What It Is, And What It Is Not

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 24, 2010

Listen up, Marines.

When it came to West Chester, former Borough Mayor Thomas A. Chambers was extremely particular. That is, there were a few rules he wanted followed when his hometown was mentioned in the news columns of the Daily Local News. Foremost was this: West Chester is West Chester.

West Chester, Mayor Chambers (U.S.M.C, Ret.) instructed, is not West Goshen. West Chester is not East Goshen. It is not West Whiteland, nor is it East Bradford. Heaven knows it is not Birmingham or Thornbury. It is he one-plus mile square geopolitical entity that starts when you pass the West Chester Golf and Country Club and ends when you pass the main campus of West Chester University. That’s it, and that’s all.

Chambers was particular about this rule of geography especially when it came to news reports of misbehavior by people within the four corners of West Chester. Identify a person who was nabbed by police for purse snatching on East Gay Street as a West Chester resident when the evildoer actually lived in East Goshen and you might as well have left a message on Mayor Chambers’ voice mail suggesting, in fairly blunt terms, that it was just too bad that he had to go and join the Marines after the Army wouldn’t have him. That is, he did not take the notion kindly. Trust me, I know.

I say this as instruction for the fellow who very recently wrote a weekend travel piece that identified West Chester as a quaint little “city” where a slumming urbanite might spend a few fanciful moments before heading back to his or her trendy pad in Northern Liberties. Leave for a moment the fact that West Chester is not, and for my money will not ever be, a city. The writer proceeded to list a number of attractions that are not, technically, in West Chester. They may have West Chester addresses, but the Good Lord and Mayor Chambers know for certain that QVC studios and the American Helicopter Museum are not located in West Chester proper.

I have spoken before about this identity crisis that Chester County is prone to, so I should not be surprised, nor angry, about the mistake the writer made. Malvern, after all, is not just the borough that hovers between Paoli Pike and Lancaster Avenue, providing the good burghers of Willistown a place to go and get a newspaper and a decent breakfast before catching the Paoli Local into the city. It is now the megalopolis that spreads out over the map of eastern Chester County like a spilled glass of Bordeaux at a wine, cheese, and horse dung party up Charlestown way. The news that the founder of Urban Outfitters, one of the richest men in the world, will soon have the same home mailing address – West Grove, Pa. – as an assortment of mushroom house laborers speaks volumes, too, about how postal boundaries are not class-conscious.

But as understandable as the travel writer’s mistake may be, it nevertheless grates, primarily because the writer missed many great spots that weekend tourists could visit in the borough if they only took the time and stayed away from bars that are partially owned by former “reality TV” stars whose nickname rhyme with “Spam.”

Why not stop off at the Chester County Historical Society for a while to see how Chester County residents lived in the ages before the Internet took over? Well, at least the non-minority residents of the county, anyway.

Why not take a stroll down South Church Street from the downtown business district to the university campus? Along the way, visitors will get a view of some of the most striking examples of Victorian Era architecture that Pennsylvania has to offer, and at the same time can help collect cans and bottles that university coeds thoughtfully left behind to help spur recycling efforts in the borough.

Why not take an elevator to the seventh floor of the Chester County Justice Center and ask to be let into Courtroom One, where they can witness a panoramic vista of county countryside that is almost unparalleled in its beauty? If they are lucky, new President Judge James P. MacElree II will be on the bench and offer to show them what he can do with prisoner “shock belt.”

You see, you don’t have to while your time away watching spokes-models sell garish jewelry and read about the new design of a Sikorsky 91-XJ-7 to get a sense of what life is like in West Chester. You can get it all without having to venture outside its cozy confines.

You can stand at ease now, Mr. Mayor.

Not That Kind of Bar

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 17, 2010

The history of Chester County is framed by the work of Quakers and colored by the blood of revolutionaries. The history of the Chester County Courthouse is intertwined inexorably with the pungent odor of whiskey and ale.

If you don’t believe me, take some time in your busy scheduled the next time there is a trial in the courtroom on Judge Thomas G. Gavin and listen to his “jury-selection lecture” on the events that brought the courthouse to West Chester, or more correctly, Turks Head, as the village was known in the days when the United States of American was nothing more than a babe in swaddling clothes.

I had the chance to attend said lecture last week. Leave it to a judge to tell you things you didn ‘t know about as easily as rattling off a mandatory sentence for a DUI.

The connection between alcohol and jurisprudence in Chester County apparently began when Chester County spread itself all the way to the Delaware River. Those who settled in the village of Chester, or Upland as it was then known, being enterprising businesspeople, mostly Swedes, decided that it would be a good idea to put a tavern near where so many people disembarked. And once that building went up, the idea came that a proper use of the second floor would be a courtroom. So the first county courthouse got its start above where a newly arrived Brit could get a taste of home.

It is here that we get into some “nothing new under the sun” territory. A bunch of folks, led by Revolutionary War hero Col. John Hannum, decided they did not want have to travel all the way to Chester to do their court business, and wrangled a bill in the Legislature to build a new courthouse in Turks Head, where Hannum conveniently had a lot of land foe sale.

