Michael P. Columns

Someone's In the Kitchen With Schmitty

2010-10-10T20:05:00.004-04:00

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

2010-09-27T11:02:00.001-04:00

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

2010-09-13T08:42:00.001-04:00

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

2010-08-29T15:35:00.001-04:00

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

2010-08-22T08:20:00.003-04:00

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

2010-08-15T12:18:00.001-04:00

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

2010-08-02T11:45:00.002-04:00

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

2010-07-18T12:34:00.002-04:00

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...

2010-07-11T14:53:00.001-04:00

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

2010-06-28T11:42:00.002-04:00

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

2010-06-22T11:14:00.001-04:00

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

2010-06-14T12:38:00.001-04:00

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

2010-04-25T12:23:00.001-04:00

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

2010-04-19T09:00:00.002-04:00

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.”

Take Me Home Again

2010-04-05T13:01:00.002-04:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, April 4, 2010

Some thoughts on old homes this Easter Sunday.

My mother spent the majority of her childhood in the house that her grandfather had built when he emigrated from Sweden. It was the sort of comfortable house with a screen-in porch on the second floor where you could take a pleasant nap on a summer day and smell the fresh cut grass from the lawns outside.

It had doors that looked like walls and led to dark closets that connected bedrooms from hallways, and which one could easily imagine as secret compartments when one was of an age to think of such things. It had a storage cellar where cans of vegetables and cans of fruit and other food were kept in a cool and dry place.

It was also a place that my mother returned to over and over again after she had grown up and moved away. Until a decade before her death, a member of her family lived in that house and she never had to ask permission to step inside. After everyone died, she never went back.

A woman I know in the Chester County Justice Center, Deb Randall, today will give her mother a special Easter present. She will take her mother to a house that her mother grew up in as a child, but which is now occupied by apartment dwellers on West Miner Street. The house happens to be a few doors from when I now live, and I would love to hear Deb's mother tell me what the neighborhood was like when she lived there. Were the neighbors friendly? Did the traffic jam up on weekday nights? It made me think how exciting and odd it can be to be returning to a place you called home but which had been taken away from you, in essence, by the presence of strangers.

One day a man who knew the baseball legend Dominic DiMaggio found himself in San Francisco with a mobile phone. By chance, he made his way to the home in the North Beach section of the city and found the address of the house where Dominic and his baseball playing brothers, including Hall of Famer Joe and not-so-Hall of Famer Vince, grew up, sharing bedrooms and cramped quarters.

The man, a Boston broadcaster named Dick Flavin, knocked on the door and invited himself in, then called Dominic at his home in Massachusetts and got a guided tour of the place. How strange it must have been for DiMaggio to describe a map of a home he had not lived in for decades to a friend who was walking through it. How odd for Flavin to have the immediacy of the home where his friend had grown up described over a telephone.

When I was 5, the Rellahan family spent a year in Dublin, Ireland, where my father had taken a fellowship to teach chemistry at Dublin College. The house we lived on was on a suburban street with the lovely name of Wasdale Grove, in the neighborhood of Terenure, near Bushy Park. The children had a little street gang that talked endlessly about righting other gangs from the streets nearby but which never did. My best friend and I would sometimes put our left arms inside our sweaters and knock on neighbors' doors, begging for coins because we had lost an arm in an accident.

When I was older, I visited the street and knocked on the front door of the house after finding the neighborhood on the Dublin bus route map. An older woman answered the door and looked at me quizzically for a moment as I handed her a business card and explained I was visiting from the United States and hoped to see the house where I celebrated my sixth birthday.

"Oh, you must be the American professor's son," the woman answered. She was the daughter of the couple who leased us the home as they travelled the world for the Irish diplomatic service. She lived there with her brother, and remembered our family. I was allowed to climb the stairs and see the bedroom where I awoke each day of our stay, to see the coal bin where we stored fuel that kept us warm, and to sit in the living room where I had my birthday party. She served me tea and biscuits.

I don't know if the folks who will hear a knock at their door today and see Deb Randall and her mother standing outside wanting a look at the place will do the same. But they should.

Just a Little Respect, Please

2010-03-28T13:31:00.002-04:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, March 28, 2010

What is going on in Coatesville?

That is the question Judge Thomas G. Gavin posed last week, albeit somewhat rhetorically, in response to hearing about a near-riot that broke out in the lobby of a district court in Valley Township, the city’s neighbor and near-twin sibling.

The story, when you tell it, is something you might expect from a gritty urban crime novel: A young man disappears, and a city man is later arrested and charged with his murder. Police say the victim was shot, then his lifeless body dismembered with a chain saw. During their investigation, police say the accused’s mother purposefully tried to keep them from searching her son’s SUV by dumping it in a high crime area in New Jersey.

At the mother’s preliminary hearing, tensions directed by the murder suspect’s family against that of the victim boiled over. The suspect’s sister and cousin lost control and tried to attack one of the victim’s cousins. His sister swung violently at her while dozens of others stood and watched, then fought her way through police officers who tried tor restrain her to the point she had to be forced into a bathroom by three uniformed men – including the township chief of police – and held down against her will. His cousin tried to join in the fray and fight, all the while holding in her arms her own infant child.

Both were arrested and charged with various crimes, including assault, resisting arrest, and endangering the welfare of a child.

Gavin, never one to shy away from commenting on matters outside the realm of the courtroom, took the time to explain to the two women his own experience in Coatesville. As a young assistant district attorney, he’d come to the city in the early 1970s and remembered sitting in the district court handling all sorts of cases. But none like the ones they presented.

“Coatesville was a different place in the 1970s than it is today,” he said.

I agree. The city is different today than it was when I first went there to cover City Council in the 1980s. Then, even as the shadows were gathered around the Luken’s Steel Co. operations there, some had high hopes for the city’s revitalization, and put their energies into re-establishing the city’s image as the show place of Chester County. There was a pride at the bottom of the way people spoke of the city, the way they wanted it to be considered.

What makes it different is anybody’s guess. A downward spiraling economy. The lack of political acumen on the part of city leaders. An endless drug culture that offers fast money, slow dissipation, and eventual ruin. A lack of understanding and the will to help by those outside its limits.

Some of what has gone on there is beyond there is beyond tragic. This year, I attended the trials of two young city men not even out of their teenage years who decided to accompany older men they should not have trusted to West Chester for some easy money coming from the robbery of a borough drug dealer. The dealer ended up losing his life in a shooting that made no logic or sense. The two men face the reality of spending the rest of their lives – 50, 60, 70 years? – behind bars. One shakes one’s head in disbelief and disgust.

Ask Gavin what is wrong with the United States of America and he will likely offer up an opinion or three or “how long have you got?” Ask him what is wrong with Coatesville and the answer comes back in one word. “Respect.”

“Part of what changed is the respect individuals in Coatesville don’t give to each other anymore,” he said in sentencing the two women to prison. “They don’t have any respect for the system, and they don’t have any respect for themselves. And when you have no respect for yourself and no respect for the system, you have chaos.”

One of the women involved in the district court melee had shouted out an epithet that people in law enforcement have, quite frankly, become used to across the board. “(Blank) the police,” she shouted as they tried to control her and calm her down. This stuck the judge as beyond unacceptable.

“The only things that saves us from chaos is people like the police officers who stepped in to handle things like this,” he said, perhaps thinking of the men and women who work to solve the crimes that are committed against Coatesville residents every day, even though they themselves are refused the respect of those they are trying to help.

“It’s about time that people in Coatesville, instead of saying (blank) the police, say thank you to them. The police are the ones that are keeping that city from collapsing altogether,” he said.

How To Hide A Subaru

2010-03-21T10:14:00.001-04:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, March 21, 2010

I know you scan the newspaper every day looking for some good news, news that will lift your spirits out of the doldrums that the constant caterwauling over health care reform and terrorism and financial bailouts and Lindsay Lohan leaves us all in.

I know that at least once a week you sigh as you put your newspaper down and look across the kitchen table at your spouse and say, wearily, "Must I be sentenced to forever reading daily news stories about filibusters and senatorial holds and pour taxes and Lindsay Lohan, like some common prisoner being punished for a crime I did not commit?"

I feel certain that there are evenings when you sit down in front of the television set to watch the nightly newscast, hoping for a few stories about the defeat of polio or landing a man on the moon or passage of women's suffrage, and instead get snippets of gloom in the form of stories about sex scandals on the golf course, sex scandals in the governor's mansion, sex scandals involving Academy Awards winners, and Lindsay Lohan.

I feel your pain. That's why I am here to let you in on some good news, some spectacular news, some news you can really open the bedroom window and shout to the world about without fear of retribution from the neighbors. According to my colleagues at the Associated Press, researchers at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology report they have made progress in creation of the world's first working cloaking device.

The good Damen and Herren at KIT — as the school is known in the Sweet 64 Scientific Researcher Playoff brackets — were able to cloak "a tiny bump in a layer of gold, preventing its detection at nearly visible infrared frequencies," the AP reporter wrote. "Their cloaking device also worked in three dimensions, while previously developed cloaks worked in two dimensions, lead researcher Tolga Ergin said."

Yeeeaaah, baby! That's what I'm talking about! Gold cloaking in three, count 'em, three dimensions! I have been anxiously awaiting this next development since learning that scientists at the University of California at Berkley were working on a similar project back in 2008.

Back then, I wrote that creation of a cloaking device would give us residents of West Chester the ability to hide our hometown from pesky outsiders who want to visit and, well, frankly, vomit on, our friendly downtown during constant bar-hopping contests. I don't know whether it has hit your radar screen, but my neighbors and I have made frequent comment about the increasing influx on weekends of people from Delaware County for such activities, and we wonder aloud about the ability of immigration authorities to get a handle on anything if they can't stop such obvious violations of the nation's culture barriers.

But the news from Berkley left me encouraged, at the time, because I had always assumed that the soonest the cloaking technology was going to be available was sometime in the mid-23rd century, and then it was going to be used exclusively by the Romulans to hide their Battle Cruisers until they were ready to fire their Plasma Torpedoes at the Starship Enterprise.

According to last week's AP story, the cloak is a structure of crystals with air spaces in between, sort of like a woodpile, that bends light, hiding the bump in the gold layer beneath. In this case, the bump was tiny, a mere 0.00004 inch high and 0.0005 inch across, so that a magnifying lens was needed to see it. Which would lead one to believe that there is still some road to travel before we are able to install a device that will be able to hide a geo-political entity one mile square.

Nevertheless, we assume the team at KIT will not fall prey to the "always say die" mentality that apparently has kept their colleagues at NASA from putting the finishing touches on that human teleportation device I've assumed was well on its way to completion.

Besides, for immediate purposes we don't need the cloaking device to be functionally able to hide all of West Chester. Cloaking an object the size of a small Subaru station wagon would suffice, with enough portability to allow it to travel to various parking spaces along West Chester's Gay Street corridor. After all, I have begun to get the impression that the parking ticket payment department at District Court 15-1-01 in West Chester has pretty much gotten fed up to here with my appearances every month to clear up the latest in an on-going series of apparent misunderstandings.

Almost as fed up as I am with stories about Lindsay Lohan. But not quite.

Wait, Wait! Don't Rush Me!

2010-03-15T11:00:00.001-04:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, March 14, 2010

I hope you are not thinking that we folks who live in the 200 block of West Miner Street in West Chester are hopelessly lazy. Because, if you were of a mind to consider us hopelessly lazy, you would be wrong. Not that I would entirely fault you for the lazy perception, but you would be wrong nevertheless. Sorry.

I can understand that the idea of us being drudges, when it comes to keeping up with our day-to-day tasks, might have been planted in your minds by the fact that more than one of us still has Christmas and holiday decorations on our front porches. That idea may also have gained traction with a majority of you who pass by our homes if you were also to learn that some of us still have holiday lights burning both inside and outside our homes.

The fact that the winter holidays are rapidly fading in our rear-view mirrors and that we are approaching ever rapidly the arrival of the vernal equinox is, I must admit, unavoidable. I cannot deny that the calendar has moved a notch or two from where you might ordinarily expect to see red ribbons and green wreaths on one's doorway, and even if I did, I do not think you would be so naé�ve as to believe me. However, I would point out, merely for the sake of the record, that until just a few days ago, snow, which usually is a dead giveaway for winter and thus, winter holiday scenes, was still on the ground in the fronts of some of our homes in the 200 block of West Miner Street. We know it's gone now, but, well, who can predict the future? Give it time, we say.

I would also point out that unlike the very strict rules that West Chester borough authorities have developed for winter storm emergencies (in a nutshell they boil down to the firm request, "move your bloody automobile, you lazy bums! Or else!") the good burghers at Gay and Adams streets have yet to set any guidelines, rigid or not, on the deadline for removal of holiday house decorations. We can leave our ribbons and wreaths and lights up until Memorial Day for all Mayor Comitta and Chief Bohn care, it seems reasonable to assume from their silence on the matter. They might have a problem with Halloween pumpkins being left on the porch past Martin Luther King's Birthday in January, but more for aesthetic or olfactory reasons than anything else.

But back to that accusation of laziness.

My argument against that designation is not that it is unreasonable to assume we West Minerists are a pack of laggards and lollygaggers, but merely uninformed. It's like thinking that everyone who lives in Willistown is a multi-millionaire, when I have it on good authority that the number of multi-millionaires in Willistown is no more than 50 or 60 percent of the entire township population. 65 percent, tops, I'm told. It's a simple matter of perception over reality. Maybe 75 percent, but that's it.

You outsiders would be more accurate when describing the overall characteristic of the people who live on our block if you were use the words "cautious" and "patient." We move slowly not because we are sluggish or slothful, but because we are thoughtful, considerate, and not given to rash action of any kind. We know that the winter holidays have come and gone for several weeks, months perhaps, depending on how you read the calendar. But we simply believe that there may be a few of our West Chester neighbors who have not had the chance to walk by our homes and enjoy the seasonal decorations we spent so much time picking out and setting up. When we are reasonably certain that everyone who wants to get a peek at the December greenery on our doors, we'll happily take them down.

I believe that we take as our example the Japanese sakura, or cherry tree, that the late U.S. Rep. Thomas Stalker Butler received from ambassadors from that Asian nation in 1912 and brought home to his place in the 200 block of West Miner. This massive cherry tree blooms in tremendous fashion once a year in the spring, and it takes its time. It starts slowly in March, and bloom by bloom eventually fills the streetscape just about dead center in the block with its white-pink blossoms in late April. It takes its time, not in any hurry, and eventually sheds those floral decorations when it will — with no reminder, I might add, from the mayor or the chief of police or anyone from the borough's Office of Parking Punishment. It takes its own sweet time, and why shouldn't we?

Now, if you excuse me, I feel the need for a nice nap.

One Reader Comments

2010-03-08T08:40:00.003-05:00

Here's a comment from one my my readers on the Phoenixville column:

" Michael, I would not expect anything less from you. The Blob culture and it's local popularity has probably saved the historic Colonial Theater from the wrecking ball! Because of your abrasive negative reporting, I overlook anything with your name on it, but I could not overlook this. You owe phoenixville an apology for your ignorance! If you don't like the town, don't ever disgrace it further with your presence. If you are not educated in your empty rants, don't write about them. I don't know why they keep you. you always distort facts in such a negative manner, you must be a very unhappy person. No wonder your weekly reports on your adventures are always solo. I hope some day you get a life with friends! In the mean time, stay out of P'ville! We don't want you! Go find a bar in West Chester! "

Now, there's an idea!

The Blob Loves Phoenixville

2010-03-08T08:37:00.002-05:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, March 7, 2010

I have heard them talk for quite some time now, these folks who love Phoenixville.

I have heard them rant about the great movies at The Colonial Theater, which they repeatedly tell me was featured in the Grade-D movie classic, “The Blob,” which I saw on commercial television when I was in high school and have never felt tempted to watch any part of again.

I have heard them rave about the great restaurant and night spots in downtown Phoenixville, and about the great shopping outlets there and the ubiquitous sighting of the Bacon Brothers, Michael and Kevin, whom I once saw act in the movie called “Footloose,” after I had graduated from college and have never felt tempted to watch again.

I have heard them ramble on about the famous folks who grew up in Phoenixville, including baseball stars Andre Thornton and Mike Piazza and famous outlaw Harry Longabaugh, alias “The Sundance Kid,” who was profiled by Robert Redford in a movie that I saw when I was in grade school and have never felt tempted to stop watching whenever I see it come on television, even if I’m in a department store looking for new cookware.

Whenever those folks start talking about Phoenixville, they ultimately ask me if I’ve been there lately because, you know, its got “The Blob” and The Bacon Brothers and The Baseball Players and I stare at them for a moment and ultimately answer, “Does Kimberton count?”

