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.

Bad Luck Streak

This story originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 27, 2008.

Lawyers have at times been known to overstate or exaggerate their clients’ situations when pleading their case.

But West Chester attorney Thomas Bellwoar might not be too far off the mark when discussing Sandra Peirson, whom he has represented in various legal actions for more than five years.

“Her poor life,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s like the life of Job.”

Peirson’s tribulations began at age 12, when she was shot in the face by a BB-gun accidentally fired by an uncle, leaving her blind in her left eye. They continued 30 years later, when she sat in a Kennett Square restaurant and was struck in her right eye by a bullet fired by a drunken patron. The ricochet plunged her into total darkness, completely without sight.

Most recently, moreover, Peirson lost her oldest son in a horrific accident in southern Chester County – again involving a bar patron who was visibly intoxicated but who continued to drink. Joseph Peirson was 24 when he died and had been his mother’s primary caregiver, living with her in Kennett Square, said Bellwoar.

Now, Peirson, along with her ex-husband Joseph E. Peirson, is suing the owners of the Applebee’s restaurant in East Marlborough, claiming they improperly served alcohol the driver of the car in which her son was a passenger when he was killed. The suit contends that bartenders and servers at the restaurant continued to give drinks to the driver, Shaun Collins, after he was clearly drunk, and even went so far as to help him to his car and get him behind the wheel of his pickup truck.

The suit also contends that Applebee’s did not have trained personnel at the restaurant that night who were familiar with the standards of serving patrons alcohol.

Filed in Common Pleas Court in Philadelphia, the suit is tentatively scheduled to go to trial in April. The Peirson’s are asking for more than $50,000 in damages, the minimum threshold for such actions, charging negligence on behalf of Applebee’s local subsidiaries – Rose Management Services of Newtown and Delaware Valley Rose of Kennett Square.

Under what are commonly called “dram shop laws,” Pennsylvania is among those states that allow motorists, or others who have been injured, to seek monetary damages against bar owners who serve visibly intoxicated persons who later are involved in a drunk driving or other accidents.

These laws make bar owners and alcohol servers financially liable if their customers become obviously intoxicated on their premises and subsequently injure someone or cause property damage, typically by driving drunk.

Thus, if a person has several drinks at a bar and is visibly intoxicated then gets in a car and kills someone on the way home, the owner of the serving establishment can be sued for damages.

Such suits are not always successful. One question that must be answered in the cases is just how visibly drunk the patron was before leaving the bar and getting behind the wheel of a car, and whether a reasonable person would be able to determine their level of sobriety.

Jerry Marks, whose Philadelphia law firm of Marks, O’Neill, O’Brien & Courtney is representing Applebee’s in the case, declined to speak to a reporter about his client’s position in the case when contacted Friday. “It’s coming up for trial, and I just can’t comment,” he said.

The accident which claimed Joseph Peirson’s life occurred on Oct. 15, 2005. According to the lawsuit and police reports, Collins, a friend of Joseph Peirson’s, was driving north on Route 41 in Londonderry about 3 a.m., when he lost control of the 2001 Chevrolet Silverado.

In his suit, Bellwoar says that Collins, who had a blood alcohol level of .125 when he was tested after the crash, was arguing with other people in the car, taking his eyes off the road, when he lost control.

Driving at speeds estimated later by police to be close to 100 miles per hour in a 45 mph zone, the truck drove onto the northbound shoulder of Route 41, struck a mailbox, and then crossed over into the southbound lanes and struck a guardrail. The truck traveled about 50 feet along the rail, and then became airbourne.

The truck went 82 feet in the air before it hit the ground, rolled over and collided with a house at 2200 Gap-Newport Pike.

Of the four people in the vehicle, two were thrown from the cab – Joseph Peirson and Tashia A. Gambill, 21, of Cochranville, Collin’s girlfriend. Both were killed instantly, Gambill being thrown completely over the roof of the house into which the truck crashed.

A fourth person, Nichole Stahis of Kennett Square, was severely injured.

Gambill’s family, as well as Stahis, is also suing Applebee’s for its alleged negligence in serving Collins.

Collins was charged with homicide by vehicle while driving under the influence, involuntary manslaughter and related charges. He pleaded no contest to two counts of homicide and one of aggravated assaulted while DUI, and as sentenced by Judge William H. Mahon in February 2007 to nine and a half to 18 years in prison. He is currently housed at the State Correctional Institution at Huntingdon.

“It’s a DUI case that should be shown and taught to kids everywhere,” said Assistant District Attorney Carlos Barraza, who prosecuted Collins. “It was, for me, the worst accident scene I have ever seen.”

The case resonated with Mahon as well, but for a different reason. It was Mahon who in January 2003 sentenced Cesar Arreola-Solis to 11 ½ to 23 months in prison and 1,000 hours of community service for the shooting that left Sandra Peirson blind.

Barraza said that Mahon remembered the case and Sandra Peirson.

Sandra Peirson, then 43, was at the Birch Inn in Kennett Square the night of Nov. 11, 2001, sitting at a table enjoying a drink with the bar manager when Solis, who was drunk and who had brought a loaded handgun into the bar undetected, began waving the gun around. At some point, he accidentally fired the weapon, hitting himself in the hand, his brother, sitting next to him, in the ear and Peirson in the eye "due to an unforeseeable ricochet," according to records.

Left blind, Sandra Peirson could not work any longer and moved in with her mother. She sued the bar owners and settled the case out of court in 2003, a settlement that Bellwoar said allowed her to buy a home in Oxford, where she and her son Joseph lived until late summer 2005, when she sold the house and the pair moved back to an apartment in Kennett Square.

A month after moving, Joseph Peirson went out to Applebee’s with Collins, his friend, and the two women. He never came home. Sandra Peirson moved away from Pennsylvania, and now lives in Virginia, where she is cared for by a friend, Bellwoar said.

A Table, Some Chairs, a Bitter Memory

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 20, 2008


There are no rules to the way we react to trauma. Some people become obsessed by their misfortune and it grips them whole. Some shake the evil off their coats like a drenched dog drying himself.

Years spent sitting in court rooms has shown me that the victims of crime approach their lives differently after the harm that befell them was inflicted. There are no longer any walks after dark. Strangers are greeted with distrust. Children become more clinging, or less approachable. A proud stride is reduced to a painful shuffle. But until last week, I never thought of that trauma having an impact on a room, and a piece of furniture.

Two years ago, a Honey Brook man argued with his girlfriend about the course of their relationship. During the fight, he took their 30-day-old son and held him up, dropped him to the floor and kicked him twice, in the head.

The assault took place in the kitchen of the woman’s home on Horseshoe Pike as the family ate dinner. In a letter she wrote to the judge who was set to sentence her former boyfriend for the assault, the woman remembered that location particularly.

