Life Lessons, Newsroom Style

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snow Bound, Mysteriously

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider yourself tapped, shoulder wise.

Keep Your 3-Way, Gimme a Batty Hattie

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Dec. 13, 2009

There is a restaurant in New York City’s Tribeca neighborhood named Edward’s, where once a month the owner, Edward (naturally) Youkilis puts out a spread of food specialties from his native Cincinnati, Ohio. It is a popular event among other ex-Queen City-ers, most probably because Youkilis serves up heaping plates of Skyline Chili.

Youkilis, at 62, is older than I am, so I will avoid making any disrespectful remarks about him or his culinary offerings except to say I disagree with them completely. I understand Youkilis’ desire to bring the taste of his youth to those who have not had the chance to savor it, as well as to those who have had that opportunity and find the pleasure of digging into a heaping plate of Skyline Chili missing from their soul, like a cactus longing for a drop of rain in the desert.

But if you are a restaurant owner in Chester County and think that you will be able to entice me once a month to patronize your eatery by putting out a spread of foodstuffs from my hometown that includes heaping plates of Skyline Chili, here’s a note of caution: Don’t waste your time.

To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen’s remark to Dan Quayle about Jack Kennedy, I know Skyline Chili and -- no matter how much spirit Youkilis and his ilk put into recreating the Skyline experience -- that’s not Skyline Chili. It is not possible to transport a chili parlor to the East Coast, and believe me I‘ve tried. Perhaps later in life than I would care to admit, I have come to realize that there are incandescent pleasures in life you cannot recreate just because you find yourself missing them. Your first kiss, your first World Series championship, your first heaping plate of Skyline Chili -- all remain eternally unattainable a second time.

At heart, Youkilis recognizes this, I believe, although the impetus for his continued attempts to put together a Skyline Chili experience are apparent: he serves twice as many meals at his restaurant on a Monday Cincinnati Night than other Monday night of the month. The restaurant owner told a writer for The New Yorker magazine, where the tale of his adventures in Skylining appeared last week, that there were key details of a normal heaping plate of Skyline Chili that he just could not match.

“The authentic shredded cheese, which is a fluorescent yellow, travels poorly, so Edward’s must grate its own,” the story states. “The Skyline company also refuses to sell (Youkilis) the intentionally tasteless franks (to keep the focus on the chili) for (hot-dog, chili, and cheese) Coneys, so he buys a local substitute.” I might also add that you can’t find the right oval-shaped serving plates used at Skyline outside the Queen City, and the oyster-style crackers available east of Cleveland are more suited to clam chowder than a heaping plate of Skyline Chili.

Skyline Chili is available nationally in cans. I have two or three in the cupboard right now. But my attempts at recreating the Skyline Chili experience have fallen so far short of expectations that they serve only to make me want to jump on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and head straight for the parlor at Clifton and Ludlow avenues where I first tasted ambrosia with a grated cheese topping. It just doesn’t translate well, like former President George Bush’s syntax.

But it also strikes me that it is just plain wrong try to transfer our hometown treasures out of their natural element. Like putting an Eskimo in Florida, they are soon to shrivel and wilt.

An all-too-sad fact of 21st Century America is that there are fewer and fewer regional differences between where we grow up and where we live after we have grown up and moved away. I recently began thinking about television shows that I watched as a child in Cincinnati. There were TV hosts named Uncle Al and Skipper Ryle and Batty Hattie from Cincinnati and Bob Shreve and Nick “Father of George” Clooney. If you did not grow up in the area to which the broadcast signals of their home stations reached, you did not know who in the world they were. They were no better, probably worse, than the TV hosts in Chicago or New York City or Philadelphia, but they were yours and you loved them for the Cincinnati-ness.

My friends Trevor McVickar, age 9, and Emma McVickar, age 6, live in Chester Springs, and they love their TV heroes and savor the moments when they can watch SpongeBob Squarepants enter his pineapple home under the sea. But when they grow up and go away to college, they are not going to be able to regale their new comrades with strange tales of SpongeBob, because everyone they will meet already know who he is. He’s not Batty Hattie, he’s homogenous. He’s Wal-Mart, he’s Hostess Twinkies, he’s – dare I say it -- McDonald’s.

And no matter how tempting it may be, I never want to order a heaping plate of Skyline Chili at McDonalds.

Carrying A Porch

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Dec. 6, 2009

(Editor's Note: The West Chester Old Fashioned Christmas Parade this year became corporately sponsored by Flavia, Inc., a division of Mars, Inc., and is now known as the Flavia Old Fashioned Christmas Parade.)

This country is going to hell in a hand-basket, and I know why.

Actually, I don’t know why, but the punditocracy of the current media conglomeration requires that pretend to, and have at least three easily relatable reasons why this country is going to hell in a hand-basket at any given moment. Columnists such as I are statutorily obligated to pontificate on hand-baskets, hell-bound, in re: This Country. Fail to deliver an occasional sermon on the collapse of America’s foundations at least once in a fortnight gets you an official reprimand signed by Rupert Murdoch and Warren Buffet, and a robo-call featuring a voice that sounds suspiciously like Bill O’Reilly, with Jon Stewart egging him on in the background.

