duel over my non-phone service that intrigued, and ultimately frustrated, me the most was the seeming overarching willingness of the customer service folks to apologize to me. In the many, many discussions I had over my non-service, I was told that the person I was speaking to was sorry more times than I can remember. In one discussion -- in which I merely wanted to know what a certain light on my new television box meant -- the on-line person opened the conversation by saying he was sorry for the inconvenience I had suffered. He was pleasantly surprised when I told him I had no problem, just a question. Seems he had been sorry for nothing.


It went on like this for days. One morning, while again recounting the saga of my phone service, the live telephone person said she was sorry for any "miscommunication" I had experienced five times before I stopped counting. A supervisor I discussed things with also opened our conversation by saying he was sorry. He didn’t even know what the problem was, but he wanted me to know that he felt my pain. It drove me a little batty, I admit. At one point I heatedly insisted that someone in my immediate family could die and I wouldn’t be told about it because the phone call couldn’t go through. The hyperbole brought forth a rather languid, “Yes, sir. I am sorry for that.”


Little by little, it dawned on me that they were not really personally sorry at all. They were, instead, corporately sorry. And there is a difference.


As an example, I point you to the tale of Peter Blok of Uwchlan and the 300 or so other passengers on the Virgin Atlantic flight he took from London to Newark, N.J., last month after a golfing vacation that had a unscheduled stopover in Hartford, Conn. After sitting on the un-airconditioned plane and being lied to by the air stewards for five hours, when they finally deplaned an announcement came over the loudspeakers saying that Virgin was “sorry for the inconvenience.” Blok didn’t believe them, and neither do I.

What I now believe is that large corporate institutions believe that if their minions say they are sorry for putting you out, whether they mean it or not, they are somehow off the hook. "Look, buddy, I said I was sorry! What else do you want?' is the common attitude.

Meanwhile, my mechanic, Andy of Downingtown, offered to cut my recent $2,000 repair bill by $500 because it had taken him longer to diagnose the problem that he originally led me to believe. I declined his offer because it wasn’t his fault, but his apology was genuine. I will never take my car anywhere else.

This also came about the time that Nancy Slome, my onetime class mate back at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati, Ohio (Alma Mater: “High on the Hill”), asked rather straightforwardly whether I was the person who stole the mezuzah from the front door of her home when we were teenagers. I admitted it, and explained how awful I felt for doing something so juvenile and harmful. She accepted my apology, and I felt better for it. Not because it got me off the hook, but because, in a small way, I atoned for something I had done wrong.

Anyway, I am sorry if I bored y ou.

Discussion of bunkers forbidden at hearing

No column this week, but I'm passing along this story that appeared on Page One on Sunday, June 27, 2010.

WEST CHESTER — Richard Steven Newman said almost nothing in court as a Chester County Common Pleas judge added another year to his state prison sentence. His former wife kept her thoughts private as well, talking only with her husband and family during the brief hearing.

But what remained completely unspoken in the case of an "obsessed" husband stalking and ultimately attacking his ex-wife were the boxes that police found buried in the ground behind Newman's former home in West Bradford.

Two underground "bunkers" had been constructed there, far away from where anyone inside could be heard or seen. At one, there were wire restraints screwed to the wall, jugs full of water stored inside, and a trap-door mechanism hidden under leaves and dirt that would keep the person inside from raising the lid and escaping his or her confinement.

The purpose of those bunkers was clear to Newman's ex-wife, Barbara Sexton, when she learned of them, seven months after Newman broke into her home in Lancaster County, clubbed her boyfriend with a hammer, and tried to drag her from the house.

"She expressed her belief that they were designed by the suspect to restrain her," wrote state police Trooper Samuel Laureto in his report of the discovery of the bunkers.

Newman, 51, a former high school industrial arts teacher in Downingtown and West Chester, is now serving a sentence of 12 to 44 years for the February 2008 attack on Sexton and her now-husband, Michael Vidolin, after he pleaded guilty but mentally ill to charges including attempted murder, aggravated assault and burglary.

Mention of the bunkers — which Newman's former attorney, Richard Meanix of West Chester, referred to in court documents as "forts" or "sanctuaries" — was, however, barred by the sentencing judge in Lancaster County from being mentioned by the prosecution in its plea for a long period of incarceration.

Meanix had argued that the purpose of the boxes was in no way sinister, but that Newman had built them to provide him a place to retreat to when he was overcome with anxiety brought on by his agoraphobia. Bringing up their existence at sentencing would be prejudicial and irrelevant to the charges he pleaded guilty to. Judge Hoard F. Knisely agreed.