Here is what she wrote:

“He did all of this in the kitchen where my children and I used to share so many laughs, sit down as a family for dinner and have family game night. Now we are unable to sit around the table; it’s become a useless piece of furniture. The chairs are now in the children’s room, where they sit to eat their dinner, while the table grows cobwebs.

“It’s too painful to enter the kitchen where the assault took place. Even after I tried to re-arrange it to make it less painful, we can still see the image of (her ex) holding (her child) in the air by the back of his pajamas, then being thrown to the floor.”

Her description struck me as profound, and poetic. The trauma suffered that night had an impact not only on the physical and mental well being of those involved, but on their relationship to their own environment. And the picture is immediately recognizable: what family doesn’t use the kitchen table, or counter, or island, as a place to gather and laugh and talk and play and perhaps shout a bit. It is the central place for where the business of being a family gets conducted.

And what more poison could there be than to bring violence into that space, and how could you not feel a chill every time you went back to that place?

The idea of the table itself being shunned, being cast aside, growing dust and cobwebs, drew me in. Inanimate objects do have lives, I thought. We give cars names and they grow personalities. We find a rock in the cool shade and it becomes a friend. Violence enters our homes and the furniture itself become witnesses and victims.

At the end of her letter, the women pleaded for a sentence that would bring her family justice. Here’s how she put it.

“Please let us get that phone call, knowing maybe we’ll go to sleep tonight and actually wake up tomorrow and be able to live again, start on the process of moving the chairs back into the kitchen, sitting around the dinner table as a family … and just finally get back some happiness.”

Enveloped By The Modern World

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 13, 2008

It remains for me a striking image: Five Old Order Amish men sitting in a sterile, modern, community hearing room inside West Chester Borough Hall, listening to a family describe how one of their number’s perceived racism had damaged them.

Here were people — who, because of their religious faith and practice, work in varying degrees to separate themselves from the outside “English” world — being brought kicking and shouting, figuratively, into that sad feature of the modern world — the racial dispute.

To recap, a black family from Valley had been looking for a new home to rent that would take them out of the urban setting where they lived. Responding to an advertisement, the wife went to look at a home for rent in Little Britain, just across the Lancaster County line from Oxford. She fell in love with the picturesque, rural property and eagerly told the landlord, an Amish carpenter, that her family would like to rent it.

But later that night, the landlord called and left a phone message that another tenant had complained about her race and had threatened to leave the property if they moved in. “I’m sorry,” the Amish man told her. Shocked and angry that the color of their skin would be reason for rejection, the family filed a complaint with the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission.

Attempts at reconciliation with the parties failed, leading to Thursday’s hearing.

The black family was accompanied by a lawyer from Philadelphia; the Amish landlord was accompanied by four men from his church district and a non-Amish fellow who drove them from their homes 35 miles away.

The rejected family spoke eloquently about the pain, humiliation and anger they endured because of the denial. With his head bowed, his traditional black brimmed hat laid on a chair next to him, the landlord sat silently alone at the defense table that had been set up for him.

Factually, the case against the man seemed strong. His voice could be heard on a tape saying how his other tenants didn’t want a “colored” family living next door. His argument that the lease application started by the wife hadn’t been fully completed and was thus still not formally “rejected” seemed forced. But there was no hateful monster sitting there to despise, just a man seemingly caught up by something he had not anticipated.

I am not one who looks at the Amish through the misty-eyed romanticism of “Witness,” or the Lancaster County Tourist Bureau, viewing them as plain, uncorrupted folk who just want to be left alone to live their simple life. The Amish have bad apples and good ones, just like any community, and can be just as wrong in their decisions as you or I.

But as used to seeing the courtroom dynamics of practiced attorneys and judges and litigants as I am, I will long remember the response of the landlord when asked by the commission’s hearing examiner if he had any more evidence to provide.

Sitting quietly for as long as 20 seconds, scratching his beard and fiddling with his hands, the man finally spoke.

“I can’t understand what any of this is about,” he said.

My Next Job

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 6, 2008

The matter of my retirement occurred to me the other day when I sat looking at the line up of Chester County Common Pleas Court judges during a swearing in ceremony in stately Courtroom One at the courthouse for their newest member, David Bortner.

One of these days, I say to myself, I am going to be forced to give up this newspaper dodge I’ve been engaged in since the late days of the Carter Administration and find something useful to do. One of these days either Chelsea Clinton or Jenna Bush is going to be President of the United States, and the sublime will have sunk to the ridiculous so far so that reporting the news won’t be half as stimulating as just making it up, and I’m going to have to find another way to occupy my time and/or mental capabilities.

What better job, I thought, than Court Tipstaff.

All those folks sitting in Courtroom One wearing their black robes would be hard pressed to admit it, since they’re constantly having people stand up for them when they do nothing more than enter a room, but in general I’d say the Court Tipstaff is the central figure in any courtroom in Chester County. They may not look like it sometimes, but the power and influence they hold is incalculable.

Take a for instance.

I’m sitting in Courtroom Seven a few days ago waiting for something to happen. That’s what we do at the courthouse, mostly: wait. There’s me, a court clerk, a court stenographer, a deputy sheriff or two, and Al the Tipstaff. Otherwise, it’s an empty courtroom.

So who walks out from his chambers but Judge Anthony Sarcione, who by my estimation is the only currently sitting jurist in Chester County who has ever ridden a surfboard, unless there’s a side to Judge Robert Shenkin that I haven’t been exposed to. Anyway, Judge Sarcione walks out of his chambers, strides purposefully to his bench, and looks out on the courtroom to see…

“What? No attorneys?” he says, disappointedly, to no one in particular.

Now, a judge on a bench without any attorneys in the room is a lost cause. It’s a boat without a sail, a gun without bullets, a pitcher without a batter. There’s no one to squint at in confusion, there’s no one to argue with in derision, there’s no one to overrule, for heavens sake. So there stood Judge Sarcione, ready to hang ten on the Big Kahuna Wave of res judica, so to speak, and the only one looking back at him from the audience is me. And I’m nowhere near qualified for him to hold in contempt, at least in a legal way.

Al the Tipstaff to the rescue.

Minutes later, there are not one but two attorneys in the courtroom, just aching to tell Judge Sarcione about this or that aspect of their case, meet with him at sidebar, call him “Your Honor,” use words like “colloquy” without chuckling, and ask to be excused when they leave the courtroom. All was right, God was in his Heaven, and we owe it all to Al the Tipstaff.

That’s what I want, real power. And the chance to say, “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” in public.

The Skyline's Limited

This column originaly appeared on Sunday, Dec. 30, 2007

There is no easy way to put this.