Remember the “Bowling Alone” phenomenon? That’s the sort of hand-basket, hand wringing that can catch some attention, and helped me formulate my most recent explanation for the ills that beset our nation. A fellow named Robert D. Putnam back in the mid-1990s noticed that although the number of Americans who bowled on any given night was increasing annually, the number of those bowlers who participated in bowling leagues was steadily declining. “If people bowl alone, they do not participate in social interaction and civic discussions that might occur in a league environment,” the proposition went. And therewith forms the start of the decline in democracy and the dissolution of the social compact. So you look at the characters who bowl in leagues like the one in the movie “The Big Lebowski” and you don’t see ne’er do well losers, one-step-from-over-the-edge psychopaths, and the occasional Latino pederast, but the very foundation of American society.

But I’m not here to talk about bowling. I’m here to talk about porches.

It occurred to me as I watched the stream of cars rolling down West Miner Street past my home in West Chester during Friday’s coffee-and-candy-bars-themed Old Fashioned Christmas parade (soon to be sponsored by Hy-Tech Mushroom Compost of West Grove, or Enron) that the time spent sitting on a porch contributed real value to American society in the past, a value that has been eroded by the trends in new home construction that see (one), new homes constructed where people heretofore have not actually lived and (two), new homes constructed with backyard decks.

Note to residents of DevelopmentLand: Backyard decks are not porches. To be a porch, a portion of the construction needs to be at the front of the home or at least visible from the front of the home, so you can see and be seen by your neighbors. To be a deck, the construction has to be completely hidden from view, so homeowners can cook steaks on the Webber in their sleeveless t-shirts and ratty gym shorts. Porches are what bring us together as a community, America-wise. Decks drive us apart, and lead to a fractured social consensus, a decline in voter participation, and a growth in those holiday yard displays that feature vinyl blow-up Pilgrim and Frosty the Snowman dolls. Which is de facto evidence, needless to say, that this country is going to hell in a hand-basket.

I am not only a great believer in porches and porch sitting; I am also a proud practitioner in porch sitting. I am even responsible, in part, for the use of the word “porch” as a verb in the West Chester community, starting circa 1984. “Let’s porch,” I used to say to my friends and neighbors of a summer’s eve. “We could have dinner and then porch awhile,” I’d suggest to a date I wanted to impress. “I’m going to be porching tonight, so come on over and let’s seal the social compact,” I’d tell others, who I knew had college degrees and could, therefore, understand the varied meaning of the word “compact.”

Porches help you make friends; they help you understand what is going on in your neighborhood; they serve as a perfect way of getting fresh air; and occasionally they can help you stay cool when the power goes out in the summer and the inside of your home heats up like a toaster oven in a steam bath. There was a reason why George Washington included a porch on the front of his home at Mt. Vernon, and why the White House has a porch that the president can sit on with world leaders from around the globe when the power goes out in the summer. The reason is that porches helped make America strong and good and solid and the sort of place where a Christmas parade didn’t need a corporate sponsor, which is apparently where the country is today.

If you drive through West Chester or Kennett Square or Downingtown or even Modena, for pity sakes, you will see porches. And outdoor furniture placed there for the specific purpose of sitting outside and chatting with people who walk by. If you drive past the West Marlborough home of noted financial wizard and indicted Ponzi swindler Donald Anthony Walker “Tony” Young, you will see an outdoor pool, a driveway suitable for 13 cars, two chimneys, a tennis court, and a horse stable. What you will not see is a porch.

I think I’ve made my point. Now get off my back, Rupert.

My Favorite Pennock

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Nov. 29, 2009

It probably has not occurred to you that I have one or two things in common with Joseph Pennock.

The reasons why it has not occurred to you that I have one or two, perhaps three, things in common with Joseph Pennock are, as a former college roommate of mine once said, varied. It could be that you are unfamiliar with me and my personally biographical history and idiosyncratic likes and dislikes, or it could be that you are unfamiliar with Joseph Pennock and his “back-story,” as they like to say in the theater.

I am guessing the latter since before Monday of last week, I had never heard of Joseph Pennock, either.

But Joseph Pennock came to the United States and, ultimately, West Marlborough, from County Tipperary in Ireland. It just so happens that not only have I been to Tipperary, but I was at one point in my life a fervent, if somewhat ill informed, supporter of the Tipperary Hurling Team, and could not only sing their fight song (“It’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way to go”) but also could at the drop of a hat sport a lapel badge that said, “Come on Tip!” So that is one commonality we share.

Another stems from this snippet of a sentence written by Joseph Pennock as he was contemplating the construction of a building that now stands as Primitive Hall in West Marlborough. "The 14th of the 9th 1738/ then my impostum brok and the Seme year I Bilt my nu Hous." What links Joseph Pennock to me in that statement is not that I have ever built a house, or had my impostum broken, or even bent I dare say, but that there are times when one or more of my editors has commented that my copy read like I was an unschooled inhabitant of the 18th century.

But I don’t want to talk about Joseph Pennock. I would rather talk about his distant cousin, Herb Pennock.

