Sniffing Out Chester County's Sights

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

Hello tourists! Welcome to Chester County, land of rolling hills, historic battlefields, stone barns, and the fresh scents emanating from various mushroom composting houses! We’re glad to have you!

We know you’ve been aching to see the sights that the Chester County Conference and Visitors Bureau described in its most recent propagand..., er, brochure, and we trust that at some point in your life you’ll get to see Longwood Gardens, the Brandywine River Museum, the Chester County Historic Courthouse and the QVC studios. But in the meantime we thought we would take you on a little tour of some of the out of the way or little noticed spots that make up our fair county.

Now, don’t worry. We’re not going to lead you to some dark and dank spot that you’ll end up writing about in your travel journals as “the worst place I ever imagined they would serve actual food in.” Those would be the aforementioned mushroom composting houses, and we promise we won’t take you there, although you’ll likely get a whiff of them as we stop by the first spot on the tour, the White Clary Creek Preserve.

The White Clay is one of our county’s most scenic waterways, but it gets short shrift in the public relations department because of all the attention paid by the national media to the Brandywine Creek. The White Clay’s relationship to the Brandywine is sort of the aquatic version of that between the Chicago White Sox and the Chicago Cubs; you get the sense that one team is richer, fuller, more die hard and truer in spirit than the other, but the other squad gets all the pub from yuppie outsiders just because of the ballpark.

I mean, put all those Wyeths in an old composting house on London Tract Road along the White Clay instead of an old mill at the River Museum, and you’d see documentaries on National Geographic TV about William Penn buying the White Clay Creek land from Chief Kekelappen 24/7. Trust me on this.

While we’re on our way back north from the White Clay we thought you’d like to stop on top of the hills south of Coatesville, the city which you may have heard so much about in the national media of late. Try to ignore that. We’d like you to pay particular attention to the view from Hilltop Road across what used to be the King Ranch and which is now part of the stunningly beautiful Laurels Preserve, which you are not technically allowed to look at, or even think about, unless your annual income approaches the mid-seven figures, but go ahead anyway because we’re not going to drop a dime on you.

The folks from Texas will recognize the name of the King Ranch as the largest cattle operation in the world, but you probably didn’t know that the King family bought about 17,000 acres here in Chester County to fatten the cattle with grass feed. You might want to imagine the manure-based compost produced by those longhorns, but we don’t, so we’ll move on.

We’re stopping finally at the corner of Market and Church streets in downtown West Chester because it’s the site of the former Mansion House Hotel and Restaurant. The place was built in 1846 as a temperance house, which we feel is particularly ironic since it’s where a memorable meal took place in the early 1970s. Seems a lawyer acquaintance of ours had just secured the release from jail of a few well, shall we say, fallen women, by promising a judge they’d be out of the county before nightfall, when he decided that it might not be such a bad idea to celebrate their freedom with some spirits across the street at the Mansion House. Several hours and as many bottles of wine later he had to call his wife to come pick him up, and in the meantime wondered if she’d like to meet his new clients.

We’re still uncertain if she got the joke, but we appreciate the humor in the situation nonetheless. We hope you did, too. The Mansion House is now a bank, by the way. Which we suppose is better than a mushroom composting house, but not by much.

Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life, At Last I've Found You....

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Feb. 8, 2009.

Constant Reader Ed of West Chester wants to know something, and he wants me to get the answer. What Constant Reader Ed from West Chester wants to know is, “Why is there no grape bubble gum for sale in West Chester?”

I will give you all a moment or two to ponder that, while I explain that everyone has their own particular Chester County mystery, and it is my lot in life that they usually ask me to solve their personal riddles. Other people I know are asked how their health is or how their car is running or how many hours they had to wait in line at the self-service car wash to rid their cars of the winter’s ubiquitous coating of salty brine residue when they greet an acquaintance. I get asked why there are no park benches in front of the Chester County Justice Center, or where the hell the grape bubble gum is.

The sorts of mysteries I refer to are not the Sherlock Holmes/Miss Marple/Nero Wolfe-type mystery. The mysteries I speak of are the unanswerable questions we ponder while waiting for the light to change. Such as, “Who decided we need another bank in this town?”

My personal mystery starts, and ends, in Exton. What, I ask myself on an almost hourly basis, is up with the West Whiteland Municipal Building?

No, not the old one on Route 100 that looks like a plantation house from northern Virginia circa 1776. I’m referring to the building on the oh-so-aptly named Commerce Drive in the Main Street at Exton “life-style mall” that looks like a post-modern, avant-garde, semi-psychotic architect’s nervous doodling brought to brick-and-mortar fruition.

To get those you who are still pondering the grape bubble gum query a chance to catch up, let me explain that the West Whiteland Municipal Building has stood largely finished but virtually unoccupied for months. How long has it been thus? Remember when the only obstacle that stood between Hillary Clinton and the White House was the issue of whether or not she knew how to measure the drapes for the Oval Office? Well, the building has been around since before then.

There it sits, unused, vacant, and surrounded by a chain link fence that screams, as only a chain link fence can scream, “Keep out!” Apparently, the notion that a building pretty much completed might actually be put to use is not one that I alone harbor. In fact, the matter has raised such a ruckus in West Whiteland that the township devoted a full page of its Fall 2008 newsletter to the matter.

The building isn’t being used, the anonymous author of the newsletter informs us, because it is waiting for the “fit out” to be completed. “These contracts are for installation of the walls, flooring, finishes, electrical fixtures, plumbing, and HVAC necessary for the proper functioning of the building,” the newsletter informs us cheerily. It’s like those neighbors of yours who built a fancy new home in the cul-de-sac but did not have exactly enough scratch to put actual furniture and carpeting and kitchen cabinets in the place, so they wind up eating dinner on the hood of the SUV in the garage. Except that the West Whiteland Municipal Building cost $16 million.

Ooops, sorry! I meant $16,347,503. But who’s counting?

Here’s my favorite part of the newsletter article about the building. “A fifth query” – can’t you just imagine the phone calls? – “we have been asked is, ‘When will the Township have the deed for this property?’ At present, we have a court order that allows us access to the property to construct our building. Unfortunately, the developer who holds the deed has refused to deliver it to the Township. Following lengthy, unsuccessful efforts to resolve this issue, the Township is now pursuing a legal resolution to this matter.” Folks, I’ve been a courthouse reporter since 1992, and when the answer to a question includes terms such as “court order” and “legal resolution” and “unfortunately,” there is only one response: “No good can come of this.”

Anyway, the whole thing is supposed to be taken care of by this summer, when the newsletter estimates the township will move into the building. This would reassure me except that I once read in Popular Mechanics magazine that in the summer of 2009 we would all drive flying cars when we weren’t riding monorails and eating freeze-dried Chicken a la King. So pardon me if I remain skeptical.

Oh, and to Constant Reader Ed from West Chester: The answer is, “It’s a mystery.”

Hearts for Megan Redux

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

Every life involves an amount of tragedy. The portion allotted to us may be larger or smaller – the loss of a home, say, versus a loss in the NFC Championship Game – but the time does come when it seems as though the world is falling apart around us.

The way in which we approach that inevitable tragedy, then, comes to mark us. Do we become bitter at life and bear the weight with scorn and vitriol, or do we reach within and pull some light out of our personal darkness?

I am sure that there are better ways to handle tragedy than the way Michael Bates, his ex-wife Kim Fellows, and their daughter Clare Bates have. But if theirs is not the best then at least it will do until the best shows up.

Their daughter and sister, Megan Bates, died in a traffic accident on Feb. 12, 2007, as she was on her way home from a night out in West Chester, where she was attending college. She was just 21. She died when the car she was a passenger in skidded off he road and into a utility pole. Making her death even more horrific was the fact that the driver was her boyfriend, and he was drunk.