If there was an easy way to put this, you can be certain that I would take it. We in the news businesses – with the possible exception of Dan Rather, Jim Lehrer and some of the folks who work at E! Entertainment’s crack Britney Spears Division -- are very comfortable, shall we say, with taking the easy way when it comes to life.

Believe me, I don’t like the hard way. I avoid the hard way like the folks at the E! Entertainment's crack Britney Spears Division avoid discussions on Salman Rushdie’s latest novel. If the hard way was walking down the street and I spotted it coming in the opposite direction, I would cross over and pretend to do some window shopping at Fairman’s Skate Shop.

So believe me when I say it is not easy to admit that the skyline that greets me when I return to Chester County on the Pennsylvania Turnpike from traveling out west makes me want to yawn.

There, I said it. The sight of Chester County’s border along about mile marker 300 is boring with a capital “Is that it?” It’s unidentifiable. It’s non-descript. It’s a vacuum in the skyline sense. My sister once drove to Chester County from her home in Cincinnati and didn’t even know she had passed the so-called “most beautiful place on earth” until she hit the New Jersey Turnpike.

You cross into Chester County on the Pennsylvania Turnpike from Berks County and you might as well be left in a time/space warp in which you continually return to the same Berks County landscape that you just left, only with fewer animal food processing plants.

Travelers the world over get awe-striking views of the cities they enter that stick with them for years. New York City’s skyline upon boating in on the Staten Island Ferry is one. Driving around the bend in the Schuylkill Expressway near the Philadelphia Zoo when that city’s Boathouse Row comes into view at night is another. Even coming into my hometown of Cincinnati from the south, where the skyline emerges above the stately Ohio River, always left me with a bit of a tickle on the back of my neck.

Coming into Chester County from the west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike leaves me thinking, “What should I cook for dinner?”

This calls for action. This calls for change.

We need to create some better skyline, some identifiable landscape, that will stand up and be noticed. We need to create a skyline that speaks to the Chester County-ness out there, something that will leave travelers passing by open-mouthed and drooling and leave residents coming home from the west with a warm feeling in their souls like they just rescued the neighbor’s puppy.

What that scene should be is not up to me. No, I’ve fulfilled my role in this situation. I’ve identified the problem, and now I’m leaving it up to others to deliver the solution. It could be politicians, it could be business leaders, it could be -- dare we say -- Lani Frank. I don’t care. As I said before, I’m about the easy way.

And when they come up with a new skyline for the entrance way to Chester County from the west, I’ll be here, waiting.

As for the eastern skyline, we’ve got the Gateway Shopping Center and that’ll do.

Will The Real Chester County Stand Up?

This column originally appeared on Dec. 23, 2007

Have you ever closed the refrigerator door and wondered whether the light inside has actually gone off, or is rather still burning, illuminating all the leftover meatloaf and pasta with pesto and rapidly deteriorating lettuce that is taking up space in there?

Ever shut the front door behind you on the way to work and imagined your kids had stopped running around like 5-year-olds and had sat down calmly on the sofa to discuss options for reducing the family household’s carbon footprint, rather than tracking actual carbon footprints from the Webber grill detritus through the living room?

Then you can understand the way I feel at this time of year, when I leave Chester County behind and travel to my original hometown.

I have spent the past 25 years as a resident and registered voter in Chester County, and have stayed relatively put during that quarter century. I don't move much. Suffice to say, the state constables know where to find me if -- or more accurately, when -- my parking ticket warrants reach maturity.

But I have never spent a single Christmas Day in Chester County. Each year I make the sojourn back over the Alleghenies and across the Monongahila and the Ohio to Cincinnati, Ohio, to visit my family. I may stay only a day or two, sometimes as long as a week, but I have never failed to return there for Dec. 25.

And that has me thinking, as you do when you shut that refrigerator door, what in the world goes on in Chester County when I’m gone? What if it’s nothing like I'm used to? What if everything changes? Could it be that for the few days I’m absent from the Brandywine Valley, the lay of the land reverts to some other reality that only exists just after the Winter Solstice?

Could it be that all of those quaint Revolutionary War stone farmhouses that dot East Bradford are replaced by cheesy Yeadon-style rowhomes? That the breathtaking beauty of Route 162 through Unionville transmorphs into a streetscape comparable with the Golden Outlet Mile outside Lancaster?

Could it be that for a few days the Democrats start running the county courthouse, and that they vote to replace the Ten Commandments plaque with a framed copy of “It Takes a Village?” That Bill Scott and Andy Dinniman have a quick holiday luncheon at Rex’s Bar and not a word passes between them besides, “How ‘bout that Bam?”

Could it be that former Commissioner Colin Hanna whips up a batch of tacos and margaritas and invites his favorite atheist, Margaret Downey, over to the family manse to join him in a few verses of “Feliz Navidad?”

Could it be that while I’m sitting down to a plate of Skyline Chili (onions, no cheese, and two Coneys on the side, please), noted defense counsel John Duffy is standing up in a courtroom somewhere and saying, “Now that I think about it, You Honor, my worthy adversary on the prosecution just might have a point there?”

I don’t know if any of these things actually happens, but if they do and you know about it, keep it to yourself, please. I’ve got one reality and I’d like to stick to it.

Trump Trumped

This column originally apered on Sunday, Dec. 9, 2007

Did you see the news item the other day about the Scottish landowner who is standing up to billionaire egomaniac Donald Trump and his plans to build a $2 billion golf course and condo development project on the Aberdeen Coast?

Did you hear how Michael Forbes, a multi-tasking fisherman and farmer, has refused to sell his 23 acres of “wind-scoured coastline” even though Atlantic City’s favorite comb-over casino mogul had offered him more than three-quarters of a million dollars for it?

Did you tell the story around the dinner table of how the local Scottish business community was up in arms about Forbes refusal to sell, seeing the golf complex as a boon to the local economy?

Did it remind you of anything?

No, I am not referring to that paltry little dust-up in Coatesville over the Iron Eagle Golf Course and one man’s refusal to give up his family farm so that duffers would have a place to shoot a round within spitting distance of a beleaguered steel mill.

I’m talking about the epic confrontation involving Knox Oil and Gas Inc., the residents of Ferness, Scotland and crusty old beachcomber Ben Knox, who owned the beach at Ferness and refused to sell out so that Felix Happer could build a multi-million dollar oil refinery there.

If you didn’t read about that situation in the papers or see it on CNN, don’t feel loop challenged. The confrontation took place only in the sublimely comic imagination of Scottish writer and director Bill Forsyth.

In 1983, Forsyth released the film, “Local Hero,” a story about a Texas oil company executive named “Mac” McIntyre who gets orders to travel to Scotland to wrap up the Ferness land purchase for the oil refinery, an assignment that fell to him largely because of his Scottish heritage. Except that Mac is the descendant of Hungarians and really doesn’t like to travel (“I’m more of a Telex man,” he says.)