Herb Pennock was born in Kennett Square in 1894 and died there in 1948, just weeks before he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. He was elected to the baseball Hall of Fame for a variety of reasons, but for my mind mostly because he played in the major leagues for 21 seasons, starting from when he was just out of high school in 1914 to when he was just about washed up as a left-handed pitcher for the Boston Red Sox in 1934.

In between times he was a pitcher that, as Casey Stengel used o say, had been up and been down. He had a stellar opening season with the (almost) home town Philadelphia Athletics, then went south for a while until hooking up with the New York Yankees. He won five games in the World Series competed in, including four with the Yankees and along the way helped tone down the profane ebullience of one George Herman Ruth, known more familiarly as Babe.

Once when Babe and Herb were dining with their wives as a fancy restaurant, Ruth rose to excuse himself to go to the bathroom, explaining in no uncertain terms what it was he had to accomplish once there. Herb followed Babe to the washroom and counseled him that it was unnecessary, and perhaps a bit impolite, to explain exactly why he was excusing himself. Babe, embarrassed for once in his life, apologized to Herb and made his way back to the table. There, he sheepishly tried to make amends for his gaffe but saying he was sorry he said what he said, repeating it word for word, of course.

I also enjoy the story about the time that Herb and the Babe and some Yankee teammates made their way to a Kennett Square street fair and started knocking down milk bottles at a street both for prizes. It was no sweat for the pitchers to break the bank, and they did so by throwing curves with the light balls. The next morning, one of those pitchers woke to find his arm swollen from the curves and the light balls, and had to explain how he had hurt himself to the Yankee skipper, Miller Huggins.

That pitcher, as I remember, was Waite Hoyt, who in the early 1960s provided a young boy just returned from Ireland with a new team to root for as he broadcast games played by the Cincinnati Reds. For me, you see, it was hard to find the Tipperary box scores in the paper.

The Road to Corruption

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Nov. 22, 2009

It is easy to see why Tony Young coveted a place at the Unionville table so greatly that he went to swindling people he knew just to get his Chippendale chair there.

I attended the auction that was held recently at Young’s former home in West Marlborough, covering the event for the paper. I had driven by the place just once before out of curiosity, the allure of seeing a mansion that theft built drawing me there. I was left somewhat unimpressed by the place. No Xanadu of Citizen Kane, the mansion can be seen plainly from the road and strikes one as more nouveau riche splendor than classic grandeur.

But the drive to and from Young’s place was more than worth the trip. I have spent a wealth of time on the back roads of Chester County on my way to and from West Chester, but never have I been tempted to stop and stare in wonder at the landscape as often as I had on the trip west from Unionville out Route 82 as when I went in search of Young’s home.

What you see as East Marlborough melts into West is not picture-postcard beauty, or generic rolling hills landscape painting beauty, but a vista of quiet green elegance that extends across the horizon. The view that unfolds is like Chester County’s own Big Sky country, where the meadows and fields and stands of trees fill your eyes and the turns in the road bring new pleasures in an instant.

Driving that road I admit to feeling the pull to be a part of it, to wish that I could feel at home in it. Obviously those who have grown up in that slice of the county feel protective of their world, and try their best to ward off changes. I imagine as well that there is an insularity to the community because of the beauty that encompasses it. The betrayal that Young visited on those he called friends was exacerbated strictly because of he cast a cloud on the landscape they love, at least for some fleeting time.

Young, pardon the interruption, is the boyish looking investment financier who swindled people he knew in the equestrian community of greater Unionville for millions and millions of dollars. According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, he used the money he funneled from those who invested in his investment firm for the specific purposes of living as they did – with horses and polo silks and mahogany furniture and Audubon prints and foxhunting ephemera and – most striking for me -- a classic Triumph TR-3 convertible. I assume that Young took rides in that car with the top down, imagining himself an English landowner sporting his way across the fox hunting hills and valleys of that countryside the fields of Unionville are so reminiscent of. I assume that he loved the fact that he could buy fifty boxes of shotgun shells and just leave them in the storeroom for whatever time he wanted to go shoot at skeet or trap or pheasants or quail of whatever it is they shoot at out there in the land beyond the Po-Mar-Lin Fire Co. firehouse.

A silver-haired man I spoke with at the auction told me he thought the piles of possessions that were for sale spoke to him of one thing – guilt. Young spent the money he stole on whatever he fancied at the moment because for him there was no future to save for. He must have known, the man said, that it was only a matter of time before the truth would close in on him like a pen, and so why not acquire as much as he could beforehand?

Just a few days before the auction took place, an article on Young appeared in Fortune magazine, and was a topic of conversation at the event among those who knew Young and knew those who trusted him with their cash. One man I spoke with expressed relief that the scheme had been laid bare in detail as an explanation for those who wondered at the crassness of it all, but another had a more bitter reaction to it. “Why,” he wondered, “did the article have to paint all of the people in the community as possible criminals?”

To explain that I turn to Wendy, a writer and colleague who is wiser in the ways of that world than me.

"It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience,” she wrote to me after hearing of my visit to the Young auction, quoting Sherlock Holmes at his most arch, “that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside."