I don’t get to Phoenixville much, and it is not Phoenixville’s fault. My attitude towards Phoenixville has been colored by death and mishap, and you can’t blame either of those things on a geopolitical entity unless you are speaking about Coatesville and then, well, never mind.

My first thought whenever I think about Phoenixville is that I had a car crash there that put a literal dent in my first new car – a 1984 Renault Alliance, thank you very much – and a figurative one in my bank account. I was driving along Nutt Road one morning looking for a fire that I had been sent out to cover when the Chevy van that had been in front of me suddenly stopped while I was wondering whether I had to turn right or left off Nutt Road to get to the Colonial Theater.

The driver of the van got out, looked at my crumpled hood, then looked at his pristine rear bumper, and said, “Hummpf!” and drove away. It took me months to fix the car, during which anyone who came in the newsroom and wanted to know which car belonged to me was directed to the car with the accordion hood.

My second thought when I think about Phoenixville is of the morning I stood in a cold wind outside a church downtown, Sacred Heart I think it was, and approached people who were coming to pay their last respects to John T. “Jack” Jeffers, the district justice who had died in office and whose funeral I had been sent to write about.

It wasn’t the first funeral I’d attended with a reporter’s notebook and ball point pen in hand, and it likely won’t be the last, but I will always remember how overcast the sky seemed, and how sorry the people coming to the church were to have to say goodbye, and how disappointed I was that I hadn’t gotten to know Judge Jeffers a little better while he was around. He was a writer for newspapers and a courtroom aficionado and I probably could have learned a bit about both from him.

It’s not Phoenixville’s fault that I have bad memories of it, and perhaps I should try to erase them. It might actually be therapeutic for me to stop by the downtown scene some warm summer night when the music is good and the food is hot and the crowds are friendly. I could have a nice dinner and find some good dessert, then wander over to the Colonial Theater and catch whatever’s playing.

But if it’s “The Blob,” I’m leaving. I’ve seen that movie before, and I have no temptation to ever see it again. Not even if Kevin Bacon remakes it.

Unexpected Discovery Sunday

2010-03-01T09:19:00.002-05:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Feb. 28, 2010

There are times when life affords serendipity an opportunity to intrude into your world more than others, and I am a firm believer in always giving serendipity its due. Folks like to spend a lot of time talking at end about irony, or vitriol, or perspicacity these days, and I don’t begrudge them their labors. But for me, a dose of serendipity is always more than welcome.

I got such a dose a week ago, as I left Downingtown Friends Meeting after an hour of comfortable reflection. I know folks who contend that an hour’s worth of comfortable reflection should include mostly spiritual concerns or ruminations on the nature of time, space, life, and death, and I would never be so unseemly as to disagree with them in public, but manys a time my thoughts during a period of comfortable reflection drift to somewhat more mundane concerns. The week’s shopping list, for one example. Questions to pose in an upcoming interview with the county’s recycling coordinator, for another. What’d I’d really like for my birthday. Not the sort of thing that would, if discussed in the quiet sanctity of the meetinghouse, inspire one’s fellows to paroxysms of rapture, I’ll admit, but there you have it.

My thoughts last Sunday circled around winter scenes that would make good photographs. I’ve been on a hunt lately for pleasant visual images that will remind me, or inform others, of what beauty we have had spread before us in the past weeks, thanks to the recent snowfalls. Sunday persuaded me that views of the Barndywine Creek from bridges that crossed it would be a good target to aim for, and off I went.

I felt somewhat disappointed, however, because a scene I had come across several months ago and had, at the time, passed the chance to record haunted me, and I did not know where to find it. The scene was composed of a quiet village, that to my mind featured a rippling descent of the Brandywine above which a fine stone span crossed. I thought it would be picture perfect, so to speak, for my mission but could not remember where it was. When you gambol about the confines of Chester County as I do, you can lose track of where you’ve been.

Nevertheless, off I set, choosing my course with a modicum of randomness, but also not without purpose. I could not expect simply to stumble upon a picturesque bridge over the Brandywine Creek accidentally, stumbling about like the proverbial man in the cane break wildly swinging about in hopes of finding a clearing. I knew I had to point myself in the right direction, so I grabbed the ADC map from the rear seat and traced the creek back to a spot where I saw I could find a suitable number of creek crossings. Up Horseshoe Pike to the suburbs of Icedale, east towards East Nantmeal on Chestnut Tree Road. Such is headwaters country, near Struble Lake.

Wouldn’t you know that as soon as I descended the hill towards the village of Cupola that I realized I had rediscovered my quiet village scene. There over the Brandywine was the sturdy stone bridge I had visualized in my mind before leaving, along with a few homes dotted on either side of the creek, and a creekside scene worthy enough of stopping for more moments of quiet, calm reflection. Plus photos.

The Chestnut Tree Road (love the name) serves as a dividing line between Honey Brook and East Nantmeal there at Cupola, and the Brandywine gives the locals a reason to stay put even if their taxes approach half their annual salary. I stayed awhile and shot, then moseyed on in a haphazard way towards Glenmoore and home, finding a few other pleasant scenes of snow covered creek banks and blue-grey sparkling waters to make the trip more than worthwhile.

So now I would like to thank the folks who live in Cupola for letting me intrude a bit on their perfect world. I would like to thank the folks at Downingtown Friends Meeting for giving me a place to spend an hour in calm reflection. I would like to thank the folks who stopped in their Jeep Cherokee as I pulled over on Lewis Mill Road, asking whether I was lost and needed help finding my way.

And mostly, I would like to thank Horace Walpole (1717-1797), Fourth Earl of Orford, author of “The Castle at Otranto,” because he’s the guy who thought up the word, serendipity.

The Winter Market Cure For The Blues

2010-02-22T12:44:00.002-05:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Feb. 21, 2010

There was still about two feet of snow in the front yards along West Chestnut Street in West Chester, and the temperature was in the mid-30s, but Saturday morning a group of about 50 people showed up at a parking lot bordering North Church Street and thought of spring.

More to the point, the people who arrived to partake in the West Chester Growers Market's third Winter Market came not only to cheer themselves partially out of the winter doldrums the snowstorms and cold weather have put them in, but also to stock up on items they've been missing since the last Saturday in November, when the market vendors folded their tents — literally and figuratively — at the end of the market's May to December season.

There were decent-sized lines at the Big Sky Bread Co.'s tables, and a healthy crowd checking out the new Horseradish and Cheddar spread at Lizzie's Kitchen. (Healthy in the sense that the folks were large and ruddy-faced; I'm not entirely certain what effect large servings of Horseradish and Cheddar spread would have on Chester County's recently designated "healthiest county in Pennsylvania" designation.) A more-than-smattering bunch of folks were waiting patiently to pick up their pre-orders of grass-fed beef, chicken and lamb from Lindenhof Farms, and Ellen's soap stand was drawing in customers wanting to pick up a discount on her holiday spice soaps. The older guys at Oak Shade Farm's homemade cheese stand looked like they were doing a typically brisk business.

As stated previously, there was still snow on the ground and the air was chilly, but the conversation and rhythms of the market could have taken place in July or August.

"Does that blackberry jam have seeds in it?" a woman inquired at Lizzie's Kitchen. The long lines moved slowly but surely and no one seemed out of sorts if the person two spots ahead decided they had to jump back and grab a plate of dinner rolls as well as what was already in his bag. People you had forgotten you knew bumped into you and caught up with the news, and adults remarked a lot about how much the kids had grown. If it weren't for the down jackets, hats and scarves, you'd think that Labor Day was just around the corner.

The truth be told, this was not the third Winter Market at the WCGM. The first Winter Market was scheduled for Dec. 19, but if you remember, we got a little snow that weekend, a trifling 20-plus inches, and traffic was a little slow that Saturday. But you had to figure that people were waiting to come out of their snow-imposed shells. More than one person could be heard complaining about snow-shoveling woes, and the bright sun was on everyone's lips as a way of shaking off the cold.

As for me, I had a fine time reconnecting with the various growers' stands and discovering new ones I'd overlooked in the past. I hadn't been to Jeff Porter's Chile Spot stand before, but my friend Jamie recommended it since he used to work with Jeff. An amateur chili sauce creator, Jeff was only happy to unload a tall bottle of Chipotle Finishing Sauce, which his young assistant packed up for me very nicely. Jeff in his real life is a business executive of some kind, I believe, but his chili stand is just the sort of local production that makes the growers market what it is. (I also picked up my order at Lindenhof's stand, which should last me until the next Winter Market in March. Or not, depending how many uses I can find for the lamb sausage.)

I've read a lot about the move to locally grown food products and how environmentally beneficial they are. You cut down on transportation and thus on fuel usage; you get a more diverse set of offerings and thus are exposed to better foods; you support the economy in your community instead of some multinational agri-conglomorate run by alien robots and thus keep down the possibility of outerspace domination, or whatever. I understand all those concepts, but frankly it's the sense of community that I get wandering between the stalls while I'm there that brings me back. It's nice to see folks pretty much thinking along the same lines as you do, picking up some interesting eats, and enjoying the sunshine. That's what keeps me coming back.

That and, frankly, the prospect of more Horseradish and Cheddar spread.

Push. Lift. Sling.

2010-02-15T11:18:00.003-05:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Feb. 14, 2010

Push. Lift. Sling.

You have a lot of time to think when you find yourself shoveling two or more feet of snow from your 35-foot-long driveway. There isn’t much about shoveling snow that requires your concentrated attention; it is mostly a sequence of repetitive moves, the wintertime equivalent of mowing the lawn. It’s perfectly okay if you let your mind wander, because unlike using a snow blower you are not likely to face any major malfunctions if you don’t pay strict attention to the shovel. The worst that could happen is the blade falls off, and then you have a good excuse to quit. Which is nice.

Push. Lift. Sling.

So it occurred to me recently that snow inherently has a dual nature when it lands on a landscape in large proportions such as Chester County has seen in the past few days (a good 47 inches between Feb. 5 and Feb. 10, if you’re playing at home.) It can both obscure details of the landscape onto which it falls, and highlight others. The thought occurred to me as I made my way back to West Chester last Sunday along Valley Creek Road in East Bradford – a lull day in our storm cycle, as it turned out.

I travel Valley Creek Road almost religiously if I find myself having to get to Downingtown with time to spare. It’s a nice, windy, wooded stretch of road that crisscrosses a pleasant little stream, hence the name, and features some architecturally pleasant homes along the way. There are also impressive geological outcroppings of some stone or schist or rock that I can tell you nothing more about than they are impressive and outcroppings. But on Sunday, they were gone.

They were covered instead from bottom to top by a true blanket of snow, the kind of layer that would look magnificently tasty on a coconut birthday cake. Instead of the normal jumble of rock that lines the western side of the road, all that could be seen was a sheer face of white. It was as thought the snow had wiped the face of the rocks clean, the way an artist will use a putty knife to flatten and smooth out a piece of the landscape.

Push. Lift. Sling.

But on Thursday I drove along South New Street in Westtown, alongside of Crebilly Farm north of Street Road. I’d come from Stetson Middle School where a friendly and talkative woman named Ellen Davis had told me about her decision to leave the home she’d slept in since 1981 to spend the night at the Red Cross emergency shelter there. (If you are wondering, two adjectives that newspaper people like in the folks we meet in the midst of our professional responsibilities are “friendly” and “talkative.” Much better than “dismissive” and “mute.”)

And I noticed that the branches of the trees that line both sides of the road were outlined in detail by the snow that clung to them, brining them into stark relief against the blue sky and asking me to open my eyes and take notice of them individually. Instead of the mass of brown and gray intertwined sticks globbed together as one, I saw instead each single fiber of the landscape – not unlike a group of colorful pick-up sticks laid out on a kitchen table, each one set against the other. The woods became transformed, branches singled out one by one.

So there you have it. Snow both obliterates and reveals, all in the same brush. Not the most profound of epiphanies, but one that I will remember for days to come as the white fades from the scene outside my car window.

Push. Lift. Sling.

Another thought that came to me whilst shoveling was the recollection from freshman sociology that Eskimos have dozens of words for snow and use them interchangeably to connote different types of frozen precipitation. Whereas I have only one extra word for snow in my vocabulary, and I cannot print it in a family newspaper.

Push. Lift. Sling.

You Don't Know Who You Know

2010-02-08T15:24:00.001-05:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Feb. 7, 2010

There have been a few people that I’ve been thinking about while waiting to strap Tango, the Wonder Hound, to the dogsled and head out for provisions.

I’ve been thinking about Fred Gusz, who was recently named the “Outstanding Citizen of the Year” by the Greater West Chester Chamber of Commerce. I’ve have been acquainted with Fred Gusz for quite some years, and there are a few things that I know about him that the chamber forgot to share with its membership before they voted him in as the year’s outstanding citizen. Because, however, I find the sort of historical revisionism that is currently taken for granted in the media (See” “Edwards, John – Former Aid Sells Tell-All Book”) I am going to keep those items to myself.

Unless, of course, some publisher fronts me six figures to do a tell-all book about the outstanding West Chester citizen of the year, then I’ll just start making stuff up as quickly as I can.

Frankly, though, I could not be more pleased with giving Fred Gusz a nod or two. In all the years that I have known him, he has seemed to me to be the epitome of what you want a citizen to be. He is friendly, he is honest, and he is charming, but more than that he sees people for who they are and what they do, instead of looking at a label that someone else has pinned on them. He has friends in both political parties, and toils away with them for the greater good of the community even though he probably wouldn’t agree with them on every issue that comes down the pike.

He is the sort of person who will accompany a young reporter to a Bob Dylan concert and then get praised by the Republican former mayor of West Chester, all without changing his personality. I almost never agree with what commerce chambers do, but this time I’m signing on.

I’ve been thinking about my former colleague Jill Nawrocki, who was a staff reporter at the Daily Local News for a couple of years in the early 2000s. When she was slouching at her desk in the newsroom, she appeared mostly interested in television shows about teenagers in high school, or television shows about Olympic athletes. But you should know that Jill Nawrocki just finished two years of duty in the Peace Corps, stationed in Namibia working with young children there to make their lives fuller, better, and healthier.

Jill is of the generation that many people complain about because of their lack of commitment and sense of entitlement, and I do not know if she is the exception to the rule or an odd combination of focus and frivolity. I do know, however, that actions speak louder than words, and in Jill Nawrocki’s case those actions are very loud indeed, because Jill Nawrocki always had a rather powerful way of expressing herself.

Lastly I have been thinking of Charles Faust, better known as Charles Victory Faust, who was born in 1880 in Kansas and died in 1915 in Washington. I don’t know anything about the first 30 years of his life, but I know that for the last three he was a member of the New York Giants baseball team, even though he was not an athlete and had no baseball skills to speak of. He was put on the squad by John McGraw, the Giants’ manager, for good luck. I had read about him in the wonderful memorial to the old days of baseball, “The Glory of Their Times,” but was always a little skeptical about his contributions to the team.

So on Saturday I pulled out the “Total Baseball” almanac and looked him up. Sure enough, he pitched two innings in two games over four seasons with the Giants, and they won the pennant every year he was there. He died in 1915, and the Giants ended up in last place.

What each of these people tell me, I guess, is that I have to be careful whom I judge, because nobody really knows anybody

Ready, Tango?

Bob's Bookstore

2010-02-03T10:41:00.001-05:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 31, 2009

Bob Simoneaux was one of the reasons I love living in West Chester. He is gone now, dying at the age of 64 on Jan. 11, but it is no stretch to say that you and I have the ability – some might go as far as to say the responsibility – to insure that the contribution he made to our community lives on for years to come.

Bob was, along with his wife Kathy, the founder of the Chester County Book & Music Co. He was a native of New Orleans, La., and worked there as a police officer, but wound up in New York City at some point and found himself in the book business. He and Kathy opened their bookstore in 1982 in the Parkway Shopping Center, where I discovered it shortly after moving here and starting my career at the Daily Local News. Walking in there the first time, I knew that it was a special place and would help me adjust to my new surroundings.

Bob and Kathy were friendly people, and made you feel at home walking through the stacks and stacks of books they put on display. Because they took the trouble to know their customers by name as much as possible, the feel of their bookstore was comfortable and welcoming at a time when the trend in bookstores was to be more corporate and indifferent. They made sure that a sense of discovery hung about the place, as you could find some written work you had never heard of before; had heard of but never found; or had simply stumbled across as you made your way through the piles of novels and biographies and travel books that seemed to grow volume by volume from the carpeted floor itself like a beautiful house plant.

I loved the old place on South High Street for its intimacy, but grew to adore the new larger location Bob and Kathy opened later on Paoli Pike. They added a restaurant that served some Louisiana specialties that reminded Bob of home, and gave my friends Patrick, Greg, Marian, and Meg and I a table to sit at on weekend mornings to read the papers and gossip our time away before wading into the stacks looking for a new book to read. I do believe that Meg, who lives in Washington, D.C., would agree that a trip to see the West Chester branch of her family would not be complete without a rip to the bookstore.

