This column originally appeared on Sunday, June 8, 2008.
Here are some things you may not know about Chester County.
These little-known and hard-to-substantiate tidbits of information may have escaped you during the history portion of your high school education — either because you didn’t live in Chester County when you went through that particular course of study and the teachers in Kansas City, Mo., didn’t think to include a syllabus item on an obscure-though-wealthy southeastern Pennsylvania county, or because you did live in Chester County when you went through that particular course of study but your teachers were more intent on clueing you in to the history of the Phoenicians or the Hammurabians or the Mesopotamians or other surging, vital cultures, knowledge of which is essential for understanding the current energy situation.
First, did you know that West Chester was the number two pick for county seat? The top pick? Tredyffrin, of course.
It seems that William Penn was quite partial to the Welsh who populated the eastern portion of Chester County back in the day. (And by “back in the day,” I don’t mean the Earl Baker-Bob Thompson-and-Pat O’Donnell day. I mean the Everybody-Dresses-Like-The-Guy-On-The-Quaker-Oats-Box day.) He proposed to local Welsh leaders Owain Glyndwr and Gruff Rhys that they pick a site where they would like the county seat of Chester to be located, within the bounds of their native Tredyffrin. Someplace along the beaten path where farmers could come and pay their taxes or take out a marriage license, and preferably a place whose name contained as few vowels as possible. (Consonant-to-Vowel Ratio, CVR, in name Tredyffrin — 8:2.)
Rhys and Glyndwr (CVR — 11:0), unfortunately, personified the great Welsh character trait of being exceedingly proscratinatory and were forever putting the decision off. “Coda i’n gynnar for,” Glyndwr could be heard to say when Penn asked him to name a suitable place. (Translated, “I’ll get up early tomorrow and let you know.”) “Na’i godi’n gynnar fory,” reiterated Rhys, when Penn sought him out. (Translated, “It’s at the top of my list, I swear.”)
Meanwhile, farmers were pressuring Penn to designate a county seat because they had no place to pay their taxes or take out marriage licenses, and what with being unable to balance their checkbooks because of the non-payment of taxes and a certain level of frustration over not being able to settle down with a wife and kids, they asked him to make a decision like, yesterday. So legend has it that Penn took a dart, aimed it at a map and decreed that wherever the dart landed, so would that be the county seat. Thwunmp! Hello, Dub-C, as they say.
(Five inches to the left? Hello, downtown Modena.)
Second, did you know that of all the elected county officials in Chester County listed on Wikipedia, from district attorney to jury commissioner, only one person’s name is a hyperlink that will direct you to more information on said person? And did you know that said person is Sheriff Carolyn Bunny Welsh? And that “Bunny” is not encased in quotation marks, like George Herman “Babe” Ruth or Eliot “Emperor’s Club” Spitzer? And that if you Google “Sheriff Bunny” the second link you see is to “I Shot the Sheriff” by Bob Marley and the (Bunny) Wailers?
Third, did you know that the police public affairs specialists in West Goshen speak only the Welsh English language (colloquially known as “Wenglish”) and that’s why they never tell us anything?
Showing posts with label West Goshen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label West Goshen. Show all posts
Monday, June 09, 2008
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Going, Going ... Gone!
This appeared June 11, 2006
This was supposed to be a column about the monstrosity township officials in West Goshen are attempting to pass off to the unsuspecting public as their latest "park" - that steel-caged nightmare motorists on Route 100 can view under construction just outside West Chester.
That is, if they can stand the sight of it without screaming and shielding their children's eyes, like you would a particularly grim traffic accident.
And it still is about that, in a way. But more, it's about backyard softball, shady summer evenings, hitting your first home run and an inevitable loss of innocence.
Oh yeah, and beer.
Back in the middle of the Reagan Era, I used to play softball in a coed league with colleagues from the Daily Local News and various friends. The league didn't have a field of its own, and many of the games were scattered across the county - Lionville, Embreeville, a lot across from Schramm's manufacturing plant on Virginia Avenue near Henderson High, wherever.
But the favorite place for all of us to play was a lot we called Ashbridge Field, located in the Green Hills Farm section of West Goshen on, appropriately enough, Ashbridge Road.