Additionally, because police determined that the construction of the bunkers in West Bradford had not involved any criminal activity, local authorities did not mention their existence on Wednesday when Newman appeared in county Judge Howard F. Riley Jr.'s courtroom for sentencing on a violation of his 2007 probation for stalking Sexton at her job in West Sadsbury.

But they remain forefront in the mind of the Lancaster County prosecutor who handled Newman's case there.

"It is certainly one of the most troubling things I've even seen in a case," said Assistant District Attorney Susan Ellison, a 17-year veteran prosecutor and head of the Lancaster County District Attorney's Domestic Violence Unit.

The matter has taken its toll on Sexton as well, Ellison said. "She is terrified of him," she said in an interview last week. "I don't think that this is ever going to go away for her. It is a comfort to know he is incarcerated, but in the back of her mind she knows there is a possibility he could get out of jail."

Meanix, contacted Friday, declined comment.

In a response to Meanix's request to keep mention of the bunkers from being used against Newman, Ellison laid out what authorities believed Newman intended on the night of Feb. 12, 2008.

He rode a bicycle from his home in the Romansville area of West Bradford near what is now township park property to Sexton and Vidolin's home in Warwick, Lancaster County, a distance of more than 42 miles. He broke into the home and waited in the basement until after 1 a.m., when he knew the couple had gone to bed, removing his shoes and leaving there a change of clothes, plastic bags, a flashlight and a ski mask.

He then went into the bedroom and struck Vidolin in the head several times with a hammer while he slept, so hard that he had to be taken to the hospital for treatment. Newman then tried to drag Sexton from the house, but was stopped when she disabled him with a stun gun she kept for security. He was arrested by township police that morning and taken into custody.

Ellison wrote that she believed Newman intended to kill Vidolin and take Sexton from the house in her car, casting suspicion on her for Vidolin's murder. She, presumably, would be hidden from the world in one of the bunkers.

The attack came less than six months after Riley sentenced Newman to 30 days to 23 months in prison with three years probation on three counts of stalking, stemming from episodes that occurred 10 times in October 2006, November 2006 and January 2007. He had sent her obscene messages, followed her home from work, sent her mysterious packages, and entered her place of employment.

At the time, Newman was described by his father, Dr. Richard A. Newman of Downingtown, a local psychiatrist, as "a kind, gentle person who always tries to help those who need help." In addition to successfully connecting with troubled high school students, he coached Little League and umpired for youth teams in the 1990s, all the while raising three sons as a single parent.

A Phoenixville psychiatrist, Dr. Johanna Gorman, diagnosed him as suffering from major depression and other emotional and mental health issues, including panic disorder and agoraphobia — the fear of open, outdoor spaces. She said incarceration would lead to "a severe breakdown," but said he appeared to be finally dealing with his divorce from Sexton.

Gorman "does not believe that the type of behavior that (Newman) engaged in and pled guilty to would occur in the future because he is 'very much at peace' now that his marriage to Mrs. Newman has ended," wrote defense attorney Thomas Ramsay of Lionville, who represented Newman in September 2007.

A year later, on Sept. 2, 2008, state police were called to a wooded area owned by West Bradford that had been a landfill at one point but was then being surveyed for use as a township park. Surveyors had found the underground bunker, when a worker tripped over its hatch. Laureto wrote in his report of "an interior trap door with a hooked tension bolt … reinforced with blocks to prevent someone from escaping if pushing up from the inside." There was a "U" bolt attached to the wall with a cable lopped at one end, and milk jugs with liquid with the date February 2008 on one's side.

After some investigation, Laureto interviewed a couple who had moved into a house in a subdivision near the woods in April 2008. They had discovered a hatch underneath their back deck that led to an underground room.

"They debated calling the police but decided not to after talking with their neighbors who described the former resident as very odd," Laureto wrote. That owner was Newman.

On Wednesday, Riley added one to three years to Newman's Lancaster County sentence, which he is currently serving at Norristown State Hospital.

Ellison, the Lancaster County prosecutor, said that the sentences will keep Newman under court supervision for the rest of his life. "

"I think (the court) recognizes that this defendant is going to be a danger to these victims," she said. "He is very much obsessed with these victims, and blames (Sexton) for everything" that has happened to him. "He needs to be supervised for a very long period of time."

Candidates With Color

This column originally appeared on Sunday, June 20, 2010

The news is replete these days with examinations of the political stances of various candidates whose public views seem at first glance to be, well, let us say out of the ordinary.

