Pooling One's Interest

This column originally appeared on Sunday, May 25, 2008

Word has it that the Chester County Commissioners are taking suggestions for what should happen to the vacant space they will have when they move all the judges, prosecutors, public defenders, prothonotaries, clerks of courts, tipstaffs, secretaries and veteran criminal defense attorney John J. Duffy's motor scooter to the new Justice Center.

Word has it that they'll take suggestions from just about anyone as to what to do with the vacant North Wing and Mosteller's Annex, all the way down to that dog Marley who everyone seemed to be making such a fuss over last week. (Even West Chester Police Chief Scott Bohn's family dog was said to have asked to secure a spot watching the movie-making proceedings on West Gay Street on the off chance that Marley the Mutt might need a stunt double.)

Word has it that the county would just as soon rid itself of the Mosteller Annex, which used to be a department store back when former West Chester Mayor Thomas Chambers could still play a game of half-court basketball without an oxygen tank and a de-fib machine seated next to him on the pine, because, well, frankly, because it's the ugliest building in the borough not owned by renowned landlord Stan Zukin.

Word has it that as long as the price is right, anything goes with the Mosteller site, short of the housing the future home of Andy Dinniman's Personal State Senate Library and Skate Park, with its “Before Mustache,” “During Mustache,” and “After Mustache” sections divided by floors and an animatronic greeting by a life-sized Bam Margera, bar not included.

Excuse me, but Memo to Carol, Terence and Kathi: No need to send out the RFPs. Save the postage. I've got the answer that should have been as obvious to you three commissioners as Joe Norley at a West Chester U frat party.

Two words: Community pool.

West Chester has been aching for a community pool -- where hot, tired sweaty citizens could relax themselves after a hard day's work and, as I have pointed out on many occasions, is within walking distance of South Church Street -- ever since 1983, when I, coincidentally, spent my first summer watching the temperature in my South Church Street apartment rise above 95 degrees.

There didn't seem to be much room in the borough, however, for a pool the size that could accommodate hot, tired, sweaty journalists because the space was taken up by frivolous luxury uses like houses and stores and parking lots. Now, however, opportunity is presenting itself with all the anticipatory glee of a 15-year-old hacker looking at the Downingtown Area School District's computer “security system.”

So tear down the Mosteller, dig a nice hole, get the crews to come pour some concrete, plant a few trees for shade, get Wally the Wiener Man to provide concessions, and open it up in time to provide a backdrop for the first “Swinging Thursday” event. Don't worry: We don't need anything as fancy as an Olympic-sized pool with lap lanes, because frankly, we don't lap. We float and bob and chill like a half-empty wine bottle in Marsh Creek Lake.

Word.

Change That Matters

This column originally appeared on Sunday, May 18, 2008

My friend Rich Henson, of the West Chester Hensons, once found himself pulling into a parking spot somewhere in Philadelphia without the benefit of the proper coins with which to feed the meter. Fearing what might happen if sufficient time wasn’t added to the meter, he breezed into a nearby retail store with a dollar bill in hand.

“Might I exchange this paper Washington for four silver Georges?” Mr. Henson inquired politely of the proprietor.

“Whadduz this look like, the four-quarters-for-a-dollar store?” the friendly owner rejoined. Mr. Henson, chastised, found other means of exchanging his funds.

I tell that story to make this point: If you are contemplating a trip into the Borough of West Chester from your pricey but cheaply constructed McMansion in Developmentland, it would be incumbent on you to make a quick trip to the bank and fill up your SUV’s change dish with 25-cent pieces. That simple step would lead to a better life all around for everyone.

Parking meters are central to our life here in West Chester. Check that. Parking in general, and all its accompanying systems, is central to our life here in West Chester. And we who have grown so accustomed to the Facts of Parking Life 101 take it as an affront that those of you coming here from outside the borough’s four corners are showing up unprepared for the obstacle course that is our parking code.

Hence the borough’s latest municipal motto: “West Chester: Bring Quarters.” (Signs to be posted shortly.)

You wouldn’t think of going on a vacation to France without learning how to say, “Can I have some Freedom Fries with that souffle?” in the native lingo, would you? You wouldn’t think of going to Philadelphia without $10,000 in cash to bribe a city official, would you? But yet you come to our town without the one thing that is most necessary to making your stay here run smoothly. For shame.

Waitresses at West Chester restaurants spend so much of their time filling requests to make change for dollars to feed the parking meters on Gay Street that they have been known to let the various attorneys, judges, police officers, courthouse tipstaffs, state Senate legislative aides and real estate brokers who actually pay their salaries wait overtime to get their meals served.

And we all know what happens anyway, don’t we? You, having gotten your four quarters for a dollar, return to your car only to be confronted with one of our sunny, smiling, effervescent parking enforcement officers cranking out a parking ticket because your meter had no time on it.

“But I just ran in to get change!” you explain. “Can’t you see I was just away a minute? I’m sure you can just let me slide this one time, can’t you?”

“Sure! When pigs get the vote!” comes the cheery response. “See you soon! In court!”

There are myriad tales of the disputes that arise over parking in West Chester, with equally rude and antagonistic charges on both sides of the meter: The meter-person who berates the quizzical senior citizen over some minor infraction; the blustering insurance salesman who demands the officer’s badge even though he was 30 minutes behind schedule. It’s the Mideast conflict, without Jimmy Carter.

So it is obvious why Barack Obama did as well as he did here in the recent presidential primary, his message of “bringing change” resonating so clearly with voters in the borough.

We just thought he meant loose coins.

Amish Housing Dispute Update

This article originally appeared on Sunday, May 11, 2008

An Amish landlord discriminated against a black family from Chester County when he bowed to the bigotry of another tenant and failed to rent them their picturesque dream home in rural Nottingham, the state Human Relations Commission has ruled.

Emanuel Hertzler was “naive” about state law concerning fair housing practices and did not mean the family any harm, the commission stated in a 22-page opinion in the case filed by Glenda and Raymond Brown and their children, but he violated provisions of the state's Human Relations Act nonetheless.

“It is simply wrong to allow the prejudices of a potential neighbor to trump the mandate to make rental decisions absent racial considerations,” the opinion stated. “Here, Hertzler did just that.”

The order was filed April 22. The Browns, along with one of their two sons, were awarded $5,000 for embarrassment and humiliation, $240 for out of pocket expenses, and Hertzler was ordered to begin adhering to federal fair housing practices in renting his property, including proper advertising and annual inspection of rental records.

Raymond Brown, contacted at the family's home in Atglen Friday, said the decision came as a victory for both his family and others confronted with racal discrimination in housing.

“We are pleased this is over,” Raymond Brown said. “We are pleased the commission sided with us. We just hope that people know they do have a mechanism in their defense, and they don't have to sit back and take these kind of things.”

Hertzler, of Little Britain, Lancaster County, could not be reached for comment.

The commission's decision followed a hearing in January at the West Chester Borough Hall in front of Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission (PHRC) hearing examiner Carl Summerson, attended by the Browns, their two sons, their pastor, Hertzler and four other Amish men from Hertzler's church district, including his bishop.