I would venture to say that I have not gone more than six weeks without spending some time at the bookstore, and my shelves at home are filled with wonderful results of the money I spent there. Going to the bookstore always gave me the anticipation of bringing joy between two covers home. My friends and family have all received gifts that I found for them at Bob and Kathy’s bookstore, and I hope that their lives are better for it.

Bob was a constant presence at the bookstore, and I remember him sitting at one of the restaurant tables and drinking a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette. He always had a dry comment to make about something of interest in the local news, and spoke kindly with Marian and I whenever we would see him. He kept tabs on what was going on behind the scenes in West Chester, and dropped tips on stories off at my table on occasion.

He and I never spoke about the weighty issues that his battle to keep the bookstore open must have presented. In an age of chain stores and Amazon, independent booksellers like the Simoneauxs are fewer and father between. They are incredibly important, however, because they do not dictate to the reader what is necessary for them to digest, no do they trade familiarity for savings. The book by the local author about his or her memories of growing up in West Chester is as available for the reader as the new bestseller; the loyal staff who populate the service desks are there to wind the customer through the shelves to find exactly what it is they are looking for, not simply what the cheapest flavor of the month is.

A few weeks ago I stopped in looking for “River of Doubt,” a tale of Teddy Roosevelt’s trip down the Amazon River in the years after he’d left the White House. I’d never known the book existed, or that the trip had occurred, until a few days before I went looking for it, but it was there waiting for me on a shelf at the bookstore as if I had always known I would want it at some point. I did not see Bob, had heard he’d been sick, and feared for the worst.

Robert Ross Simoneaux may not have lasted in life as long he should have, but we, his neighbors, have the chance to keep a bit of him alive simply by stopping by the bookstore he opened 28 years ago and buying a book. Or two.

What It Is, And What It Is Not

2010-01-25T13:04:00.002-05:00

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

2010-01-19T10:10:00.001-05:00

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

2010-01-14T14:32:00.001-05:00

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.

Snow Bound, Mysteriously

2009-12-21T16:28:00.002-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider yourself tapped, shoulder wise.

Keep Your 3-Way, Gimme a Batty Hattie

2009-12-14T09:20:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carrying A Porch

2009-12-07T11:29:00.002-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Favorite Pennock

2009-11-30T13:18:00.001-05:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Nov. 29, 2009

It probably has not occurred to you that I have one or two things in common with Joseph Pennock.

The reasons why it has not occurred to you that I have one or two, perhaps three, things in common with Joseph Pennock are, as a former college roommate of mine once said, varied. It could be that you are unfamiliar with me and my personally biographical history and idiosyncratic likes and dislikes, or it could be that you are unfamiliar with Joseph Pennock and his “back-story,” as they like to say in the theater.

I am guessing the latter since before Monday of last week, I had never heard of Joseph Pennock, either.

But Joseph Pennock came to the United States and, ultimately, West Marlborough, from County Tipperary in Ireland. It just so happens that not only have I been to Tipperary, but I was at one point in my life a fervent, if somewhat ill informed, supporter of the Tipperary Hurling Team, and could not only sing their fight song (“It’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way to go”) but also could at the drop of a hat sport a lapel badge that said, “Come on Tip!” So that is one commonality we share.

Another stems from this snippet of a sentence written by Joseph Pennock as he was contemplating the construction of a building that now stands as Primitive Hall in West Marlborough. "The 14th of the 9th 1738/ then my impostum brok and the Seme year I Bilt my nu Hous." What links Joseph Pennock to me in that statement is not that I have ever built a house, or had my impostum broken, or even bent I dare say, but that there are times when one or more of my editors has commented that my copy read like I was an unschooled inhabitant of the 18th century.

But I don’t want to talk about Joseph Pennock. I would rather talk about his distant cousin, Herb Pennock.

Herb Pennock was born in Kennett Square in 1894 and died there in 1948, just weeks before he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. He was elected to the baseball Hall of Fame for a variety of reasons, but for my mind mostly because he played in the major leagues for 21 seasons, starting from when he was just out of high school in 1914 to when he was just about washed up as a left-handed pitcher for the Boston Red Sox in 1934.

In between times he was a pitcher that, as Casey Stengel used o say, had been up and been down. He had a stellar opening season with the (almost) home town Philadelphia Athletics, then went south for a while until hooking up with the New York Yankees. He won five games in the World Series competed in, including four with the Yankees and along the way helped tone down the profane ebullience of one George Herman Ruth, known more familiarly as Babe.

Once when Babe and Herb were dining with their wives as a fancy restaurant, Ruth rose to excuse himself to go to the bathroom, explaining in no uncertain terms what it was he had to accomplish once there. Herb followed Babe to the washroom and counseled him that it was unnecessary, and perhaps a bit impolite, to explain exactly why he was excusing himself. Babe, embarrassed for once in his life, apologized to Herb and made his way back to the table. There, he sheepishly tried to make amends for his gaffe but saying he was sorry he said what he said, repeating it word for word, of course.

I also enjoy the story about the time that Herb and the Babe and some Yankee teammates made their way to a Kennett Square street fair and started knocking down milk bottles at a street both for prizes. It was no sweat for the pitchers to break the bank, and they did so by throwing curves with the light balls. The next morning, one of those pitchers woke to find his arm swollen from the curves and the light balls, and had to explain how he had hurt himself to the Yankee skipper, Miller Huggins.

That pitcher, as I remember, was Waite Hoyt, who in the early 1960s provided a young boy just returned from Ireland with a new team to root for as he broadcast games played by the Cincinnati Reds. For me, you see, it was hard to find the Tipperary box scores in the paper.

The Road to Corruption

2009-11-23T09:24:00.001-05:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Nov. 22, 2009

It is easy to see why Tony Young coveted a place at the Unionville table so greatly that he went to swindling people he knew just to get his Chippendale chair there.

I attended the auction that was held recently at Young’s former home in West Marlborough, covering the event for the paper. I had driven by the place just once before out of curiosity, the allure of seeing a mansion that theft built drawing me there. I was left somewhat unimpressed by the place. No Xanadu of Citizen Kane, the mansion can be seen plainly from the road and strikes one as more nouveau riche splendor than classic grandeur.

But the drive to and from Young’s place was more than worth the trip. I have spent a wealth of time on the back roads of Chester County on my way to and from West Chester, but never have I been tempted to stop and stare in wonder at the landscape as often as I had on the trip west from Unionville out Route 82 as when I went in search of Young’s home.

What you see as East Marlborough melts into West is not picture-postcard beauty, or generic rolling hills landscape painting beauty, but a vista of quiet green elegance that extends across the horizon. The view that unfolds is like Chester County’s own Big Sky country, where the meadows and fields and stands of trees fill your eyes and the turns in the road bring new pleasures in an instant.

Driving that road I admit to feeling the pull to be a part of it, to wish that I could feel at home in it. Obviously those who have grown up in that slice of the county feel protective of their world, and try their best to ward off changes. I imagine as well that there is an insularity to the community because of the beauty that encompasses it. The betrayal that Young visited on those he called friends was exacerbated strictly because of he cast a cloud on the landscape they love, at least for some fleeting time.

Young, pardon the interruption, is the boyish looking investment financier who swindled people he knew in the equestrian community of greater Unionville for millions and millions of dollars. According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, he used the money he funneled from those who invested in his investment firm for the specific purposes of living as they did – with horses and polo silks and mahogany furniture and Audubon prints and foxhunting ephemera and – most striking for me -- a classic Triumph TR-3 convertible. I assume that Young took rides in that car with the top down, imagining himself an English landowner sporting his way across the fox hunting hills and valleys of that countryside the fields of Unionville are so reminiscent of. I assume that he loved the fact that he could buy fifty boxes of shotgun shells and just leave them in the storeroom for whatever time he wanted to go shoot at skeet or trap or pheasants or quail of whatever it is they shoot at out there in the land beyond the Po-Mar-Lin Fire Co. firehouse.

A silver-haired man I spoke with at the auction told me he thought the piles of possessions that were for sale spoke to him of one thing – guilt. Young spent the money he stole on whatever he fancied at the moment because for him there was no future to save for. He must have known, the man said, that it was only a matter of time before the truth would close in on him like a pen, and so why not acquire as much as he could beforehand?

Just a few days before the auction took place, an article on Young appeared in Fortune magazine, and was a topic of conversation at the event among those who knew Young and knew those who trusted him with their cash. One man I spoke with expressed relief that the scheme had been laid bare in detail as an explanation for those who wondered at the crassness of it all, but another had a more bitter reaction to it. “Why,” he wondered, “did the article have to paint all of the people in the community as possible criminals?”

To explain that I turn to Wendy, a writer and colleague who is wiser in the ways of that world than me.

"It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience,” she wrote to me after hearing of my visit to the Young auction, quoting Sherlock Holmes at his most arch, “that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside."

Chastised

2009-11-02T08:56:00.002-05:00

I have been chastised for not including the name of the former reporter to whom I gave the Jake's t-shirt. She's Jill Nawrocki and she's about to leave Namibia after two years of tremendous, awe-inspiring work. You can catch her accomplishments at http://jillnawrocki.blogspot.com

Sorry, Jill! Hurry home!

That's Just Jake('s) With Me

2009-11-02T08:20:00.001-05:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Nov. 1, 2009.

My friend Tom McKee, the keyboardist for the band Brothers Past and chief music director at the Paul Green School of Rock in Downingtown, was the person who introduced me to the way that Chester County seems to envelope the entire globe at times through cheap t-shirts.

Go virtually anywhere, he told me some years back when we were trying to avoid doing real work at the Daily Local’s news desk, and you are sure to come across a Jake’s t-shirt. Jake’s as in Jake’s Bar, the cozy little dive on South Matlack Street hard by the West Chester University campus.

He said he had heard stories about people getting off the London Underground at the Marble Arch Station and being confronted with a passenger getting on the tube wearing a shirt from Jake’s. I suppose that I might have even contributed to this phenomenon by giving a former DLN reporter who was on her way to serve a two-year stint in the Peace Corps one of the navy tees with the overflowing beer mug on the front as she made her way out the door. Perhaps the folks in Khorixas, Namibia, where she is stationed, now dream about the possibility of immigrating to the United States and making a scared pilgrimage to the bar that serves 50-cent drafts and has a shuffleboard game handy.

It’s not just that Jakes t-shirts rule the globe. I also may point to a photo I have seen hanging from a certain sandwich place in West Chester which clearly shows the back of a t-shirt proclaiming the wonders of Penn’s Table to the mountains of Machu Picchu in Peru. Can’t say what the Inca ancestors might think of William Penn’s image, but I’m sure they would go for the chicken salad club.

So I should not have been surprised this past weekend when I found myself surrounded by Chester County residents I far away Richmond, Ind. The possibility of coming across someone who knows the difference between Toughkenamon and Landenberg is always around the corner.

I was seated in the dining room of the Richmond Holiday Inn scarfing down the complimentary buffet breakfast Saturday morning when I heard conversation from a group of friendly characters at a booth in the corner. “I just left the car parked in Parkesburg,” said one affable woman. “It’s so much easier than driving to Exton.” Being the fearless reporter that I am, I scooted over and introduced myself. The woman was one Jane Hutton, a research librarian at West Chester University who happened to know my friend Anne Herzog, a professor at the school, and who was in Richmond for the 40^th anniversary of her graduating class at Earlham College. She didn’t look a day over 45.

Which, truth to tell, is what I was doing in Richmond. The good folks at Earlham handed me my diploma and sent me out into the world 30 years ago, in May 1979, and I had ventured back there to meet up with others who had similarly been loosed on an unsuspecting populace. There isn’t just a happenstance connection between Chester County and Earlham, since Westtown Friends School is sort of a feeder institution to the college, which has a long history as a bastion of Quaker education. One of the alums that I had dinner with at the school not only had family from West Chester, but who also had taught at Westtown for a few years after graduation.

I thought about the similarities between my home in West Chester and my four-year former home in Richmond as I gazed across the central courtyard of the college campus from atop one of the classroom buildings. I thought especially how students at Earlham and students at West Chester University are likely to be too busy sometimes while crossing the campus to notice how beautiful the fall leaves can be, how perfect the architecture fits in with the landscape, and how lucky they are to have months and months and months in which they are only required to learn and not make money or raise a family of pay the cable bill.

And as I watched one student struggle against a cold wind on his way from the dormitory where I had spent the last days of my college career I thought I recognized sometime of myself in him, on his way to the library or to the student union or to the dining hall. I thought how similar I must have looked in October 1975 when I first showed up at school. I thought how much he might look like me when he turns 50. I thought we had a lot in common, but, in reality, it was probably just the t-shirt from Jake’s.

I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change

2009-10-12T14:35:00.003-04:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Oct. 11, 2009

In the movie “Smoke,” Harvey Keitel plays a kindly and slightly eccentric cigar store owner who spends his days talking with customers and his mornings taking a single snapshot of the same corner in his Brooklyn neighborhood. The photos he puts in an almost endless series of scrapbooks, page after page of pictures of the same street corner.

A customer who becomes a friend, played by William Hurt, one day comes to look at the photo gallery that “Augie” has compiled. At first he s bemused, then slightly bored, then slowly overwhelmed by ho the same scene can take on so many different hues and shades and meanings. In an instant, he sees the figure of his deceased wife, killed in a bank robbery close to that same corner. She had been walking by the camera as Augie snapped his single photo that day.

It is a powerful scene, and on that reminds me of autumn.

Don’t’ ask me why. Do I associate the season with impending demise? Do I view it as the most romantic of all the four seasons? Did I see the movie in the fall and transfer the sensory bombardment that we get here in Chester County to my thoughts of the film? These are questions I cannot, and shall not, try to answer.

But what I am thinking is this. October is the time when every day the same scene outside your front door becomes different in incremental, but nevertheless entirely noticeable, steps. The light is demonstrably different; the sun finding its way up over the horizon at a different angle. The temperature makes its way south down the thermometer. But mostly, the pigment that has been waiting to explode in the leaves of the trees outside gets its chance to burst through.

In the spring, those changes in the foliage e see on our way to work or from our favorite window seem to go from zero to 60 in a minute, like a vernal Lamborghini. One day you notice a small green blossom on a tree as you get behind the wheel to drive o work, and then next day there are cherry blossoms and apple blossom and pear blossoms all over your windshield. Then by the time you get around to loading the camera to take a picture of the pink snow that envelops the branches above your head, it’s gone.

In the fall, you get a change to linger with the changes. Right now, I can see bits of yellow in the tips of the leaves outside the window. There is an orange chunk on the tree across the street. Red dots the top of the bush I pass by on my way home from Sunday services. And I know that little by little, those colors will replace all of the green that still makes up he bulk of the landscape.

I wax rhapsodic about these autumnal sights because I love the season so. I would not trade the hillsides of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware in fall for all the palm trees in Florida, or the sandy beaches of Hawaii. I moved here to Chester County in the fall, driving over the Allegheny Mountains in a 1970 Dodge Dart that held virtually everything that I owned to find a job on a newspaper that I had never heard of until then. The Phillies beat the Montreal Expo on a Mike Schmidt home run in the 11^th inning of the next to last day of the year, and I started getting to know the people I still call my friends.

Here is what the songwriter Robbie Robertson said about the fall when he was talking with a filmmaker about the meaning behind his ode to life and hard times, “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)”:

“In the story to me, it’s another piece I remember from my youth, that people looking forward, people out there in the country somewhere, in a place; we all know it, may have been there, may have not. But there are a lot of people for whom the idea of come autumn, come fall, that’s when life begins.

“It is not the springtime where we kind of think it begins. It is the fall, because the harvest has come in.”

Welcome back.

Missing Ponds

2009-10-05T14:52:00.002-04:00

This column originally appeared on Oct. 4, 2009.

There is nothing more comforting than a good map.

When confusion or frustration come calling, I find great solace in grabbing a book of maps and staring at places I have been, or want to go, or have never heard of before. When I sit down to write a news story about someplace I have never been and required to describe, I find the assistance that I get from looking at a map of the place invaluable, and reassuring. If I stick to the map, I cannot err.

Is this comfort a reminder of those days that I spent in the passenger sat of my family’s 1973 Dodge Dart, patiently explaining to my mother that she had 15 more miles before she had to take the New Stanton exit of the Pennsylvania Turnpike? Well, certainly. Aren’t we all put at ease when confronted with things that are familiar to us? For me, opening a map is not unlike opening the front door to your home and smelling a cake in the oven.

Which is a round-about way of stating that the road map I have of Chester County lacks detail when it comes to our ponds and lakes, a situation that I would be more than happy to help sort out should I be asked.