There is the fellow from Kentucky who, as I recall, suggested that letting people who own lunch counters decide who to welcome into their businesses and who to make creep around to the back door for a chicken salad sandwich might not be such a bad idea. I think he also was quoted as saying that since nothing could be done to prevent at least some people from dying in coal mines, why get all upset when it happens.

I've also heard tell about the woman in New Mexico, I think it is, who apparently thinks a glass of red wine with dinner is something that maybe the government should rethink allowing Americans to have. Something also about coming up with a few "Second Amendment remedies" if the government thinks it can use your money to fund that Social Security scheme also strikes a bell when I think of her.

We don't know much of how to take the fellow down in South Carolina who won the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate because, well, he really hasn't said much of anything, before, during, or after the election — except making an alleged attempt to introduce a college student to the wonderful world of pictures of naked people. We are certain, however, that things will work themselves out in the wash, or the courtroom, for this fellow.

But I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that exciting candidacies like these never happen in Chester County, and what a shame. With the recent exception of the school board election in which the guy who hinted that sticking people's faces in a tub of water was pretty much good clean fun, political candidates in Chester County are usually pretty boring.

Even the guy who ran for township supervisor on the Hot Air Balloon ticket had only an odd predilection for sleeping someplace other than his actual home, and compared to suggesting armed insurrection in Sin City, that hardly ranks.

We're left mostly with Andy Dinniman and his dog when it comes to providing local color in election campaigns. (I once saw state Sen. Dinniman walking said dog on the front lawn of the Chester County Historic Courthouse and wondered if he included the traditional plastic shopping bag in with his legislative briefs, but, alas, things never reached that stage. Another missed opportunity for the front page.)

Let me assure you, however, that we have had our own set of oddball candidates in the past whose stories would rival those of the candidates in Kentucky, New Mexico and South Carolina. For starters, there was the guy who ran for county commissioner on the platformthat he wanted to put a heliport on the top of the courthouse.

I forget his name, but he was ubiquitous at commissioners' meetings for a spell in the early and mid-1980s. He used to march up and down the sidewalk on North High Street in front of the Old Glory statue with a hand-drawn picture of what the heliport would look like after it was constructed next to the clock tower on Thomas U. Walter's architectural masterpiece.

He was adamant about it. It wasn't a joke. He truly believed that what the county needed was a central heliport in downtown West Chester. Taxes had something to do with it, I imagine. He would get righteously riled up at the commissioners' meeting when the trio in power didn't take him seriously enough, and once I remember he brought his one-man protest to the parking lot of the Daily Local News because we wouldn't include him in the candidate profiles we ran in the commissioners' race.

Occasionally I wonder what life would be like today if he'd been successful at convincing the public that a heliport was just what our county needed. It couldn't be worse than having an MTV reality TV star parade through downtown West Chester dressed as a rabbit, could it?

Another of my favorite campaigners was the former mayor of Parkesburg, who told me in a pre-election interview that one of his goals if re-elected was to erect a sign at the borough's edge proclaiming Parkesburg as "The Beverly Hills of Chester County." He had a hard time getting me to understand exactly how that 1.2 square mile municipality could compare with the land of palm trees and millionaire mansions, but that could be my fault. Maybe it was the presence of backyard "cee-ment ponds" that they had in common.

I think he won, though. Which may or may not give you pause if you live in Kentucky, New Mexico or South Carolina.

The Judge, The Boss, and Chihuahuas

This column originally appeared on Sunday, June 13, 2010

I'm at The Table last week for lunch and settling in to work on a late-week edition of The Times and its close-to-impossible crossword puzzles, staring vacantly at the clue for 9-Across — "Erased," five letters — when The Judge sits down.

The Judge tells me he's exhausted because he's been working so hard all week. I'm thinking to myself why he should be tired now, since The Judge pretty much works hard 24-7-365. I don't always stop by his courtroom a whole lot because he works so hard it makes ME tired. He comes in early and leaves late and when his schedule says he's going to be on the bench at 9 a.m. you can't just show up at 9:27 a.m. and figure you've got an extra minute or two to complete your paperwork, because he's been waiting for you since 9:01 a.m.

The Judge said he'd been so busy this week that he'd almost forgotten to tell me that he sentenced a fellow to a state prison term for shoplifting. Not that that in and of itself is necessarily newsworthy, since lots of people get sentenced to go upstate for shoplifting, I've learned. Collecting shoplifting convictions in Pennsylvania is sort of like collecting baseball cards — the more you have of them, the more you're gonna get at the back end. No, what he found interesting about this fellow's case was what he decided to steal. To wit, more than two dozen copies of the DVD presentation of "Beverly Hills Chihuahua," starring Jamie Lee Curtis, George Lopez, Piper Perabo, and Drew Barrymore as the voice of Chloe the Chihuahua.