Under questioning from Charles Nier, assistant chief counsel of the PHRC, Glenda Brown said she had seen an advertisement in early May 2007 for a house in a local newspaper and made arraignments to meet Hertzler there. When she toured the house on Little Britain Road across the Lancaster County line from West Nottingham, she said she got very excited that it offered what she and her family had been looking for. It was in the countryside, with a large yard and enough space for all four of them.

Plus, it was $50 cheaper than the $850 rent she and her husband were paying for a row-home in he Westwood section of Valley. “It was like a picture postcard,” she said.

She said she filled out a portion of the lease application and left it with Hertzler, who promised to call and let her know if they were accepted. She said had no reason to believe they would not get the home.
But later that night, Hertzler left her a message on the family's answering machine.

“We talked it over with the neighbors there, my other tenants in the house besides you, and I'm sorry to tell you this,” Hertzler could be heard on the message as it was played back at the hearing. “But they do not want a colored family living next door.

“They are very choosy,” he continued. “They said they would move and it would cost me lots to go looking for people to move in, so I'm sorry,” he said on the tape.

It was later established that the neighbor he spoke of was troublesome man who had earlier brushses with the law, and that Hertzler was afraid of what he might do if the Browns moved in.

But Glenda Brown said the message shocked her. “That in 2007 that someone would have that type of an attitude – it was blatant discrimination,” she testified.

The commission agreed.

“Fear of a white tenant moving if an African American family moves in is not a legal excuse for a landlord's fundamental legal obligation to afford everyone an equal opportunity to secure suitable hosing of their choice,” the opinion read.

In his halting testimony, however, Hertzler defended himself, saying that an incomplete application had been the stumbling block for him, not the couple's race.

Glenda Brown had left out information on vehicles that would be on the property, and financial information about past bankruptcies or missed rent payments, he said. When he ran a credit check later, he found out that she had once filed for bankruptcy and that the couple had had some rent payment problems in 2006.

However, the commission found that those considerations did not outweigh his initial hesitation to rent to the family based on their race.

The opinion noted that Amish landlords are at times not fully versed in the law and that Hertzler seem to act with a “ misplaced paternalistic attitude” to keep the Brown's away from the neighbor who did not want to live near blacks.

“Hertzler, being Amish, can best be described as naïve,” it stated, ading tat his motivation not to rent to the Brown's “was not borne out of a personal ill will, malice, or desire to harm the Brown family.”

In assessing the penalty for the Brown's humiliation, the commission noted that there had been little testimony to show that the family suffered and physical, psychological or emotional turmoil over the matter.

Glenda Brown had testified that she spoke with friends and acquaintances about the matter, and that while hers sons were “dumbfounded” to be confronted with such racially tinged attitudes, she believed they handled the situation with maturity.

The couple said that the size of the award was not the most important thing for them, but rather the recognition that what had happened to them was wrong.

“We are excited that justice has been done,” said Glenda Brown. “We are grateful that this type of thing has been exposed.”

See original article here

Wawa Hoppers

This column originally appeared on May 11, 2008

The story that I enjoy the most from the saga of the Wawa Hoppers is the episode in which Ann and Mary speed away from the site of a street shooting in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, only to make a quick stop at the Wa on Aramingo Avenue while the sound of the gunfire is still fresh in their ears.

You may have heard of the Wawa Hoppers, the five young women who hail from West Chester — Jill Fitzpatrick, Emily Koch, Andi Sasin, Mary Speer and Ann Wuetig — and who more than a year ago began a quest to visit and shop at each of the 578 Wawas known to man — Wawas, of course, being the equivalent in convenience store circles as Tiger Woods is to golfers.

What at first blush sounds like some particularly silly attempt to gain entrance into the Guinness Book of World Records is put into serious context when the Hoppers explain that their mission is being performed in honor of a childhood friend, Maria Whitehead, who died in November 2006 of melanoma. They say they are hopeful that Wawa will provide a matching gift to the Melanoma International Foundation for every dollar the pentangle spend at one of its stores.

Whitehead was a classmate of theirs at West Chester East High School and an athletic legend in the area. She was an assistant coach for the Duke University field hockey team when she died and had earlier played and coached on U.S. Olympic field hockey teams. (For matters of full disclosure, I should note that she was also the niece of my friends Jim and Marian Vito, and I met her once at a family celebration.)

It doesn’t matter how much they spend, only that they collect a receipt. Their self-imposed rule states that only the five are part of the mission, although they will accept rides from friends. The Hoppers have as of recently visited 440 of the 578 Wawas, about 75 percent of their goal, and despite the rising cost of gasoline at the pumps seem well on their way to getting the last outlet crossed off the list sometime this year. They’ve still got the northern section above Allentown to go and the easternmost Wawa in Ocean City, Md., to take care of.

But back to the shooting.

It occurred in August and, in the spirit of letting the Hoppers play the game themselves, I’ll turn the story over to Ann:

“A few weeks ago myself and Mary were on Girard Avenue in Philadelphia at a ridiculously late hour attempting to get home. Right in front of the car, six gunshots went off, and those on the street corner flew by our car,” she wrote on the crew’s blog.

“In stressful situations I always choose the ‘flight’ response, which was obviously smart in this situation. I blindly put the car in reverse fearing that if I raised my head, a bullet would go through the window.

"Speeding off, I was oblivious to the red lights I was passing through; yet, the car came to an abrupt stop when a Wawa sign appeared in front of me. We somehow made it over to Aramingo Avenue, and I was not going to pass up the opportunity to cross that Wawa off the list.

"Mary and I ran in and out of there in a matter of one minute. There is dedication, and then there is stupidity. I think the decision to stop that night was the latter of the two.”

I would respectfully disagree.

For more about the Wawa Hoppers, visit www.wawa2010.blogspot.com.

And Now For Something Completely Different ...

This column originally apared on Sunday, May 4, 2008

Readers of a certain age will remember fondly the cartoon “The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show,” and as part of that series the inevitable exchange between two codgers sitting on a park bench watching as madness and frivolity ensues around them.

“That’s something you don’t see every day, Chauncy,” one would always remark. “What’s that Edgar?” would come the reply, followed by a description of the cartoon moose and squirrel being chased in some ridiculously menacing, and completely unexpected, way by a vaguely Eastern European couple somehow involving a lighted bomb.

That situation — albeit absent the moose, the squirrel, the vaguely Eastern European couple and the bomb — was what the folks at the Chester County Courthouse were saying to one another Thursday.

For the first time anyone in West Chester could remember, an all-female jury was empanelled to hear a trial.

The 12 women were of different ages and races, wore differently colored clothing, and had different hairstyles and hair colors. Six wore glasses, and six didn’t. But they all had in common at least one thing — the extra X chromosome.

Even the alternate juror, chosen in the event one of the other jurors had to be excused before the conclusion of the trial, was of the fairer gender.

