Mr. Mawby You've Been On My Mind

This column originally appeared on July 18, 2010

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

Allow me to explain.

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

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

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

I digress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry If I Miscommunicate This, But...

This column originally appeared on July 11, 2010.

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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

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

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

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

Anyway, I am sorry if I bored y ou.

Discussion of bunkers forbidden at hearing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanix, contacted Friday, declined comment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Candidates With Color

This column originally appeared on Sunday, June 20, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Judge, The Boss, and Chihuahuas

This column originally appeared on Sunday, June 13, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, and the answer was "blank."

Parking in a Parallel Universe

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

Parking is a problem in West Chester.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feeling The Inner Wa

This column originally appeared on Sunday, April 18, 2010

You gotta love the Wa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take Me Home Again

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

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.