I first encountered the Bates-Fellows family at the sentencing hearing for that young man, who would eventually be sent to state prison for the crash. I found it profoundly moving that rather than dwell on the anger and pain that this crime had brought their family, Megan Bates’ parents urged him to atone for his actions and make their daughter proud of his life.

“If she were here today, she would say to you, as she has said to me, to be strong,” Michael Bates told the young man as they stood in a courtroom filled with tears. Looking him in the eye, Bates also said he wanted something else from his daughter’s killer. “I want to hear from you. I want to hear that you’ve made your life better. I want you to do that to honor Megan.”

Some time later, I sat in Kim Fellows’ kitchen in West Whiteland and listened as the family talked about Megan, and what a remarkable force she had been in their lives.

She had a “desire for things to be perfect for everybody,” Fellows said, remarking that she could not remember setting out consciously to instill such values in her daughter . “She had such a strong sense of self, from a very, very early age.”

I was there to listen to the family’s plans to join with Megan’s friends and fellow workers at the Riverstone Cafe in Exton for an event, called Hearts for Megan, that would honor her life and at the same time raise money for the Mommy’s Light charity, which arranges for children who have lost their mother to have certain traditions carried on – such as baking Christmas cookies, playing Monopoly together, or simply going to the zoo on a summer day – as a way of helping to deal with the loss. Fellows said it as chosen because of Megan Bates' devotion to her own family traditions.

The event, organized by the Bates-Fellows family and Riverstone owner Nicholas Cacchione, was held last Feb. 13, and was a deep success, in more ways than the nearly $20,000 that went to Mommy’s Light at the end of the night. In Michael Bates’ words, “I stopped and looked around and all around there were nothing but smiles and people laughing.” It seems the tears had started to dry.

In extending her family's gratitude for those who participated in the event, Fellows related the Cherokee myth of the Good Wolf and the Bad Wolf. In it, a grandfather explains to his grandson that there is an ongoing struggle in all people between the Bad Wolf, which represents greed, envy, anger and jealousy, and the Good Wolf, which represents kindness, compassion and forgiveness.

The grandson thinks about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?" The old Cherokee replies simply: "The one you feed."

Fellows thanked those who came, “for feeding the Good Wolf.”

This year, Hearts for Megan will be held on Wednesday, Feb. 11, at the Riverstone, from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Fellows said that students from Downingtown West High School had become involved, and that the television personality Glenn Beck had also taken up the Mommy’s Light cause. “We’re trying to keep it ‘hometown,’ but it is really kind of exciting,” the way the event has grown, Fellows told me Friday.

We have had a lot of tragedy in our community in the past weeks and months, and people have lost things that can never be replaced. But if you want to see how love can fill the cup that has been emptied, you ought to stop by.

For more information, go to www.heartsformegan.com

House Rules

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 25, 2009.

Everyone has rules in life. Call your mother on Mother's Day. Take the shopping cart back to the cart corral. Never buy the first newspaper in the stack. Always park the car with the headlights facing out. Never buy a hamburger from a person dressed as a clown.

One of my rules is to always live near famous people. I've been at it for more than 50 years, and it's served me well.

These famous people may be dead at the current time, to quote "Perfesser" Casey Stengel, but frankly it's my rule and I can position the exception to it any way I darn well please, thank you very much. They need not even be famous at the current time, but as long as there was once a connection between them and the outside world that meant if you mentioned their name in polite conversation the other fellow would not look at you with a sense of bewilderment, I'm good.

Like my current neighbor, Smedley Darlington Butler.

I'll get to him more in a moment, but first I wanted to take you back to the early 1970s, when I first began propagating this rule. That was the time period when the family next door to our house in Cincinnati included a young girl who my sisters and I called Sarah and who you now call Sarah Jessica Parker.

Yes, that Sarah Jessica Parker. The "Sex and the City" star. The second "Annie" on Broadway Sarah Jessica Parker. And I'm talking about the Hollywood Sarah Parker, not the Chief Justice of the North Carolina State Supreme Court Sarah Parker. She and her family — three brothers, two sisters, a mother, stepfather and beat up old VW Microbus they never drove — lived next door to my family before she hit it big. (Trivia: SJP's first television appearance was in a local half-hour Christmas special of "The Little Match Girl." We watched it like it was Obama's inauguration. Not to spoil things for you, but her character dies in the end. Don't ask me why.) She moved to New York when I was in college, so I never got the chance to say goodbye.

It certainly should be obvious to the readers of this column that for more than a quarter century I lived in a house across the street from Buffalo Bill Cody and Claude Rains — although unlike my association with Sarah Jessica Parker, I never was afforded the opportunity of playing "Kick the Can" with either Messers. Cody or Rains. (More trivia: SJP was much better at "Cry Wolf" than "Kick the Can." Don't ask me why.) They had both long since shuffled off their mortal coils by the time I arrived in town. Cody wintered at the red brick mansion in the 300 block of South Church Street around the turn of the century while his Wild West Show played uptown, and Rains lived in the 400 block at the intersection with West Dean Street after his days of performing in films as the Invisible Man had come to a fortunate end.

To be sure, the selling point my new landlady pitched to me when she told me about the spot that was to become my new home had nothing to do with its nearness to fame. She was selling availability, not proximity. But for those of you without a proper sense of history, Smedley Darlington Butler was the Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf of his day.

He was born in West Chester to a prominent Quaker family and grew up to become one of the country's most decorated Marines. He served in China, Honduras, in World War I. He uncovered the alleged Business Plot to overthrow the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a military coup, and wrote a book called "War is a Racket." He had not one, but two nicknames, "Old Gimlet Eye" and "The Fighting Quaker." (Trivia: The nickname of my college basketball team was "The Hustling Quakers," although we lost games with stunning regularity. Don't ask me why.) He lived in the 200 block of West Miner Street and so, now, do I.

Thus, when I sit on the porch and gaze across the street I know I am looking not just at a red brick house with anonymous tenants, but at the concrete realization of my life's rule: make a neighbor of someone famous. So thanks for having been around, Smedley. (Trivia: SJP once starred in the movie "Dudley Do-right," the villain of which is named "Snidley." Don't ask me why.)

Exit Andy

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 19, 20009

I had not been working at the Daily Local News for very long when the managing editor, Bob “Shoe” Shoemaker, handed me an assignment that struck me as impossible. I had to get in touch with Andrew Wyeth and record his comments on some or other award he was set to receive.

I looked at Shoe with the sort of look that reporters give their editors when their editors tell them to do something that any person with half a functioning brain should know is just not ever going to happen. “Get Sandra Day O’Connor on the phone and ask her how she’s going to rule in that anti-abortion case? Sure, chief, but first let me turn this lump of coal into the Hope Diamond. I’ll get back to you.”

But Shoe was adamant. I needed to get Andy on the horn ASAP. How in the world was I ever to do that, I asked. “Look him up in the phone book. He’s listed,” Shoe told me.

No way. No how. Can’t be, were my first three reactions -- the only ones printable here in a family newspaper. This is the guy with his own museum, for pity sakes. This is the man who created “Christina’s World,” the masterwork that had hung on my wall as a teenager in Cincinnati. This was the guy who was more famous than anybody else from Chester County, including the Herr’s potato chips guy.

But I did what I was told and picked up the phone book and looked under the “W’s.” And there he was, in black type, Wyeth A, somewhere between “Wyerman” and “Wygent.” And so I picked up the phone and dialed (remember, this is the mid-1980s and the ever cost conscious DLN, and yes, we did still have rotary phones) his number. It rang, someone picked up the other end, I asked for Andrew Wyeth, and he said, “Speaking.”