Chastised

I have been chastised for not including the name of the former reporter to whom I gave the Jake's t-shirt. She's Jill Nawrocki and she's about to leave Namibia after two years of tremendous, awe-inspiring work. You can catch her accomplishments at http://jillnawrocki.blogspot.com

Sorry, Jill! Hurry home!

That's Just Jake('s) With Me

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Nov. 1, 2009.

My friend Tom McKee, the keyboardist for the band Brothers Past and chief music director at the Paul Green School of Rock in Downingtown, was the person who introduced me to the way that Chester County seems to envelope the entire globe at times through cheap t-shirts.

Go virtually anywhere, he told me some years back when we were trying to avoid doing real work at the Daily Local’s news desk, and you are sure to come across a Jake’s t-shirt. Jake’s as in Jake’s Bar, the cozy little dive on South Matlack Street hard by the West Chester University campus.

He said he had heard stories about people getting off the London Underground at the Marble Arch Station and being confronted with a passenger getting on the tube wearing a shirt from Jake’s. I suppose that I might have even contributed to this phenomenon by giving a former DLN reporter who was on her way to serve a two-year stint in the Peace Corps one of the navy tees with the overflowing beer mug on the front as she made her way out the door. Perhaps the folks in Khorixas, Namibia, where she is stationed, now dream about the possibility of immigrating to the United States and making a scared pilgrimage to the bar that serves 50-cent drafts and has a shuffleboard game handy.

It’s not just that Jakes t-shirts rule the globe. I also may point to a photo I have seen hanging from a certain sandwich place in West Chester which clearly shows the back of a t-shirt proclaiming the wonders of Penn’s Table to the mountains of Machu Picchu in Peru. Can’t say what the Inca ancestors might think of William Penn’s image, but I’m sure they would go for the chicken salad club.

So I should not have been surprised this past weekend when I found myself surrounded by Chester County residents I far away Richmond, Ind. The possibility of coming across someone who knows the difference between Toughkenamon and Landenberg is always around the corner.

I was seated in the dining room of the Richmond Holiday Inn scarfing down the complimentary buffet breakfast Saturday morning when I heard conversation from a group of friendly characters at a booth in the corner. “I just left the car parked in Parkesburg,” said one affable woman. “It’s so much easier than driving to Exton.” Being the fearless reporter that I am, I scooted over and introduced myself. The woman was one Jane Hutton, a research librarian at West Chester University who happened to know my friend Anne Herzog, a professor at the school, and who was in Richmond for the 40^th anniversary of her graduating class at Earlham College. She didn’t look a day over 45.

Which, truth to tell, is what I was doing in Richmond. The good folks at Earlham handed me my diploma and sent me out into the world 30 years ago, in May 1979, and I had ventured back there to meet up with others who had similarly been loosed on an unsuspecting populace. There isn’t just a happenstance connection between Chester County and Earlham, since Westtown Friends School is sort of a feeder institution to the college, which has a long history as a bastion of Quaker education. One of the alums that I had dinner with at the school not only had family from West Chester, but who also had taught at Westtown for a few years after graduation.

I thought about the similarities between my home in West Chester and my four-year former home in Richmond as I gazed across the central courtyard of the college campus from atop one of the classroom buildings. I thought especially how students at Earlham and students at West Chester University are likely to be too busy sometimes while crossing the campus to notice how beautiful the fall leaves can be, how perfect the architecture fits in with the landscape, and how lucky they are to have months and months and months in which they are only required to learn and not make money or raise a family of pay the cable bill.

And as I watched one student struggle against a cold wind on his way from the dormitory where I had spent the last days of my college career I thought I recognized sometime of myself in him, on his way to the library or to the student union or to the dining hall. I thought how similar I must have looked in October 1975 when I first showed up at school. I thought how much he might look like me when he turns 50. I thought we had a lot in common, but, in reality, it was probably just the t-shirt from Jake’s.

I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Oct. 11, 2009

In the movie “Smoke,” Harvey Keitel plays a kindly and slightly eccentric cigar store owner who spends his days talking with customers and his mornings taking a single snapshot of the same corner in his Brooklyn neighborhood. The photos he puts in an almost endless series of scrapbooks, page after page of pictures of the same street corner.

A customer who becomes a friend, played by William Hurt, one day comes to look at the photo gallery that “Augie” has compiled. At first he s bemused, then slightly bored, then slowly overwhelmed by ho the same scene can take on so many different hues and shades and meanings. In an instant, he sees the figure of his deceased wife, killed in a bank robbery close to that same corner. She had been walking by the camera as Augie snapped his single photo that day.

It is a powerful scene, and on that reminds me of autumn.

Don’t’ ask me why. Do I associate the season with impending demise? Do I view it as the most romantic of all the four seasons? Did I see the movie in the fall and transfer the sensory bombardment that we get here in Chester County to my thoughts of the film? These are questions I cannot, and shall not, try to answer.

But what I am thinking is this. October is the time when every day the same scene outside your front door becomes different in incremental, but nevertheless entirely noticeable, steps. The light is demonstrably different; the sun finding its way up over the horizon at a different angle. The temperature makes its way south down the thermometer. But mostly, the pigment that has been waiting to explode in the leaves of the trees outside gets its chance to burst through.