When the folks in Upland found out what the “Removalists,” as Hannum’s band was called, had done, they were incensed. Itching for a fight, as the folks in Delaware County are to this day, they loaded up a cannon and some muskets and went west to Turks Head to confront the Removalists in a decidedly non-Quaker way. According to a history of the time, they also loaded a casket of whiskey on the wagons so they could have something to do in between volleys with the Removalists. They encountered the other side at the site of the Turks Head Tavern – at what is now High and Market -- for what promised to be an epic confrontation.

So hear ye, hear ye, Chester County Peace Movement and American Sheepdog types. Your Saturday morning shout-fests at Market and High streets? Been there, done that.

The two sides mended their ways without bloodshed, however, and later Hannum was able to get a courthouse constructed across the street from the tavern, where the Historic Courthouse sits today. Hannum went a step further, however, b building an inn on a plot of land next to the court, an putting a second-floor passage way from that building to his, to make it easier for judges and lawyers to take a break from their wrangling and quench their thirst. The phrase “sober as a judge” apparently was meant as an ironic expression in those days.

Those with less spirit, so to speak, however, did away with that arrangement, and by the time that the 1846 courthouse was built, you had to walk outside to get a quaff in West Chester if you were being sued by our neighbor for horse thievery, or whatever they sued people for back in those days.

The connection between barrooms and the bar in the county died off for 100 years or so until n enterprising attorney named Fred Cadmus saw a chance to accessorize his fledgling County Lawyer restaurant and bar at Church and Market streets by taking possession of the oaken bench from Courtroom Three when it was being remodeled for use as the county law library. He put the ornately crafted bench in a room in his bar and subbed it an auxiliary courtroom. It got a lot of use, I understand.

The restaurant went under, but the bench was saved, and now Judge Edward Griffith gets to prop himself behind it as h listens to the argument over whether current or former insane killers should be loosed on the citizens of Norristown.

At least that’s the story I thought Gavin told. I could be wrong. I was thirsty.

Life Lessons, Newsroom Style

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 10, 2010

The best lesson I ever learned in the news business was never to get caught off guard when someone hangs up on you.

Those of you not in the news business most likely have not had the pleasure of being hung up on by strangers repeatedly, unless you have somehow found yourself in the telephone solicitation dodge, in which case you have both my deepest sympathy and my never-ending antipathy.

The best lesson I learned as a reporter is that when someone hangs up on you, perhaps after you have asked them a rather personal question surrounding the whereabouts of their missing husband, your surest bet is to jump right back on that horse and ring them back. “Hello, it’s Michael P. Rellahan calling again from the Daily Local News,” you say with a tone that suggests that sugar would not melt in your mouth. “We must have gotten disconnected. You were going to mention something about your missing husband.”

That lesson came from the heroic Miami crime reporter Edna Buchanan, who used it to her benefit on any number of occasions. (As a corollary that lesson, one former Daily Local News reporter who, when people tired to shut her off by saying, “I can’t comment on that” when she would ask a simple question about the whereabouts of their missing husband, liked to ask, “Well, if you could comment, what would you say?”)

But perhaps the second best lesson that I learned in the news business came from a photographer. And if you know anything about newspaper photographers, as I do, you will of course be surprised that they have anything useful in the way of lessons to impart, with the exception of, “If the food is free, don’t knock it.”

My photographer buddy from the old Suburban and Wayne Times, Dave Hickey, would usually find himself driving me to an assignment. He did not mind doing it, first because his car was bigger than my old Volkswagen and he could sprawl out over the front seat, and second his car was equipped with a cassette tape deck on which we could listen to any number of bootleg Bruce Springsteen recordings.

His lesson was, “Always have more than one route to get to your destination.” Dave hated to be stuck in traffic, as I do, and loved to find new ways to get from Point A to Point B. When you drove with Dave, you were never forced to sit in a long line of cars behind a spilled lumber truck, because he always knew a second, or third, way to get where you were going.

I tell you this in hopes that all you people who are driving into West Chester from points west of Marshallton have found suitable alternatives to the stretch of Strasburg Road over the Copes Bridge, which closed last week for repairs that may take until the early years of the presidential administration of Miley Cyrus. You may have simply chosen the old Route 322 substitution to get you to and from work, but for my money that route lads to traffic and, thus, to madness.

The topic came up among a few of us courtroom denizens on Wednesday as we again played a round in the never-ending game of fun and glee, “Waiting For The Judge To Take The Bench.” One deputy wondered what the best way around the closed bridge was, and so we all pitched in and gave out various options. I found myself riddled with alternatives, since the Hickey Rules have stuck with me lo these many years. I had already found my ways around the Creeks and Allertons and Lucky Hills and Harmony Hills roads many times before, and could pass out suggestions like so many business cards.

I would not want to say that the state Department of Transportation is in the business of closing bridges along various roads in the county on a semi-regular basis simply to improve the geographical knowledge of daily commuters to West Chester, so I won’t. But in the end, forcing detours on drivers does give people a new view of the countryside around them, and the scenery they have been afforded. Without having to make the detour, how many people would never have seen the Jeffers Ford Bridge over the Brandywine, or the remarkable examples of changing architecture along Hillsdale Road?

Take my word; it is always best to have more than one road to take on your way to wherever it is you are going. And don’t try to win at the old judge-waiting game: they hold all the cards.