The subject came up for me whilst sitting in a recent court hearing over the future of Kardon Park in Downingtown. The park, such as it is, has four ponds running from north to south along the so-called Lion’s Trail. The ponds are called, according to more than one witness, First Pond, Second Pond, Third Pond, and Fourth Pond. Remember, the walking trail has a name that is associated with something – a mammal, a social organization, whatever. The ponds are known only by numerical order.

But those ponds are lucky, you see, because at least they have names. There are ponds across Chester County that have existed along the landscape for years, and still they go unnamed, at least map wise.

And it is not as though there are not lakes and ponds across the county that do not have proper names that are listed on the map. The book of maps that I was staring at when these thoughts occurred to me lists 12 distinct named still bodies of water. They range from the familiar – Struble Lake, Marsh Creek Lake, Sharpless Lake – to the strange and slightly odd –Gotwals Pond and Grace Mine Settling Basin.

A popular fishing website lists 23 lakes or ponds suitable for dropping a hook and line into, including Icedale lake, the Rodebaugh Dam and Sinkler Lake. Try to find these on the map and you are on your own, unless you happen to be sitting next to someone from Honeybrook who grew up fishing on Icedale Lake and can tell you that it’s right off Route 322.

There are definite needs to differentiate which lake is which, or else you might find yourself confused between the Westtown Lake on Westtown Road with the Westtown Reservoir on Reservoir Road and the West Chester Reservoir on Airport Road. And since Westtown Lake is open to the general public for visual enjoyment but West Chester Reservoir is a gated community, so to speak, with water too precious for human sight, according to the folks at the water company that owns it, you want to know these things if you are out looking for a place to see the clouds reflected on the water.

I could come up with names for the lakes and ponds I see spotting the map like so much water running over a dam. There would be Red Bone Lake in West Vincent and Woodview Lake in London Grove. I could give you Pine Creek Park Lake in West Pikeland and Trout Run Lake in New Garden. Not a problem at all to drop the name of Boot Jack Lake off Gum Tree Road out Cochranville way, or Limestone Lake down there in Londonderry. Look, I’m a professional newspaper reporter; whatever else, I have time on my hands.

The feeling of discomfort that disturbed me most during my recent quest of watery names came when I went searching to see if the pond I enjoyed the most had a name. I found it one day while driving along Hilltop Road in Newlin, a road that starts along the woods near the Brandywine Creek and rambles skyward until opening on rolling meadows high above the western end of the Great Valley. I stopped where the road meets Green Valley Road, and hopped out to spend some time staring at a quiet pond as the sun went down.

I checked. It’s not there, according to the map.

Watch-ing The Sunrise

2009-09-28T09:02:00.001-04:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Sept. 27, 2009

My guess is that the watch had something to do with it.

That is, I just purchased this new Casio watch and it has functions that my Uncle Harry Redborg, whose Elgin watch I was given as my first wristband timepiece, could not have imagined if he had lived to be 150 years old. The watch not only tells the time and date, but also has a picture of the phase of the moon, presumably for werewolf protection. It has a component wherein I can tell the best time of day to hunt or fish for any particular date between now and, well, eternity for as much as I can figure out. And more.

It has a stopwatch and an alarm, and graphically tells me how much daylight is available. It has four buttons that do things I have not figured out, and a way of lighting itself if I turn my wrist just so. I believe it also predicts tomorrow's Dow Jones Industrial Average, albeit not as accurately as you might like if you were thinking of sinking your life savings into Tastykake stock.

But the function I spend the most time fiddling with is the screen that tells me the time of the day's sunrise and sunset. And this is what I was getting at earlier: being able to see just when the sun was expected to rise and/or set has got me thinking about those daily occurrences, and how much people enjoy them.

I remember once walking home from the Daily Local News and turning around to see the sun setting over Sam's Pizza on Hannum Avenue. The shades and the clouds and the sunrays were so dazzling, I picked up a pay phone and called back to the office to tell anyone who was there to step out the back door and enjoy. Which they did. That's the way it is with sunrises and sunsets; you see a really great one, want to share it with people. So I asked some former Daily Local colleagues if they could recommend really good places to enjoy the sunrise, since I figured my watch would give me the opportunity to plan ahead on when to go if only I knew where.

I had an idea that the best places would be near water. I remember once seeing the sunrise over the Octorara Reservoir down around Nottingham, by Camp Tweedale. It was picture perfect, and the reflections of the reddish yellow clouds on the surface of the calm water made it doubly enjoyable. But Octoraro is a 25-minute drive from my house, longer if I don't avoid the state police speed trap on Route 1, so I was hoping for a place a little closer to home.

Kyle suggested Valley Forge National Park, which he said offered an overlook of the upper stretches of the Schuylkill and had the enjoyable ambiance of the rolling hills that make up the start of the Great Valley. But Kyle pointed out that much of the panorama is made up of Route 422 and the nearby malls, and by the time he had finished enumerating the defects of the view he had pretty much talked himself out of the whole thing and gone back to bed.

Melissa weighed in by suggesting that the Stroud Preserve in East Bradford provides a particularly good viewpoint over the East Branch of the Brandywine Creek, which happens to be my personal favorite of the two branches. I have spent a good enough amount of time wandering the stretches of the former Georgia Farm there to know that it would offer some particularly pleasant vistas. But it also offers a significant amount of Canada goose guano, and that is something I try hard to avoid in the near darkness of early morning.

Christine offered visual aids in her advice that a stretch of the Route 30 Bypass near the Chester County Airport gave her the most memorable sunrise in her recent memory. According to Christine, she was on her way to work in the early morning from her home in Sadsburyville when the sun rose spectacularly over the flat road where the airport stretched out ahead of her. The picture she shot of it from her camera phone was impressive, I admit, but I have a hard time accepting that anything good can come of something if the word "Sadsburyville" is attached to it.

The watch on my wrist Saturday morning said sunrise came at 6:50 a.m., and so I dutifully rolled out of bed a half an hour beforehand to go sunrise hunting. But rather than drive for miles in my quest, I climbed instead to the top of the Chester County Justice Center Parking Garage, conveniently located behind my apartment.

And as I watched the clouds brighten and the shadows disappear and the color come back into the red brick sidewalks of my beloved hometown below me, it occurred to me that any sunrise you live to watch is the best one. Even from a parking structure.

Get Out Of Town Day 2009

2009-09-21T15:06:00.003-04:00

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

You want my town? You want this one mile square piece of geography? You want this county seat? You want to take over the central business district for a one-day bacchanal of gastronomic engorgement? Go ahead, take it. I’m gone.

Today, as many of you may know, is the annual West Chester Restaurant Festival, where literally hundreds of restaurants and funnel cake vendors descend on Our Fair Borough like so many Mongol Hordes and bring with them hungry interlopers in numbers not seen since the recent Teabagger protest in Washington, D.C.

For those of us who live in West Chester, however, today is not known as Restaurant Festival Day. It’s known as Get Out Of Town Day. Rather than fight the crowds and battle with the interlopers over parking on our streets, we choose to find something else to occupy our time, someplace else to go and enjoy the wonders of late summer.

Some of us choose to replicate the experience of the restaurant festival by finding the nearest traffic jam and joining the queue. Others of us offer up hundreds of dollars of our hard earned cash for mushroom-sized appetizers at the nearest convenience store, estimating correctly that the cost is equivalent to what we would expect on Gay Street, but the wait is far less.

Me, I’m heading for the hills. More specifically, I’m going to take a nostalgic drive up Route 282 north of Downingtown into the wilds of Wallace and the Nantmeals.

Route 282 is not the most picturesque back road in Chester County, but it does crack the top ten. It meanders nicely alongside the East Branch of the Brandywine Creek for miles and miles, passing through villages like Lyndell and Glenmoore, Springton and Cornog, until it terminates at an intersection between Barneston and Huntsfield.

It is nostalgic for me because it is the scene of one of the first prime assignments I received as anew report at the Daily Local News in the late fall of 1982. The news editor saw I wasn’t busy and told me in no uncertain terms to get out to the Cornog Quarry and find out what all the fuss was about.

What the fuss was about was a state police dive team searching in the murky waters for cars that had been dumped there. I wasn’t the only one who arrived at the scene to judge their progress, and wondered why so much attention was being paid to an operation to clear and otherwise unused former quarry of dumped cars.

It was not until after I had filed my piece that I learned that what police were really searching for were the bodies of the two young Reinert children, part of the eerie criminal case surrounding teachers at Upper Merion High School. The whole thing happened under my nose without my realizing it, and now wherever I wander up Route 282 and pass by that quarry, I am reminded of how little I really know.

But the ride up Route 282 also brings back more pleasant memories, of finding out of the way people who are as friendly and as open as the fields that developers like to gobble up in northern Chester County.

On one spring Sunday after a series of hard rains, I was sent out to talk to people who now had lakes in their backyards as the Brandywine overflowed its banks. I wandered up the road and made my way to Glenmoore, stopping along the way to knock on doors and interview the flood victims. Those I spoke with were open and forthcoming, if a little quizzical about why a reporter would be so intensely interested in the water level in their basement. I suppose that in those days before cable television and incessant news hounding the sight of a person with a notebook showing up on your doorsteps was still something you would face with a sense of excitement, instead of one of ennui.

I also like to slow down as I pass through Lyndell and look up on the hillside at the gazebo that sits on the property where Jim Croce once lived, and imagine him writing those faux folk hits in the 1970s that occupied so much of my radio listening time when I was in high school. I used to be able to sing a few verses of “Workin’ at the Car Wash Blue” at the drop of a hat, and wonder always if that’s where the idea came to him, on that hill.

So if you want my town, go ahead and take it; I’m planning on invading a few places of my own. Just make sure you have it back by 7:30.

One Man's Meat Is Another Man's 4-Way

2009-09-13T13:52:00.003-04:00

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

So that we are clear about this, I will start today by declaring openly that I am not in favor of gluttony. However much you think that my adherence to the sin of sloth in my position as a professional newspaper reporter would ipso facto lead me down the road to wholesale acceptance of sins such as lust and greed and wrath, I would like you now to disabuse yourself of that notion. For me, gluttony is right out.

But that being said, let’s hear it for Bob Stoudt of Royersford. Because he is a man who has lived my fantasy for me, and with Cincinnati chili.

Stoudt, of course, is also known as “Humble Bob” when he is out on the circuit of something called the International Federation of Competitive Eating (an organization that screams for a better acronym than IFCE, something along the lines of CRAM, for Competitive Regurgitation Appears Manly.) That’s the group who put on the eating contests involving things like Nathan’s Hot Dogs and Corn Beef and Rye sandwiches.

Last weekend, when I was blissfully celebrating the end of another summer and honoring the workers who proudly built this country so those who came after them could sock shelves at Wal Mart, Humble Bob made his way out to my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, to engage in a Labor Day Cincinnati chili-eating contest. He won. Dude put down 13 pounds, nine ounces of chili spaghetti in 10 minutes flat, bless his heart and digestive system.

Of course, the obvious question that sprung to my mind when I became aware that I had missed out on the spectator sporting event of a lifetime was: “Three way or four way?”

That is, in Cincinnati chili parlance, did Stoudt go for the spaghetti, chili, and onion (three-way) selection or the more traditional spaghetti, chili, onion, and grated cheese (four-way) option? In my youth in the Queen City, when an after-school snack consisted of an entire box of Kraft macaroni and cheese, I could easily have seen the pleasure of scarfing down a few pounds of four-way. Now, however, I am frequently made aware of the space that cheese, grated or not, takes up in the stomach and thus, would’ve gone three-way and damn the torpedoes.

But as I saw from the photos that appeared on the Internet of the plates of Cincinnati’s finest that contestants were required to consume at the event (and a better educational tool for the uplifting of our global community than the World Wide Web the world has not known, is what I say), it looks as though the organizers went with the cheese. Again, not what I would have done, but sticking with tradition is something ingrained in the history of Cincinnati and its chili. (How else to explain the side dish of oyster crackers?)

You should know that eating 13 pounds and nine ounces of Cincinnati chili in 10 minutes flat is not something we who grew up in the City of Seven Hills are normally wont to do. We are primarily a civil, polite bunch – the occasional police shooting or The Who concert riot notwithstanding. By the looks of the strands of chili smeared pasta coming out of Stoudt’s mouth as he chewed, and his apparent technique of using his hands to shovel in the food that I saw in one of the photos of the event, I would suggest that as a city we would more than likely not have invited him over for dinner if that was how he was going to approach a meal. Should that be how he wants to eat in his own home, fine. But really.

I will point out two things that struck about Stoudt’s comments after winning the $2,500 prize at the event. First, he said that Cincinnati chili “tastes great.” Secondly, he opined that when he had finished eating he intended to take his son on a roller coaster ride at Kings Island, the amusement park where the contest was held.

The first comment made me think that perhaps he had never eaten Cincinnati chili before cramming his face full of it, which struck me as so much putting the cart before the horse, and the second made me think that if I was in line at the Son of The Beast roller coaster at Kings Island with Stoudt and his son, I would probably let them go on ahead of me.

That all being said, what was important is that Stoudt got to do what I can honestly say is something I have always aspired to – that is, having as much Cincinnati chili as I wanted, within easy reaching distance, and without the approbation I usually receive from my Cincinnati vegetarian nieces when I suggest that a plate of three-way would taste as good at breakfast as it would at lunch or dinner. (400 people turned out to cheer Stoudt and his opponents on as they did battle, a lesson that my nieces would do well to learn.)

That is gluttony at its finest, I suppose. And, truth be told, envy as well.

Michael P. Rellahan is the news editor of the Daily Local News. To contact him, send an e-mail to mrellahan@dailylocal.com

Thrown For A Loop In Eagle

2009-09-08T10:32:00.001-04:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Sept. 7, 2009

Pardon me if I interrupt your morning debate over the entire health care reform issue, from death panels to public options, but I’d like a chance to talk about something that has been bothering me for several days now. I’d really like to put it aside, get it off my chest, and deal with it now so that when my concerns are all out in the open I can rejoin the entire health care reform debate, as the program is apparently already in progress and I don’t have TiVo.

So: What’s up with this Eagle Loop Road business?

If you have ventured north above Eagleview Boulevard on Route 100 in the past month of so, you know what I’m talking about. If you have not ventured north above Eagleview Boulevard on Route 100 in the past month or so, give yourself a treat and do so post haste. Make sure, however, that your collision insurance is up to date, because let me tell you.

Some background: A few years ago, the good folks in Upper Uwchlan (pending motto: “Where The Car Dealerships Look Like Churches, And The Churches Look Like Car Dealerships.”) looked outside the window of the township building and noticed something unusual: traffic wasn’t moving. Route 100 had become, little by little, inch by inch, McMansion by McMansion, the New Jersey Turnpike at rush hour of North Central Chester County. Being the good folks that they are, the Upper Uwchlan officials decided to do something to ease the congestion and -- realizing they could not simply erect metal highway barriers at the township line and keep people from driving through-- the concept of the Eagle Loop Road was born.

All good reporters love a road construction story. Because roads take so long to build (pending motto for East Whiteland: “Forty Years And Counting On That Alleged Route 202 Widening Phase”), you always have stories about them in reserve. Anytime the workload slows down and no new health care reform forums have been scheduled, you can whip off a “Fill-In-The-Blank” Road Construction Update in and hour and a half. Trust me, I know. For several years, I made my reputation on Exton Bypass stories. I could speed dial the Chester County Planning Commission official in charge of the project, Lee Whitmore, without opening my eyes from my afternoon nap.

The Daily Local News once had a reporter assigned to pay attention to the Eagle Loop Road fulltime, ever since it was first floated as a surefire way to make sure the commute time from Black Horse Road (pending motto: “Best Damn Dirt Back Road in North Central Chester County”) to Hannum’s Harley Davidson did not approach 90 minutes. But that reporter has left our employ and no one has taken up the Eagle Loop Road gauntlet, so to speak, in quite some time. Imagine my surprise, then, when on a recent trip north above Eagleview Boulevard I discovered that the project had been finished.

The original idea, as I understood it, was to build a road that looped around Eagle – hence, the name – so that motorists not wanting to stop off for a test drive at CarSense or have quiet dinner at the Eagle Tavern could just avoid the whole section of Route 100 through the village. Which made sense to me, even though I once reported a series of stories about how G.O. Carlson Boulevard in Caln, another inspired road project, had utterly failed to divert the thorough traffic off Route 30 in Thorndale.