The film has everything you’d want in a comedy, if by everything you mean an injured rabbit with two names; a small town populace looking to make a killing and pick up a few Maseratis on the way; a mysterious and beautiful marine researcher who may or may not be a mermaid; a Russian fishing boat captain with a serious investment portfolio; a crazed motorcyclist; the aurora borealis; and a red telephone booth.

The film does in fact have a character that refuses to sell his beach property because he loves living there. Old Ben Knox turns down Mac’s offer to buy him a beach anywhere else in the world, and tricks the exec when he offers to set a price equal to the amount of sand he holds in his hand. It’s wonderful to hear the dialogue between characters as they discuss the modern world versus the traditional world, as in the exchange where Mac wonders how one negotiates business deals with a man who has no door and is told: “The ethics are the same.”

I don’t think The Donald is going to end up with a plan like oil company owner Felix Happer (deliciously played by Burt Lancaster), who eventually decides to scrap the refinery plan and build an institute dedicated to the sea and the sky at Ferness.

But it is wonderful to see life imitating art in some small way, and to know that there are people off the movie screen who regard a stretch of beach as being worth something more than money.

Some Words to the Wise (And O'Rourke, Too!)

These posts go out to my Google Groups list, and show up in (at least) my e-mail without any paragraphing, just one big blog blob. (Say that five times fast!)

If you want to see how the columns/stories look with paragraphing, go to www.michaelpcolumns.blogspot.com.

Good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow.

Ode to a Road

This column first appeared on Sunday, Dec. 2, 2007.

While taking in the sights and sounds of Old Fashioned Christmas in West Chester Friday evening, it occurred to me that although there have been literally dozens of Christmas carols written for our listening enjoyment, there are exactly no poems available to those of us who want to sing the praises of state Route 926.

Forgive me, but that’s the way my mind works. You do not even want to know what occurred to me after taking in the sights and sounds of the Phoenixville’s Blogfest.

In order to correct that situation, I hearby submit the following, “Ode to a Road.”

926! 926! 926!
Your lanes cross open fields.
And the homes that dot betwixt
All bear security shields.

We adore your wooden barns
And landfills named SECCRA.
And across from Landhope Farms
A chiropractic Mecca.

Oh, your ponds must have toads
And your pastures fine horses,
And round about Lamborton Road
There’s room for golf courses.

Springdel and Chatam and 841
Post a speed limit 45.
But squinting at morning’s new sun
On you at 30 we drive.

Your balm of Friends Meeting,
London Grove, is like talcum,
Owning much to the greeting
First Day School, “All Welcome.”

We think as New Bolton nears
“With joy must come woe.”
And then we raise up our beers,
And toast Barbaro.

It’s the watershed of Red Clay
That get’s us to thinkin’
Where will come the day
You’ll be a highway like Lincoln?

For although your number
Is more than 30 times as sweet
We can’t help but wonder
Why this road’s name is “Street.”

New Justice Center Emphasizes Security

This article first appeared on Monday, Nov. 26, 2007.

WEST CHESTER – Chester County’s new Justice Center on West Market Street has one district court, seven floors, more than a dozen cells – group and individual size -- for prisoners, enough space for 18 courtrooms, and a stairwell with 152 steps.

But most tellingly, it also has 172 individual panic buttons to bring courthouse security personnel on the run.

That final figure is the result of changes in design for the 422,000 square foot, $100 million building brought about by a bloody attack in the Fulton County Courthouse in Atlanta two years ago.

In March 2005, a man on trial for rape overpowered a court deputy, took her gun and killed three people – the judge overseeing his case, a court reporter and another deputy who confronted him as he fled the courthouse. He later pistol-whipped another man whose car he stole and shot and killed a federal marshal unconnected to his trial.

The courthouse killings in Atlanta came just two weeks after a federal judge’s mother and husband were found murdered in their home, and set off a flurry of concerns about the safety of judges, prosecutors and others who work in courthouses across the country.

What had thus been planned as a somewhat standard-issue building housing the county’s Common Pleas courts and court-related offices underwent a metamorphosis into a high-tech structure whose complexity rivals hat of a hospital and whose security suggests something close to a modern maximum security prison.

“This is in no way a run-of-the-mill building,” explained Don Thompson, the county “owner’s representative” who is overseeing the work on the Justice Center, as he did for the Chester County Prison expansion in Pocopson and the county’s Juvenile Detention Center in West Bradford.

“This is a big building. A really, really big building. It is a special place that requires service you can’t ever imagine would be done at another facility,” Thompson said during a recent tour of the building. “The normal frame of reference of an office building that you and I would work in just doesn’t apply.”

Among the security measures that are incorporated in the Justice Center include a basement sheriff’s lock-up that is state of the art in its safety measures to keep prisoners from escaping; judges chambers that are accessible only by security card or electronic entrance; separate elevators for the public, judges and prisoners; and courtroom corridors that are inaccessible to the public and are used only by sheriff deputies and their charges.

It is a far cry from the current courthouse facility, where shackled prisoners walk down hallways in plain view of the public, and can be brought into the courtroom only one at a time. No longer will someone riding one of the courthouse’s four elevators be ordered off so that the deputies can transport a defendant to the courtroom of his or her destination.

“I think the county is going to get a good building,” said Thompson. “Perfect, no. What they paid for? Yes.”

The decision to build a new court facility was years in he making. As long as a decade ago the county’s judges began urging the commissioners to expand the court facility to make room for the new judges the county gained because of its striking increase in population, and all the component personnel – extra prosecutors and public defenders and courts clerks, for example.

The decision was first made to expand on the footprint of the current courthouse, located in the center of West Chester bordered by High, Church, Gay and Market streets. But a dispute between the county and the borough over the density of the planned construction and the proposed demolition of historic properties led to the ultimate decision to relocate the court facilities to the 200 block of West Market Street, across from the site of the county’s new parking garage.

In some ways, the delay itself became a favorable circumstance; because construction did not begin until after 2004, the county was able to incorporate the security changes brought about by the Atlanta courthouse shooting into its design while the building was still being built, instead of after it was completed.

Thompson said that when he came aboard the project, the design by architects Bernardon Haber Halloway of Kennett Square were already on the books. It became his task, he said, to go to all of the county’s court-related department heads, show them the design and ask them what changes they needed.

Which leads Thompson, a friendly man who needs only a small invitation to talk about the project in his hands, to tell the story of the district attorney’s restroom.

In the original design, the DAs office had no interior restroom facilities. In his conversations with District Attorney Joseph Carroll, however, Thompson discovered what a mistake that had been; if left unchanged, it would have put criminal witnesses and victims in the uncomfortable, if not unsafe, position of having to share the facilities with someone connected with their case – perhaps even the defendant.