I thought of that day and that call Friday, or course, when the news came that Andy died in his sleep at age 91. You might be excused for thinking it fitting for him to pass away in his sleep, since the “removal into dreams,” as one critic I read put it, had so much to do with his work. I think primarily of “Night Sleeper,” the wonderful study of Wyeth’s dog, Nell Gwyn, lying on a sofa, her head pressed against a pillow and the moonlit Brinton’s Mill in the background, a painting that he said had come to him on a nocturnal walk about his home.

Or “Master Bedroom,” another of a dog fast asleep, this time on a large bed with a white bedspread and a pale blue sky through an ancient window. And finally, “Spring,” the wonderful landscape of an old man lying in a field while the snow melts around him and brings him back to the world of the living. Sleep is where magic can occur in our everyday worlds as we remove ourselves into dreams, and the best of Wyeth’s works were nothing short of magic.

I am sorry that Andy had to die, but also a bit relieved that he did. I think his beloved world around Chadds Ford and the Brandywine Creek valley has lost a bit of the character he captured, and don’t know whether its move into the modern world disturbed him the way it disturbs me. I love the dry brush painting, “Roasted Chestnut,” but its view of a youth on a dirt road selling that particular treat does not strike me as a scene one would find along the back byways of Chester County today.

I once wrote that 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 in your life if you are to truly count yourself among the truly blessed. 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 on Route One. I’ve had my share over the years, including the aforementioned telephone call, but my last one didn’t involve meeting or seeing or talking with Andy.

My friend Julia and I visited Andy’s family home, there off Creek Road in the shadow of Rocky Hill, and took the guided tour of his father’s studio. The guide talked about how N.C. Wyeth’s children would play in that wonderful building and how N.C. would create scenes with props and costumes and bits of this and that for his illustrations. I imagined the young Andy playing in that room, and I saw a little bit of the magic that must have transformed him on the face of Julia’s daughter, Isabel.

I didn’t move to Chester County because of Andrew Wyeth, but I certainly stayed, in a large part, because of him. So thanks, Andy.

Being A Good Newspaperman

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

Like any good newspaperman, I have my share of secret sources, those people who call me on the telephone using hushed voices to relate information that otherwise would not see the light of day, leaving it up to me whether to investigate further in the cause of freedom and justice or to put the notes in a stack of press releases from the public relations firm that believes the next Pulitzer Prize-winning story is the one involving their client, the Roto-Tiller Cultural Institute and Dramatic Society, of Modena.

And like any good newspaperman, I keep the identities of those secret sources anonymous, refusing to tell anyone, even them, who they are, not even if compelled to by a court of law. New York Times scribe Judy Miller, who went to jail to protect someone who had actually told her it was all right with him to say his name in public, has nothing on me. I would gladly be incarcerated to protect the sanctity of the reporter-source relationship, especially because I am under the distinct impression my landlord will forgo any rent due while I am an official Guest of Her Majesty, as we like to say around the Chester County Justice Center.

So like any good newspaperman, I am not going to divulge the identity of the secret source who I spoke with last week and who informed me, somewhat breathlessly, that he had witnessed …

What? I thought. Official corruption? Bribes being passed between obscenely rich land developers and municipal codes enforcement officers? Text messages describing illicit encounters between high-profile county elected officials and certain cocktail waitresses who wore Dolly Parton-esque wigs? What was he spilling the beans about?

… a Bald Eagle flying down Route 322 outside Downingtown.

I may have not gotten the story straight at this point, so forgive me if what I am reporting here today is not as accurate as I normally demand of my work. But frankly, I quit listening when it dawned on me that what he was giving up was about as much value in the world of high-powered investigative reporting as the worn Chuck Converse high-top sneakers I threw away last month. There’s Gov. Rod Blagojevich caught on tape selling U.S. Senate appointments like so many beef ‘n beer tickets, and then there’s the occasional avian sighting outside West Chester. Or Downingtown. Whatever.

Don’t get me wrong. I am all for stories about Bald Eagles. And American Eagles. And the occasional osprey. I once spent several hours of my working day chronicling the discovery outside the Daily Local News offices’ of an exotic cockatoo and the bird’s eventual reunion with its owner. Even though some readers have of late referred to me as “completely offensive, arrogant and disrespectful,” I feel I can relate to the public’s general sense of newsworthy fascination in finding sea gulls pecking at food crumbs in the parking lot of the Giant supermarket across the street from our offices.

I would even be willing to participate in a newspaper contest to name a parrot who saved a woman from burning in a house fire and who later turned out to be of a different gender than first assumed – as a certain unnamed publication once did.

But why, I wondered to myself, did I have to keep the source’s name a secret? Was the person someone involved in anti-Bald Eagle activities and wanted to keep their bias out of the paper? Would the person’s employers wonder what he, or she, was doing calling the media to report local raptor activity? Was the person flat out lying and not wanting to be caught misrepresenting what had been seen?

I halfway feel like outing my secret source, thus punishing him for bothering me with this scoop-less scoop. But that would be unethical, and possibly time consuming. So I did what I always do in these situations. I told him I’d “look into it,” and “get back to him” if necessary. And I considered what angle the folks at the Roto-Tiller Cultural Institute and Dramatic Society, of Modena, had in mind exactly. Like any good newspaperman would.

Old County, New Map

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 4, 2009

It's a new year, but it's the same old Chester County.

Call it a hangover from the hours I have spent recently arranging and then re-arranging furniture in my new apartment, or attribute my thoughts on the geographical makeup of Chester County to my lifelong appreciation of the work on Continental Drift by the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener (b.1880, d.1930, m. 1912 to Else Koppen, daughter of the "Grand Old Man of Meteorology," Wladimir Koppen), but I think it's high time we reconsidered the present layout of the 72 municipalities we have here.

The basic blueprint of Chester County was set back in 1789 when Delaware County was finally, and thankfully, excised from our borders, left to wallow in its own cheesesteak grease. The arrangement of the municipalities hasn't changed since the creation in 1921 of not only South Coatesville but also Modena — two places that frankly could be left off any road map of the county with few people the worse for wear, but there you have it. We've had 188 years of uninterrupted sameness in the county, and I say that as we near the centennial of the formation of South Coatesville and Modena in 2021 we put our collective minds together on moving things around so that they make a little more sense.

I know that some of you will ridicule me for thinking it possible to physically relocate a municipality from one place on the map to another seemingly overnight, but I would point out that there were those eminent geologists who ridiculed my hero Wegener when he first started talking about Continental Drift and the theory of Pangaea, and what did he do? He took off in a hot air balloon with his brother Kurt to win an international contest by staying aloft for 52 hours so he wouldn't have to listen to the geologists scoffing, of course. I have a distinct fear of heights so I'm not about to do that, but I can still suffer your arrow slings of outrageous derision, nonetheless.

Here are my initial suggestions for moving things around on the map. Feel free to submit your own.

Let's start with the jewel in the crown, West Chester. We're the county seat, the center of attention, the destination sensation of the Delaware Valley (as anyone who has dared to venture out toward Gay Street on Restaurant Festival Sunday is more than painfully aware) and yet we (a) have no riverfront and (2) are not the center of the county. So we obviously need to switch places with Downingtown. We get the East Branch of the Brandywine Creek, they get the Goose Creek Waste Water Treatment Plant. We get an easy drive to Wegmans, and they can have the entire campus of West Chester University, kegs included.

Next up of course is the inclusion of the township of Chadds Ford, which I have argued in this space for some months naturally deserves to be part of Chester County rather than (shudder) Delaware County. I see a perfect space for it wedged in the Tri-Township area of Pocopson, Newlin and East Marlborough. The cheese, tweed and horse dung crowd out in Unionville will of course have no cause to look down their noses at these new neighbors, as they're probably sharing recipes for coq au vin or arugula salad or whatever it is you have with wine and cheese these days. Plus, you've got the added opportunity to change the name of the fire company over there from Po-Mar-Lin to something resembling actual words.