But when I approached Eagle last month, driving under the Pennsylvania Turnpike Overpass like a motor driven Alice down the rabbit hole, my idea of the loop road became, well, shall we say, challenged. The road was going left when I was used to driving straight. Strange signs offered me detours onto something called Ticonderoga Boulevard (pending motto: “Benedict Arnold Has Nothing To Do With Us.”) I wasn’t certain whether a left hand turn meant a hard left or a soft left, and a woman in an Audi A6 decided that a helpful toot of her horn might get me going in the right direction. At least that is what I think she was trying to communicate with her helpful hand gesture.

The road makes no sense, or at least will take some getting used to along with some dented fenders. I know there have been traffic issues, because the good folks at Wolfington Bus Co. have placed a pair of school buses blockading their property and a portable toilet has been set up right at the loop road stoplight, presumably so that those local Eagle residents who want to watch the comedy show that has become rush hour there have a suitable place to relieve themselves when the laughter loosens things up a bit too much.

OK. I’m finished now. It is off my chest. The Eagle Loop Road may not be what I had imagined it would be, but I am certain that in short measure I will become as used to it as I have the Exton Bypass and G.O. Carlson Boulevard. So now you can fill me in on this entire health care reform debate thing (pending motto: “You Can Have My Blue Cross Card When You Pry It From My Cold, Dead Fingers.”)

Through a Screen, Darkly

2009-08-24T11:11:00.001-04:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Aug. 23, 2009

The other day, someone I was speaking with said they were “privileged” to grow up in Chester County in the 1980s, when the county was coming into its own, culture-wise. Local art became noticed, local cuisine started developing, and local entertainment exploded.

And I scoffed.

Privately, of course. You have to keep the scoffing to yourself when you are a professional newspaper reporter and you occasionally deal with people who say scoff-worthy things. You never are quite certain that the person you are scoffing at will at some point be on your “People to Call For Important Quotes” list and who may remember all too clearly the time you scoffed at something he or she said. Because let me tell you, professional newspaper editors are not wholly sympathetic with the “Scoff Defense.” It dos not tend to go over well on deadline. Editors given the “Scoff Defense” tend to look at the reporters who have offered it up with the expression of someone who has found gum on the sole of their shoe and who wonders, “How soon can I get rid of this?”

But scoff I did. “Privileged?” I chortled, softly, in my head. “Cultural opportunities in Chester County, circa 1980?” I clucked, privately, without expression. “Mister, you must be thinking of a whole ‘nother Chester County than I’m thinking of,” I retorted, with no outward display whatsoever.

It’s the movie theater situation, you see. When I moved to Chester County in 1982, the area lacked two things: decent Chinese restaurants, and movie screens. If you wanted either of those, you were likely to end up in Delaware County and what’s the point of that, anyway. If I had the urge to go to Delaware County for a plate of good Chinese food and a nice action flick, I would have shot myself immediately, thank you very much.

If you want to talk privilege, culture-wise, then you have to take a look at my childhood in Cincinnati so as not to scoff too loudly. Where I grew up, we could walk to a movie theater, the Esquire, where you could see a decent first-or-second run movie for $1. Or you and your friends could see a good first-or-second run movie at the same theater for the same $1, provided the usher was not looking too closely when you opened the back door and let your friends in.

I saw, “Dirty Harry” there. I saw, “Let It Be” there. I saw “M*A*S*H” there, and “Straw Dogs” and “Shaft” and even “Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang.” Pretty much every movie I saw from 1965 to 1980 I saw at the Esquire.

The Esquire was there when I came into the world in the mid-1950s, and is still there as I type this. Except that now, it’s even better. You may have to pay closer to $10 to see a good first-or-second run film, but you have your choice of four or five movies as the theater now has three separate screening rooms. That is privilege. And if the usher is not looking too closely, you can skip from room to room and squeeze in all four or five movies on the same $10 ticket. That is, you might do so; I wouldn’t think of it.

Chester County, by the time I arrived, on the other hand had depopulated itself of just about al the decent movie theaters within its borders, perhaps not realizing that people were just as interested in seeing a good first-or-second run movie as they were in visiting the Herr’s Snack Factory or the Mushroom Museum. Gone were the Palace and Silver in Coatesville; the Met and the Oxford in Oxford; the Garden and the Harrison in West Chester; and even the Roselyn in West Grove. The Warner Theatre in West Chester, grand as is was, was open sporadically, as I remember, but even that was eventually relegated to the misty-eyed past. We were pretty much stuck with the Eric in West Goshen, which is now a K-Mart and which tells you about something about the cultural landscape of the county, circa 2009.

Folks I know who grew up in West Chester in the 1960s and 1970s have pleasant memories of seeing their fist movies at the Exton drive-in, which I remember mostly as the spot where some depressed fellow set himself on fire around Christmastime one year, then walked across the street to the Howard Johnson’s and bummed a cigarette from someone at the counter. I suppose that seeing a movie at an outdoor arena while inhaling the all-too-fresh aroma of the result of your little sister’s car-sickness episode is the definition of privilege to some, but for me, it’s just one more reason to scoff.

To myself, of course.

Rounding Second, Heading for Home

2009-08-17T11:31:00.001-04:00

This column originally appeared on Aug. 16, 2009

One of my favorite books to read and re-read is by a former Sports Illustrated writer, Leigh Montville, called “Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero.” Although the portrait that Montville paints of Williams as a great but flawed man is vivid and electrifying for a baseball fan such as I, there are an number of smaller descriptions of the people in Williams’ life that Montville uses to fill in the background and brighten the color that make the book that much more enjoyable.

People like Johnny Orlando, the clubhouse man for the Boston Red Sox when Williams was a rookie and not yet the famous “Teddy Ballgame, “and who gave Williams $2.50 when The Kid was sent down to the minors his first year. Or Dave “The Colonel” Egan, the Boston sportswriter who vilified Williams in print worse than anything ever said or written about Donovan McNabb. Or Maurice “Mickey” McDermott, the young pitcher who Williams took a shine to, but whose life off the field was one loud foul after another, including the time he and Frankie Fontaine, of the old Jackie Gleason Show, went drinking and McDermott left some lobsters in his car. For three days. “Smells so bad I have to sell it,” remembered the late McDermott.

And most striking of all, for me, Joe Villarino, who was interviewed by Montville in San Diego, where he and Williams grew up together in the 1920s and 1930s. Villarino loved to play baseball with Williams as a kid, but knew he was no match for Ted’s talent and never made it above Class D ball in Kilgore, Texas. But what he accomplished that Williams never would was an act of longevity. As Montville pointed out to my delight, Villarino played some form of ball for all of his life; Williams, except for some old timers’ games in the 1980s, hung them up when he hit his last home run in 1960. At the time the two spoke about Williams’ life s a young man, Villarino was holding down first base for a team in the LaMesa, Calif., Senior Slow-Pitch Softball League. He was 85.

“We have guys who drop dead playing,” Villarino told Montville. “There was a guy just last year. He was on second base and someone hit a ball into the outfield, and he tried to get from second to third. Never made it.”

I have not heard of that happening locally, but I have discovered that there are a bunch of people like Villarino who have apparently not been told that you are too past it to quit playing ball after you get your AARP application. They belong to a league called the Chester County Senior Modified Softball League, and have games from April to August in field in Coatesville, Downingtown and West Chester. In fact, they just finished their season on Aug. 10, when Proudfoot Roofing defeated Fence Sense for the championship, the 14^th straight time Proudfoot has won the league title. (Break up the Roofers!)

I bring this up because I recently came across a story written 15 years ago about one of the league’s players who exemplifies something about longevity the way Ted Williams’ friend Joe Villarino did. His name is Ben Catalano and he spent the season managing and playing for the Coffee Cup squad in the senior league. He was 73 when the article was written about him in 1994, which makes him, by my calculations, 88 years old and a marvel of life. Someone told me he’s still the oldest player in the league.

The story profiled not only Catalano but the league itself, which had then only recently come into existence. Catalano was known then as a feisty catcher who on occasion would get tossed from games for arguing a call. Must be a leftover from his boyhood in Brookyln, where he played ball and umpired in leagues that included players like Phil Rizzuto of the Yankees.

“I like to catch because you’re involved in almost every play,” Catalano told the writer. “Ever year, the league gets a little more competitive.”

The Coffee Cup squad didn’t make any headlines this year, going 7-11 and finishing in the middle of the pack. And Ben Catalano has been feeling a bit under the weather lately, although there is hope that he’ll be able to watch the World Series from home again this year. But playing ball at 88? That’s a hell of a thing.

I like to think about people playing ball into their retirement years because it allows me to imagine that life will go one as long as you want it to. I like to think about people playing ball when they are close to 90 because it proves that the best things in life are timeless. I like to think about playing baseball when you’re old because if you had to choose a place to die, wouldn’t it be wonderful to close your eyes one last time when you’re running between second and third?

No Potter, No Problem

2009-08-17T11:25:00.001-04:00

This column originally appeared on Aug. 9, 2009

I have a lawyer acquaintance who jumped out of an airplane last week. Voluntarily. At 14,000 feet. In the air. Understandably, he had a parachute attached to his body, as well as a sky-diving instructor, so the chances that he would end up on the ground in a deceased state of mind were lessened, and he had a good time, especially when the 'chute opened at 5,000 feet (in the air) and he drifted downwards to once again set foot on terra firma.

And I am glad for him that he jumped out of that airplane and got the ride down. He is at an age when the things you always wanted to do before the bucket got kicked are more than just a list in your mind as you drift off to sleep. They actually become goals to achieve and enjoy. He was ecstatic and said so, and I wish him the best.

But frankly, no way.

Jumping out of an airplane is something that I have no intention, desire or hope of doing either now, or as the Grim Reaper is approaching. Jumping out of an airplane to me is like joining in a "tea bag demonstration" is to President Barack Obama. If other people want to do it, go ahead. I'll be in the snack bar.

My acquaintance's achievement, however, did set me to thinking. Not about what I would want to do as the bucket started to quiver and shake and tip a bit to the left, but rather what items are on my personal list of things not to do. Jumping out of an airplane is, somewhat obviously, near the top of the list. But there are other elements to the list that I would like to now state for the record.

First, however, a disclaimer: These are things I don't want to do, but am making no judgment about for others. That is, I am not pointing these non-goals out to cast aspersions on those who would engage in them and find them fun and worthwhile. Live and let live, I say.

No. 1: Visit the Reptile House at the Philadelphia Zoo. Why? Two words, to quote the actor Samuel L. Jackson. "(Expletive) snakes." I understand that there are other reptiles in the Reptile House that are less of a threat to my personal well-being, and I appreciate them. My car insurance is, after all, provided by a company which uses a lizard as its national spokesperson. But when it comes to snakes, I draw the line. Indiana Jones has got nothing on me in the snake department. I once stayed in bed for an entire day because I was convinced that there were snakes underneath it waiting for me to arise. If you want to see something slither, go ahead. I'll be in the Elephant House.

No. 2: Read "Harry Potter." I know, I know. You love him, it's the best literature since Dickens and you'd love to play Quiddich and J.K. Rowlings has brought back reading as a cool thing for young people to do. I just have no desire to find out what a "Half Blood Prince" is. If you want to study the world of wizards at Hogwarts, go ahead. I'll be in the non-fiction section.

No. 3: Attend an Ultimate Fighting Challenge event. It's not that I don't enjoy blood sport every now and again. After all, in my youth I watched Roller Derby games endlessly on UHF television, and even once attended a match featuring the Bay City Bombers at Cincinnati Gardens. (Shout out to Ronnie "Psycho" Rains!) If you want to pay good money to see grown men gnaw each other like so much steak, go ahead. I'll be in the line for Wilco tickets.

No. 4: Drive cross country with state Sen. Andy Dinniman. Not that I don't enjoy the landscape of this beautiful country of ours and would love to share it with a statesman/legislator/politician. But, really. If you want to listen to a four-day dissertation on SB 2742, go ahead. I'll be at the rest area.

Oops! Wrong Bar

2009-08-17T09:17:00.001-04:00

This column originally appeared on July 26, 2009

Judge Howard F. Riley of the Court of Common Pleas of Chester County is not given to muttering.

No, Riley is a straightforward sort. Open and direct, straightforward and clear in vocal expression. He may not be as verbose as some on the bench or in the Bar, but what he does say comes across as clear and concise. A grumbler he is not. Maybe it is his upbringing on a farm outside West Chester, but he had not truly mastered the art of the whispered verbal aside. When he wants to tell a defense attorney from Philadelphia to keep the editorial comments to himself during cross-examination, he pretty much says just that.

So it came as a surprise to at least one longtime court observer the other day when Riley suddenly entered mutter mode. "I think we ought to bring a PBT to the courtroom at the rate we're going," Riley said, to no one in particular, and everyone who was in hearing distance, in a low, but distinct, frustrated comment.

Three things should be known by the reader to grasp the significance of Riley's mutter. First, Riley was not referring to Proton Beam Therapy (PBT), or a Pit Bull Terrier (PBT, also), of Polybutylene Terephthalate (PBT, ditto). No, he was muttering to the Gods of the courthouse that his courtroom equipment just might need to include a Portable Breath Tester (PBT, as well.)

You know what a Portable Breath Tester is, don't you? Well, you would know if you had been watching "Cops" lately, or else had the misfortune to come in contact with the "home version" of the "Cops" studio game, so to speak, on a late night ride home from the eight-month anniversary of the Phillies World Championship Celebration and Drunken Riot. It's that small device that allows a quick read on whether someone has alcohol in their system.

The second thing you need to know about Riley's mutterance is that when he said it, a young man from Staten Island who was pleading guilty to a minor drug possession charge had just informed him that, yes, indeed, as a matter of fact, he had consumed some drugs, alcohol or medication within the last 24 hours. To wit, six or seven beers the night before.

It's a standard question that judges ask of defendants when they are pleading guilty — "Have you consumed any drugs, alcohol or medication within the past 24 hours?" It comes right after how far the defendant went in school and if they understand, read and write the English language. The question is sort of the judicial equivalent of, "So, do you live around here?" that might be asked by a member of one gender to a member of the opposite at any one of a number of local watering establishments. It's an ice-breaker, something said to open up the dialogue. Usually, the defendant answers by saying "No," just as how usually the aforesaid one gender member responds to the other by saying, "Stick a cork in it, pal."

On Thursday, however, the young man from Staten Island surprised everyone, including his attorney, Assistant Public Defender James McMullen, by allowing that yep, he'd consumed what Beldar Conehead on "Saturday Night Live" used to refer to as "mass quantities" of beer. And not only that, but he'd smoked marijuana not three nights before, too boot.

The third and last thing you need to know to fully understand Riley's muttering is that it is not the first time someone has shown up in his courtroom under the possible influence of alcohol in the past few months. It's not the second time, either, or the third. Showing up under the possible influence of alcohol in Judge Riley's courtroom is getting to be a somewhat regular occurrence. Things have gotten to the point that Ken Webb, one of Riley's tipstaffs, treats walking the defendant down to the Adult Probation Office, where they view PBTs as just so much office equipment, as part of the job description, like showing defense lawyers from Philadelphia how to fill out continuance requests.

The young man from Staten Island followed Webb out the door of the courtroom and came back a little while later with a report that he wasn't currently under the influence, and his sentencing was able to proceed without any further ado. He got probation, a lecture from Riley about why drinking six or seven beers before coming to court might not have been the best option to consider, and a handshake and best-of-luck wishes from McMullen.

And although he may not have been serious about actually bringing a PBT (Portable Breath Tester) to court for future emergencies, Riley may want to think again about the whole PBT (Proton Beam Therapy) thing. Might come in useful for those defense lawyers from Philadelphia.

Park Here

2009-07-22T11:13:00.001-04:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, July 19, 2009

Stop what you’re doing.

Put down the remote control, and turn off the Wii. Set aside the hedge clippers and quit cranking the lawn mower. If you’re in the car on your way to the mall, hit the brakes and turn around (making certain you use the turn signal; we don’t want you to get 1) rear-ended or 2) a moving violation citation.)

Why? Because there are about eight parks in East Bradford that deserve your attention, and with the weather doing its best impersonation of mid-May there is no time to waste to get to them for a little outdoor recreation.

Walking the sidewalks of West Chester we have found is a fine thing to do, and we are not about to start complaining about it. Sidewalks make a community livable because they bring people in contact with one another – either in the active sense of using them to get from one place to another all the time running into people you know, or want to know, along the way to whom you do not owe actual money, or in the passive sense of sitting on your front porch and watching as your new, or old, neighbors pass by with either a friendly wave and a kind hello or, if you are truly lucky, with a blueberry pie they baked for their Aunt Hester but decided to bring it over to your house instead.

But walking along paths that meander through the woods or along the peaceful banks of the Brandywine Creek is something that is not to be sniffed at either, and that is why we say that the parks of East Bradford demand your attention. They have both of those options aplenty, and other amenities to boot, like picnic tables and soft meadows, and shady trees and the Valley Creek. Not to mention the odd rope swing.