The DAs office now has its own washroom, Thompson said.

The original design also showed judges having to share courtrooms; now, each judge on the bench currently will have their own courtroom – although they may have to trade off during criminal sessions. Not all courtrooms have been given the necessary individual prisoner lockups, so a judge who hears mostly civil cases would have to move to another courtroom temporarily if he or she is hearing a criminal matter.

When the Justice center opens in late spring or early summer, it will have 15 completed courtrooms, one for each of the county’s judges. There are three additional courtrooms that will remain unfinished until more jurists are added.

Thompson says that special touches in the building – terrazzo floors and milled cherry wood paneling, for example – make it somewhat elegant. Those touches also prove less costly to maintain, however, so that the county will end up spending less money in the long run. He refers to the center as a “50-year building,” ready to stand up for the long haul.

The commissioners, who every month or so are faced with the decision to approve construction change orders that add to the cost of the building, have expressed faith in Thompson’s proposed changes.

“I’ve got lots of confidence in Don,” said Commissioner Patrick O’Donnell, who owes that nevertheless he has ridden Thompson hard on some of his requests.

“I think there were design flaws in (the center) that hadn’t been thought out clearly,” he said. “But Don does not come in with changes lightly.”

Thompson predicted that the final cost of the building will be within three percent of the original budget.

“I’m very proud of that,” he said.

All The Dirt On Dirt Roads

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Nov. 25, 2007


Why would you think that I would just flat out tell you where he penultimate Chester County dirt road is?

Why would you think that after discovering it by accident on recent misty morning I would give up its location without so much as a second thought?

Why would you think that I would immediately spill the beans when the people who live and frolic on this rut-strewn cart-way have obviously gone to some lengths to keep their wilderness wonderland private?

Is that what you think of me?

Well, if that's the case then all I will tell you is that I was driving along a local highway on that misty morning, not truly paying attention to the road ahead, when off to the side I noticed a set of joggers running through a wooded area I had always thought as just a mess of native Chester County underbrush. The fallen foliage had made their presence clear; had they been running their route in mid-summer, they would have been hidden.

Being the curious sort, I made my way to the area I thought their hidden road would emerge. And there it was: a glorious stretch of prime country back road, with enough character to populate any Brandywine Valley picture postcard.

I knew it was designed to meet the requirements of Frost's a "less travelled road" for a number of reasons. First, the potholes marking the path were deep enough to hold cauldrons, and I remembered from my cub reporter days the folks who live up in the Mount Misery area of Tredyffrin begging the supervisors not to pave their roads, so that the tourist traffic would be kept to a low boil.

Second, dirt roads in Chester County mean, "Oops, you're off the beaten track." They don't put up new auto dealerships and banks and lifestyle malls on dirt roads around here.

And third - as Maxwell Smart might say -- was the sign on the post and rail fence that read "Posted: Private Property" within 10 feet of the road's beginning.

I knew the road was mean to be private because of its quiet, simple beauty. On the one side of the road was an outcropping of Wissahickon Schist, plopped there as if waiting for a passing watercolorist to notice it. On the other side sat a ruin of an old stone farmhouse, which I imagined had housed runaway slaves in their journey on the Underground Railroad And meandering all along the way the sight of the Brandywine Creek itself. The affect of the mist in the autumn trees made me appreciate its twists and turns all the more.

I say this is the penultimate dirt road in Chester County because I know you are wondering where the ultimate dirt road is. And just to get you off my back, I'm going to tell you.

Blackhorse Road, Chester Springs, West Vincent. Just don't speed.

An Andy Moment

This column first appeared on Sunday, Nov. 18, 2007

There must be a category somewhere in the register of Chester County Citizenship Requirements that dictates that you have to have at least one Andrew Wyeth Moment.

That is, a time when you or someone close to you have a brush with the most famous painter ever to eat at Hank’s Place.

I thought about this when I saw him on the front page of Friday’s Daily Local. Andy – you get to call him Andy if you’ve lived here long enough and run into him once or twice -- was honored as a recipient of a 2007 National Medal of Arts at a White House ceremony Thursday morning.

Wyeth, now 90, is no stranger to White House honors. In 1963, President Kennedy gave him a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and he got the first Congressional Gold Medal given to an artist from Bush One is 1990.

But it was still good to see him up there next to the president – smiling what must be a trademark smile and wearing what must be the only lapel-less, collarless suit jacket in America. It’s the “local boy makes good” story on a grand scale.

And Andy remains a local boy at heart. He was raised here in the land around Chadds Ford and Birmingham and Pennsbury, and if you pick up the West Chester telephone book today and page through to the “W’s,” you’ll find a listing for an “A. Wyeth” on Route 100. It’s his business office mind you, but you still can call him up if you’d like.

It was just that kind of neighborliness that marked the two encounters I’ve had with him. In November 1986, as a major exhibition of the works of Andy, his father N.C. Wyeth, and Andy’s son Jamie Wyeth was about to open in the then-Soviet Union, I picked up the phone and dialed his number. The phone rang a couple of times, then someone answered and I asked to speak to Andrew Wyeth. A moment later, he came on the line.

I probably didn’t ask him any questions that could have been considered probing or thoughtful, but he was jovial and responsive during the interview and seemed pleased when I told him of an evening a few nights before that we’d spent together – and by together I mean we both occupied space in the same large auditorium at the Metropolitan Life Building – in New York City.

The occasion was a preview of the hour-long documentary, “The Wyeths: A Father and His Family.” After the viewing, I approached Andy for a few words and a quick photograph. He was sitting with his older bother Nathaniel and his sisters Henriette Wyeth Hurd and Ann Wyeth McCoy. When I mentioned I was from the Daily Local News, Andy turned to his siblings and said, “It’s the man from the hometown paper!” I snapped off three or four shots and took my leave.

I was looking at one of those photographs recently and felt pleased. One, it’s in focus. Two, I didn’t cut anybody out of the frame. But best, Andy is wearing that lapel-less suit, holding his sister Ann’s hand, and smiling a smile as big as the Brandywine.

Not bad for an Andrew Wyeth Moment.

Bar Light, Bar Bright, First Bar That I See Tonight

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Nov. 11, 2007


We gathered together Friday evening, a lively group of friends and me, in a beautiful, historic home on the west side of High Street in West Chester, for a flavorful meal of spicy soup, crisp salad, leg of lamb and lightly fluffed potatoes.

Naturally the talk turned to old bars. Old West Chester bars to be exact.

I will state for the record here and now that it was not my decision to bring up the subject. I understand I have a reputation for enjoying a memory or two about saloons I have inhabited in the past. I am well aware that I have, on occasion, mentioned my fondness for certain old West Chester bars that no longer exist. I am fully cognizant that I have been accused of bringing the subject up whenever it struck my fancy, even if the conversation into which I inserted myself dealt with the root causes of the Civil War, or current monetary policy in Trinidad and Tobago.