"What do we do with Coatesville?" I hear you ask. Not a problem. I say move the Steel City lock, stock and uncertified police chief to the 19301 ZIP code, right smack between Paoli and Berwyn on the Upper Main Line. The advantages of this are that the city residents will be able to look at a functioning community and decide to stop shooting one another, and that District Attorney Joe Carroll won't have to wear a bulletproof vest while walking the dog. I had thought of scrunching Coatesville in beside the other old aging steel town, Phoenixville, but that borough seems to be making a rise from the ashes and we wouldn't want to drag it down.

And as for Oxford? I say move it back to Mountain City, Tenn., where it apparently came from in the first place.

A Ramblin' Guy Rambles On

This column, published Dec. 28, 2008, originally appeared as my annual Christms Letter, in slightly different form.

It goes without saying that I'm a rambling sort of guy, but I'm going to say it anyway: I'm a rambling sort of guy. And I don't mean my conversational style.

Always on the move, I am. Never comfortable staying in one place too long, me. A highway junkie, I need the ol' white line. My life's motto is, "A rolling stone gathers no moss." Or, as Publilius Syrus put it, from the original Latin: "People always moving, with no roots in one place, avoid responsibilities and cares." (He had quite a way with the words, that Publilius.)

So when I discovered recently that I had been living at the same address for 26 years, the news took me completely by surprise. Are you sure, I asked? Can you check those dates again, please, because I'm a rambling sort of guy and to stick around that long in one location would not fit my particular, well, idiom. But they looked and there it was in black and white: I'd been living at the same address on South Church Street (The Best Street in Chester County) in West Chester since December 1982. You know, back when the Soviet Union still existed and the use of tobacco was condoned in public buildings.

So of course I had to move, which I did last week. Goodbye South Church, hello West Miner.

I started living at the top of a beautiful brick building on South Church Street across from the well-known Buffalo Bill Cody home and had gradually been working my way down the staircase over the years, so it was fairly well assured that I'd be out the front door at some point. Now just seemed the perfect time to roll away, seeing as I've noticed some green bryophyta developing in the spaces between my toes.

I started in an apartment on the front of the third floor, in a two-room place with virtually no furniture, a kitchen stuck in a corner much like an afterthought, and a small bathroom with a sheet-metal shower stall. After a spell in a third-floor rear apartment that in the summer felt more like "The Box" that the prison guards send Paul Newman to in "Cool Hand Luke when he misbehaves ("What we have here is a failure to persperate") than any other place on Earth, I ended up on the second floor in a four-room apartment that contained more in the way of cultural artifacts than you would guess a man of my age and situation could reasonably be expected to have accumulated. Or, as my landlord once put it, "You got a lotta clutter."

There is a mystical sort of symmetry — which happens to be my favorite sort of symmetry — in the place I am moving to and the place I am moving from. My new home is a two-room apartment on the third floor with a small bathroom — perhaps even smaller than the one I brushed my teeth in back in 1982. But this time I'll have plenty of furniture, and not the kind that was created by placing wooden planks across the plastic milk cartons stolen from area convenience stores — the statute of limitations for, I might point out, have expired.

And although I've spent far too long in that old place on South Church Street for a rambling sort of guy like me, I have learned a few things in the years I spent there. Such as:

It can take 150 years to grow the perfect sugar maple tree, but only a day to take it down.

Parking spaces will appear magically when it is raining and you've got a load of groceries in the car. They will disappear, however, when the meter maid is on the prowl.

Most importantly, the electricity will always stay on in a summer thunderstorm, but only on the other side of the street.

I wish all of you happiness in your homes in the coming year, and hope that you will wander by and see my new place sometime. Don't wait too long, however, because, well, you know me …

Case Closed, Opened

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Dec. 21, 2008

For those of you keeping track, I've got one mystery solved and another opened.

Don't know what I'm talking about? I refer you to the question I raised last week about a great slab of stone that sits quietly on the east side of North High Street across from the West Chester Golf and Country Club. It had no obvious purpose, with the possible exception of annoying me because I had no idea what it was. I am, after all, as news editor of the hometown paper, expected to keep on top of local items of interest, such as the reason behind West Chester's designation as the "Athens of Pennsylvania" (two locations on Gay Street that serve souvlaki, for those of you keeping score) or what the "B" in "B. Reed Henderson High School" stands for (I'm not telling, for those of you inquiring.)

I mentioned last Sunday that I could not divine what the stone slab was all about, and as luck would have it the following day two things happened: my telephone rang, and I picked it up to hear the gentle and thoughtful voice of Dr. F. Peter Rohrmayer.

Dr. Rohrmeyer has lived in West Chester since 1939 and practiced medicine here so long that by the day in May 1980 when he retired he had actually become pretty darn good, if not perfect, at the whole "doctor" thing. Dr. R informed me in his gentle and thoughtful way that the stone slab was not a slab at all but in fact the remnants of a horse trough that had been built by the person who owned the property along North High Street back in the days when horses were a regular sight on West Chester streets. He said that in years past, it had even been decorated at Christmastime, and that occasionally it would be festooned with flowers in the years after horses became its primary interest.

It's function, thus, was similar to the stone fountain that stands outside the Historic Courthouse a few blocks to the south, quenching the thirst of beasts of burden, and thus accounting for another place that state Sen. Andy Dinniman could have taken his pet (a labradoodle, as far as I can tell, for those of you wanting to know) dog for a drink if he had actually been alive in the 1890s.

But what Dr. R. really had to tell me about the old trough and fountain had nothing to do with the thirst quenching business, and all to do with a mystery that has gone unsolved to this very day.

It seems that on the top of the fountain was a bronze statue of a boy and a dog (no obvious relation to the current state senator from the 16th Senatorial District of Pennsylvania, for those of you checking your Pennsylvania Manuals.) Dr. R. said he remembers seeing the statue even after horses disappeared from High Street, until one day sometime after the end of World War II. Suddenly, the statue was no longer there. Gone. Stolen. Unlawfully removed without permission of the rightful owner.

The good doc related that the conventional wisdom at the time was that some miscreant had wrenched the statue from its moorings to melt it down somehow and sell the metal for whatever bronze was selling for in post-1945 West Chester. But, he said, one day before he retired he had a patient sitting in his office who told him the real story behind the theft.

The man, who Dr. R. said was in the plumbing trade, told him that he had a friend who had the statue sitting in his garage, plain as day. Being the gentle, thoughtful and lawfully minded general practitioner that he is, Dr. R. urged the man to come clean and go to the police with the information so that the statue could be recovered and returned to its proper place. But the man demurred and passed away without letting the doctor know the name of his (presumably) thieving friend.

So there you have it.

Somewhere, in some corner of Chester County, perhaps, sits a statue of a boy and a dog in a garage on top of a stack of old National Geographic magazines. And the folks who move it out of the way every now and again to get at the badminton set it blocks probably don't even know where it came from.

And that's a shame, for those of you taking notice.

Arcana Mania

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Dec. 14, 2008

I know what you are thinking.

You are thinking that because I moved to West Chester 26 years ago to the month and have departed only occasionally to get a taste of Skyline Chili in Cincinnati, Ohio, I must know pretty much everything there is to know about West Chester.

You’re thinking that when it comes to West Chester, I’m the guru, the master, the Mr. Know It All. That because I can pick up the telephone and dial the number to the office of West Chester Borough Manager Ernie McNeely without even looking at the buttons on the phone, that I’ve got all the bases covered, West Chester-wise.

You’re thinking that since I’m one of the few people in the world of West Chester arcana who not only knows that Thomas U. Walter designed the Historic Chester County Courthouse on North High Street in West Chester, but also knows what the “U” in Thomas U. Walter stands for, and that it is Glen Osbourne, the East Coast Wrestling Association Hall of Fame member, Class of 1996, who was born in West Chester and not Glen Osborne, the New Zealand rugby player, I must be about the smartest person in the galaxy when it comes to West Cestrian knowledge.