Judge Thomas G. Gavin, in whose courtroom the jury sat, was among those to marvel at the sight. Despite years of work in the courthouse, including 22 on the bench, he said he had never come across an all-female jury and had never heard of one being seated. But the veteran jurist recognized the unique situation the jury presented, even as he apologized for keeping them outside the courtroom while he conducted other business.

“I was taught never to keep a woman waiting, and now I’ve kept 13 of you waiting,” Gavin said as they took their seats for the start of testimony Thursday. “I realize the degree of difficulty I now find myself in.”

Ultimately, the jury did not get to decide the case, as a mistrial was declared and Gavin was forced to send everyone home. Shame it was, said more than one courthouse observer, since it would be nice to know how an all-female jury would deliberate.

That question, in fact is at the heart of the history of women as jurors. The male-dominated legal community for years kept women off panels because of ignorant prejudices against their perceived weaknesses; would they be too sympathetic to judge the case on its merits and too easily swayed by emotions to render a fair verdict?

The first all-female American jury was seated in 1654, because the court needed to know if the defendant, Judith Catchpole, could have been pregnant at the time of the alleged crime.

But years and years have gone by since women starting serving on juries, and the course of American justice seems to have proceeded fairly much apace. There is no evidence I know of to show that juries with women bring back verdicts predominantly one way or another. And you never know, if there had been “Eleven Angry Men and One Calm Woman,” would we have gotten a verdict sooner, and without all that melodrama? Now our chance is gone.

And all I know is that Bill Scott was the voice of Bullwinkle. But not that Bill Scott.

Goodbye, and Good Luck

This is a revised version of a column that originally appeared on April 27, 2008

Now that they are gone, don’t you miss them?

I’m speaking, of course, of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the two U.S. senators and would-be presidents who occupied so much of our time and thoughts over the past seven weeks as they traveled every part of our state in their seemingly insatiable quest to get us to vote for them last Tuesday.

You opened the newspaper, they were there. You turned on the television, they were there. You went to visit your your son’s high school counselor and there was Barack, sitting in with you and discussing college choices, joking about how bad the food was when he went to Columbia. You went shopping for cammo hunting clothing at Cabela's, and there was Hillary offering to take you up to the family place on Lake Winola for a refresher course in gun safety.

For more than a month, they loved us and needed us and asked us to remember them come Election Day. Then, like Andy Dinniman’s mustache, they were gone.

I know Barack liked me, because he called me and left me a message. His voice on my telephone answering machine was as clear and powerful as it was in that “Yes, We Can” YouTube video that featured dozens of people whose names and identities I could not place, and Scarlett Johannson. He even sent me an e-mail calling me by name, and later had his wife, Michelle, follow up with another call. I was sorry I wasn’t home when they called so I could have spoken to them personally and told them how much I admired them and how all my friends were inspired by them and asked how Barack chose the music for his rallies; I hadn’t heard the O’Jays sing “Give The People What They Want” since I graduated high school.

I was less certain about Hillary’s feelings for me, even though she sent me e-mail after e-mail after e-mail every single day of the month she was here. She wanted me to know where she was, whether it was Scranton or Lehighton or Palmerton or Aliquippa, and what she was thinking about. But her messages always seemed like someone else was writing them, not her. I took it as a good sign, however, that she sent her one and only daughter, Chelsea, to stop in for a quick visit to my neighborhood near West Chester University. It meant a lot.

I wish they were still here because there is so much I wanted to show them about my hometown.

I would have taken Hillary to Jitter’s in West Chester and bought her a shot and a beer and watched the Phillies game with her and made sure she got home OK with her own Jitter’s T-shirt that she could wear when she wanted to fit in with us folks. If Bam had been there, I’d have even introduced them.

I would have taken Barack around the borough to show him that not all folks who live in small towns in Pennsylvania are bitter. Only when it snows and they don’t clear the streets on time. Or when they give us parking tickets for parking in front of our own homes. Or when they put up new stop signs, this time in the hallway between our living room and our bedroom. Come to think of it, we’re pretty much bitter most of the time, but we would have hidden it for politeness’ sake.

Now we are left with an emptiness, a void, a hole in our lives that qualifies us for a stop on U.S. Sen. John McCain’s tour of “forgotten places.” Like a spurned boyfriend who wallows in grief waiting for his ex to return to his life, we would give anything for a note in the e-mail or a flyer in the postal box.

All we have now are the memories. And the remaining campaign signs.

I Know Nothing...

This column originally appeared on Sunday, April 20, 2008

Behold the glory of spring in West Chester.

The sounds of birds chirping outside your window. The sights of mothers and father strollering their children down brick sidewalks in the warm evenings. The smell of flowers coming into bloom. The touch of insincere political candidates grabbing your hand and slapping your back as though you and he, or she, were as close as prison cell mates.

Unfortunately, all this vernal activity simply adds up to one more way of exposing one of my greatest failings in life: I cannot for the life of me tell what kind of trees are flowering down my block, what kind of birds are chirping outside my window, and what kind of flowers are blooming in my town.

You can call me stupid for not knowing the basic of flora and fauna around these parts. I've been called stupid before, and sometimes by people who actually know what they are talking about. I'm used to it.

I prefer to view myself as vastly uniformed.

It's the line of work I'm in, I suppose, that counts for my lack of knowledge in matters of day to day life.

You remember the story of how I got this job in the fist place, don't you? How back in 1982 Bill Dean, the saintly longtime editor of the Daily Local News, gave me the mynah bird test? That's where you get a set of facts abut a burglary that included the theft of a mynah bird, and are expected to write a story based on them. If you mention the bird in the lead paragraph, they make you a news reporter. If you don't, you get to be a sportswriter.

Just kidding. Advertising salesman, actually.

But that's the point. All I knew was that the mynah was the lead, and I got the job. I didn't even know what a mynah bird was. I couldn't tell a mynah bird from a cockatiel if you spotted me the wings and the plumage. But there I was, writing about it nonetheless, with authority.

Here's how the job works. The editor tells you to write a story about why a gallon of gas costs more today than a bottle of Chateau-du-Pape 2005. You call someone at the AAA, write down whatever he or she tells you, get them to spell their name correctly, regurgitate it succinctly in 750 words or less by 5 p.m., get the mynah in the lead, file it, and forget it. I've done thousands of stories about subjects I knew nothing about, and still don't. And those are the ones that made Page One. Don't get me started on the inside pages.

I was reminded of this lack of knowledge recently when I mentioned in a column that one of my neighbors had been pruning the blossoms from her gladiolas. A few days after its publication, another neighbor stopped by and said, “Gladiolas don't have blossoms. You must have meant hydrangeas.” Who knows, maybe she said geraniums. But she gave me a look like you give the dog when he hasn't made it outside.

Look. I know I can't tell a crimson-rumped waxbill from a Madagascar periwinkle, but I do know what I like. And I do like the way that South Church Street in early May looks like a snow shower had greeted us out of season when the trees shed their white blossoms, and I like being awakened on a spring morning by the song birds who live next door.