But I’m pleading innocent on this one. I did not start the conversation this time, although I merrily went along with it. I believe it was Paul, a former borough resident now exiled to the rural pastures outside Marshallton, who broached the subject. I could be wrong.

Paul and his wife lived in the borough for a decade or so, and he became fond of the myriad pleasures the borough had to offer, pleasures I have described on these pages in the past: the historic architecture, the cozy neighborhoods, the alleys that open up newly discovered treasures almost daily.

But what he missed most, it seemed, were the bars.

He told of days spent exercising, finishing up a bicycle ride or a long run and finding himself quenching his thirst at the Square Bar, the best bar in town without a sign on the front door. Or ending a night of fine, upscale urban dining with his bride at a pub where the bartender had no teeth.

We compared notes on those taverns we missed, either because their ambiance was friendly and warm or because their ambiance was slightly threatening and edgy. I’ll let you be the judge which was which.

There was Carlini’s on North Church Street, The Shingle on East Gay Street, Donohue’s at the corner of High and Gay, and the bar they called Joe’s Sportsman’s Lounge on the west side of town. They all echoed a time and place when the borough was something different; an earlier version of its current self, like a teenager just growing into an adult skin.

Most of those places are gone now, replaced by other tap rooms of slightly pricier menus. West Chester endures with or without Carlini’s and Donohue’s, and constantly reinvents itself.

Mosteller’s Department Store becomes the annex to the Chester County Courthouse. The Mansion House Hotel becomes a bank and office building. Mr. Sandwich’s Coffee Shop becomes home to first stockbrokers, then politicians. W.E. Gilbert’s appliance store, where I once bought a VCR, is now Carlino’s Foods, where I recently bought chicken parmesan.

The beer may cost more now at the new spots that have replaced the old, but it doesn’t taste any better.

Just ask Paul.

Worrying About Ben

This column originaly appeared on Oct. 28, 2007

We all have worries that keep us awake at night.

Some of us worry about events worldwide that we wish we could control, but we can’t. Some of us worry about our children or spouses or siblings or parents, and hope that we can help them through the struggles that life serves up. Some of us worry about paying the mortgage or getting the Smithson Report ready at the office or having to spend the holidays with the in-laws.

Lately, I’ve been worried about Franklin Township.

You know, Franklin Township down southern Chester County way. Stuck right there between New London to the west and London Britain to the east. Home of the historic village of Kemblesville, parted by the waters of the West Branch of the White Clay Creek, and bisected by Route 896. Sorry to say, but its shortfalls have kept me awake for several hours these past few weeks.

The folks who live there don’t worry me so much. They tend to keep mostly to themselves, and their only complaints seem to stem the fact that people steal stuff out of their cars when they are parked unlocked in the driveway. Parents there concern themselves mostly with whether to attend Toddler Tuesdays at the Avon Grove Library or Homeschoolers Happenings.

What’s got me fidgety is the lack of honor that is apparently being paid to the township’s namesake, one Benjamin Franklin.

We have had this discussion before, about the disconnection between the names given to places in Chester County and reality. As I proved conclusively some time ago, for example, there are no Elk in Elk. Lower Oxford, you may recall, is located north of Oxford, and Highland has a lower elevation than Elverson. We can’t be certain how many Vincents there are in East or West Vincent, and don’t even get me started on the role Robin Hood and His Band of Merry Men may or may not have played in East and West Nottingham.

But there is clear evidence that Benjamin Franklin did spend time in Franklin, and by clear evidence I mean my conversation with Wendy Toman, until recently the chairwoman of the township’s Historic Commission.

Toman, who now lives across the border in Delaware, said that research indicated that Franklin owned land in the area of Kemblesville, and paid taxes on it to boot. He may have also scouted around the area for cheap paper from one of the paper mills for use in printing his newspaper, and as an inventor of farm equipment he is almost certain to have provided technology to help the farmers nearby bring in the fall crops.

Most importantly, Toman told me, Ben liked to stop off at what is now the Kemblesville Inn and quaff down a tankard or two there. “He apparently liked to go to taverns,” she said, with a knowing chuckle.

What has me bothered, however, is that in the century and a half since the township broke away from new London and named itself Franklin, no one has seen fit to memorialize the connection in some physical way. No statues. No monuments. No public portraits. On the township web site, you can find out more about the Colonial Pipeline Co.’s plan to mow its right of way than you can about the ties to Founding Father Franklin.

I think it’s time to correct this deficit. If not for Ben’s sake, then just so I can get my full eight hours of shut eye in.

Kidnapping McCullough

This column appeared on Sunday, Oct. 21, 2007

The law defines a criminal conspiracy as an agreement between people in which each member of the group becomes the partner of every other member of the group in deciding to carry out a criminal act.

So let’s just keep this between me and you. I think we should kidnap David McCullough.

You know, the historian-slash-Pulitizer Prize winner who authored the book “1776,” which every person in Chester County is supposed to be reading as part of the Chester County Reads program -- no matter what else they’re doing, even if they’re presently involved in open-heart surgery, on either side of the table.

If you’re not reading “1776,” then let’s just keep that between you and me, because if anyone else finds out then you are going to have to be referred to Diane Gring, public relations maven of the Chester County Library, who will personally assign someone to come to your house and read the entire book to you. And the first name on the assigned readers list is a certain Pennsylvania state senator whose last name rhymes with “dinner mint,” so I’d be extra cautious about not getting to it yourself first.

I’m in the middle of the book now and I can personally say that it among my favorite books about the year 1776. It has taught me quite a bit, including the up to now unknown fact, by me at least, that Revolutionary War soldiers were really bad dressers. It is a marvelous book, between you and me, and I highly recommend that you pick it up at your earliest convenience, and not just because of the aforementioned penalties for not doing so, either.

I think we should kidnap McCullough because I think he would fit in very well in Chester County. And between you and me, I have an inside track to get the job done.

McCullough, you see, was involved in a television documentary about the Wyeth family – you know, Andy and N.C. and the lot, and I was assigned to cover its premier in New York City. I heard him lecture briefly about the film that night, and thought he was brilliantly convincing. If he had told me that the defining moment of American history was when “Come On, Eileen” by Dexy’s Midnight Runners topped the MTV rotation in 1982, I would have repeated it as fact during my next dinner conversation.

But my “in” with McCullough comes because I spoke to him once, in 1990, on the telephone, from his home in West Tisbury, Mass., by pre-arrangement with his literary agent, about the death of Nathaniel Wyeth, the older Wyeth brother who invented the plastic soda bottle. He was kind and gracious and brilliantly convincing, and when he was done he asked me to send him a copy of his story. I did.