In the spring, those changes in the foliage e see on our way to work or from our favorite window seem to go from zero to 60 in a minute, like a vernal Lamborghini. One day you notice a small green blossom on a tree as you get behind the wheel to drive o work, and then next day there are cherry blossoms and apple blossom and pear blossoms all over your windshield. Then by the time you get around to loading the camera to take a picture of the pink snow that envelops the branches above your head, it’s gone.

In the fall, you get a change to linger with the changes. Right now, I can see bits of yellow in the tips of the leaves outside the window. There is an orange chunk on the tree across the street. Red dots the top of the bush I pass by on my way home from Sunday services. And I know that little by little, those colors will replace all of the green that still makes up he bulk of the landscape.

I wax rhapsodic about these autumnal sights because I love the season so. I would not trade the hillsides of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware in fall for all the palm trees in Florida, or the sandy beaches of Hawaii. I moved here to Chester County in the fall, driving over the Allegheny Mountains in a 1970 Dodge Dart that held virtually everything that I owned to find a job on a newspaper that I had never heard of until then. The Phillies beat the Montreal Expo on a Mike Schmidt home run in the 11^th inning of the next to last day of the year, and I started getting to know the people I still call my friends.

Here is what the songwriter Robbie Robertson said about the fall when he was talking with a filmmaker about the meaning behind his ode to life and hard times, “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)”:

“In the story to me, it’s another piece I remember from my youth, that people looking forward, people out there in the country somewhere, in a place; we all know it, may have been there, may have not. But there are a lot of people for whom the idea of come autumn, come fall, that’s when life begins.

“It is not the springtime where we kind of think it begins. It is the fall, because the harvest has come in.”

Welcome back.

Missing Ponds

This column originally appeared on Oct. 4, 2009.

There is nothing more comforting than a good map.

When confusion or frustration come calling, I find great solace in grabbing a book of maps and staring at places I have been, or want to go, or have never heard of before. When I sit down to write a news story about someplace I have never been and required to describe, I find the assistance that I get from looking at a map of the place invaluable, and reassuring. If I stick to the map, I cannot err.

Is this comfort a reminder of those days that I spent in the passenger sat of my family’s 1973 Dodge Dart, patiently explaining to my mother that she had 15 more miles before she had to take the New Stanton exit of the Pennsylvania Turnpike? Well, certainly. Aren’t we all put at ease when confronted with things that are familiar to us? For me, opening a map is not unlike opening the front door to your home and smelling a cake in the oven.

Which is a round-about way of stating that the road map I have of Chester County lacks detail when it comes to our ponds and lakes, a situation that I would be more than happy to help sort out should I be asked.

The subject came up for me whilst sitting in a recent court hearing over the future of Kardon Park in Downingtown. The park, such as it is, has four ponds running from north to south along the so-called Lion’s Trail. The ponds are called, according to more than one witness, First Pond, Second Pond, Third Pond, and Fourth Pond. Remember, the walking trail has a name that is associated with something – a mammal, a social organization, whatever. The ponds are known only by numerical order.

But those ponds are lucky, you see, because at least they have names. There are ponds across Chester County that have existed along the landscape for years, and still they go unnamed, at least map wise.

And it is not as though there are not lakes and ponds across the county that do not have proper names that are listed on the map. The book of maps that I was staring at when these thoughts occurred to me lists 12 distinct named still bodies of water. They range from the familiar – Struble Lake, Marsh Creek Lake, Sharpless Lake – to the strange and slightly odd –Gotwals Pond and Grace Mine Settling Basin.

A popular fishing website lists 23 lakes or ponds suitable for dropping a hook and line into, including Icedale lake, the Rodebaugh Dam and Sinkler Lake. Try to find these on the map and you are on your own, unless you happen to be sitting next to someone from Honeybrook who grew up fishing on Icedale Lake and can tell you that it’s right off Route 322.

There are definite needs to differentiate which lake is which, or else you might find yourself confused between the Westtown Lake on Westtown Road with the Westtown Reservoir on Reservoir Road and the West Chester Reservoir on Airport Road. And since Westtown Lake is open to the general public for visual enjoyment but West Chester Reservoir is a gated community, so to speak, with water too precious for human sight, according to the folks at the water company that owns it, you want to know these things if you are out looking for a place to see the clouds reflected on the water.

I could come up with names for the lakes and ponds I see spotting the map like so much water running over a dam. There would be Red Bone Lake in West Vincent and Woodview Lake in London Grove. I could give you Pine Creek Park Lake in West Pikeland and Trout Run Lake in New Garden. Not a problem at all to drop the name of Boot Jack Lake off Gum Tree Road out Cochranville way, or Limestone Lake down there in Londonderry. Look, I’m a professional newspaper reporter; whatever else, I have time on my hands.

The feeling of discomfort that disturbed me most during my recent quest of watery names came when I went searching to see if the pond I enjoyed the most had a name. I found it one day while driving along Hilltop Road in Newlin, a road that starts along the woods near the Brandywine Creek and rambles skyward until opening on rolling meadows high above the western end of the Great Valley. I stopped where the road meets Green Valley Road, and hopped out to spend some time staring at a quiet pond as the sun went down.