As for the insincere politicians, don't worry. I learned their names long ago.

The Luck of the Draw

This column originally apeared on Sunday, April 13, 2008

You, the folks who live in Chester County who are reading this, don't know how lucky I am.

And by lucky I mean that it took unfathomable good fortune for me to be born and to grow up in Cincinnati, Ohio. That life was not foreordained. My mother was raised in small town Illinois; my father was born in Wisconsin. They met in New Jersey and were married when my father received his doctorate at Penn State. Somehow fate got them to Cincinnati and allowed my formative years to take place there.

According to one source, one's “formative years” are the time we acquire our adult personas as we move in stages from from childhood to adolescence. For example, the source states, in Hindu culture, during “upanayana, sometimes known outside India by the name, 'sacred thread ceremony,' children are taught the secret of life through Brahmopadesam (revealing the nature of Brahman, the Ultimate Reality) or the Gayatri mantra.” The child then becomes qualified for life as a student or adult, depending on his caste or walk in life.

Me, I just went to Skyline Chili.

I do not have to try very hard to capture in my mind the face of he waitress who served me my first portion of God's Greatest Gift to Food – the Skyline Coney. I don't, because she served me those same delights for two decades at the same chili parlor in Cincinnati, on Clifton and Ludlow, where we first encountered one another, until she retired. I didn't know her name and she didn't know mine, but she led me through the sacred ceremony of ordering “two up with mustard,” as respectfully as any guru would the Brahmopadesam.

That's where I grew up; that's where I learned to appreciate the fine things in life.

How lucky I was to spend those years learning how to eat the food of Nirvana from master teachers. The softness of the bun, the tang of the onion, the fluff of the grated cheese, the aroma of the chili sauce, all were as well known to me as the Torah is to any candidate for the Bar Mitzvah.

I tell you all these things because at this very moment I am less than a mile from that self-same chili parlor, and in several moments time, fate willing, I am going to walk into that parlor and order the Skyline meal I was brought up to receive and revere.

My meal will come after having spent the morning wallowing in the glory that are the other foods one can only truly find in Cincinnati. Shopping at the historic Findlay Market in the city's downtrodden downtown, I chose between hot beef metts and mild pork metts; between link bratwursts and old fashioned frankfurters; between garlic sausage and picnic hams. Today I passed on the smoked turkey necks out of a newly acquired mid-life appreciation for moderation. In my 20s, they'd have easily made the shopping cart.

My Cincinnati born-and-bred nieces, Emily and Alice, have chosen to lead vegetarian lives. Although I respect their freedom to make such choices, I sometimes wonder whether their parents should be investigated by the Hamilton County, Ohio, child welfare authorities for violations relating to culinary deprivation. But I let them slide, like a good hearted cop on the beat who looks the other way, knowing that the girls will still accompany their uncle to Skyline when he offers them a ride.

They know how lucky they are to sit in the Temple, whether or not they partake of the Ambrosia.

A Bridge Out of Place

This column originaly apeared on Sunday, April 6, 2008

There are a few things that strike you as if not out of place, then certainly just this side of odd when you travel west from West Chester on Route 842 into the wilds of East Bradford.

The first is the house with the large window behind which sits a chair and a bicycle in perfect repose opposite one another. You cannot be certain if these items are there on display, or whether the homeowner put them there months ago and has just simply forgotten them, or whether he or she sits down in the chair every now and then and contemplates going for a quick jaunt on the bike while the afternoon traffic passes by.

The second is the rusted piece of what looks to be old farm equipment along the roadside past the old Gun Club. You wonder when it was last used. What was it used for? Was threshing involved? Is it there for display purposes as well, or has the landowner been so lazy over the years that he or she can’t get around to removing it?

But for my money what stands out the most as an anachronism is the bridge over the East Branch of the Brandywine at Allerton Road.

Do not mistake what I am saying. It is a picturesque bridge, and not at all without its charms. Casey Stengel used to say that every baseball manager wants a bridge to jump off every now and then, and I think he would have enjoyed doing so here. He’d have gotten wet, but would have likely walked away none worse the wear from the plunge.

The bridge is a steel Pratt Truss bridge, painted a light shade of aquamarine, and spans about 105 feet of the Brandywine in the shadow of the Blue Rock Farm. According to the clutter of signs that line the road on its approach, the bridge can handle a weight of 8 tons, and has a clearance of 12 feet 1 inch. It was built about 1905, I learned, and if you want to look it up in Pennsylvania’s list of bridges, you’d be advised to check No. 15701504380111.

It is rated as “functionally obsolete.”

It is, as I said, a pretty bridge, but to my mind wholly out of place. The bridges of East Bradford should be made of stone, like Cope’s Bridge, or wood, like Gibson’s Covered Bridge. You want your scenery in a place like East Bradford to fit snugly, like a stone barn into a green embankment.

The bridge does not have a name, so far as I can tell. If it did, it would likely be the Jefferis Ford Bridge, since its location is the point of the Brandywine where Cornwallis found the creek sufficiently shallow enough to cross on his way to routing Washington in the Battle of the Brandywine. The sign that tells you this also notes that Cornwallis made his crossing between “1 and 2 o’clock.” No one has ever established exactly how many of Washington’s soldiers were killed on Sept. 11, 1777.

The bridge was not there that afternoon, of course. Nor were the five horses that now dot the pasture on the west side of the creek, nor the fences that line the pasture, nor the barn that the horses came from. All that remains of when Cornwallis and his troops crossed over is the rippling sound of the Brandywine, which is always exactly where it is supposed to be.

The Truth About Pat

This column originally appeared on Sunday, March 30, 2008


Allow me to clear up a few misconceptions about Pat Morley. I would have done this sooner, but Patrick, as I always referred to him, out of honor and respect and because I didn’t know his given name was actually Thomas, would not permit it, out of pure Irish stubborn humility and dignity. If people want to believe things about me that aren’t true, he would have said, I can only hope they spell my name right when they do.

But now Patrick is gone, and he can’t stop me. Thus:

It is not true that the Chester County Commissioners built the Courthouse Annex in 1892 so that Patrick would have a place to sit and talk with his fellow tipstaffs. Truth be told, the building was already 28 years old when Patrick entered the world in West Chester’s Riggtown neighborhood, so the timing is off.

But he was as central to the Annex as the marble on its walls, and nowhere near as cold. As a new reporter to the courthouse in the early 1990s, I thought of the lobby outside Courtroom Two as Patrick’s living room away from home. He populated it as if he had always been there, and always would be.

It is not true that everyone liked Patrick. Because he rarely left West Chester — living outside the borough’s confines for only four of his 88 years — he did not give all the people in the world he never met a chance to get to know him and, ipso facto, like him. But those who did cross his path — and whom he would not allow to wander off without a handshake and a quick wink — did.

When you think of how many people today hate one another, and how they wear that hatred like a badge of honor, it seems impossible that someone as amiable and kind as Patrick could have existed. But I can attest that he did.