So I figure I’ll just saddle up to Dave when he speaks at Immaculata University on Friday and remind him that I still have some left over notes of my story if he’d like to step outside and see them. Then we’d hoodwink him and spirit him away to a quiet house along the Brandywine Creek, and he could and read and write and occasionally lecture us on the importance of classic music videos, or whatever.

Because between you and me, I think he’d do well at it.

New Posts

Hello all from the Chester County Courthouse.

If you read further down, you will see that I have left my cubicle at the main office of the Daily Local News and returned to the bowels of the Chester County Courthouse, where I will be filing stories as the "senior staff writer" and Courthouse Bureau Chief for the Daily Local. It's sort of like sending Mary Richards out to scout down stories for Ted Baxter to read over the air, except nobody watches when I toss my cap in the air at the intersection of High and Gay in ol' WC.

I thought that in addition to the weekly ... well, semi-weekly, column posts, I'd throw up ... well, put up, some of the stories I had the most fun writing, or which I thought would be of most interest to my diverse audience.

Hope you enjoy.

Oh, and everybody say hello to the new kid on the block, Mike Sherman, the sports editor of the Daily Oklahoman. You can catch more about him on YouTube.

Naming Names in Chester County

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Oct. 14, 2007

Brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors, Democrats and Republicans, tall guys and short gals, please hear my words. We here in Chester County, most glorious county on Earth, most noble county in the Solar System, most awesomest county in the Known Universe, have a problem.

I noticed the problem on Saturday in Downingtown, on my way to the annual Downingtown Friends Fall Festival, the kind of event that is meant to provide absolute faith in the notion that all is well and good in the world, and that funnel cake with powdered sugar is just as nutritious as mother’s milk.

I noticed it not because I was stuck behind the annual Downingtown Halloween Parade, which was held on Saturday, which I personally believe is a perfect time for a Halloween parade, since it gives parents and kids the opportunity to spend even more money on their real Halloween costume, which they will wear in two weeks, on the official Halloween Day, which is actually two days before Halloween.

But who’s counting.

No, I had beat the parade traffic jam by a good 90 minutes and had quite enough time to wait a few minutes at the traffic light in Downingtown, where I am accustomed to seeing all manner of real estate signs pointing me to the latest grand opening of whatever subdivision is seeking to relieve me of a sum starting in “the high 900s,” as they say in the real estate biz.

And it hit me then. There, to my left, was a directional sign pointing me toward ... Round
Hill. And another, showing me which way to get to … Tall Trees.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we have run out of names to give our developments.

Time was that it seemed obvious that the builder of any new cul-de-sac or luxury housing project with a stone gate at the entrance could just dip his hand into the name basket and come up with some variation of the county’s historic/geographic/ancestoral/natural/ cultural background to name his latest masterpiece.

You know. Like Hummingbird Farm. Or Serpentine Acres. Or Fox Knoll. Or Brandywine Estates. Or Meadows at Summerhill. Or Deer Valley. Or Deer Run. Or Deer Pointe. Or Deere Ticke. (Sorry. Couldn’t resist.)

But like a shopper driving into downtown West Chester for the first time and condemned to circling the block for hours trying to find the perfect parking space, the ringmasters of Development Land have realized that all the good names have been taken.

After all, what self-respecting pharmaceutical marketing consultant specialist wants to spend $560,000 to buy a new McMansion in the Village of Cross Keys when the guy across the cubicle from him just spent $775,000 on a pied-a-terre at the Keys at Cross Village. Who wants to move to Beaver Creek Estate when you’re already living at Quail Hill Acres?

So we’re moving to generic place names like Round Hill and Tall Trees. It’s almost sad to know that the days of Brandywine Manor Farms and Brandywine Pointe and Brandywine Terrace are behind us.

So line up very soon, brothers and sisters, for the grand opening of Small Creek and Gentle Slope and Asphalt Driveway and Crumbling Curb Estates.

I hear the Halloween parties there start in July.

Funeral Scofflaw

This story originally appeared on Sunday, Oct. 14, 2007

WEST CHESTER — Seventy five dollars.

That’s all that Douglas Daniel “Dusty” Ditmer had to pay each month to live up to his end of a bargain he made with the family of the man he killed 10 years ago in a violent crash in the center of West Chester after a night of drinking at a borough bar.

The money would have gone to reimburse the funeral costs that William Lynch Jr.’s family had paid to see him buried at the Philadelphia Memorial Gardens in Frazer. But despite repeated promises to the judges overseeing his case, Ditmer continues to fall short of that goal, causing frustration among court officials and anguish in the East Goshen home where his wife and daughter live today.

Probation officers and prosecutors are set to go to a court once again to convince Judge Phyllis Steitel that Ditmer, an itinerant worker who has a record of sporadic payments for other legal obligations, including care for his 5-year-old daughter, is once again in contempt of the court’s restitution schedule. But this time it may be harder to collect, since Ditmer’s whereabouts are unknown.

“Part of our job is to help make the victim whole, and that means getting the restitution paid,” said Christopher Murphy, Chester County’s chief probation officer, in a discussion of the generalities surrounding Ditmer’s case. “It’s offensive if defendants don’t pay it, especially if its money for a funeral. It really reopens old wounds, and the victims have to go through (the case) all over again.”

Lynch’s family agrees.

“We feel like every time we have to contact the district attorney’s office to tell them that he’s fallen behind again, that we are victimized over and over again,” said Sandra Lynch, William Lynch’s 49-year-old daughter. “It’s been a real hardship on my mom financially.”

Ditmer, now 31, owes $5,497. He has not made a payment since May, when he was threatened with six months in prison if he did not pay.

“We put him in a holding cell and he eventually came up with $200,” said Craig Geisel, the adult probation officer in charge of collections, describing the last time Ditmer was brought to court. “We haven’t seen anything from him since.”

Ditmer’s saga began the morning of March 8, 1997, when West Chester police were dispatched to an accident at the intersection of North High and West Chestnut streets about 4:40 a.m.

As was described in the arrest affidavit charging Ditmer, he was driving between 56 and 69 mph when he collided with the driver’s side of Lynch’s 1992 Honda. He knocked the car into the parking lot of a pizza parlor once located at the intersection, the impact of the crash causing severe injuries to Lynch. By the time police arrived, Lynch was dead.

In the back seat of Ditmer’s car was a bottle of Bicardi Gold rum. Under the driver’s seat was a 12 ounce bottle of Bud Light, and in the rear of the car a bottle of Milwaukee’s Best beer. Neither Ditmer nor his two passengers that night suffered more than minor injuries.

Ditmer’s blood alcohol at the time was tested as 0.17, almost twice the legal limit for driving under the influence.