You are thinking that, and you are thinking wrong.

There is a significant gap in my knowledge of West Chester that was made apparent just this past week, and I am not too big a man to admit it. Driving past the West Chester Golf and Country Club (est. 1898, 9-holes, par 35, 5,700 yards, slope rating 126, 111 W. Ashbridge St., 610-696-0150) on Thursday I noticed a large stone slab on the east side of North High Street that I must have driven past hundreds of times but paid no attention to.

But what the deuce is it? I asked myself. It stands front and center of a semi-circular stone wall and is about the size of an extra large steamer trunk. It has levels and mantles that suggest that there was some purpose to it that is no longer active. Made of granite or some other deep grey substance, I first thought it must have been an altar of some kind that was used when the folks who settled West Chester (orig. Turks Head, after Turks Head Inn, est. 1747, stagecoach stop, house specialty mutton, prop. Jack McFadden) conducted ritual human sacrifice.

Kidding. That’s Coatesville.

It made me think of the small stone fountain (erected 1869, one spigot for people, one for horses, a little trough at the bottom Andy Dinniman’s dog) in front of the county courthouse, but what would Senator Dinniman be doing walking his dog across from the golf club? His game is squash, after all. Was it a stone bench for the High Street ‘Dinky’ Trolley (est. Nov. 10, 1891, terminates West Chester Normal School, see John’s, Jimmy: Hot Dogs for replicate)? Was it akin to the stone obelisks in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” whose discovery signals man’s progress? It was clear I had I had more questions than answers.

I could have take this as a sign that I’d hit the wall when it comes to West Chester knowledge, but I’m a hard-headed sort of fellow and am taking this as a challenge. So some time in the coming quarter century when I find out what this stone mystery is about I will get back to you and let you know just what it is.

In the meantime, just for the record, it’s Thomas Ustick Walter.

This Is What It's All About

This originally appeared on Sunday, Dec. 7, 2008

If you are looking for a good way to spend your morning you might take my advice and stop by the West Chester Public Library on North Church Street.

You want to time it just right, though, so you get there just about the time that the children’s reading group is breaking out in song. I cannot think of a better experience to put you in a good frame of mind than to sit at a table in the West Chester Public Library looking out on North Church Street while listening to children singing “The Hokey Pokey Song” in the next room, all the time surrounded by shelves and shelves of books.

Libraries occupy a special space in my memory, in the main because -- and I’m paraphrasing Willie Sutton here -- that’s where the books are. The Rellahan family had a reverence for books that was on par with the reverence some Italian families show for particular meatball recipes. A sketch my older sister (now a valued member of the library staff at the high school we both graduated from) drew once of our family shows a bunch of people sitting around a living room, faces stuck in open books. She was probably reading something while she drew it.

There was the Clifton Library at the corner of Ludlow and Ormond in Cincinnati where I got my first library card and paid my first overdue fine, and the library at Clifton Elementary School, which was located in the cafeteria and thus provided me the opportunity to nourish my stomach and mind at the same time.

The Clifton Library was a small affair, very similar to the community libraries here in Chester County, but when I was old enough to take the city bus downtown I made haste for the main Cincinnati library branch, a relatively massive, multi-storied building. School friends and I would make regular trips to the main desk there to request books that we knew were not on the shelves and would thus have to be delivered to us on a dumbwaiter-like affair up from the basement stacks., a particulary magical experience for an 11-year-old. Even now when I return to my hometown I am certain to stop at two places – the Skyline Chili parlor at Clifton and Ludlow and the used book store at the main library on Vine Street.

When I got my fist newspaper job in Sturgis, Ky., you could regularly find me killing time at the town library while I put off writing about the winner of the Miss Union County Fair contest or whatever the tops story of the week was. When I hooked on at the Suburban and Wayne Times in 1980 covering Tredyffrin, one of the first controversies I wrote about was whether to open a library branch in the (then) new Chesterbrook community. The supervisors ultimately decided not to, providing me with the first item in my ever-growing file of Stupid Political Decisions.

I find myself spending more and more time at the Exton Library these days, although fighting for space in the parking lot there is not unlike finding a seat at a Saturday matinee showing of “Twilight.” I also like the painting of barns that have been on display at the Hankin Library up north, and so I visit there occasionally even though it’s about a half an hour out of my way.

But the West Chester library remains my favorite of all. When I try to wonder why I find myself looking at the stained glass windows at the front of the century old building. There’s an inscription on one that shows faintly through the incoming sunlight. It’s from Bayard Taylor, Kennett Square’s famous poet, literary critic and -- oddly enough -- travel author.

“The healing of the world is in its nameless saints,” it reads. “Each separate star seems nothing, but a myriad scattered stars break up the night and make it beautiful.” I am not entirely sure I grasp its full meaning but, like the Hokey Pokey, I am fairy certain that that’s what it’s all about.

Thanks For Being An Adult

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Nov. 30, 2008.

Go ahead. Go ahead and be thankful for the bounty that has been laid on your table. Go ahead and be thankful for your family, friends and good neighbors. Go ahead and be thankful for your good health and the fact that that the sun still shines brightly and the grass is still green and the flowers at Longwood Gardens are still vibrant and colorful.

It is certainly all right with me if you want to give thanks for all those things. You have my absolute permission. I would not deny you your Pilgrim-given right to be thankful for those things, because they are fine things and worthy of gratitude.

But me, I am thankful for none of those things. I’m taking a pass on the bounty-family-friends-sun-grass-Longwood route. Me, I am thankful for Lawrence H. “Larry” Summers.

Yes, that Lawrence H. “Larry” Summers, the former secretary of the treasury, the former president of Harvard University, and, until recently, employed as the Charles W. Eliot Professor of Economics at the Kennedy School of Government. Mr. Summers made the papers this month when he was appointed chairman of the U.S. government’s National Economic Council by President-elect Barack Obama, and became a charter member of Obama’s team that will be given the task of pulling this great nation up by its bootstraps, financially speaking.

I am thankful for Mr. Summers and his appointment because of anything he believes in when it comes to economics. I have no sense of gratitude for whatever his past track record is, or whether he’s a supply-sider or flat-taxer or free market-supporter or trickle-up theorist. I am thankful for Mr. Summers because, frankly, he’s older than I am.

It was enough that I had to accept the fact that the man who’s going to be leading the free world in a couple of weeks just turned 47 in August. It was enough that I had to face the fact that the most powerful person on the planet not named Buffet (Warren or Jimmy) was going to be not only younger than me, but younger than my younger sister. It’s a little disconcerting to wake up to a world in which the guy they will be dedicating, “Hail to the Chief” to for the next four years is young enough that when he was in fourth grade I would have been perfectly willing, able, and justified in taking his lunch money.

But putting a guy in the Oval Office who’s younger than me by four years is the will of the people, and I stay out of arguments with the people, in the main, because there are so many more of them than me. But there I was looking at the bunch that was picked by Mr. 47-Years-Old to rescue my 401(k), and they were all post Baby Boomers. And that doesn't feel right.

If you are me, you don’t want a 47-year-old treasury secretary, like this Timothy Geither fellow. You don’t want a 49-year-old chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisors, like this Christina Romer person. You want someone who’s more grown up than you are, someone you can be certain knows how to balance a checkbook, someone like your Uncle Adrian who smokes a pipe and remembers rotary telephones. You want, frankly, an adult.

And that means they have to be older than you, or me, because you are well aware that you are not an adult. You are fairly sure that you are practically just out of college, for crying out loud, even though you recognize that most recent college graduates do not have gray hair or recent colonoscopies. You are certain that only adults know how to get countries out of economic meltdowns, and people who are younger than you are, sorry to say, not adults.

So I am thankful that Mr. Summers is there in Washington to let the kids know what they can and can’t do, and how best to save the country from utter bankruptcy.