I say I'm sorry I missed that because that's the sort of story that has legs, as we say in the ink-sloshing business. The Judge says he's sorry he missed it, too. The movie he means. He said he heard it was pretty funny. Seems there's a pampered Beverly Hills Chihuahua named Chloe who, while on vacation in Mexico with her owner's niece, Rachel (Perabo), gets lost and must rely on her new friends before she is caught by a dognapper who wants to ransom her. OK, fine. Whatever. Anyway, all the talk about Chihuahuas made The Judge hungry for some Latino food, he says. The Judge says he hasn't had a nice, inexpensive Mexican dinner in a while.

Over walks The Boss, who couldn't help overhearing what The Judge and I were talking about, primarily because she was eavesdropping anyway. The Boss doesn't actually own The Table, but when the nominal boss comes over and tells her that he thinks the special should be the cheeseburger hoagie on Wednesday, The Boss pretty much looks at him and says, "Let me get back to you on that." Anyway, The Boss says there is this place down at that new shopping center on Route 202 near where they used to have the drive-in movie theater that serves a mean Mexican meal. The Boss has The Judge's attention, because he'd forgotten that he once had a pretty good meal at that very same restaurant. The Boss says she feels comfortable at the restaurant since the owner used to be a pilot and she used to be a flight attendant for the same airline, except that when he was flying east to west she was flying west to east so they never actually met.

This is somewhat confusing to me since I'm not clear what air-piloting skills actually have to do with one's ability to set out a table of nice Mexican food, but The Judge is off and running. He and The Boss are comparing notes about the best types of burritos and enchiladas and whether refried beans are better than rice and how hot the hot sauce should be on a plate of quesadillas, when all of a sudden The Judge mentions that as a matter of fact the best taco he'd ever had was served to him at …

And at this point he says the name of a fast-food restaurant that I will not repeat but which occurs to me used to use a Chihuahua as its national spokes-animal and I wonder if The Judge has worked himself so hard that his taste buds have pretty much fallen off, and whether airline pilots who take second jobs wear their flight uniforms to work out of habit, and what Drew Barrymore thinks of the whole thing.

Oh, and the answer was "blank."

Parking in a Parallel Universe

This column originally appeared on Sunday, April 25, 2010.

Parking is a problem in West Chester.

All right, all right, I hear you. You scoff, make that "pffft" sound with your mouth, and say to yourself aloud, "Tell me something I don't know!"

Well, OK, I will. I'll bet you did not know that that the medieval military leader Ivan the Russian defended Plovdiv, the second largest city in Bulgaria once conquered by Alexander the Great, in a four-month siege by the East Roman Empire, or Byzantine, army, only to find out that the, apparently, clueless citizens of Plovdiv let the Byzantines traipse right on into the city while he was away on other business without so much as a "how do you do."

So now that we have that out of the way, I will explain that the problem with parking in West Chester is not so much a quantity problem as a quality problem. Parking spaces are a dime a dozen in West Chester if you look for them, which those of us who live in the borough spend most of our waking hours doing, that is when we are not complaining about the imminent loss of another historic building. (At last count the borough was down to 5,678 historic buildings, which means if we lose one a year we'll be right out of historic buildings about the same time they unwrap all those cryogenically frozen folks in that lab out in New Mexico. Unless, of course, the world has been incinerated by a stray asteroid, in which case no one will care, except A. Roy Smith.)

No, there are always places to park in the borough, and believe me I have found them -- although some of the places I have found to park are not what you would technically call legal parking spaces, which I why I lead the National League in visits to District Court 15-1-01 at the Chester County Justice Center.

The question is not where you park, but how you park.

This became evident to me one evening last summer as I sat on the front porch at Central Headquarters on West Miner Street. (We call it that in honor of Ol' Gimlet Eye, Gen. Smedley Darlington Butler, the Fighting Quaker, who used to live across the street.) Kathleen, our Electic Landlady, noticed that someone had parked their car so badly that the passenger side tires were virtually in the neighbor's front living room. "If these folks tried to pull that kind of parking job in Manhattan, they'd be towed to the East River," she exclaimed.

It struck me that we in West Chester judge those who visit our hometown on the basis of how well they park. Can you swing that sedan into a spot on the street in one swift, sure move that doesn't slow traffic down for more than a few seconds? Then you have what we like. Do you attempt the parallel moves required to squeeze that SUV into a space the size of an ice chest without a care in the world? Come right on in and stay awhile. Put those tires exactly four inches from the curb and leave no more, no less, than three feet between you and the cars parked to your front and rear? Please, sir or madam, you go first.