In fact, it as a rope swing that got us thinking about the parks in East Bradford in the first place. We saw the photos on the front page of our favorite daily newspaper last week that showed a gang of teenagers using a rope swing to douse themselves in swimming hole in the cool waters of the Brandywine, and though to ourselves. They looked as though they were having the time of their lives, if their lives had been lived in a Norman Rockwell universe of about July 1947, we thought. Teenagers, we thought, are not supposed to use rope swings to douse themselves in cool water in the 21^st century. Teenagers in the 21^st century are supposed to use rope swings to tie up their parents so they can spend an hour or two more playing WarCraft on the Dell without interference. Cool water and teenagers only come into contact when the latter needs something to drink after falling off their skateboards, and the former is available in plastic bottles.

And we wondered where in the world there still existed something akin to a “swimming hole,” which we understood once was available in every Chester County backyard until the developers started to use them as stormwater detention basins. So we did what all good newspaper reporters do when confronted with a question we had no ready answer to: we asked the photographer involved. Newspaper photographers may not actually work for a living the way normal people do, but we are certain they have an answer for just about any question you put to them.

So they told us: The swimming hole is down the road at Shaw’s Bridge Park. On South Creek Road off Route 842. You know, in East Bradford.

And we remembered visiting Shaw’s Bridge Park last year when the weather was just hot enough to make you want to take a dip in the Brandywine Creek, west branch, and watch kayakers float by. We remembered that we smiled at a young woman who had taken her babysitting charges to the bench at the park that overlooks the creek and that the children looked like they were having fun circa 1947, splashing in the water and skipping rocks across to the other bank. And we remembered that we liked parks that had real names, like Paradise Valley and Harmony Hill and Timbertop and Sugar’s Bridge and Shaw’s Bridge, names that conjured a place and ambiance instead of a generic designation.

And so we stopped what we were doing and turned off the laptop and made haste for Shaw’s Bridge Park. And we listened to the wind in the trees, felt the cool water on our feet, and heard the ripple of the creek over the rocks. And for our attention to the parks of East Bradford, we were rewarded.

Walking the (Clifton) Walk

2009-06-15T11:34:00.002-04:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, June 14, 2009

I don’t normally get involved with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I tend to steer fairly clear of organizations in general – the words “organization” and “newspaperman” not wholly fitting together – and have also for several years given wide berth to any group whose formal name contains the word “disease.” So don’t go getting the idea that whatever issues the boys and girls down at CDC headquarters decide to promote go straight to my mass e-mail list. I know they’re doing good work, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to put down my iPod every time the CDC wants to talk about bio-terror emergency preparation or mold prevention strategies.

But I do want to thank them for coming up with their KidsWalk to School Program, which teaches parents and community leaders how to encourage the practice of kids, well, walking to school. The idea is that kids who walk to school are healthier, more energetic, friendlier and less inclined to grow obese or, worse yet, watch “reality TV” programs like “Viva La Bam” or “Kendra.” I think the goal of getting kids to walk to school is laudable for a variety of reasons, but they have more to do with collecting four leaf clovers than staying slim. I’ll explain why in a moment.

The walking to school issue rose to national prominence recently because, frankly, I began communicating with kids I went to elementary school with back in the days when nobody envisioned a black president, Hispanic Supreme Court justice, or $4 a gallon gasoline. They are, of course, not kids anymore, but apparently have reached the same conclusion as I about life in general, and that is that practically everything was better then than it is now. Including, you guessed it, walking to school.

We all lived in a neighborhood called Clifton in Cincinnati, Ohio, through which Clifton Avenue ran past two schools, “old” Clifton Elementary School and “new” Clifton Elementary School. (Curiously, the “old” building still stands, while the “new” building was torn down a few years ago for a new “new” building. Go figure.) The schools were adjacent to one another, and within an easy half to three-quarters mile from our homes. It took 15 minutes to half an hour to get to school, depending on how far away you lived and often and for how long you stopped to look for four-leaf clovers.

A friend named Paul Patterson, you see, had started this obsession with finding four leaf clovers in the front yards of the homes that lined Clifton Avenue. He developed such a knack for it that he claimed to have 20 or more of the good luck charms encased in plastic display boxes in his room. I did not doubt him for an instant, nor did any of the other kids in our class, who, I remember, when once asked on a test to use the words “four, leaf, and clover” in a sentence, all connected them with Paul Patterson, to a boy and girl.

So the race was on for those of use who felt slightly jealous of and intimidated by Paul Patterson and his collection of four-leaf clovers. Watching him, it seemed easy enough to accomplish the same thing, after all. He walked up to a yard, stood over the grass, stared for a while, then bent over and picked up a fresh four-leaf clover and went home to do his homework and practice the violin. (Paul Patterson now plays second violin with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and although I am not entirely certain that luck did not play a pivotal role in his selection, would nor debate the point that talent certainly cannot also be dismissed.)

There must have been some other factor in the hunt for four-leaf clovers that Paul Patterson either neglected to mention or kept to himself because to this day I have amassed the grand total of only zero four-leaf clovers, a number I fear is approximately the same as my childhood classmates Mary Hoffheimer, Helen Richards, and Caroline Siegfried, with whom I began this reconsideration of school walking earlier this month. But in looking for the lucky charms, I at least began to get to know on a more intimate level the community in which I lived, and connected on a friendly level with people who 40 years later I can still talk to without having to explain what I mean when I reference the “old” school.

So thanks, CDC, for the effort to get kids to walk to school so that they are healthier, more energetic, and less like to grow obese. But you might want to also mention the part about the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. It couldn’t hurt.

A Lesson in LIfe

2009-06-08T09:11:00.002-04:00

This is a revised version of a column that originally appeared Sunday, June 7, 2009

I remember seeing him in the surf at Cape Henlopen in Delaware, on what I imagined was his first visit to the beach. He kept his t-shirt on when he went in the water, even though it was not particularly cold. It seemed clear that he was enjoying himself -- a big smile played on his face -- but he also struck me as timid and careful, never ducking under the waves, always turning away from them, afraid of their spray.

He was shy and said little, the way teenagers will when surrounded by adults they do not know well. The language barrier between us perhaps made him even more bashful. He was friendly, the other way from teenage surliness, but hard to get a handle on.

How could I have known that just months before, this quiet young man had made one of the bravest, most courageous decisions that a person could make; that he had willingly put his safety in jeopardy, his life in peril, so that he could attend school? That he knew every day that gunmen were looking for him, or someone like him, to shoot in order to make an example? To put it plainly, how could I know that he had risked death, simply to have a chance to learn?

This winter, he asked me to help him proofread the essay that he would be sending to colleges that he was applying to, here in his adopted country. (I do these freelance editing tasks willingly as favors, since it is almost all I am capable of doing. Please do not ask me to help change the oil in your car; I am still paying for the seized engine from the last go-round.) The essay came to me as an e-mail, and this is what I read first when I opened it:

“As I sit here in my room in my second home, in the United States, I can still see their faces, their dirty clothes, and their guns.”

In striking detail, he recalled the day in June 2007 when he sat in his classroom at the Gifted Students School in his native Baghdad and a teacher came in to announce simply that: “They are here. Al-Qaeda.”

For months before he had walked to school in his neighborhood and seen the dead bodies piling up. “People got shot for being Shia, like me, in a Sunni neighborhood,” he wrote. “I saw something like that almost every day; it was very dangerous every day.” Now, the gunmen from Al-Qaeda were in the school office, asking if there were any Shia students in class. The teachers and staff tried to convince them there was not, that this school was Sunni. One and all were aware what would happen: if the children were found out: Any Shia student would be taken away and shot. No questions, no doubt. And so he sat and felt his teenage heart beat in his chest and thought, I suppose, of the few years he had spent on Earth. And, remembering later that cold grip on his soul, he wrote this:

“At that time, I felt that I was few minutes away from death, getting closer every second. I was scared, but not because I thought that I was going to die. I was scared because I was thinking about what might happen to my family when they heard that I got killed. My dad always told me, ‘Don’t go to school, your life is more important than your education,” but I never listened and I always argued with him because I believe that my education was important enough to take the risky chance.”

The gunmen entered the room, looked around, and went away. They stole some cars, but left everyone alive. “Those seconds felt like years, they were the longest seconds in my life,” he wrote. “I felt that everything was happening in slow motion. I can still see them, right there by the classroom door, looking at us.”

And the next day, he went back to school. And the next, and the next, never telling his family what had happened, because if they knew it would mean the end of his schooling. What parent, after all, would put a child in a situation where the alternatives are hoping to complete exams or staying alive? But he said he earned an important lesson as he walked into his school the day after the men with their guns had left. In his essay, he wrote:

“Education is an important factor for success in everyone’s life. And just like many kids, I took it for granted. But now I know how important it is and how valuable it is. There are things in life where we don’t understand their value until we either lose them or get close to losing them, and education is one of them.”

He graduated from Westtown School on Saturday. That day, I saw a photo of him with his classmates taken at the beach this spring. He is bare-chested and bold, playing beach volleyball in the sun like a Californian, with a smile as big as ever.

Congratulations, Ammar Al-Rubaiay. You are my hero. Good luck in college.

An Old Fogey Remembers

2009-06-02T11:08:00.003-04:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, May 24, 2009

This is an apology alert.

I am going to apologize to a section of the Chester County demographic for the column I am about to compose, and I wanted to let you know about it. I am going to apologize to that demographic – i.e. the 18 to 35 age bracket -- because I know what it is like to have inflicted upon you, meaning me, what I am about to inflict on you, meaning them. I am going to apologize because I am going to write what we in the ink-stained wretch biz affectionately refer to as “the Old Fogey Column.”

You know the type, I am certain. You know the type because you have read them as long as you’ve been reading newspapers. You know the type, but you may have also referred to them as the “back in my day column.” You know the type, because you’ve read them and either nodded your head sagely about the perspecaciousness of the writer, or shook your head and wondered what they pay people for putting drivel such as this in print.

This is the column in which the author gets to harrumph about some change he or she just woke up from their afternoon zizz long enough to notice, whereupon he or she promptly made a mental note to pontificate on the subject of how “times have changed” and then go back to sleep. This is the column in which the author proclaims the benefits of the rotary telephone, or transistor radios, or non-bottled water that was so commonplace when he or she was coming of age.

The subject of this column occurred to me Monday when I heard that the folks in the Chester County republican Party were not, repeat not, going to be gathering at a spot on the west side of West Chester to go over the returns from the Tuesday’s primary election. Rather than live it up at the Elks, Skip Brion and his merry bunch of Grand Old Partiers were going to hunker down at the headquarters on South Church Street.

A similar theme was relayed to me about the plans of some major Democrats. The days of gathering at the local Knights of Columbus having gone the way of the nickel candy bar, they were going to get together at somebody’s house to check the returns as they came in.

Watching Out

2009-06-02T11:02:00.002-04:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, May 31, 2009

You are being watched.

Ahem. Perhaps “watched” is not quite the correct word, since it means that a person is looking at you, observing you, studying your moves. Let me say instead that you are being captured by a camera’s eye, recorded on video, your image filed away for future reference, whether you know it or not.

It’s not entirely a Big Brother sort of thing, the surveillance of average people by the government as envisioned by George Orwell in “1984,” the telescreens there in every apartment waiting to catch the citizens of Oceana acting without the interests of their all-knowing leader at heart. No, we Winston Smiths are in this case watched primarily by business interests, rather than political bureaucracies. And entertainment colossusses.

The thought of this ubiquitous video presence occurred to me some time ago, when I wrote of the case of several young men who were arrested and charged with a home invasion robbery at one of the apartment complexes in West Chester. Police were able to make a compelling case against the men in part by the use of videotapes taken from security cameras at both the apartment building where the robbery took place and a local Wawa, where the co-conspirators -- as we enjoy calling folks who decide that committing a crime is the best way to solidify a budding relationship -- gathered before and afterwards.

The men knew there were security cameras in the apartment hallway, and tried to disable them. But they did not realize that they were also being filmed as they stood outside the Wawa, their disguises in the apartment having discarded. Police were able to watch the Wawa video and match each man up to the images of the hooded and masked men who came to ransack and rob.

So, too, I believe, was the Buck County woman who faked her own kidnapping last week unaware that she would be spotted by a security video walking through the Philadelphia International Airport on her way to a luxury vacation at Disney -- a vacation albeit shorted somewhat by the delivery of an arrest warrant for false reports by the FBI. She apparently was not aware of the scope of the modern Big Brother’s presence.

And neither would I be. When I shop, I don’t consider that my movements, and inadvertent impulse purchases, are being filmed for general viewing purposes. When I walk down the street, I don’t imagine that a camera is going to catch me secretly scratching my nose. Or worse.

But I am perhaps among a select group who do not desire their lives to be filmed and broadcast, even though it may show those lives disintegrating into cheesy drama. I am referring of course, to the news that the Berks County couple who have become known far and wide as simply “Jon & Kate,” are now having marital and, possibly, legal problems.

According to the Associated Press, Jon, Kate and their eight children have attracted a huge TV audience, screaming tabloid headlines and, now, a state labor investigation.The Pennsylvania Department of Labor says it's looking into whether the hit reality show "Jon & Kate Plus 8" is complying with child labor laws.

The show drew nearly 10 million viewers for its fifth-season premiere Monday following reports of trouble in the Gosselins' marriage. Labor Department spokesman Justin Fleming tells The Associated Press that the department is looking into a complaint against the show. So now the poster family of fertility has the potential to find itself a symbol of child exploitation.

People must realize that the presence of cameras has unintended consequences, and rather than define reality, alters it. Recall the example of the All American Loud family in the early 1970s, whose idyllic family life ended in surprising divorce as the Public Broadcasting System cameras rolled. The impact of an ever present lens is why courtrooms in Pennsylvania don’t allow cameras, and why I am certain that the Chester County commissioners’ meetings are soon going to start featuring some classic “American Idol”-type moments, now that the meetings are being videoed. People, any good newspaperman will tell you, turn into different characters when the camera starts rolling

Perhaps the best consequence of this video presence is that eventually those potential criminals will realize that their every movement is on tape, and they’ll simply burst into a version of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miz, ala British reality-show chanteuse Susan Boyle, instead of carrying through on that carjacking.

I’d watch.

Connecting The Dots With Cheryl

2009-05-20T10:25:00.002-04:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, May 17, 2009

My friend Cheryl has this theory about the universe.

Cheryl, who close friends refer to as The Wise Woman of West Vincent, frankly, has a lot of theories about a lot of things, including, for example, but not limited to, the restorative benefits of black and white commercial television circa 1967, and I am glad she does. Generally having her around relieves me of having to develop my own theories about the universe.

My feelings about Cheryl’s theories are similar to a relationship I heard that developed between the writer Calvin Trillin and his beloved late wife, Alice. In their marriage, she took responsibility for keeping on top of certain world current events, such as the war in the Middle East or monsoons in Bangaladesh, allowing him the freedom to concentrate more on finding a very good bagel shop in East Lansing, Mich. With Cheryl, she’s got the spiritual nature of the universe covered while I’m free to focus my attention on getting a nice cup of hot chocolate with whipped cream at Penn’s Table.

Cheryl’s theory about the universe goes something like this: If you have question about something, you just pose it in your mind, wait awhile, and the answer will eventually come to you out of nowhere. The universe will deliver it, free of charge.

If you wonder, for instance, how Indian children can eat the sort of spicy food that you can’t get your 8-year-old to swallow at gunpoint, at some juncture you are going to turn on the radio and some author from Mombai will be telling an NPR host how she used to train herself to eat cayenne pepper curry when she was 4 so she’d be ready for the “adult food.”

Her husband, Jamie, refers to this theory as “interconnectedness,” and has developed his own corollary that sort of goes like this: if something cross your mind for no particular reason, someone else is going to mention the same thing to you without you asking. You’re going to remember a night you spent in a fire house in Asa, Oklahoma, and two minutes later the phone is going to ring and the sports editor of the Daily Oklahoman is going to be on the other end.

Now, the truth be told, I don’t hold with a lot of this “curve of binding energy” mumbo-jumbo stuff. I’m not a New Age, crystals and pyramids sort of guy. I’m actually an Old Age guy, who more or less believes that many of the answers to the world’s mysteries can be solved by ordering another cup of hot chocolate with whipped cream at Penn’s Table. But occasionally, I give in.

Case in point: I recently drove up Bell Tavern Road in East Caln on my way to Cheryl and her husband’s house for dinner, and passed by a unique street lamp along the side of the road. It reminded me of the gas lamps that lighted the street on which I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. Quietly, I wondered if those lamps still existed, or had been replaced by some electric arc-light monstrosity such as the ones that illuminate my bedroom at night, free of charge, from the roof of the Chester County Justice Center Parking Garage. (Thanks, commissioners!)