And if you want to be thankful with me, go ahead and wish him a happy birthday. Because today Lawrence Summers turns 54.

Posted Monday, Nov. 24, 2008

No column this week, friends. Bumped by a series on guns, if you can believe it.

So instead, on to limericks!

There was once a man named O’Rourke
A much better lawyer than Bork
His greatest achievement
Beyond any believment
Was inventing wine bottles sans corks!


I knew an old woman named Sondra
Who had the most curious mantra
“You know you’re at peace,
When you’re covered in fleece,
And driving to work in a Honda.”


A college worker named Kate
Kept her friends’ favorite foods up to date
“Mickey D are all crooks,
So we’ll stick strictly to Brooks’,
And I’ll ship it to you if you’ll wait.”

There’s no one at all who is slicker
At getting in free than McVickar
“It so much more fun
When the payment is, ‘None”
And you still breeze by the turnstyle ticker

Feel free to join in at any time.

The Tribulations of Trials

This column originally appeared on November 16, 2008

There is a dirty little secret that we here at the Chester County Justice Center keep to ourselves, but one that I am afraid I can no longer contain. With the hope that my disclosure will not anger any of those in the criminal justice system that I pal around with -- to use a recent catchy urban slang phrase meaning, “having met once at a cocktail party” – I find myself wanting to come clean and share this confidence with you readers.

Trials are boring.

I have to tell you this because I’m tired of the lying. I’m tired of the deceit. I’m tired of agreeing with people who stop me in the street and ask, “Did you see that robbery trial the other day? Goodness, that must have been a thrill!” I’ve nodded and smiled and mumbled that it was the most excitement I’ve had since the Phillies won, when actually I’m thinking of my dentist saying, “Now this root canal may take a little time.”

Trials drag on too long, even when they are over the same day they start. Trials mean seemingly endless hours of sitting on uncomfortable pews and trying to strain an inch of drama out of whether the purse was in the woman’s left hand or right hand. Trials get in the way of a good story, as has often been said of the truth. Trials are, in their very essence, trials -- i.e., a state of pain or anguish that tests patience, endurance, or belief. (Thanks, Webster.)

I’m sorry to have to tell you this because I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking trials are the antithesis of boring. You’re guessing trials are to boring as McCain is to winner. “Trials are the most exciting, tense, mysterious, sexy thing to occur in the American jurisprudence orbit since the Magna Carta! I love trials! I’d watch them all day if I could. Give me your job!” you say.

Buster, you don’t want my job. The job you think I have is the one you dream of while sitting on the divan while watching one of the actors on “Law & Order” cross-examine Paris Hilton, the ne where you get all tingly as Atticus Finch delivers his summation to the jury in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” or tear up as Denzel Washington puts the screws to Jason Robards in “Philadelphia.” You want the job where you’re scribbling furiously as Tom Cruse tells Jack Nicholson he wants the truth and Nicholson howls, “You can’t handle the truth!”

You don’t want my job, because my job is scribbling lazily as a bright, motivated, articulate assistant district attorney asks Witness A if he or she can identify the contents of a manila folder labeled Commonwealth Exhibit 21-A and the witness drawls, “Yes, it’s a photograph taken of an empty parking lot with a White Castle sign in the background.” Thank you, sir. Now if you can turn your attention to the envelope that’s been marked as Commonwealth’s Exhibit 21-B…

The fun comes when one of the attorneys appearing in a courtroom decides he’s going to act like he or she is playing an attorney on television. “It’s acting!” you can almost hear them exclaim. They wave their arms and roll their eyes and speak directly to the jury during a witness’s testimony and ask questions like, “Do you remember where you were on the night of the 22nd?” They make things lively for about 15 minutes, until the judge in the case looks up at them and says, “Counsel, will you please turn off your television set?” Then, it’s Return to BoringTown.

Give me a plea bargain any day. You get the facts in brief, a quick recitation of the defendants sorrow for having run over the neighbor’s rose bushes, and if you are lucky, the judge will give the defendant a colorful lecture that makes for the kind of snappy copy that editors love.

For example, last week I heard a judge ask a DUI defendant step back from the lectern and look at the ground. What did he see? “My sneakers,” the defendant replied. “That’s right. And that’s the only transportation you’re going to have for the next two years, do you understand?” the judge said. Copy boy!

Meanwhile, down the hall the witness in the trial was being directed to look at the envelope containing Commonwealth’s Exhibit 33-C. It was a Mars candy bar wrapper, slightly torn.

Doing Something New For A Change

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Nov. 9, 2008

In 1972, Robert Redford starred in a film called “The Candidate,” in which he was cast as idealistic lawyer Bill McKay, who fights for the little man.

A man of integrity and charisma, McKay runs for high public office against an apparently overpowering opponent, but does it on his own terms, his way. Incredibly, he wins -- just like a certain someone you might have read about recently.

Anyone who knows movies knows the famous last line of the film, in which Redford, huddled with his advisors just moments after he has been crowned the winner, looks at them and says, “What do we do now?”

With Barack Obama’s historic, perhaps unlikely, surely enthralling victory in the presidential race on Tuesday, there are a lot of people repeating that line over and over. But it’s not Obama that I’m worried about – he’s got plenty of people on hand to answer the question for him, if he asks it. The people on my mind are, frankly, us. Or as Barack would put it, you.

On Tuesday I stood in line waiting to vote with Constant Reader Linda From West Chester, who poured out her soul to me as we inched closer to the ballot booths. The deadline was coming, the election would soon be over, and she was going to have to find something else to occupy her time come Wednesday morning.

For more than two years, she’d been glued to the tube after dinner, wrapped up in the news, eyeballing every hidden nuance in the election that glimmered on the screen. She watched O’Reilly, Olbermann, Maddow, all the debates, Chris Matthews at West Chester University, every viral YouTube video she could get her hands on. The election coverage was like air: it enveloped her, gave her life, never let her down.

And now all that was being taken away. She looked as if someone had run over her favorite dog.

Linda is not alone. There is me, for instance. For months I have established a regular routine when I signed onto my computer at work (don’t tell The Management.) I checked my e-mail, filled out my Facebook status, and headed right to the bookmark labeled, “Political Stuff.” The next 30 minutes or so was a blur of jumping from one site to the next: Huffington Post, Real Clear Politics, Daily Kos, ElectoralVote.com, PolitikerPA, Political Irony, you name it. I didn’t feel complete until I had consumed all that there was to be had at each site. I was lifted up or shot down with every posting.

On Thursday, however, I sat at the computer and opened one of those sites and stared at the screen blankly. I realized that there was nothing of interest there for me anymore. I’d seen the movie’s end and had no use for the credits.

So here’s the answer to candidate McKay’s question. Here’s what we’re going to do now.

1) Check out the fall foliage. I have it on the highest authority that this year is the best in the past 50 for autumn colors in Chester County. Not only are there yellows and reds, but there are also oranges and pale greens and crimsons scatted all over the hills from Nottingham to Warwick. My suggestions for the best place to “leaf peep” are the hills above Coatesville on Oak Street, and the west window on the fifth floor of the Chester County Justice Center.

2) Volunteer for a day at a local agency. You don’t have to put in much time, but you’ve got a couple of hours a day on your hands now that Hannity & Colmes are as outdated as Currier & Ives. Call the folks at the United Way of Chester County for help in finding a place to work. They love to help.

3) When was the last time you went to the Brandywine River Museum? It’s still there, you know, and it is just as peaceful and inspiring as it was the last time you walked its floors. Plus, if the day is nice enough you can sit outside and watch the Brandywine Creek glide by, which is in many ways better than anything on Fox. Or CNN. Or MSNBC.

4) Don’t look at the calendar. 2012 is only 1,147 days away.