It is not true that Patrick loved his wife, Catherine, his entire life. He did not, in fact, come across her until he was 26, so that would not have been possible. But I have it on good counsel that he did love her from the moment in the spring of 1946 when he spotted her at the Eagles Club in West Chester.

I can also report in good faith that their life together started with one of the most romantic gestures I have ever heard of. Arriving late for their first date, Patrick saw Catherine get on a transit bus bound for her home in Downingtown. Realizing that opportunity lost is fate never regained, he hopped in his car and chased the bus down on Route 322, passed it and waited for it to stop. When it did, he got out of his car, Catherine stepped off the bus, and two sons, two daughters, two sons-in-law, two daughters-in-law, seven grandsons, six granddaughters and two great-granddaughters later, they still smiled when they saw each other.

Finally, it is not true that Patrick’s funeral was the largest seen in St. Agnes Church. Nor was it the smallest. But it may hold the record for attendees who believed they were singularly special in the departed’s eyes.

The service reminded me of what actress Ruth Gordon said at the funeral of the once famous writer and broadcaster Alexander Wollcott in 1943. “I was Aleck’s best friend,” she told a stunned crowd. “As, I suspect, were all of you.”

Thomas J. “Pat” Morley. Born Feb. 7, 1920. Died March 21, 2008. Rest in peace.

All I Need Is....

This column originally appeared on March 23, 2008

Some time ago, I voiced the opinion that the municipality known as Chadds Ford had mistakenly been incorporated into the county known as Delaware, and that a change should be contemplated in which that township would be annexed by the county of Chester and thus placed in its proper geographic and cultural setting.

Leaving Chadds Ford in Delaware County struck me as close to a sin against nature as you could get without an actual disruption of the gene pool. Chadds Ford, after all, is home to the Wyeth family, scenic creeks, rolling hillsides and picturesque stone barns. Delaware County, as far as I can tell, is home to a number of meth labs.

But I must acknowledge that there is a corollary to this campaign of mine that became clear on a recent trip to the northwestern edges of Chester County.

This is what everyone should do at some point in their lives if they live here: circumnavigate the county. It could take you several Saturdays, depending on your stamina and what time you get up on weekend mornings, but it is worth the time. A trip around the boundaries of Chester County gives you the clearest picture of not only the beauty we enjoy here, but of the multiple types of communities within our borders. If you live in West Chester or Downingtown or Kennett Square or the suburbiplex known as Lionville, and you don't travel outside of a limited distance from those town centers, you can't grasp what a complex world Chester County is.

Or realize that just as Chadds Ford has more in common with life here than it does to Delaware County, then so too does West Sadsbury or West Caln or Honey Brook look more like the rural world across the border in Lancaster County than it does the corporate centers of Malvern or the shopping centers of Paoli.

You see it from the road: The sign that advertises “Hay, Straw, Pine Shavings, One Mile.” The sight of clothes freshly washed hanging on a clothes line beside an Amish farmhouse. The sight of a barn and a silo, with a shingle telling you that brown eggs are available, turn here. A sign pointing you the way to “Hides and Supplies.” A big black angus bull standing in someone's front yard. An odd congregation of white and grey seagulls flocking around a mule-team drawn plough. Working wind mills.

Wait, did that sign say “Hides”? HIDES? What in the name of suburban sprawl do they sell there?

So if I maintain that we should get Chadds Ford, then I'd obviously have to acknowledge that Lancaster gets Honey Brook. Fair's fair, after all.

And Lancaster can have it. I don't need any part of Honey Brook at all. Except the Berry Patch Campground off Broad Street in Cambridge. That's all I need. That, and the gas station that still sells “Regular” and “Super.” That's it, and that's all. The camp, the gas station, and the “Schoolhouse Bar and Grille” on Route 10 are all I need. OK? The camp, the gas station, the bar, and the cheddar cheese curds from September Farm, South Mill Road, Est. 2002. That's it in toto. The camp, the gas station, the bar, the cheese and the place that sells “Hides and Supplies” are all I need. The camp, the gas station, the bar, the cheese, the hides, and ...

This is going to be harder than I thought.

Where Have All The Snowflakes Gone?

This column originally apeared on Sunday, March 16, 2008

It is 9 a.m. Saturday and the temperature is hovering in the low-50s. A little while ago I saw a fellow walking down South Church Street in West Chester who was not wearing a coat, just a shirt and some jeans, and he looked perfectly comfortable. When I left the apartment, my neighbor greeted me as she was arranging the flower pots on her porch with a cheery, “Happy Spring!”

I remember when it used to snow in March. Check that. I remember when it used to snow in February and March. The first winter I spent in West Chester, the skies dumped 22 inches of snow on the borough on Feb. 11. My friend Jamie and I watched the snow inch its way up the side of my Volkswagen Beetle until you could not see the door handles anymore. Then we went out and made snow angels in the drifts that had closed down the town to all but foot traffic and snowmobiles.

But those days are seemingly gone. We have not had a really good snowfall here in February or March for years.

Now, it’s about 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, and the temperature is inching toward 60 degrees. The fellow whom I saw walking down South Church an hour and a half ago returned wearing just a T-shirt, shorts and a breezy smile. My neighbor was pruning the dead blossoms from her gladiolas and greeted me with a cheery, “If April showers bring May flowers, what do May flowers bring?”

I checked the records. It usually snows in March at least once, sometimes twice. Fifteen years ago, I’d lived in my apartment building for a decade when the skies dumped 10 inches of snow on the borough on March 13 and overnight into March 14. My car got stuck in the deep snow that clogged the alley behind my house, and I had to call a tow truck to pull me out.

In 2005, 5 inches of snow lay on the ground when the morning of March 1 dawned. A week later, another inch showed up. It was fun taking snapshots of the ankle-deep drifts outside my door and walking to work straight down the middle of West Market Street without a car in sight. Can we hope that any of those days come back?

I just checked the time and temperature at 2:30 p.m. Saturday here in West Chester and it’s a sunny 85 degrees. My walkabout friend just passed by wearing swim trunks and a Hawaiian shirt open at the collar, presumably to show of his tan. When I stepped outside my neighbor was mopping the sweat from her brow, cheerily singing, “We’re havin’ a heat wave, a tropical heat wave …”

What I miss about the snows of March isn’t the shoveling or the scraping or the slipping or the slush that arrives later. It’s the few hours after the snow stops falling when everything seems suspended and people get outside of their everyday skins. Strangers help push cars out from snowbanks and people stop each other on the street to marvel at what Mother Nature has wrought. There’s a sense that the rules of caution are postponed and you can go out of your way to be friendly without encouraging suspicion.

And you can make snow angels in the drifts without embarrassment.

A Primer For Hills and Barry

This column originally appeared on Sunday, March 9 2008

They tell me that it is going to get fairly intense over the next few weeks as Hillary and Barack descend on Pennsylvania, in general and Chester County in particular, as the make their run for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

But while we may have gotten to know them fairly well over the past few months — the way she likes to wear pant suits and he likes to go without a tie; the way she likes to take credit for bringing peace to Northern Ireland and he likes to take credit for blue skies and sunny days; the way she digs on KT Tunstall and he grooves to Natasha Bedingfield — they likely have been too busy to really get to know us.