Two days later, I opened a package that arrived from my aunt containing a book of photographs of Cincinnati, Ohio, that she had found at a library book sale in Lawrenceville, N.J., and thought to send to me. Leafing through its pages, I turned to a photo of one of those aforementioned gas lamps, framed in snow, with accompanying text that spelled out how residents of the neighborhood had fought for years to keep the lamps trimmed and burning in the face of increasing costs. And the more I looked at the photo, the more I recognized the scene –the very street that I grew up on.

An I sat on the edge of my bed and thought about those nights when I would sit in an old broken down Volkswagen Microbus my next-door neighbor’s father owned but didn’t drive, dreaming about the day that I would be old enough to drive a stick-shift car, my revelry illuminated by the glow from those gas lamps. And I wondered what had become of my neighbor, who had played in the street with my sisters as I sat in that bus, on those warm Cincinnati nights as the sun went down and the gas lamps lighted up.

And the next day I turned on the television and watched the movie star Sarah Jessica Parker describe her new “Lovely” perfume. And I thought, “Oh, so that’s what happened to her.”

Paying Attention

2009-05-12T15:00:00.003-04:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, May 10, 2009

There are people in any community who go about their lives in a quiet fashion, ruffling no feathers and roiling no waters. They fly mostly under the radar, out of either conscious choice on their part or studied indifference on ours. They make a difference in the world, surely, but in a low-key, self-conscious manner. Like the fictional Willie Lowman in “Death of a Salesman,” when they are gone, perhaps we look about and wonder why we didn’t notice them before, and kick ourselves for not paying attention to their quiet contributions.

This isn’t about one of those people. It’ s about John J. Duffy.

I have not known John J. Duffy all my life, but there are times it feels like it. He is as much a part of the landscape of the Chester County I have come to know and appreciate, if not adore, as the clock tower on tip of his beloved courthouse or the waters of the Brandywine Creek. He is as noticeable and brash as the neckties he favors. Among the legal circle I associate myself with on a professional basis, there are few who do not, when you ask them, have a ready, distinct, certain opinion of John J. Duffy – good or not so good, affectionate or antagonistic.

That is to say, you may not like John J. Duffy, but you must acknowledge him. He is no shrinking violet, no silent witness, no unseen face. He is a criminal defense attorney and a proud, accomplished one, who has battled his way through countless trials and rubbed those across the aisle from him more than one wrong way over the years.

So the very fact that this coming week John J. Duffy will be called to stand and be honored by those people he has battled – judges and prosecutors, for starters – is remarkable. On Friday, the Chester County Drug Court will present John J. Duffy with its Osceola Wesley Award, given to a person who has aided in the recovery of people gripped by addictive demons. He does not want the award –there are between 11 and five other people, depending on who he’s telling, who deserve it more – but he’s getting it anyway and that’s a hell of a thing.

John J. Duffy is perhaps as well known for his battle against, and continuing triumph over, alcoholism, as for his courtroom skills. Years ago, researching his back-story for a piece I was putting together before one of his trials, I read all about it: the angry, booze-tinged fall from grace, much of it in the public eye, and then the eventual redemption. It made fascinating reading. Most of all, the tale demands wonder at what became of the John J. Duffy who was. Not content to keep his sobriety to himself, John J. Duffy has since his recovery gone on to share it with as many people as he can fit into a 24 hour day -- without ticking off the missus.

“John wears his recovery on his sleeve,” a woman who knows him well told me while we stood in a hallway of the Justice Center last week. If a ride to a meeting is needed, or a referral to his treasured Caron Foundation is required, or simply a person to stand by while the addiction is still holding sway is necessary, John J. Duffy has been available for countless lost souls, she said.

Judge William P. Mahon, the county’s recovery court champion, told me that John J. Duffy’s life and work in helping people regain their lives was nothing more than “extraordinary.” He said that John J. Duffy had gone out of his way to provide assistance for those in recovery, with no thought for himself.

Except once, the judge remembered.

When still in private practice, a client of Mahon's was facing his fourth DUI charge. Or was it his fifth? No matter, the man’s life was a wreck, careering out of control like the drunk driver he was. Sitting in court while Mahon asked a judge to continue the case so that everything could be tied together, John J. Duffy heard the story and approached. “I’m not trying to steal your client,” he told Mahon, “but tell him to call me.”

A year later Mahon attended his client’s 12-month sobriety anniversary. John J. Duffy had shepherded the man through the recovery process and helped negotiate his life back to a clean and straight course. In return, however, the client, a professional fitness trainer, helped John J. Duffy lose weight. And for a time, at least, John J. Duffy approached being svelte.

Osceola Wesley, the Coatesville man and recovered drug abuser for whom the award he will receive was named, came from a world different than John J. Duffy’s. North Philly versus West Philly; Army service in Korea versus law school at Villanova; African-American versus Irish American. But, as Mahon pointed out to me last week, their worlds converged around how they dealt with their addictions. “Both came out of those experiences determined to contribute back to the recovery of others,” he said.

Attention must be paid, someone once said. And so now it will be.

For The Love of Downingtown

2009-04-28T10:24:00.002-04:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, April 26, 2009

Maxwell Perkins, the New Jersey man who edited Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Lardner and Wolfe, was married to the same woman for 37 years. Louise Perkins and Max raised five daughters and honored one another faithfully until his death.

But Louise was not max’s “ideal woman” and at some point he met and fell head over heels for a Virginia born beauty named Elizabeth Lemmon. He wrote her constantly, viewed a visit from her as an occasion better even than the Fourth of July or his birthday, and carried on a platonic love affair with her, under the accepting gaze of Louise, for 25 years – again, until his death.

Which is a roundabout way of saying I’ve been spending a lot of time in Downingtown these days.

Look, we all know how I feel about West Chester – the county seat, the home of the Henderson Warriors, the only place I know where you can eat a hot dog you bought from a guy who can stop a table fan with his tongue in the shadow of a statue named “Old Gory.” I love this place. I honor it daily. I have lived and paid parking tickets here for longer than max knew Elizabeth Lemmon.

But, well, sometimes things change. Eating even the best mint chocolate chip ice cream for dessert every day can lead one can lead one to gaze expectantly over at a bowl of Rocky Road. I started going to Downingtown on a regular basis when I began attending the Quaker meeting there. Then I started eating breakfast on Sundays there, and doing a bit of shopping there, and getting my car serviced there, and well, before you know it, I’m going to be entering my own duck in the annual Good Neighbor’s Day Rubber Duck Race along the Brandywine.

It is not as though Downingtown hasn’t caught my eye before. Downingtown was one of the first places I ever visited in Chester County, and I can still recall the sight of the Trestle Bridge as I drove into town on Route 322 in 1979, listening to the Phillies blow another game on my friend’s car radio. (“If these pitchers hang another slider over the plate, I’m going to stop listening to them for ever,” my friend promised me. He lied.) My dear friend and colleague, the late Elene Brown, lived there pretty much all her life, and she loved it so much she didn’t move even after she tried to drive the family van though a flooded section of town and ended up replacing the engine.

I have even suggested in this space that it would be advantageous for West Chester to switch places with Downingtown, since we have no navigable body of water and it does. I wrote, “We get the East Branch of the Brandywine Creek, they get the Goose Creek Waste Water Treatment Plant. We get an easy drive to Wegman’s, and they can have the entire campus of West Chester University, kegs included.” Idea hasn’t gone too far forward, truth be told, but I’ll be willing to give it time.

Here’s what I know about Downingtown:

It was initially called Milltown because it had a lot of mills. The name was switched in 1812 to Downingtown, because one of the mill owners was named Thomas Downing. The Quaker settlers in the borough were, I suppose, hewing to their spiritual quest for simplicity and so didn’t see the value in coming up with a more, shall we say creative name, like Elk or Toughkenamon or Tweedale, but when you live in a town that dropped the vivid moniker “Turks Head” for the bland “West Chester” (“We’re WEST of CHESTER, see, and CHESTER is EAST of us and, well, oh never mind…” ) you can’t really throw stones.

Theobald Wolfe Tone, the Irish patriot and martyr, lived in Downingtown for a while. Jim Croce lived up the road from Downingtown in Lyndell, so technically he had a Downingtown mailing address when he was writing “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.” I think if you asked a teenager today who was more famous, Jim Croce or Theobald Wolfe Tone, they would not be able to hear you because their ears had been permanently damaged through repeated iPod use.

Lincoln’s funeral train passed through town, which is somewhat convenient since Downingtown is located along the Lincoln Highway, which is strangely referred to mostly as Lancaster Avenue by the folks who live in Downingtown from what I can tell, but Abe was dead at the time he passed through so I don’t believe he was put off by the slight.

If you go to the “Downingtown” page on Wikipedia, you get a picture of marsh Creek State park, which is not in Downingtown, is located a good five miles from Downingtown, is closer to Dowlin and Glenmoore than Downingtown, but does have a Downingtown address. I suppose now the Wiki folks are going to start putting photos of Longwood Gardens on the Modena page as an illustration to dress things up a bit, and I don’t blame them. But there’s the Log House, circa 1705, just sitting there screaming to be pictured, and they go to a man-made lake that destroyed an entire village.

If you type “Maxwell Perkins Downingtown” into Google, you get a link to the JoBlo.com movie site. Don’t ask me why.

Every Day Is Record Store Day

2009-04-20T10:06:00.001-04:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, April 19, 2009

The time was 1969. The place was Air-Waye Records on Ludlow Avenue in the Clifton neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. And the album was “Disraeli Gears” by Cream.

There you have the basic facts behind my first solo purchase of a record album, and the start of a spending spree at local records stores that has continued unabated to this very day. I just picked up copies of Radiohead’s “OK Computer” (Remastered Version)” and Lady Gaga’s “The Fame” (don’t ask me why) on Friday at Mad Platter Records on West Gay Street in West Chester.

I’d like to encourage you to join in my consumerism. Yesterday was Record Store day across the United States and Great Britain, a day set aside to celebrate, promote and sustain the local independent record stores that still exist in this age of downloads and file sharing. Although lots of such retailers have shut down in recent years, about 2,000 are still putting music out there for us to gather up, and many—like the Mad Platter -- are thriving. Maybe you should go out and see.

Record Store Day was the idea of Chris Brown, a long-haired, goateed music guru from Bull Moose, a chain of 10 record stores in Maine and New Hampshire. Now in its second year, Record Store Day is being celebrated at more than 1,000 independent record stores in the U.S. and in 17 countries.

"I wanted to have a fun kind of party event at Bull Moose where we could thank our customers and just have a fun time," he told the Associated Press.. "I realized that it would be a much better party if we got the other stores involved, just make it a national thing."

I like the idea of a day that gives me an excuse to do what I love doing anyway – going to a record store and shopping through hundreds of titles – but in a way I think it is a shame as well. In my mind, every day should be Record Store Day.

To be sure, I’ve spent a lot of time in record stores that could have been put to better use, but what of it. As they used to say about Midnight Basketball, lurking in records stores kept me off the street when I otherwise would have engaged in socially destructive behavior, like spray painting graffiti on neighborhood walls or studying for the law school entrance exams.
Air-Waye Records was about a mile from my home and I could easily ride the Schwinn there with my friends. Before “Disraeli Gears” with its “Sunshine of Your Love” hit came along, I’d picked out dozens of 45s to buy and badgered my parents into picking up copies of the latest Beatle or Beach Boys album, so my life was not without the sounds of the ‘60s before then.

The phrase “kid in a candy store” does not begin to describe the hours I could spend at Air-Waye thumbing though the racks of LPs, trying to imagine what it would be like to own each and every one of them. Those were the days when album art covers were just starting to come into their own as a cultural medium, and I am sure the owner of the store got used to the sight of me flipping the albums over and over the better to read and stare and contemplate the figures on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” or the Bob Dylan painting on the cover of “Music From Big Pink” by The Band.

Not that I’m obsessed with the subject, but I can tell you that I still remember there were two prices for LPs at Air-Waye -- $4.19 for new releases and $3.49 for older ones. Don’t ask me why. When folks of my parents’ generation start moaning about how they knew the country had gone to hell in a hand basket when a gallon of milk went above $1, I smile knowingly and think of the number of albums I could buy with a $20 bill and some loose change these days if we’d stayed out of that hand basket.

I understand that we cannot as an economic system cling to businesses that are outdated, and that sometimes things just don’t last. I haven’t seen too many haberdashery stores opening along the avenue lately, and frankly I’m not sure I care. But if record stores are going to disappear from the face of the earth, I would simply rather that they do so after I’ve shuffled off my mortal coil so that I won’t have to know about it.

Meanwhile, I think ‘m going to stop by Mad Platter and ask Debbie if she’s got an extra copy of “This Mortal Coil.” It’s not “Disraeli Gears,” but then what is?

Turning Over An Old Leaf

2009-04-14T11:41:00.001-04:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, April 12, 2009

Keeping life simple is a concept that many people try to embrace, even though that can be somewhat problematic in a world in which pirates suddenly reappear among the various and sundry dangers that travelers must gird themselves against when going overseas. But I aspire to that lofty goal and put it at the forefront of both my long term and everyday decisions.

My list of New Years’ resolutions, for instance. I try to keep them simple and thus easy to attain. “I promise this year that I will not take a dog’s temperature in church,” is one I have found easy to adhere to. “I will avoid giving my neighbors a gift of Haggis for Easter,” is another. "No space travel for me this year" is a sure winner. I realize that you will consider these to be an example of stacking the deck, but since I’m dealing the cards only to myself I feel no shame in loading the aces on the top.

I will now, given the events of last weekend, be able to add another such resolution to the list: “I promise not to attend the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington D.C.”

Do not get me wrong. I have nothing against the blossoms themselves. They were wonderful. Delightful. They were everything you would want a blossom to be. And the venue for their blossominess was a treat as well. As many times as I have visited our nation’s capital, I never found the opportunity to walk the Tidal Basin area. As basins go, I’d rank it up there among my favorites.

The trip to Washington last weekend also gave me a chance to stop by the Vietnam Memorial, a place I had avoided in the past out of fear of being overcome at the stark emotion it might give rise to. But I found it inspiring in its beauty, and stood in awe of the imagination that must have gone into its creation. The connection it offers to both the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument made me think about how we now recognize that the ordinary among us are as worthy of timeless respect as the extraordinary.

But unfortunately for me, I had to experience all of that in the presence of a crowd that I would conservatively estimate approach one billion, many of them speaking loudly into cell phones. It was the time of the season – peak blossom time, I’m told – as well as the blue of the sky and warmth of the sun that brought everyone out and I can’t blame them. But in their presence I was once again reminded of that snippet of conversation between Wanda and Henry in the film “Barfly,” when she asks him if he hates people. “No,” Henry replies. “But I seem to feel better when they’re not around.”

When Yogi Berra said, apocryphally, “No one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded,” the person he was referring to was me. Some people recharge their emotional batteries in a big group of strangers they can turn into friends; others do the same by themselves. I belong to the latter.

Now, don’t get the impression that my resolve never to attend the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington D.C. again will have any impact on my cultural and/or aesthetic development. In the cherry blossom department, I’m pretty much covered.

You see, I live on what has been proclaimed by pretty much everyone I have talked to as the second most perfect flowering tree spot in the country, West Miner Street. Take a drive down my way sometime this week and you will see what I mean. Spring along this stretch of road simply bursts with blossoms pink and red and white and variations in between. In a short while as the wind picks up and the blossoms loosen their grip on the boughs, the street looks like a colorful snow squall had struck.

And I’ve got a little bit of the Washington experience right outside my front door. You see, back in 1912, U.S. Rep. Thomas Stalker Butler received two Japanese sakura, or cherry, trees as a gift, from the same lot that ended up being planted at the Tidal Basin. He took them home with him and planted them in the front yard of his home in the 200 block of West Miner where one has grown fat and fit and tall and its blossoms bountiful and beautiful.

And I resolve to enjoy them again next year when they come again.

Saturday Night (Flashing) Lights

2009-04-07T09:45:00.001-04:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, April 5, 2009.

“So who’s the cook?”

To tell you the story behind that quote, I’m going to have to tell you another one first. Stay with me here. That Villanova score isn’t going to change anytime soon, and you’ll still be able to turn to it in the sports section.

In 1977, I worked for the U.S. Forest Service in the Uinta Mountains of northeastern Utah. We, a bunch of students from Earlham College and counterparts from schools in Utah, worked in the Wasatch National Forest about 100 miles east of Salt Lake City. Although some of us did heavy-duty forest service work, like cutting down trees, my job was mainly to empty trashcans from the campsites in the area.