I checked. It’s not there, according to the map.

Watch-ing The Sunrise

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Sept. 27, 2009

My guess is that the watch had something to do with it.

That is, I just purchased this new Casio watch and it has functions that my Uncle Harry Redborg, whose Elgin watch I was given as my first wristband timepiece, could not have imagined if he had lived to be 150 years old. The watch not only tells the time and date, but also has a picture of the phase of the moon, presumably for werewolf protection. It has a component wherein I can tell the best time of day to hunt or fish for any particular date between now and, well, eternity for as much as I can figure out. And more.

It has a stopwatch and an alarm, and graphically tells me how much daylight is available. It has four buttons that do things I have not figured out, and a way of lighting itself if I turn my wrist just so. I believe it also predicts tomorrow's Dow Jones Industrial Average, albeit not as accurately as you might like if you were thinking of sinking your life savings into Tastykake stock.

But the function I spend the most time fiddling with is the screen that tells me the time of the day's sunrise and sunset. And this is what I was getting at earlier: being able to see just when the sun was expected to rise and/or set has got me thinking about those daily occurrences, and how much people enjoy them.

I remember once walking home from the Daily Local News and turning around to see the sun setting over Sam's Pizza on Hannum Avenue. The shades and the clouds and the sunrays were so dazzling, I picked up a pay phone and called back to the office to tell anyone who was there to step out the back door and enjoy. Which they did. That's the way it is with sunrises and sunsets; you see a really great one, want to share it with people. So I asked some former Daily Local colleagues if they could recommend really good places to enjoy the sunrise, since I figured my watch would give me the opportunity to plan ahead on when to go if only I knew where.

I had an idea that the best places would be near water. I remember once seeing the sunrise over the Octorara Reservoir down around Nottingham, by Camp Tweedale. It was picture perfect, and the reflections of the reddish yellow clouds on the surface of the calm water made it doubly enjoyable. But Octoraro is a 25-minute drive from my house, longer if I don't avoid the state police speed trap on Route 1, so I was hoping for a place a little closer to home.

Kyle suggested Valley Forge National Park, which he said offered an overlook of the upper stretches of the Schuylkill and had the enjoyable ambiance of the rolling hills that make up the start of the Great Valley. But Kyle pointed out that much of the panorama is made up of Route 422 and the nearby malls, and by the time he had finished enumerating the defects of the view he had pretty much talked himself out of the whole thing and gone back to bed.

Melissa weighed in by suggesting that the Stroud Preserve in East Bradford provides a particularly good viewpoint over the East Branch of the Brandywine Creek, which happens to be my personal favorite of the two branches. I have spent a good enough amount of time wandering the stretches of the former Georgia Farm there to know that it would offer some particularly pleasant vistas. But it also offers a significant amount of Canada goose guano, and that is something I try hard to avoid in the near darkness of early morning.

Christine offered visual aids in her advice that a stretch of the Route 30 Bypass near the Chester County Airport gave her the most memorable sunrise in her recent memory. According to Christine, she was on her way to work in the early morning from her home in Sadsburyville when the sun rose spectacularly over the flat road where the airport stretched out ahead of her. The picture she shot of it from her camera phone was impressive, I admit, but I have a hard time accepting that anything good can come of something if the word "Sadsburyville" is attached to it.

The watch on my wrist Saturday morning said sunrise came at 6:50 a.m., and so I dutifully rolled out of bed a half an hour beforehand to go sunrise hunting. But rather than drive for miles in my quest, I climbed instead to the top of the Chester County Justice Center Parking Garage, conveniently located behind my apartment.

And as I watched the clouds brighten and the shadows disappear and the color come back into the red brick sidewalks of my beloved hometown below me, it occurred to me that any sunrise you live to watch is the best one. Even from a parking structure.

Get Out Of Town Day 2009

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

You want my town? You want this one mile square piece of geography? You want this county seat? You want to take over the central business district for a one-day bacchanal of gastronomic engorgement? Go ahead, take it. I’m gone.

Today, as many of you may know, is the annual West Chester Restaurant Festival, where literally hundreds of restaurants and funnel cake vendors descend on Our Fair Borough like so many Mongol Hordes and bring with them hungry interlopers in numbers not seen since the recent Teabagger protest in Washington, D.C.

For those of us who live in West Chester, however, today is not known as Restaurant Festival Day. It’s known as Get Out Of Town Day. Rather than fight the crowds and battle with the interlopers over parking on our streets, we choose to find something else to occupy our time, someplace else to go and enjoy the wonders of late summer.

Some of us choose to replicate the experience of the restaurant festival by finding the nearest traffic jam and joining the queue. Others of us offer up hundreds of dollars of our hard earned cash for mushroom-sized appetizers at the nearest convenience store, estimating correctly that the cost is equivalent to what we would expect on Gay Street, but the wait is far less.

Me, I’m heading for the hills. More specifically, I’m going to take a nostalgic drive up Route 282 north of Downingtown into the wilds of Wallace and the Nantmeals.

Route 282 is not the most picturesque back road in Chester County, but it does crack the top ten. It meanders nicely alongside the East Branch of the Brandywine Creek for miles and miles, passing through villages like Lyndell and Glenmoore, Springton and Cornog, until it terminates at an intersection between Barneston and Huntsfield.