Lynch, a ceramics teacher and owner of a pottery store in East Goshen, was making deliveries for the Daily Local News that morning, earning extra money to supplement his income and pension from the telephone company. March 8 was his 60th birthday, and his family, including his 92-year-old mother, was planning a large party for him.

Instead, a few days later, they watched as he was laid to rest in Frazer. His mother was beside herself, Sandra Lynch said.

“She couldn’t understand why she had to bury her son,” she said.
Six months later, Ditmer entered a guilty plea to homicide by vehicle and DUI in exchange for an agreed upon prison term of two years to 59 months in a state correctional institution.

At his sentencing hearing, Lynch’s widow, Joan Lynch, went out of her way to express forgiveness for Ditmer and to wish him good fortune after his release from prison.

“Dusty, I miss my husband very much,” Joan Lynch told her husband’s killer. “I know I will greatly miss him the rest of my life. With the Lord helping me and with all my heart, I forgive you for what you did because I know you did not do it intentionally.”

“Your future is up to you,” she continued. “I am hoping, and it is my prayer, that you will come back (from jail) a changed person, a law-abiding person, and that you can make a good contribution to your community and to society.”

Ditmer seemed to be moved by her words and apologized. “I’d like to say I’m terribly sorry to cause the pain that I did to you and your family,” he said. “I’ll do to live in God’s light and do what I can for your restitution.”

That restitution was set at $10,418.58. Upon his release from state prison, Lynch did begin paying, whittling down the amount he owed to slightly over $8,000 by early 2003. But the money was slow in coming, Sandra Lynch said. “We even had to wait one whole year for one payment,” she said.

In May 2003, at the behest of the adult probation office, now retired Judge Lawrence Wood signed an agreement with Ditmer allowing him to pay $75 per month until the balance of the restitution was paid. It was a remarkable agreement since by law Ditmer was not under the supervision of the county’s probation department. He had served state time, and was therefore responsible first to the state probation authorities.

Three years later, Ditmer was back in court on contempt proceedings, still slow in paying. He was ordered to pay $500 up front, then $100 a month for six months until he was caught up on his back payment, and then, again, at the low rate of $75 a month.

According to a petition for contempt filed last week by Assistant District Attorney Beth Bowers, after Ditmer paid $100 in July 2006 he didn’t pay anything on his account until his mother came into the probation office and paid $400 for him.

By May of this year, the arrears had stacked up again, and Ditmer was hauled before Streitel to pay $200. At the time, he signed a wage attachment for the $75 monthly payments, but shortly thereafter he was fired from his job at Target in West Whiteland and no payment was ever made on that amount.

Authorities are not hopeful of getting Ditmer in front of Streitel at a scheduled Dec. 11 hearing. According to Bowers’ contempt petition, his current whereabouts are unknown. The house listed as his last address is apparently abandoned, and his last known phone number is disconnected.

Sandra Lynch does not blame Chester County authorities for the situation with her father’s killer. She blames the system which makes the court officials intermediaries between her mother and Ditmer, and believes that the state should pay her mother’s restitution, making Ditmer liable to the court.

“He’s more likely to pay it back if he had to be responsible to the court system and not my mom,” Sandra Lynch said. “But he’s just back in court, over and over.

“My mother should not have to do this again,” she said.

Drive Like An Egyptian

This story origoinally appeared on Friday, Oct. 12, 2007

WEST CHESTER — The Chester County Adult Probation Office supervises thousands of defendants each year, most with the relative ease that comes from an experienced staff and a well-tuned system.

But even Common Pleas Judge William Mahon acknowledged that they may have some difficulties in the case of Baha Eldin Zidan, who entered a plea this week to an assault charge stemming from a hit-and-run accident in Phoenixville in early 2006.

Zidan, you see, is Egyptian. He does not speak or write English, only Arabic.

And he is deaf.

And he is mute.

Taking all those factors into account led Mahon to offer the probation department the option of making the bulk of the time they are now responsible for supervising Zidan non-reporting probation — meaning that he will not necessarily have to come to the Chester County Courthouse to speak to — or rather meet with — a probation officer.

“I’ve been doing this for 24 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it before,” said Chris Murphy, head of the county’s adult probation office.

Zidan entered an Alford plea to a single count of simple assault for the traffic accident in February 2006 that left an 83-year-old borough man in intensive care with a broken arm and multiple leg fractures. In the plea, Zidan does not acknowledge guilt, but agrees it is in his best interest to accept the sentence offered.

Zidan, 42, of West Bridge Street, Phoenixville, entered his plea Monday in front of Mahon with the aid of not one but two American Sign Language interpreters — one of whom traveled all the way from Richmond, Va., to attend the proceedings.

Multiple interpreters are necessary in cases involving hearing impaired defendants because one must translate what is said to the defendant, while the other must translate what the defendant signs to the court.

This case was unusual, those involved said, because not only does Zidan not understand English, but also does not understand American Sign Language — a form of “signing” that combines various hand signals, palm orientations, movements of the hands, arms and body, and facial expressions.

The interpreter “speaking” to Zidan, thus, was forced to use a series of simple gestures to make certain that he understood what was going on. Zidan was represented at the hearing by Phoenixvlle attorney Elliot Goldberg, who could not be reached for comment.

According to an arrest affidavit in the case, the victim, Fred Fisher, was walking east on Pothouse Road bout 6:30 a.m. Jan. 3, 2006, when he was struck by a vehicle travelling east on the road. The car, identified as a 1997 white Ford Escort, left the scene without offering assistance to Fisher or providing drivers’ information.

Police were able to track the car to the Vale Rio Diner, where Zidan works as an assistant. Damage to the car matched some debris left at the accident, and police then tried to interview Zidan.

According to the affidavit, Zidan later went to the borough police department, where he was read his Miranda rights and admitted to striking the victim and not stopping. He was charged with accidents involving death of personal injury, a felony.

But after a hearing in April of this year, Mahon threw out both a statement Zidan gave in the diner parking lot concerning the accident and the videotaped statement he gave police at headquarters. He did so after Goldberg contended that the statements were taken improperly because there was no certified Arabic-language interpreter with signing skills present to accurately translate what the officers were saying to him.

Zidan, Goldberg argued, “could not have made the statements and explanations in any event as he is unable to speak.”

In his sentence, Zidan will spend two years on probation and pay $4,730 to the victim for medical expenses.

Murphy said his department was required by law to provide an interpreter at county expense for Zidan when he reported. “Defendants have a right to that,” he said. “I can’t not do it.”

Zidan is restricted from driving during the first five months of probation so that he can travel only to work, to visit his mother in northern Virginia, and to the probation department.

Assistant District Attorney Steve Jarmon, who prosecuted the case, declined to comment on the matter, other than to say he was satisfied with its disposition and of the relief it gave Fisher’s family.