Through a Screen, Darkly

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Aug. 23, 2009

The other day, someone I was speaking with said they were “privileged” to grow up in Chester County in the 1980s, when the county was coming into its own, culture-wise. Local art became noticed, local cuisine started developing, and local entertainment exploded.

And I scoffed.

Privately, of course. You have to keep the scoffing to yourself when you are a professional newspaper reporter and you occasionally deal with people who say scoff-worthy things. You never are quite certain that the person you are scoffing at will at some point be on your “People to Call For Important Quotes” list and who may remember all too clearly the time you scoffed at something he or she said. Because let me tell you, professional newspaper editors are not wholly sympathetic with the “Scoff Defense.” It dos not tend to go over well on deadline. Editors given the “Scoff Defense” tend to look at the reporters who have offered it up with the expression of someone who has found gum on the sole of their shoe and who wonders, “How soon can I get rid of this?”

But scoff I did. “Privileged?” I chortled, softly, in my head. “Cultural opportunities in Chester County, circa 1980?” I clucked, privately, without expression. “Mister, you must be thinking of a whole ‘nother Chester County than I’m thinking of,” I retorted, with no outward display whatsoever.

It’s the movie theater situation, you see. When I moved to Chester County in 1982, the area lacked two things: decent Chinese restaurants, and movie screens. If you wanted either of those, you were likely to end up in Delaware County and what’s the point of that, anyway. If I had the urge to go to Delaware County for a plate of good Chinese food and a nice action flick, I would have shot myself immediately, thank you very much.

If you want to talk privilege, culture-wise, then you have to take a look at my childhood in Cincinnati so as not to scoff too loudly. Where I grew up, we could walk to a movie theater, the Esquire, where you could see a decent first-or-second run movie for $1. Or you and your friends could see a good first-or-second run movie at the same theater for the same $1, provided the usher was not looking too closely when you opened the back door and let your friends in.

I saw, “Dirty Harry” there. I saw, “Let It Be” there. I saw “M*A*S*H” there, and “Straw Dogs” and “Shaft” and even “Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang.” Pretty much every movie I saw from 1965 to 1980 I saw at the Esquire.

The Esquire was there when I came into the world in the mid-1950s, and is still there as I type this. Except that now, it’s even better. You may have to pay closer to $10 to see a good first-or-second run film, but you have your choice of four or five movies as the theater now has three separate screening rooms. That is privilege. And if the usher is not looking too closely, you can skip from room to room and squeeze in all four or five movies on the same $10 ticket. That is, you might do so; I wouldn’t think of it.

Chester County, by the time I arrived, on the other hand had depopulated itself of just about al the decent movie theaters within its borders, perhaps not realizing that people were just as interested in seeing a good first-or-second run movie as they were in visiting the Herr’s Snack Factory or the Mushroom Museum. Gone were the Palace and Silver in Coatesville; the Met and the Oxford in Oxford; the Garden and the Harrison in West Chester; and even the Roselyn in West Grove. The Warner Theatre in West Chester, grand as is was, was open sporadically, as I remember, but even that was eventually relegated to the misty-eyed past. We were pretty much stuck with the Eric in West Goshen, which is now a K-Mart and which tells you about something about the cultural landscape of the county, circa 2009.

Folks I know who grew up in West Chester in the 1960s and 1970s have pleasant memories of seeing their fist movies at the Exton drive-in, which I remember mostly as the spot where some depressed fellow set himself on fire around Christmastime one year, then walked across the street to the Howard Johnson’s and bummed a cigarette from someone at the counter. I suppose that seeing a movie at an outdoor arena while inhaling the all-too-fresh aroma of the result of your little sister’s car-sickness episode is the definition of privilege to some, but for me, it’s just one more reason to scoff.

To myself, of course.

Rounding Second, Heading for Home

This column originally appeared on Aug. 16, 2009

One of my favorite books to read and re-read is by a former Sports Illustrated writer, Leigh Montville, called “Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero.” Although the portrait that Montville paints of Williams as a great but flawed man is vivid and electrifying for a baseball fan such as I, there are an number of smaller descriptions of the people in Williams’ life that Montville uses to fill in the background and brighten the color that make the book that much more enjoyable.