It is nostalgic for me because it is the scene of one of the first prime assignments I received as anew report at the Daily Local News in the late fall of 1982. The news editor saw I wasn’t busy and told me in no uncertain terms to get out to the Cornog Quarry and find out what all the fuss was about.

What the fuss was about was a state police dive team searching in the murky waters for cars that had been dumped there. I wasn’t the only one who arrived at the scene to judge their progress, and wondered why so much attention was being paid to an operation to clear and otherwise unused former quarry of dumped cars.

It was not until after I had filed my piece that I learned that what police were really searching for were the bodies of the two young Reinert children, part of the eerie criminal case surrounding teachers at Upper Merion High School. The whole thing happened under my nose without my realizing it, and now wherever I wander up Route 282 and pass by that quarry, I am reminded of how little I really know.

But the ride up Route 282 also brings back more pleasant memories, of finding out of the way people who are as friendly and as open as the fields that developers like to gobble up in northern Chester County.

On one spring Sunday after a series of hard rains, I was sent out to talk to people who now had lakes in their backyards as the Brandywine overflowed its banks. I wandered up the road and made my way to Glenmoore, stopping along the way to knock on doors and interview the flood victims. Those I spoke with were open and forthcoming, if a little quizzical about why a reporter would be so intensely interested in the water level in their basement. I suppose that in those days before cable television and incessant news hounding the sight of a person with a notebook showing up on your doorsteps was still something you would face with a sense of excitement, instead of one of ennui.

I also like to slow down as I pass through Lyndell and look up on the hillside at the gazebo that sits on the property where Jim Croce once lived, and imagine him writing those faux folk hits in the 1970s that occupied so much of my radio listening time when I was in high school. I used to be able to sing a few verses of “Workin’ at the Car Wash Blue” at the drop of a hat, and wonder always if that’s where the idea came to him, on that hill.

So if you want my town, go ahead and take it; I’m planning on invading a few places of my own. Just make sure you have it back by 7:30.

One Man's Meat Is Another Man's 4-Way

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Sept. 13, 2009

So that we are clear about this, I will start today by declaring openly that I am not in favor of gluttony. However much you think that my adherence to the sin of sloth in my position as a professional newspaper reporter would ipso facto lead me down the road to wholesale acceptance of sins such as lust and greed and wrath, I would like you now to disabuse yourself of that notion. For me, gluttony is right out.

But that being said, let’s hear it for Bob Stoudt of Royersford. Because he is a man who has lived my fantasy for me, and with Cincinnati chili.

Stoudt, of course, is also known as “Humble Bob” when he is out on the circuit of something called the International Federation of Competitive Eating (an organization that screams for a better acronym than IFCE, something along the lines of CRAM, for Competitive Regurgitation Appears Manly.) That’s the group who put on the eating contests involving things like Nathan’s Hot Dogs and Corn Beef and Rye sandwiches.

Last weekend, when I was blissfully celebrating the end of another summer and honoring the workers who proudly built this country so those who came after them could sock shelves at Wal Mart, Humble Bob made his way out to my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, to engage in a Labor Day Cincinnati chili-eating contest. He won. Dude put down 13 pounds, nine ounces of chili spaghetti in 10 minutes flat, bless his heart and digestive system.

Of course, the obvious question that sprung to my mind when I became aware that I had missed out on the spectator sporting event of a lifetime was: “Three way or four way?”

That is, in Cincinnati chili parlance, did Stoudt go for the spaghetti, chili, and onion (three-way) selection or the more traditional spaghetti, chili, onion, and grated cheese (four-way) option? In my youth in the Queen City, when an after-school snack consisted of an entire box of Kraft macaroni and cheese, I could easily have seen the pleasure of scarfing down a few pounds of four-way. Now, however, I am frequently made aware of the space that cheese, grated or not, takes up in the stomach and thus, would’ve gone three-way and damn the torpedoes.

But as I saw from the photos that appeared on the Internet of the plates of Cincinnati’s finest that contestants were required to consume at the event (and a better educational tool for the uplifting of our global community than the World Wide Web the world has not known, is what I say), it looks as though the organizers went with the cheese. Again, not what I would have done, but sticking with tradition is something ingrained in the history of Cincinnati and its chili. (How else to explain the side dish of oyster crackers?)

You should know that eating 13 pounds and nine ounces of Cincinnati chili in 10 minutes flat is not something we who grew up in the City of Seven Hills are normally wont to do. We are primarily a civil, polite bunch – the occasional police shooting or The Who concert riot notwithstanding. By the looks of the strands of chili smeared pasta coming out of Stoudt’s mouth as he chewed, and his apparent technique of using his hands to shovel in the food that I saw in one of the photos of the event, I would suggest that as a city we would more than likely not have invited him over for dinner if that was how he was going to approach a meal. Should that be how he wants to eat in his own home, fine. But really.

I will point out two things that struck about Stoudt’s comments after winning the $2,500 prize at the event. First, he said that Cincinnati chili “tastes great.” Secondly, he opined that when he had finished eating he intended to take his son on a roller coaster ride at Kings Island, the amusement park where the contest was held.