Spirited Young People Celebrate

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Nov. 2, 2008

So, anything unusual happen around here last week?

I mean, besides the fact that the authorities had to call police into West Chester from as far away as Kuala Lumpur to help calm the display of exuberance expressed by the folks in town who wanted to properly commemorate the World Series victory by the Phillies Wednesday night. I don’t know about you, but for me nothing says sporting achievement quite like the words “overturned car.”

What happens if something else exciting happens in the world of Philadelphia professional athletics? Animal sacrifice? Spontaneous human combustion? Cats and dogs living together? Democrats sweeping the Chester County Courthouse?

My neighbors and I could hear the crowds cheering the Phils from the front porch of our place on South Church Street and I briefly considered walking the few blocks to join in the celebration. Good thing I didn’t, because apparently part of the admission to the event was a predilection for removing street signs from their moorings, presumably because they make good wall art when you’re on a limited budget.

I did find the whole matter good light reading in the paper at breakfast in Penn’s Table Friday morning, however, after the dust had settled and West End Towing had cleared the streets of upside down motor vehicles. Our wise colleague Jennifer Miller described the going on in her perfectly understated way: “For the most part, the chaos involved spirited young people publicly expressing their joy for the major win, both outside bars on Market, High and Gay streets and in the 500 and 600 blocks of South Walnut Street, where many West Chester University students reside,” she wrote.

The emphasis here, obviously, is on the adjective “spirited.”

My friend and former colleague Sondra Roberto, who broke both stories and hearts when she covered the cops for the Local in the mid-1990s, was appalled by the news, but for her own particular reasons. "There was a time when the only drunks who frequented downtown West Chester were journalists and lawyers and cops,” she wrote after the news broke. “The college-aged fools stayed in their place across town."

Welcome to the new West Chester, Sondra -- the destination spot of southeastern Pennsylvania and the perfect place to visit when you want to pick a fight with a K-9 officer, as one “spirited young person” reportedly tried to do.

According to Jennifer’s story, West Chester Police Chief Scott Bohn said afterwards that his department “anticipated a crowd after the game but was hopeful illegal activity would not occur.

"You certainly plan, and we had expected there was going to be a number of people, but I'm disappointed in the destruction of property," Bohn said. "While you expect anything and everything, I was hopeful that none of that type of activity would occur."

Sort of like Gen. George Custer hoping the Cheyenne Nation just wanted to give a shout out to their homey, Sitting Bull. Bohn can take heart that no other municipal police department in Chester County reported any major disruption after the Phils won. West Chester, it seems, is where folks come when they want to be taken into custody.

When I moved to Pennsylvania in 1980 the Phillies won the World Series for their first time in their history, so I feel a certain affinity for them. My friend Jamie was, and remains, a major Phillies fan, and he taught me the essence of fanaticism during their stretch drive for the pennant and the championship. He takes a back seat to no one when it comes to being overcome with joy when the Phils do well, and morose when they don’t.

But unless I miss my guess, all of the cars on Jamie’s road in Chester Springs still remain grounded on their four tires and the stop signs are still attached to their poles. Family members in his household remain uncharged.

Oh, and for you officers from Kuala Lumpur just arriving: the specials at Penn’s Table are great.

DNA Rape Case Closed

I first wrote about this case in August, and I thought readers might be interested in the follow-up. This appeared on Thursday, Oct. 30, 2008


WEST CHESTER – A man who had been accused of the kidnapping and rape of a young West Chester area woman in 2003 after DNA tests tied him to the incident four years later entered pleas in the case moments after his trial opened Wednesday.

The combined no contest and guilty pleas will see Alex Villa sentenced to 15 to 30 years in prison, according to the terms of his agreement.

The prosecutor in the case had told the jury in his opening statement that the trial would not last long, but even he did not foresee that it would be over in less than an hour.

“I’m glad the victim was spared from testifying,” said Deputy District Attorney Stephen Kelly, who prosecuted the case. “But I didn’t conceded anything for that reason. We were prepared to go forward.”

Villa pleaded no contest to rape, but guilty to charges of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, kidnapping and robbery of a motor vehicle.

His attorney, Amparito Arriaga, said Villa had always maintained that he had neither raped the woman, nor had he forcibly stolen her car. But she said that as Kelly went to his office to bring the victim to the courtroom after her opening statement -- during which she conceded that he had forced himself into the car and made the woman perform oral sex on him -- he informed her that he wanted to enter the pleas. She said he did not indicate what had changed his mind.

“It was his decision,” Arriaga said. She said she reminded him of the possible prison sentence he could receive if he was found guilty at trial. “That was of great concern. I didn’t offer him any new advice. But I think it was a fair resolution for all involved.”

The victim, who was prepared to testify, left the courtroom while Kelly was reciting the facts of the case to Judge Anthony Sarcione, who was presiding over the abbreviated trial. She made no statement, but indicted she would speak when formal sentencing occurs in 90 days.

Villa also offered no statement to the court or the victim.

The sequence of events began around midnight on May 31, 2003.

According to Kelly in his opening, the then 20-year-old school teacher, who lived in West Goshen at the time, was driving home when she stopped at a red light at High and Market streets in front of the Chester County Courthouse.

“Little did she now she was about to embark on a journey that would forever change her life,” Kelly said in his opening.

She saw a man approach her car, Kelly said, but felt safe because her doors were locked. Unfortunately, her passenger window as rolled down, and the man reached in and unlocked the door and jumped in.

The man, who did not speak English, motioned for her to give him a ride. The woman, whose name is being withheld by the Daily Local News because of the nature of the crime, thought if she drove him someplace he would leave her alone.

But the man became more confrontational and eventually directed her to a cul-de-sac in outside the borough, where he tried to grope and kiss her, Kelly told the jury of five men and seven women. There, she ran form the car, but he grabbed her b the hair and dragged her back into the car.


“She knew this as not going to be good,” Kelly said. “Nothing good was going to come of this.”

The man took the wheel, and while driving around forced her to perform oral sex on him. At some point she was able to call 911 on her cell phone and cry for help, but the man broke the phone and threw it out the window.

He eventually parked the car, pinned her in the passenger seat and raped her, Kelly said.

But when the headlights of an oncoming car distracted him, the woman was able to free herself and run towards the car. The motorist, Dan Vietor of Thornbury, saw her running towards him, half naked, and pulled over to help. The man drove away in her car.

Kelly said the car was found in West Chester a few days later, and police found a cap that belonged to the assailant, as well as part of the broken cell phone.

Police were not able to identify the rapist, however, until a DNA match came in May 207 tying Villa to the case. Villa had been arrested in late 2006 for dealing drugs, and as part of his guilty plea in that matter gave a DNA sample. That matched DA taken from the brim of the cap found inside the car.

In June 2007, West Chester Sgt. Louis Deshullo and Detective Scott Whiteside then traveled to the prison at Camp Hill on June 22, 2007, where, using a court interpreter, they interviewed Villa. Deshullo said Villa acknowledged he had jumped into the woman’s car after drinking beer and wandering around West Chester.

“I asked her if she wanted to have sex,” police said Villa told them during the interview. “She said no and started hitting me.” I may have hit her as I was trying to get her to stop hitting me.”

In accepting Villa’s pleas, Sarcione said he was compelled to comment on the events described by Kelly.

“The violence that you inflicted on this victim is unspeakable,” the judge said. “What you did to this young lady is every woman’s nightmare.”

Villa, a Mexican national, will be evaluated by the state’s Sexual Offender Assessment Board for status as a sexually violent predator before his formal sentencing. A deportation detainer had been lodged against him, so that as soon as he is paroled on the rape sentence he will be returned to Mexico.

Dismissing the jurors around 12:30 p.m., less than three hours after they began listening to the attorneys’ opening statements, Sarcione thanked them for the relatively brief time they served, telling them the case had been resolved.