But spend half an hour going back and forth, trying again and again to fit your SmartCar into a parking space the size of the Queen Elizabeth II, bumping into the fellow in back so many times that the car alarm shrieks on high, and you will have earned our everlasting enmity. "Go back to Exton where they have acres of open fields of diagonal parking space, you rube," we sneer to ourselves (knowing that you outlanders could be packing serious weaponry.) "Time to go back to driving school and learn what the words 'final reverse turn' mean here in the real world," we say, shaking our heads in disgust.

I have long advocated that those of us who park well should be given some recognition by the borough for our efforts and skill. Every perfect parking job on the street would be rewarded by the Borough Department of Parking with a colorful token, like those 12-step chips that have become the accessory of choice for members of the rock band Aerosmith. Collect a certain number of tokens and you could exchange them for the fines and costs accrued when parking too close to an intersection or for more time than allotted on the meter. It's a simple act that could result in such good will, I don't see how it could miss.

I also don't see how you would know that since they changed their mascot from the Huron to the Eagle in 1991, the Eastern Michigan Eagles Football Team has won less than 28 percent of their games. But I'm telling you, just so you know.

Feeling The Inner Wa

This column originally appeared on Sunday, April 18, 2010

You gotta love the Wa.

No, I am not speaking of the Japanese word, “wa,” which loosely translated -- and frankly that is the only way I am capable of translating Japanese -- means something like “the experience of calmness or reflection”, or “a spirit of tranquility and peace.” Those are nice thoughts and all, but it’s not what I am referring to.

Nor am I referring to Wa, the city in northern Ghana that has been settled by the Lobi and Dagaare people for many a year now. I am certain that I would find something to like if I happened to find myself visiting Wa, perhaps even the local foodstuff known in Ghana as sao and in English as T-Zed, even though I have not normally been known to ask for a fresh hot steaming bowl of corn flour porridge at mealtime.

You probably already guess that I am also not proposing that you, and by that I mean I, gotta love the Thai unit of measurement, the wa, equal to about two meters or one fathom, if you are counting, although I wholeheartedly embrace the verb form of the word, which in Thai means to stretch out one’s arm to both sides.

Although frankly, looking at the above I wonder if what I mean when I say “you gotta love the Wa” actually does take into account a lot of what is involved in those above concepts – tranquility, food, and open arms.

I am talking specifically about the Wawa convenience store chain that many of us have come to rely on for so many of our daily needs and desires. Normally, the editors here at the Daily Local News like to caution me against taking stands one way or another on corporate interests, and I generally agree with them. But when it comes to the Wa, sometimes the normal rules just don’t apply.

The Wa made headlines this past week because of a singular moment in its company history. I speak, of course, on the moment when the one-billionth-transaction fee free ATM withdrawal was completed. If they ever track down the date when that transaction was completed, I believe that it behooves us as a country to declare it a regional holiday, or at least commemorate it as we would the day that the Phils won the World’s Series in 2008. A moment of pure joy could not be as easily pinpointed.

The notion that a corporation of the size and complexity of Wawa – whose stores are ubiquitous in southeastern Pennsylvania but also found in New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware, would offer a service for free that other entities have decided is worth charging ever increasing amounts for is nothing short of stunning. If you fly these days, the airlines will charge you extra is you have a mustache or beard, or have eaten a full meal in the last six hours. There is a popular satellite dish television network that apparently charges people who call their customer service line, at the tune of $5 a ring. Don’t get me started on companies that make you pay extra for completing your billing payments over the Internet.

I have never understood the concept of a service fee at ATMs, first encountering it in Brooklyn in the mid-1990s when my friend Sondra told me I would have to pay to get money from the machine. “What for?” I wondered. “Service fee,” she explained, being a law school graduate and having more of a handle on these things. “But there’s no person working here,” I complained. “I’m the one doing the work, pushing the buttons. It’s like a waitress charging me a fee for filling my tray at the serve yourself buffet!”

Some banks, local ones mostly, held out on charging fees to non-account holders, and then just chucked that idea like a baseball umpire chucking out a scuffed baseball. Soon, every ATM asked you whether you would accept the fee, which I suppose was polite enough, but frankly if you said no, you were left with no further options.

Except at the Wa. No fees, same money. I had a friend visit me from Minnesota last year and we stopped to get a copy of the newspaper at a Wawa on Route 202 south of West Chester. Never having heard of Wawa before, my friend made light of the name, saying it sounded like something a moody child would say. Then she stopped to get some cash at the ATM. I think I heard her say when she put those crisp bills in her pocketbook, “Ya gotta love it.”