We affectionately nicknamed the place "The Bandbox," because of its relatively tiny dimensions. People who had never dreamed of ever being able to jack one over the fence looked at the field and started doing their best Babe Ruth imitation.
It wasn't a formal baseball field, really. I thought of it mostly as some guy's backyard.
Sure, it had a backstop and benches for the players, a few bleacher seats and cutouts for home plate and the bases. But it was a little lopsided and you had to park your car on the grass, and every once in a while a foul ball would find its way into the next-door neighbor's hedges and you'd have to go root around for the ball for 10 minutes or so while everybody else waited.
In other words, it was the perfect place to play a softball game on an August night, then spend 45 minutes replaying the game over a few cold beers as twilight came on.
I decided to visit the field recently for the first time in decades, my idea being to compare its informal glory with the new Park on Route 100. But to my dismay, Ashbridge is gone.
In its place is Richard C. Cloud Park - Mr. Cloud, I assume, being the guy who built the field in his backyard. Ashbridge had been taken over by West Goshen, and is now part of its Recreational Gulag.
As I pulled into the new macadam parking lot and stared in disbelief at the concrete block dugouts, steel fences and regulation baselines, I spotted with horror the ultimate symbol that the party was over for my Field of Dreams: A sign grandly proclaimed the field's "Rules and Regulations."
Closed at dusk. Crowds must register with township. No open burning. All goofing off prosecuted. And, most depressingly: "Alcoholic beverages are prohibited in the parks."
Driving away from the field, I remember President Reagan once saying something about government being the problem and not the solution. Never have I agreed with him more.
The only benefit I took away from the change? One of the rules of the field stated plainly:
"Golf is prohibited."
This was supposed to be a column about the monstrosity township officials in West Goshen are attempting to pass off to the unsuspecting public as their latest "park" - that steel-caged nightmare motorists on Route 100 can view under construction just outside West Chester.
That is, if they can stand the sight of it without screaming and shielding their children's eyes, like you would a particularly grim traffic accident.
And it still is about that, in a way. But more, it's about backyard softball, shady summer evenings, hitting your first home run and an inevitable loss of innocence.
Oh yeah, and beer.
Back in the middle of the Reagan Era, I used to play softball in a coed league with colleagues from the Daily Local News and various friends. The league didn't have a field of its own, and many of the games were scattered across the county - Lionville, Embreeville, a lot across from Schramm's manufacturing plant on Virginia Avenue near Henderson High, wherever.
But the favorite place for all of us to play was a lot we called Ashbridge Field, located in the Green Hills Farm section of West Goshen on, appropriately enough, Ashbridge Road.
We affectionately nicknamed the place "The Bandbox," because of its relatively tiny dimensions. People who had never dreamed of ever being able to jack one over the fence looked at the field and started doing their best Babe Ruth imitation.
It wasn't a formal baseball field, really. I thought of it mostly as some guy's backyard.
Sure, it had a backstop and benches for the players, a few bleacher seats and cutouts for home plate and the bases. But it was a little lopsided and you had to park your car on the grass, and every once in a while a foul ball would find its way into the next-door neighbor's hedges and you'd have to go root around for the ball for 10 minutes or so while everybody else waited.
In other words, it was the perfect place to play a softball game on an August night, then spend 45 minutes replaying the game over a few cold beers as twilight came on.
I decided to visit the field recently for the first time in decades, my idea being to compare its informal glory with the new Park on Route 100. But to my dismay, Ashbridge is gone.
In its place is Richard C. Cloud Park - Mr. Cloud, I assume, being the guy who built the field in his backyard. Ashbridge had been taken over by West Goshen, and is now part of its Recreational Gulag.
As I pulled into the new macadam parking lot and stared in disbelief at the concrete block dugouts, steel fences and regulation baselines, I spotted with horror the ultimate symbol that the party was over for my Field of Dreams: A sign grandly proclaimed the field's "Rules and Regulations."
Closed at dusk. Crowds must register with township. No open burning. All goofing off prosecuted. And, most depressingly: "Alcoholic beverages are prohibited in the parks."
Driving away from the field, I remember President Reagan once saying something about government being the problem and not the solution. Never have I agreed with him more.
The only benefit I took away from the change? One of the rules of the field stated plainly:
"Golf is prohibited."
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