Just a Little Respect, Please

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Listen up, Marines.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can stand at ease now, Mr. Mayor.

Not That Kind of Bar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life Lessons, Newsroom Style

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snow Bound, Mysteriously

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider yourself tapped, shoulder wise.