So I thought I’d give them a small primer on what Chester County is all about, so they won’t make any stupid mistakes while going door to door in Malvern — like saying, “So how do you like living in Modena?”

The Revolutionary War came to Chester County in 1777, via the Battle of the Brandywine and the Paoli Massacre — and that is the last time anything revolutionary has happened here. We like to take our time about things and not get caught up in radically new or innovative procedures or principles. We are sort of the Dewey Decimal System to the rest of the world’s Google. For instance, school lunches here only recently started featuring brown mustard on hot dogs, I am given to understand. It took intervention by an ecumenical council of elders, but we finally gave in. Not so, however, for green catsup.

We have a number of local high school graduates who have actually contributed to the fine arts and culture of our great land. That’s right, we’re not just about Bam Margera and skateboarding naked into brick walls. For example, there is Matisyahu, the only (I think) Orthodox Hebrew rap artist and Henderson High alum. And Daryl Hall, rock and roll singer of “Out of Touch” (No. 33 on a list of worst songs of all time), Owen J. Roberts Class of 1965. And Douglas Brown, author of the soon-to-be-published book: “Just Do It: How One Couple Turned Off the TV and Turned On Their Sex Lives for 101 Days” (You’ll have to read it to find out.) The pride of West Chester East.

The tourist highlights here are not just Valley Forge, the Brandywine River Museum and Longwood Gardens. Longtime residents of our county know that when people want to see what we are really about, we take our out of town guests to one place and one place only. The Herr’s Snack Co. Plant Tour. Where else can you see the actual process of turning unflavored potato chips into Buffalo Wing Kettle Chips? Or regular nachos into Green Chile Monterey Jack dippers? And all within distance of the sweetest smelling mushroom composting operations you’d ever want to turn your nose up at.

Philly has Geno’s Steaks. Pottsville has Yuengling Brewery. Pittsburgh has, well, we’re sure that the Iron City has something but we just don’t know what. West Chester has Wally’s Weiner World, the best place in the state to buy a hot sausage from a man who can stop the blades of a fan with his tongue.

There’s more, but since Hills and Barry are going to be here awhile, I’ll save the rest for later.

Hey, Wait! That's My...

This story originally appeared on Wednesday, March 5, 2008

WEST CHESTER – Something looked familiar to Frank Nagy.

Specifically, the chain saw he spotted at a pawn shop in Pottstown, where he had gone after failing to find a replacement for his missing chain saw at one of the big box retailers. Specifically, the Husquavarna Model 23 chain saw with the plastic blade cover. Specifically, the same chain saw that had until a few weeks ago been sitting in the shed at the rear of his home on Ridge Road in East Coventry.

Specifically, the chain saw that his grandson, Stephen Allen Wisneski later admitted taking from the shed without telling anyone, then pawning it supposedly to buy food to feed his family.

The unlikely discovery of the chain saw eventually led to Wisneski's arrest on charges of burglary and theft and to an unusual plea bargain hearing in front of Judge William Mahon on Tuesday.

Although Wisneski acknowledged that he had taken the chain saw from his grandfather's shed to use on his own, he said he had not “stolen” it but rather “borrowed” the equipment. He said he got the chain saw mixed up with other tools that he took to he Cash Converters store in Pottstown to pawn them.

He said he had intended to tell his grandparents about the matter but had forgotten. But his grandfather had told police at the time of Wiseneski's arrest that he hadn't seen the man in years.

According to an arrest affidavit filed by East Coventry police, Nagy reported that he had gone looking for his chain saw the morning of Oct. 11 to do some work on the property. When he could not find it, he assumed he had misplaced it and went shopping for an inexpensive replacement.

After failing to find an acceptable model at the local home and hardware store, Nagy stopped by Cash Converters, which buys and re-sells used equipment. When he began looking at the equipment Cash Converters had on sale, he saw the chain saw he recognized immediately as his own there, he told police.

Nagy reported the matter to the store manager, and contacted police. When East Coventry Officer Brian Ceulers arrived to pick the chain saw up as evidence, the manager turned over the seller's information sheet, which was signed by Wisneski when he sold it on Oct. 3.

Nagy identified Wisneski as his grandson. He told police that Wisneski had later called his home and apologized for asking the saw, saying he did so to raise money to feed his kids. Nagy confirmed that Wisneski did not have permission to take the saw and that he had not spoken to him or seen him in two years.

When Ceulers contacted Wisneski, he said he was sorry for taking the saw and asked if charges could be dropped. When Wisneski said they could not, he told the officer that he was awaiting placement in a drug treatment program. He was arrested on Dec. 12.

Wisneski, 27, of Nutt Road, Phoenixville, was offered a sentence of six to 23 months in Chester County Prison in exchange for a guilty plea to charges of theft. But when he balked at admitting to actually stealing the saw, Mahon rejected the plea and sent Wisneski back to prison, where he is being held on a probation violation for a previous theft case, according to Assistant District Attorney Christin Kubacke, who was handling the plea.

Wisneski's case will now be rescheduled for trial. The saw is currently being held as evidence by police.

Sunrise, Sunset...

This column originally appeared on Sunday, March 2, 2008

I would say that the folks who live on Highview Road in Tredyffrin are perhaps the luckiest folks who live in Chester County. But then if I were to say that then I would also have to say that the Boy Scouts who visit Camp Horse Shoe, near Goat Hill in West Nottingham, are also perhaps the luckiest folks who live in Chester County, only in a completely different way.

You could look it up. Highview Road is the easternmost point in Chester County, sort of the Campobello Island, Maine, of our fair county. You can find it right there at 75 degrees, 21 minutes and 29.71 seconds longitude, if you care to.

Being such, it is the exact place where sunrise first touches Chester County, the place where the dawn greets us and beckons with the promise of a new day, a fresh start, and perhaps the chance that those annoying “bucket bridges” at busy intersections, with their fresh-faced college students wandering in and out of traffic begging for money to either cure cancer or fund a night of drop-dead partying, whichever comes first, will disappear from the face of the Earth once and forever.

Meanwhile, the Boy Scouts at Camp Horse Shoe find it their lucky happenstance to be the folks who see the last rays of the sun sinking below the horizon over the Octoraro Creek. Located smack dab at 76 degrees, eight minutes and 10.49 seconds longitude, the campsite is the westernmost point in the county. And a fine place to crank out the S’mores, I’m told.

If you think that everyone in Chester County gets the sunrise and sunset at the same time, you’d be wrong. I know, because I checked. Specifically with Professor Marc Gagne, head of the department of Geology and Astronomy at West Chester University and as friendly a man who teaches a course called “Remote Sensing” that you’d ever want to meet.