People like Johnny Orlando, the clubhouse man for the Boston Red Sox when Williams was a rookie and not yet the famous “Teddy Ballgame, “and who gave Williams $2.50 when The Kid was sent down to the minors his first year. Or Dave “The Colonel” Egan, the Boston sportswriter who vilified Williams in print worse than anything ever said or written about Donovan McNabb. Or Maurice “Mickey” McDermott, the young pitcher who Williams took a shine to, but whose life off the field was one loud foul after another, including the time he and Frankie Fontaine, of the old Jackie Gleason Show, went drinking and McDermott left some lobsters in his car. For three days. “Smells so bad I have to sell it,” remembered the late McDermott.

And most striking of all, for me, Joe Villarino, who was interviewed by Montville in San Diego, where he and Williams grew up together in the 1920s and 1930s. Villarino loved to play baseball with Williams as a kid, but knew he was no match for Ted’s talent and never made it above Class D ball in Kilgore, Texas. But what he accomplished that Williams never would was an act of longevity. As Montville pointed out to my delight, Villarino played some form of ball for all of his life; Williams, except for some old timers’ games in the 1980s, hung them up when he hit his last home run in 1960. At the time the two spoke about Williams’ life s a young man, Villarino was holding down first base for a team in the LaMesa, Calif., Senior Slow-Pitch Softball League. He was 85.

“We have guys who drop dead playing,” Villarino told Montville. “There was a guy just last year. He was on second base and someone hit a ball into the outfield, and he tried to get from second to third. Never made it.”

I have not heard of that happening locally, but I have discovered that there are a bunch of people like Villarino who have apparently not been told that you are too past it to quit playing ball after you get your AARP application. They belong to a league called the Chester County Senior Modified Softball League, and have games from April to August in field in Coatesville, Downingtown and West Chester. In fact, they just finished their season on Aug. 10, when Proudfoot Roofing defeated Fence Sense for the championship, the 14^th straight time Proudfoot has won the league title. (Break up the Roofers!)

I bring this up because I recently came across a story written 15 years ago about one of the league’s players who exemplifies something about longevity the way Ted Williams’ friend Joe Villarino did. His name is Ben Catalano and he spent the season managing and playing for the Coffee Cup squad in the senior league. He was 73 when the article was written about him in 1994, which makes him, by my calculations, 88 years old and a marvel of life. Someone told me he’s still the oldest player in the league.

The story profiled not only Catalano but the league itself, which had then only recently come into existence. Catalano was known then as a feisty catcher who on occasion would get tossed from games for arguing a call. Must be a leftover from his boyhood in Brookyln, where he played ball and umpired in leagues that included players like Phil Rizzuto of the Yankees.

“I like to catch because you’re involved in almost every play,” Catalano told the writer. “Ever year, the league gets a little more competitive.”

The Coffee Cup squad didn’t make any headlines this year, going 7-11 and finishing in the middle of the pack. And Ben Catalano has been feeling a bit under the weather lately, although there is hope that he’ll be able to watch the World Series from home again this year. But playing ball at 88? That’s a hell of a thing.

I like to think about people playing ball into their retirement years because it allows me to imagine that life will go one as long as you want it to. I like to think about people playing ball when they are close to 90 because it proves that the best things in life are timeless. I like to think about playing baseball when you’re old because if you had to choose a place to die, wouldn’t it be wonderful to close your eyes one last time when you’re running between second and third?

No Potter, No Problem

This column originally appeared on Aug. 9, 2009

I have a lawyer acquaintance who jumped out of an airplane last week. Voluntarily. At 14,000 feet. In the air. Understandably, he had a parachute attached to his body, as well as a sky-diving instructor, so the chances that he would end up on the ground in a deceased state of mind were lessened, and he had a good time, especially when the 'chute opened at 5,000 feet (in the air) and he drifted downwards to once again set foot on terra firma.

And I am glad for him that he jumped out of that airplane and got the ride down. He is at an age when the things you always wanted to do before the bucket got kicked are more than just a list in your mind as you drift off to sleep. They actually become goals to achieve and enjoy. He was ecstatic and said so, and I wish him the best.

But frankly, no way.

Jumping out of an airplane is something that I have no intention, desire or hope of doing either now, or as the Grim Reaper is approaching. Jumping out of an airplane to me is like joining in a "tea bag demonstration" is to President Barack Obama. If other people want to do it, go ahead. I'll be in the snack bar.