But on July 16, a Saturday as I remember, we were told that we would be driving a few hours to the south to help fight a forest fire that had gone out of control in another forest – the Ashley National Forest. The fire was near the Flaming Gorge, quite a tourist attraction.

When we arrived at the scene, we were handed Pulaski fire tools to carry and fire-retardant shirts to wear, and given sleeping bags made out of paper and told we would be heading out to the fire scene soon, ferried there by helicopter. But we were also told that there had been a tragedy before our arrival: Three firefighters had been killed when the fire turned back on them and blew over the top of the tree stand were they were standing. They tried to outrun the blaze, but couldn’t.

I did not know their names then, but do now – thanks to the wonder of the Internet: Gene Campbell, Dwight Hodgkinson and Dave Noel. Even though none of s had known them before that day, they were all we thought about as we went about the business of containing that burning forest. I was just 20, and never thought until then that I could have such admiration and fear at the same time.

So on Saturday, March 28, 2009, I was at home reading when I decided a snack would be nice. Something simple and easy to make. A piece of toast. About half way though the process I noticed that there was an unusually large amount of smoke coming from the toaster – which would be nice in a barbeque pit but not in a third floor apartment. Somewhat experienced with smoking kitchen equipment, I opened the nearest window and the hallway door to get the smoke cleared. Which is about the same time the fire alarm went off.

I had noticed the alarm bell when I moved into the apartment a few months ago but hadn’t real paid it much mind. I imagined that it was there left over from some previous incarnation; what did I need with a bell, after all? I had smoke detectors. My first thought was to muffle the bell while the smoke cleared and everything went back to normal and I could finish my toast. Which is where the landlady found me, on the landing, gripping the metal clanger, when she ordered me out of the house.

We gathered on the street in front of the apartment, my landlady, fellow tenant and I, as I learned that the alarm was hardwired into an emergency service that would contact the fire company, which would be here soon. “But al I did was burn a piece of toast!” I explained, sheepishly. I don’t know whether my fellow evacuees’ laughter was directed at me, or at the situation. Nevertheless, that’s what they were doing when the pumper truck arrived.

A person I can only imagine must have been the chief --- since he stood about 14 feet tall, six feet wide and built, as they say, by the same firm that did Stonehenge – got off the truck and walked into the building like he owned it. I tried to stutter something about the toast, but it seemed he had more important things to do, like make sure the building wasn’t on fire.

It seemed as if hours passed as I stood on the sidewalk thinking how I was going to explain this one when the firefighter finally emerged from the house, having ascertained the level of my stupidity and shut off the alarm.

“So who’s the cook?” he asked, a wry smile crossing his face. I raised my hand. I explained the situation, he gave me some advice about what to do the next time the toast gets too crispy and then said, “Friend, you are not alone.” He walked back towards the truck, and we turned to go back inside.

There’s been a lot of news in the paper these days about firefighters, and some of it has not been great. But as the fire truck left the scene, all three of us turned to those who were inside and said, “Hey. Thanks. You guys do a great job.”

Who Ya Gonna Call?

2009-03-30T15:02:00.001-04:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, March 29, 2009

This column comes with a warning.

I generally respect my readers and try not to demean or offend them, so I’m letting you all know right off the bat that I will be writing about toilets this week.

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that all of a sudden, when you were least expecting it, here is the Daily Local News turning into the Howard Stern Show. Here’s the finest example of journalism printed within spitting distance of the Downingtown Interchange of the Pennsylvania Turnpike all of a sudden joining the potty humor crowd. Here’s the Voice of Chester County letting go with a good long belch.

That’s why I warned you; I didn’t want it to come as a shock. If you’re offended, you can feel free to skip the rest of this column and go straight to the box score of the Villanova-Pitt game. (Repeat after me: “Even if every man woman and child held hands together and prayed for us to win, it just wouldn't matter, because all the really good looking girls would still go out with the guys from Penn because they've got all the money! It just doesn't matter if we win or we lose! IT JUST DOESN'T MATTER!” Thank you, Bill Murray.)

But for those of you sticking around, what I’m about to tell you is not meant to offend or insult or demean. It is meant to inform.

There’s some “ghost flushing” going on at the Chester County Justice Center.

I know what you’re thinking. You Are thinking that you haven’t heard a good ghost-flushing story since October of 2007, when the news about the library in Kent, England, hit the wires. You remember, the one about the librarian at the Gravesend Library, ex-Royal Marine Gordon Jenns, who asked the local council to pay for an exorcist to solve the mystery of his haunted water closet. Jenns, it was reported at the time, “believes that the loo is inhabited by a ghost, who flushes the toilet after everyone has gone home.”

"I'm absolutely certain the toilet flushed itself,” Jenns told his local newspaper reporter, who I assure you could not wait to get back to the newsroom as soon as he could and tell his editor about his scoop. “The door was locked and the cistern was still filling up when I went in. It even happens when the loo door’s locked,” he added, calling the matter, “off-putting.”

Be that as it may, when you go to the men’s loo on the Fifth Floor of the JC, there will come a time when the toilets around you start flushing away, every few seconds, even though you are the only person in the room. The toilets have those modern motion sensor gizmos that are supposed to react only when you leave so you don’t have to go through the trouble of pulling the handle. But instead they go off with the slightest provocation, or with no provocation at all. So there you are, all alone with your thoughts and the latest Daily Local, and all you hear is a symphony of rushing flushes, timed perfectly, one after another, whooshing away nothing but pure, clean water. It’s off-putting, you might say.

Not wishing to raise the specter, so to speak, of having an exorcism performed for the ghost flushing at taxpayer expense, I made discreet inquiries about the matter. Seems like I was not the first to knock on that door.

County Director of Facilities Extraordinaire Steve Fromnick told me that he has had his people working on the problem for some time now. One of his assistants wrote to say that: “Originally, we had to go through and calibrate the flushometers to zero them in. We believe now we’re getting ghost flushing because of cleaning agents being used on the sensors. How much of this ghost flushing is happening we’re not sure, but we are in contact with our custodian contractor to educate them on the correct maintenance procedures.”

I’ll bet the folks in the White House Press Corps would give their Blackberries to be able to use the word “flushometers” in a sentence.

I don’t know if I actually want the problem solved because it is, after all, somewhat relaxing to hear the sound of whooshing water going on around you when you’re otherwise occupied. I accept the fact that ghost flushing is most likely wasteful and environmentally unsound. Still, I remember those days when I thought that pure joy revolved around nothing more than flushing the toilet over and over again.

But we all graduate college at some point. Even ‘Nova students.

My Hero, The I Choose Hell Guy

2009-03-24T08:36:00.003-04:00

This column originally apeared on Sunday, March 22, 2009

Everybody should have a hero, and George Kalman is mine.

I know what you’re saying. I know, for beginners, that what you are not saying is: “Why couldn’t you have chosen Chase Utley, or Barack Obama, or even Joe Dirt, even though he’s a fictional movie character brought to life by the guy who is not Chris Farley, as your hero?” I know, as well, that you are not saying: “Why don’t you choose as your hero somebody really important, like the inventors of Facebook, which has done more towards the efforts of Americans who want to substitute frivolous time-wasting activities for actual productive tasks than anything since the invention of the personal telephone call from the office?’

No, I know that what you are saying is: “Who in the name of Joe Dirt is George Kalman?” I understand the sentiment behind that question, because up until about four hours ago, I did not know who in the name of Joe Dirt George Kalman was either.

But thanks to Samuel G. Freedman of The New York Times, I do know who George Kalman is, and now he’s my hero. But not for the reason you might think.

George Kalman is the East Brandywine man and independent filmmaker who has filed a lawsuit in federal court in Philadelphia to overturn Pennsylvania’s blasphemy law. He did so after the state in 2007 turned down his request to name his film production company I Choose Hell Productions L.L.C., a choice meant to emphasize his belief that even if life can be hell at times, it is better than committing suicide.

Yes, I know what you’re saying: “Pennsylvania has a law against blasphemy? Then how did they get the permission to build those awful looking homes in Upper Uwchlan? And don’t even get me started on the Coatesville City Council!” Actually, the anti-blasphemy statute it is not a law like those weird codes that outlaw women in Florida from falling asleep under a hair dryer, or ban animals in California from mating within 1,500 feet of a day care center, or restrict locating a sexology shop in West Chester, Pa., within 300 feet of a church. No, this is a statute that maintains that corporations in the Commonwealth cannot have as their names any words that would “constitute blasphemy, profane cursing or swearing or that profane the Lords’s name.”

Leaving aside for the moment the notion that there is such a thing as “non-profane cursing,” we should point out that the state bureaucrats who are in charge of sorting out the blasphemes from the ordinary words in corporate Pennsylvania have not always been as diligent as they were in Kalman’s case when they denied his I Choose Hell Productions L.L.C. name. According to the Times article, there exist in the state corporations that use the handle Devil Media and Vomit Noise Productions, so somebody was apparently paying too much attention to his or her “Which Overly Restrictive State Red Tape Functionary Are You?” Facebook Quiz when those applications came across their desks.

But thank (not to drop names) God for providing Kalman with the wherewithal to bring the matter to the attention of the courts, where hopefully someone with the requisite understanding of the Constitution will see that the Pennsylvania’s anti-blasphemy statute makes about as much sense as not being able to play professional baseball in Philadelphia on Sundays (law repealed in 1933) or being forbidden from buying a bottle of “Two Buck Chuck” wine at the nearest Trader Joe’s any day of the year (law still on the books.)

But even though I think his mind is in the right place, his legal challenge to the law is not the reason why Kalman is my hero. No, he is my hero because of what he told Mr. Freedman of the Times.

“When you read the First Amendment, this is something you can be proud of,” he is quoted as saying. “If you care about the human condition, then you care about the First Amendment.”

I think even Joe Dirt would agree.

Build A Lake, And I Will Swim.

2009-03-16T08:52:00.003-04:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, March 15, 2009

Whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword has not been paying close enough attention to my column.

I have written in these pages as advocate for a number of what I consider perfectly worthy causes, and to date have had exactly none of them come to fruition. Cincinnati chili parlors in West Chester? Nope. Chadds Ford relocated into Chester County? Sorry, Charlie. Public swimming pool within easy walking distance of my home? Fuddegaboudit. Cloaking device to keep West Chester shielded from more drunken tourists? What’re you, kidding?

I am not doing well in the mightier-pen department, you might say. If I were a presidential candidate, I’d be Dennis Kucinich (2008 campaign: 25 months, 12 days. Delegate total: 0). If I were a Major League shortstop, I’d have a batting average worse even than Mario Mendoza (Nine seasons, three teams, .215 lifetime batting average.) If I were the melting point of ice on a temperature measurement scale, I’d be Celsius (0 degrees).

But what I am not is unpersistent.

Let me put that another, less grammatically incorrect, way. What I am not is a quitter (See above: “Kucinich”). I persist in these campaigns, whether they are successful or not. Once I have taken up arms, I do not stop the just just because someone has lopped off my hands from the shoulders down. I do not take my role as an advocate lightly, especially when it comes to Cincinnati chili or cloaking devices.

So once again I hurl myself into the breech. Staring today, I am officially urging the Army Corps of Engineers to begin blocking up whatever body of water is available to create a lake somewhere in West Chester, preferably within walking distance of the childhood home of Smedley Darlington Butler, of which, as has been established previously, I am a neighbor.

The thought that we need a large body of open water here occurred to me as I visited Marsh Creek State Park one recent sunny afternoon. Marsh Creek Lake is one of the most beautiful man-made sights in northern Chester County, and brings with it a sense of tranquility and ease. It is a spot for boating or fishing, sunbathing or kayaking, or simply just gazing across its grand expanse of clear blue water. (It is also a spot for surreptitious swimming, as I once discovered when a friend of mine slipped over the side of the boat we had rented for a cool dip, even though such practice is technically illegal. I say this because I am fairly certain the statute of limitations on aquatic offenses is safely behind me.)

I am also certain that having a lake somewhere in the middle of West Chester would provide a number of financial benefits to the borough that it has heretofore not enjoyed. There is the possibility of a windsurfing franchise, for example. There would be a great opportunity for a bass fishing tournament that we could conceivably spin off of the latest television episode of “Viva Le Bam.” It would make a nice swimming location as well (See above: “Cool dip”), which would not exactly conform with the sort of economic stimulus that the papers all say our nation is sorely in need of, but it would make my summers significantly more enjoyable, and what of it?

I am not at all certain how this flooding project would be accomplished, but questions like those are, as our newly inaugurated president once said, above my pay grade. I’m the idea guy, not the nuts-and-bolts guy. I lay out the strategies in broad stokes and let the Timothy Geithners and Lawrence Summers of the world fill in the details. I say we need a lake; I let someone else build the dam. If I were a movie character, I would be Bill Blazejowsky in “Night Shift”: (“What if you mix the mayonnaise in the can, WITH the tuna fish? Or... hold it! I got it! Take LIVE tuna fish, and FEED 'em mayonnaise! Call Starkist!”).

Look, I know that you are shaking your head in disbelief at my apparent naïveté that what I wish in these pages will somehow come true. In response, I point out that someone had to be the one to think of putting a lake in the middle of Upper Uwchlan. He or she probably got laughed at by all the residents of Milford Mills right up until the time the waters of Marsh Creek started creeping into their root cellars, and where are they now? I tell you where they are: Living on the banks of a 535-acre man made lake, that’s where hey are. So sing your song of impossible dreams to them.

Or to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who, just by way of explanation, in his 1839 play “Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy,” coined the phrase, “The pen is mightier than the sword.” I’m sure he’ll listen.

25 Random Things About a Geo-Political Entity

2009-03-09T11:29:00.003-04:00

This column originally appeared on Sunday, March 8, 2009

Hello Daily Local News readers. It’s me, Chester County.

Yes, I realize that it is odd to find that a geo-political subdivision of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is writing a column, but with modern technology anything is possible. Welcome to the 21st Century! Any moment now, wholly abstract concepts, such as “happiness,” the color “red” or “Andy Dinniman” are going to have their own Web sites and Twitter addresses, so my ability to interact with you is really just the beginning.

Which is my way of getting around to letting you know that I now have my own Facebook page and am hoping you’ll all sign up to be my friends. Considering there’s almost 485,000 people living within my borders, I’d say I have the possibility of establishing yourself as the Facebook “Friends Leader of All Time” if just a small portion of you sign up. I’ll try to provide a handy link later.

But just so you know that even though I’m more than 300 years old I still have a sense of what the hottest trends are in the modern world, I thought I would let you know that I do have prepared a “25 Random Things About me” list. Apparently, it is something you have to do to really get in the spirit of Facebook. After all, chain letters are so 1888.

This is my way of letting you know a few personal things about me that might have not captured your attention in the past. I’ve dug down and mined the bottom of my personality, my likes and dislikes, the bits and pieces of my life that will let you know why you might want to be my friend. Hope you like it.

1. Degrees of separation between me and William Penn: None.

2. My Official Seal shows a tall-mast ship at sail on the ocean. But I have no ocean. Don’t ask me.

3. I have 73 municipalities, but am hoping a recent diet I started will get me down to the mid-50s.

4. Favorite television actor: Dennis Weaver, as “Chester” on Gunsmoke. Duh!

5. I have never seen Cheshire County, England, who I am apparently named after. Don’t want to, either. More of a Wales guy, myself. (See, “Tredyffrin.”)

6. Used to encompass both Lancaster and Delaware counties. Felt bad about losing Lancaster (great outlet shops!) but OK with the Delco thing.

7. Favorite fungi: mushroom. Double duh.

8. George Washington slept in me.

9. Totally over Susan Richardson of “Eight is Enough.” Sort of have a thing for Tina Fey, though.

10. Motto: “Come in Gay, go out High.”

11. Did you know: The Hooters filmed a music video inside me at an old drive-in movie theater in Exton.

12. Number of “Hooters” restaurants located in me: Zero.

13. Loved “Witness.” Hated “The Village.”

14. I would trade 50 percent of the foxhunters I find traipsing across my verdant fields if I could just have one minor league baseball team located within my borders. Preferably in the Baltimore Orioles farm system.

15. Always knew that Thurgood Marshall fellow would amount to something.

16. Can recite “Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes at the drop of a hat.

17. I’ve got lots more fieldstones where those came from if you want to build a barn somewhere.

18. Favorite Herr’s snack food: “Salt and Pepper Potato Chips.”

19. Jim Croce? Meh.

20. Turn ons: Unpaved dirt roads. Turn offs: Route 202, Tuesdays, 8:30 a.m., between Boot Road and Route 29.

21. Secretly miss Courtroom One.

22. I actually only need one jury commissioner.

23. If you go to the Eagleview business and residential community in Uwchlan, you can’t actually see Eagle.

24. Politically, I’m feeling purple.

25. I have 3,730,000 hits on Google. Go ahead, try and beat me.