Professor Gagne told me that the one degree of longitude that separates Highview Road from Camp Horse Shoe would mean a difference in the sunrise and sunset times of about two minutes or so. Theoretically, he said, someone could pick up the phone at a house on Highview Road and call the camp headquarters at Horse Shoe to report that the sun had just risen, and the camp counselor would not know what in the world the person on the other end of the line was talking about because the sun was still not up down there.

Why anyone would ever want to do that escapes me, but there you are.

The business of sunrise and sunset is preoccupying my time these days, pardon the pun, because that old devil Daylight Savings Time, is creeping up on us once again. You might remember that a few years ago President Bush, acting apparently on a whim, decided to play with our clocks. He moved the start of DST up to March 9 this year, and moved the return to Eastern Standard Time to sometime in late September. Or October. I forget.

Anyway, now the sun is going to rise an hour later than normal, and set an hour later, and completely throw off whatever physiological rhythm my body has grown accustomed to over the last six months.

I’m not sure I like it, but there’s nothing I can do about it, except complain. Sort of like “bucket brigades.”

Coffee Shop Memories

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Feb. 24, 2008

Friday morning brought just enough snow to make you think there wasn’t really a need to rush to work, so you might as well stop in at Penn’s Table for some breakfast.

When I walked in from the cold it was clear I wasn’t the only one with that idea, but there was still space at the counter. I sat down a few stools away from a middle-aged man and his granddaughter, who was having the pancakes that vaguely resemble Mickey Mouse without the copyright symbol. She looked me over to make sure I wasn’t trying to swipe the syrup, and flashed me a friendly smile after I waved hello.

After a few minutes, Anthony came over to say hello to her and banter with her grandfather. Anthony and his wife Jenn own the place, have for years, and treat the people who come in on a regular basis pretty much like you would if one of your neighbors was sitting at your kitchen table, wondering if he could get extra chips and pickles with his BLT.

Anthony went about teasing the young girl, maybe 5 years old, maybe 6, about how much she’d eaten and how fast and I suddenly remembered another snowy day when I sat at a coffee shop counter and listened to the owner tease a young kid as he topped off a cup of hot chocolate with a spray of whipped cream.

The kid was me, of course, and the owner was a Greek guy named Nick, inconceivably, and the coffee shop was the one my father stopped off at to read the paper on his way to the University of Cincinnati, where he taught chemistry. On some Saturday mornings he would take my sisters and I there for a breakfast treat, and Nick and the grey-haired haired waitress who ran the counter would make us feel at home.

It is among the treasures of childhood to have an adult in a position of such high authority – owner of a coffee shop -- recognize that you are important enough to come over and gently suggest that your haircut looks a trifle silly and maybe you just ought to keep your wool cap on all day. It is even better, though, to have the waitress let you come around behind the counter and grab a new spoon since you dropped the other on the floor and have concerns about the germs.

But this column isn’t just about coffee shop owners named Anthony or Nick. It’s about the misgiving that nestles in your stomach when you see a franchise eatery open its doors down the street from the family-owned place you always go to. It’s about how those glittery national chains slowly erode the ability of the local joints to compete, and how little by little we end up all getting the same food at the same price in the same space served by people wearing the same clothes, whether we like it or not.

You might have seen some of those places open up recently in West Chester. I am not suggesting in any way that what they’re offering isn’t tasty, well presented, and sometimes more comestible than a cup of two-day-old chili at the local diner. But I think it bears noting that when Serbian crowds in Belgrade last week decided to attack the evils they associated with America, they chose a McDonalds.

And I’ll have a little more whipped cream with my cocoa, Anthony. Thanks.

Goodbye, Sugar

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Feb. 17, 2008

All that was left on Friday night of the tree that towered across from my home on South Church Street in West Chester is a stump and a plastic sign with the name of the tree service that took it down and chipped most of it into oblivion. The sign flapped in the breeze, illuminated by a waxing moon and looking something like a tombstone.

That tree came down in a rush last week. Its absence leaves me profoundly ill at ease. I find my home diminished. I would like to have it back again. Do not ask me to explain myself, but in my heart I expect people to die and trees to survive.

The tree was sick. It did not look sick, it did not act sick. Its leaves were still full and lush and brilliant when they emerged last spring. But anyone who saw the hollow spaces in its thick trunk as it lay in the yard after being sawed apart would readily acknowledge that it was suffering from a disease that would ultimately have caused its collapse.

Last summer that tree shaded me from the afternoon sun as I enjoyed a glass of wine on my front stoop. Last fall that tree gave me a slide-show of color as its leaves turned from green to gold to brown. This winter the snow clung to it for an evening and outlined its branches in the shimmering blue of the night’s glow. This spring it will not be there at all.

I have photos of the tree taken from some years back. One view is upwards through its branches towards the sky, and makes me feel like standing at the feet of a giant. I once painted a watercolor of its trunk and its branches and sent that watercolor to a friend whose father had died. “Deep roots grow strong boughs,” I wrote. My friend thanked me for the card, thanked me for the sentiment. I am sure he still has it, and that it and my photographs will keep the memory of that tree alive.

I stopped by the home that the tree stood in front of Thursday night when I noticed that it had vanished. Melissa, my neighbor, told me that there was nothing to do to save it. The borough – which in West Chester is in charge of the trees that dot the sidewalks and rights of way and which give rise to its designation of “Tree City U.S.A.” – had tried to prop it up, but it was increasingly apparent that sometime in the future a strong wind would cause its limbs to crack like a weak sheet of ice and fall.

Fall on what? Perhaps only the sidewalk; perhaps only on a car’s roof. But perhaps, too, on a stroller that a pair of new parents wheeled past it on an evening stroll. The danger, Melissa – whose baby daughter came home last summer when that tree was in full bloom – and I knew, was too large to leave to chance.

Melissa and her husband Dennis are caretakers to the other tree in which I delight, the dawn redwood planted so many years ago. It still stands in the side yard of their home, where Buffalo Bill Cody stayed when he wintered his horses on the King Ranch in East Fallowfield. I would like to imagine that the tree was a sapling when Cody walked out of the house to go perform in his Wild West Show, but I honestly don’t know how old it was.

After talking with Melissa I sat outside awhile, long enough for another neighbor to walk by.

“See what’s missing?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s sad. Trees are coming down all over.”

Neither Plastic Nor Paper

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Feb. 10, 2008

When it comes to movements, social or political, I’m more of a leader than a follower.

That is why when I was in college, for example, I didn’t join in the popular “Don’t Eat Grapes” movement. (For those of you who have forgotten, or never knew, there was a time when grape pickers were trying to organize a union and the way you showed your allegiance to them was to swear off grapes. I can’t remember if the effort was successful or not.) At the time, I didn’t like eating grapes but just on principle I used to munch a few when I had a chance just to declare my non-conformity.

No, when it comes to movements, I like to create them on my own rather than fall in line with the crowd.

That’s why I formed the “Move Chadds Ford to Chester County” movement and the “Illuminate the Twin Bridges of Creek Road” movement and the “Build a Public Swimming Pool in My Neighborhood in West Chester” movement. These were movements that I could hold complete sway over with little effort, largely because the movements were made up of me and no one else.