“I feel kind of bad, though,” he said. “We didn’t even give you lunch.”

What A Reporter Wants

This originally appeared on Sunday, Oct. 26, 2008

You readers might think that we in the news reporting dodge would fight like tigers over the chance to cover a story like a presidential candidate coming to a West Bradford youth athletic facility to deliver a rousing campaign speech -- at which the candidate stirred the passions of his audience by declaring, “I need your vote.”

You might think that such an assignment would rouse us from our normal “cops-‘n-councils” drudgery and motivate us with a sense of excitement and First Amendment-y awe to rival any scene in “All The President’s Men,” and that, in addition, we would actually look like Robert Redford or Dustin Hoffman while covering it.

You might think that we would approach the task of reporting such an event with the same seriousness of purpose as would a firefighter at the scene of a burning schoolhouse, a policeman running down an armed bank robber, or a Republican National Committee staffer shopping at Saks Fifth Ave. for that “just-so” perfect Valentino pants suit to add to Sarah Palin’s soon-to-be-donated-to-charity wardrobe.

You might think that, but you would be wrong.

Reporters do not like covering campaign events. We do not like standing in big rooms with crowds of sweaty people, being herded around like sheep, forced to write down meaningless phrases that someone else wrote, all the time wondering how we were going to be able to keep our eyes open at the computer while we re-type those same meaningless phrases into a story.

Reporters secretly envy the people who go to the campaign rallies to actually rally, instead of transcribe. We envy them because for them, when the rally is over, it’s over. They can go home, heat up a burrito, turn on “Dancing With the Stars,” and if someone asks them how the rally went they can say, “fine,” just like that, and no crusty old editor is ever going to look at them and shout, “I send you out there for three and a half hours with two photographers to fill six columns and a 72-point headline and all you’ve got for me is ‘fine?’ ”

No, we reporters like news stories such as the one that hit the wires last week, dateline Jackson, Mo.:

“A man who left about $1,000 in $20 bills in an unzipped vinyl bag on a desk at his home is expected to be reimbursed after mice mutilated the cash. The man left the cash on the desk, but misplaced it during severe weather in March. He eventually found the bag, and in August took it to First Missouri State Bank in Jackson in hopes of covering his losses. Bank manager Michelle Johns said Wednesday she and two staffers picked through rodent droppings and bird feathers in the bag and reassembled the bills.”

Give a reporter an assignment that includes the phrases “$1,000 in $20 bills” and “rodent droppings” and you’ve given him the greatest Christmas present Santa ever conceived.

October marks my 26th anniversary covering current events for the Daily Local News. I’ve covered presidential campaign rallies, Ku Klux Klan marches, murder trials, open space referendums and Coatesville City Council before it became dysfunctional. My favorite story, however, is none of the above.

My favorite story is the one about the guy from Phoenixville who got mad at his neighbor for calling the police about a loud beer party he had at his apartment. The next day, the neighbor confronted his accuser in the backyard and pointedly took off the t-shirt he was wearing. Tattooed un-mistakenly across his chest were two words that are commonly used to describe, in vulgar terms, the act of human reproduction -- one a verb, one a pronoun.

He got 90 days probation, a $50 fine, and a reporters’ undying affection.

Blue Book Special

This has never appeared anywhere in print.

Sorry, Constant Readers. No column this week due to unavailability.

I crashed the Class of 1978’s 30th reunion at Earlham College, at which a fine time was had by all, except those of us who were held captive for 45 insufferable minutes by the college president, whose name I promise I will never remember, not only because he tried to shame us into giving the school free range over our checkbooks and retirement funds and those of our children and our children’s children during a fundraising pitch, but also because at a reception later in the day he introduced himself to me not once but twice, obviously having forgotten my name or face in the intervening five minutes between our first and (hopefully) last encounters.

The highlight of the weekend (for me, that is, not for anyone else) came when I was walking into the decorated gymnasium, with its grainy black and white photos of Mike O’Rourke in his soccer shorts for said luncheon and felt someone grab my elbow. Turning, I was greeted by a 50-ish woman in a red dress who said, “Michael Rellahan, it is such a pleasure to read your columns every week in the Daily Local.” She was a West Chester person and apparently recognized me from the photo that goes with the Sunday column. Either that or she’s seen my mug on the Post Office wall, in its semi-permanent frame under the heading, “Parking Ticket Scofflaws.”

I didn’t tell anyone because (1) I was too startled to know that I cannot escape from my own fame, (b) no one I was with would believe me anyway and, (iii) I wanted to keep it a secret until I could share it with you, my Constant Readers.

So here is what we would call on the second floor of Carpenter Hall an “essay test.” “What would be the biggest thrill for you at your 30th reunion, depending on whether you have/or have had, one?” Give examples. Show work.

Until next week.

My Thoughts of Trains

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Oct. 12, 2008

I do not know why I’ve been thinking about passenger trains so much in the last week.

Strike that, as we like to say in court when we want to take something back. I actually do know why I’ve been thinking about passenger trains so much in the last week, but I’m not going to tell you. I initially thought I would use that earlier bit of obfuscation to distract you, but I checked with the editors and it turns out I am not allowed to lie in print. Unless, of course, I am writing about the new Coatesville city finance director’s qualifications, and then the sky’s the limit.

But I have indeed been thinking about passenger trains lately, mostly about how much I love them and how I haven’t had the pleasure of taking a trip on one in quite a while. It’s something that I miss.

My fist rain rides came early in life, when my mother would put my sisters and me on a train in Cincinnati for a trip to her family in little Batavia, Ill., an hour or so west of Chicago. The train was called the James Whitcomb Riley, after the once famous “Hoosier poet” who celebrated all sorts of Americana. (Did you know that he wrote a poem called “Little Orphand Annie” that was the inspiration for the carton character of the similar name, and that years later my one-time neighbor in Cinncinnati, Sarah Jessica Parker, of “Sex and the City” fame, played Annie on Broadway? I didn’t either.)

I loved the fact that the train we rode on to see my mother’s aunts and uncles was named after a person, even if I did not know who that person was. I loved that when you tried to walk on the train, you swaggered back and forth like you were three sheets to the wind, and nobody minded because they were lurching around as much as you. I loved the peculiar aroma that came from the dining car and the fact that the tables had tablecloths on them and the silver water pitchers had small beads of water perspiration on them.

I also loved the fact that when we got to Chicago, we had to walk across town from Central Station, where the Riley came in, to Union Station, where we would catch the Chicago & Northwestern commuter train to Geneva, Ill., which was just up the Fox River from Batavia. I loved the fact that the commuter trains had an upper seating area where you could look down on the heads of passengers who were taking the train home after a hard day of work in Chicago.

As a grown up, I’ve ridden trains to Washington, D.C., and home to Cincinnati. I’ve ridden trains to New York City and to Boston. I’ve ridden trains to Philadelphia and Trenton, N.J. I’ve ridden a train from Dublin, Ireland, to Galway and from Sligo back to Dublin. I rode a train home from Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1992 after personally witnessing state Sen. Andy Dinniman wearing a tuxedo. I rode a train back to Exton from Lancaster, where I heard uber-lawyer Richard Sprague argue a case on behalf of Judge James P. MacElree II in March 1997.

In the courtroom that day, I listened to the argument Sprague made and interviewed him afterwards, then walked a few blocks to the Lancaster train station and hopped the Amtrak Pennsylvanian in the late afternoon. I sat in a seat facing back towards Lancaster as the train rolled towards Chester County.

I thought about the story that I was going to have to write when I got back to the office, mapping out the lead paragraph and mentally going over what to include in the story and what to omit. I looked out the window of the train and saw the sun going down over the farm fields of western Chester County that were furrowed with the promise of the coming spring. I’ve ridden in a lot of cars and flown in a lot of planes in my life, but I’ve never enjoyed the peace of travel as I did that day.