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.