But lately I’ve been drawn to a movement that seems to be gathering steam across not just the country, but the globe: a rejection of the plastic grocery bag.

You know, the so-called “undershirt bag” that looks like a man’s athletic t-shirt. The ubiquitous carry all shopping bag routinely dispensed in stores of all manner and stripe.

They are an environmental nuisance. Made of fossil-fuel based polymers, the bags are non-biodegradable and virtually indestructible. They remain for centuries in landfills, and clog the waterways. Ducks and fish presumably die from trying to ingest them.

Lately, local governments in New York City and San Francisco have enacted legislation to seeks t o reduce their use. In Ireland, they are taxed. In China, the world's fastest-growing economy, they are banned and shoppers are encouraged people to use cloth ones instead."This issue is not going away,”said Allen Hershkowitz, director of the solid waste program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. (He’s my presumptive choice for leader of the movement, mostly because his last name sounds so unbelievably impressive.)

I was introduced to the situation when reading pieces in The New Yorker by Ian Frazier, a wonderful writer, who discussed his growing hatred of seeing bags in trees. He even invented a device for removing them, called and patented as the “bag snagger.” He wrote: “To me, a bag in a tree is like a flag of chaos, and when I remove it I'm capturing the flag of the other side. In the end it doesn't matter how ironic or serious or even effective on a larger scale bag snagging may be. Doing it demonstrates that even in the odd little overlooked wilderness the bags inhabit, people still can use their eyes and hands and brains, and still have dominion over the chaos of bags in trees.”

Now, when I see a bag in a tree I wish them ill, and vow never to carry another one out into the wild. I have a growing collection of cloth bags from a variety of stores, and my biggest worry seems to be using one franchise’s bag in another’s check out lane.

From now on, all my eggs will go in a non-plastic basket so to speak. Ditto the grapes.

Love! In The Name Of Stop (Signs)

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Feb. 3, 2008

You will please excuse us if we seem a little giddy here in West Chester. We’ve been celebrating the arrival of a new little bundle of joy that came last month, to our surprise and delight. And not just one bundle, but twins!

That’s right, folks. We have two, count ’em, two new stop signs in the borough. Right there at the corner of West Gay and North Darlington streets, right there in front of the best darn “five star restaurant” you’d ever want to chug down a beer tower in. We are so, as they say, blessed.
You know how we love our street signs here in West Chester. We are proud of them, as proud of them as any parent who has ever seen his or her son or daughter appear on “American Idol,” or “The Apprentice,” or “Cops!” or any other avenue to the world of fame and renown.

We make sure they are kept company with other signs, and even take them down now and then and clean them up a bit if they look too shopworn. When it gets too cold or icy, we have been known to bring them to our homes for an extra bit of warmth. We ask after their health on rainy days, and always remember them on national holidays.

We try not to play favorites among our signs, as any good parent would. We know that our “No Parking Anytime, Anywhere, Anyhow” signs are just as important and special and unique as our “Welcome to West Chester, Not East Coatesville” signs are. (We’re not going to talk about our “Route 842” signs. We understand that they are trying to find their own “special place” in the world, but sometimes things just don’t work out. We wish them well.) But, just as any good parent would, we can’t help but feel a little bit fonder of our stop signs than the others.

Maybe it’s because they’ve been around so much longer. Can you even imagine West Chester without stop signs? We can’t. We even took a drive the other day just to spend some time with our stop signs. In a 10-minute spin around the borough, we counted no fewer than 45 stop signs. That’s 4.5 stop signs every minute, sometimes four to a corner! Did we say how blessed we are?

We have noticed that outsiders coming into the borough jump right into the spirit of things when it comes to our stop signs. Sometimes drivers with out-of-state plates will even stop at a corner where there is no stop sign. We think they may be trying to tell us something, like: “What? You guys run out of octagons?”

Our new signs have taken some getting used to, however. Manys the time we see drivers blow past them like they were not even there. We were hoping that the folks at the Borough Hall would have put up a few signs notifying people about the new stop signs, but they were apparently too busy reneging on parking garage contracts to bother.

Oh well. We suppose that like all good children our new stop signs will learn to assert themselves, stand up and be noticed. When they do, we will be here for them.

The Zen of Wa

This column initially appeared on Sunday, Jan. 27, 2008.

(For those of you unfamiliar with the subject, Wawas are the Penn-Jersey-Del convenience store of choice. -MPR)

If you are keeping score, add these to the things I am most certain of in life.

If I come across “High Fidelity” starring John Cusack, on television, I will watch it.

If I bet on someone to win, they will lose.

If you are walking into a Wawa behind someone, they will open the door for you.

People here in the Delaware Valley tend to be a parochial lot, concerned with a sense of the value of hometown pride. And that may be a reason why we like our Wawas so much, above and beyond any national convenience store chain and their tempting frozen sugar ice drinks. Wawa is local: there really is a village called Wawa, although I don’t remember if there is a Wawa in Wawa. Wawa is not some soulless corporation; it is regularly ranked as one of he best places to work, and when 75 managerial spots opened up in 2006 more than 1,000 people applied for the chance to work for the Wizard of Wa.

And if you have spent more than a month living here, you have an opinion about what Wawa you prefer. A friend told me that the only lunch spot he ever ventures to is the Wawa on East Gay Street in West Chester, across from Pep Boys, and that he is not alone. Ahead of him are at least 30 people waiting for their daily Shortie.

My own personal favorite was the Wawa on Old Downingtown Pike, that little spur of road that connects Strasburg Road to Route 322 on the west side of West Chester. Of course, I chose it because it was right across the street from the Daily Local News’ offices, and it provided me with food and drink at reasonable prices in the days before I started being able to afford more than $2.85 for lunch.

We all have our Wawa memories as well. At my Wawa, I once ran into a West Chester police detective who told me that yes, indeed, they had found the missing hands of a murder victim down along the Brandywine. Thank for the tip, I exclaimed! I guess I won’t be eating lunch today after all!

Tom McKee, the well-liked albeit hirsute music director of the Paul Green School of Rock in Downingtown, tells me that some of the best times of his teenage life occurred at the Township Line Road Wawa in Drexel Hill, where he would meet his friends on Friday and Saturday nights and plot aimless “secret missions” and stupid teenage pranks to keep them occupied.

Natalie Smith, our paper’s features editor, positively salivated while recalling catching sight of Frank and Mary Jelenic at the Baltimore Pike Wawa in downtown Media back in the 1980s, when the couple used to do restaurant reviews on KYW radio. She said they were pushing a tiny shopping cart ahead of them and that her immediate reaction to the moment was not, “Wow! I’m seeing real radio celebrities in person!” but rather, “Wow! Wawa has shopping carts!”

A lot of those Wawas are gone now, morphed into the new, opulent Taj MaWawas that feature gas pumps and computer touch screens. But every time I pass an old Wawa building I remember what it used to be, and try to ignore what it is today.

So come on in. I’ll hold the door for you.