The first comment made me think that perhaps he had never eaten Cincinnati chili before cramming his face full of it, which struck me as so much putting the cart before the horse, and the second made me think that if I was in line at the Son of The Beast roller coaster at Kings Island with Stoudt and his son, I would probably let them go on ahead of me.

That all being said, what was important is that Stoudt got to do what I can honestly say is something I have always aspired to – that is, having as much Cincinnati chili as I wanted, within easy reaching distance, and without the approbation I usually receive from my Cincinnati vegetarian nieces when I suggest that a plate of three-way would taste as good at breakfast as it would at lunch or dinner. (400 people turned out to cheer Stoudt and his opponents on as they did battle, a lesson that my nieces would do well to learn.)

That is gluttony at its finest, I suppose. And, truth be told, envy as well.

Michael P. Rellahan is the news editor of the Daily Local News. To contact him, send an e-mail to mrellahan@dailylocal.com

Thrown For A Loop In Eagle

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Sept. 7, 2009

Pardon me if I interrupt your morning debate over the entire health care reform issue, from death panels to public options, but I’d like a chance to talk about something that has been bothering me for several days now. I’d really like to put it aside, get it off my chest, and deal with it now so that when my concerns are all out in the open I can rejoin the entire health care reform debate, as the program is apparently already in progress and I don’t have TiVo.

So: What’s up with this Eagle Loop Road business?

If you have ventured north above Eagleview Boulevard on Route 100 in the past month of so, you know what I’m talking about. If you have not ventured north above Eagleview Boulevard on Route 100 in the past month or so, give yourself a treat and do so post haste. Make sure, however, that your collision insurance is up to date, because let me tell you.

Some background: A few years ago, the good folks in Upper Uwchlan (pending motto: “Where The Car Dealerships Look Like Churches, And The Churches Look Like Car Dealerships.”) looked outside the window of the township building and noticed something unusual: traffic wasn’t moving. Route 100 had become, little by little, inch by inch, McMansion by McMansion, the New Jersey Turnpike at rush hour of North Central Chester County. Being the good folks that they are, the Upper Uwchlan officials decided to do something to ease the congestion and -- realizing they could not simply erect metal highway barriers at the township line and keep people from driving through-- the concept of the Eagle Loop Road was born.

All good reporters love a road construction story. Because roads take so long to build (pending motto for East Whiteland: “Forty Years And Counting On That Alleged Route 202 Widening Phase”), you always have stories about them in reserve. Anytime the workload slows down and no new health care reform forums have been scheduled, you can whip off a “Fill-In-The-Blank” Road Construction Update in and hour and a half. Trust me, I know. For several years, I made my reputation on Exton Bypass stories. I could speed dial the Chester County Planning Commission official in charge of the project, Lee Whitmore, without opening my eyes from my afternoon nap.

The Daily Local News once had a reporter assigned to pay attention to the Eagle Loop Road fulltime, ever since it was first floated as a surefire way to make sure the commute time from Black Horse Road (pending motto: “Best Damn Dirt Back Road in North Central Chester County”) to Hannum’s Harley Davidson did not approach 90 minutes. But that reporter has left our employ and no one has taken up the Eagle Loop Road gauntlet, so to speak, in quite some time. Imagine my surprise, then, when on a recent trip north above Eagleview Boulevard I discovered that the project had been finished.

The original idea, as I understood it, was to build a road that looped around Eagle – hence, the name – so that motorists not wanting to stop off for a test drive at CarSense or have quiet dinner at the Eagle Tavern could just avoid the whole section of Route 100 through the village. Which made sense to me, even though I once reported a series of stories about how G.O. Carlson Boulevard in Caln, another inspired road project, had utterly failed to divert the thorough traffic off Route 30 in Thorndale.

But when I approached Eagle last month, driving under the Pennsylvania Turnpike Overpass like a motor driven Alice down the rabbit hole, my idea of the loop road became, well, shall we say, challenged. The road was going left when I was used to driving straight. Strange signs offered me detours onto something called Ticonderoga Boulevard (pending motto: “Benedict Arnold Has Nothing To Do With Us.”) I wasn’t certain whether a left hand turn meant a hard left or a soft left, and a woman in an Audi A6 decided that a helpful toot of her horn might get me going in the right direction. At least that is what I think she was trying to communicate with her helpful hand gesture.

The road makes no sense, or at least will take some getting used to along with some dented fenders. I know there have been traffic issues, because the good folks at Wolfington Bus Co. have placed a pair of school buses blockading their property and a portable toilet has been set up right at the loop road stoplight, presumably so that those local Eagle residents who want to watch the comedy show that has become rush hour there have a suitable place to relieve themselves when the laughter loosens things up a bit too much.

OK. I’m finished now. It is off my chest. The Eagle Loop Road may not be what I had imagined it would be, but I am certain that in short measure I will become as used to it as I have the Exton Bypass and G.O. Carlson Boulevard. So now you can fill me in on this entire health care reform debate thing (pending motto: “You Can Have My Blue Cross Card When You Pry It From My Cold, Dead Fingers.”)