My acquaintance's achievement, however, did set me to thinking. Not about what I would want to do as the bucket started to quiver and shake and tip a bit to the left, but rather what items are on my personal list of things not to do. Jumping out of an airplane is, somewhat obviously, near the top of the list. But there are other elements to the list that I would like to now state for the record.

First, however, a disclaimer: These are things I don't want to do, but am making no judgment about for others. That is, I am not pointing these non-goals out to cast aspersions on those who would engage in them and find them fun and worthwhile. Live and let live, I say.

No. 1: Visit the Reptile House at the Philadelphia Zoo. Why? Two words, to quote the actor Samuel L. Jackson. "(Expletive) snakes." I understand that there are other reptiles in the Reptile House that are less of a threat to my personal well-being, and I appreciate them. My car insurance is, after all, provided by a company which uses a lizard as its national spokesperson. But when it comes to snakes, I draw the line. Indiana Jones has got nothing on me in the snake department. I once stayed in bed for an entire day because I was convinced that there were snakes underneath it waiting for me to arise. If you want to see something slither, go ahead. I'll be in the Elephant House.

No. 2: Read "Harry Potter." I know, I know. You love him, it's the best literature since Dickens and you'd love to play Quiddich and J.K. Rowlings has brought back reading as a cool thing for young people to do. I just have no desire to find out what a "Half Blood Prince" is. If you want to study the world of wizards at Hogwarts, go ahead. I'll be in the non-fiction section.

No. 3: Attend an Ultimate Fighting Challenge event. It's not that I don't enjoy blood sport every now and again. After all, in my youth I watched Roller Derby games endlessly on UHF television, and even once attended a match featuring the Bay City Bombers at Cincinnati Gardens. (Shout out to Ronnie "Psycho" Rains!) If you want to pay good money to see grown men gnaw each other like so much steak, go ahead. I'll be in the line for Wilco tickets.

No. 4: Drive cross country with state Sen. Andy Dinniman. Not that I don't enjoy the landscape of this beautiful country of ours and would love to share it with a statesman/legislator/politician. But, really. If you want to listen to a four-day dissertation on SB 2742, go ahead. I'll be at the rest area.

Oops! Wrong Bar

This column originally appeared on July 26, 2009

Judge Howard F. Riley of the Court of Common Pleas of Chester County is not given to muttering.

No, Riley is a straightforward sort. Open and direct, straightforward and clear in vocal expression. He may not be as verbose as some on the bench or in the Bar, but what he does say comes across as clear and concise. A grumbler he is not. Maybe it is his upbringing on a farm outside West Chester, but he had not truly mastered the art of the whispered verbal aside. When he wants to tell a defense attorney from Philadelphia to keep the editorial comments to himself during cross-examination, he pretty much says just that.

So it came as a surprise to at least one longtime court observer the other day when Riley suddenly entered mutter mode. "I think we ought to bring a PBT to the courtroom at the rate we're going," Riley said, to no one in particular, and everyone who was in hearing distance, in a low, but distinct, frustrated comment.

Three things should be known by the reader to grasp the significance of Riley's mutter. First, Riley was not referring to Proton Beam Therapy (PBT), or a Pit Bull Terrier (PBT, also), of Polybutylene Terephthalate (PBT, ditto). No, he was muttering to the Gods of the courthouse that his courtroom equipment just might need to include a Portable Breath Tester (PBT, as well.)

You know what a Portable Breath Tester is, don't you? Well, you would know if you had been watching "Cops" lately, or else had the misfortune to come in contact with the "home version" of the "Cops" studio game, so to speak, on a late night ride home from the eight-month anniversary of the Phillies World Championship Celebration and Drunken Riot. It's that small device that allows a quick read on whether someone has alcohol in their system.

The second thing you need to know about Riley's mutterance is that when he said it, a young man from Staten Island who was pleading guilty to a minor drug possession charge had just informed him that, yes, indeed, as a matter of fact, he had consumed some drugs, alcohol or medication within the last 24 hours. To wit, six or seven beers the night before.

It's a standard question that judges ask of defendants when they are pleading guilty — "Have you consumed any drugs, alcohol or medication within the past 24 hours?" It comes right after how far the defendant went in school and if they understand, read and write the English language. The question is sort of the judicial equivalent of, "So, do you live around here?" that might be asked by a member of one gender to a member of the opposite at any one of a number of local watering establishments. It's an ice-breaker, something said to open up the dialogue. Usually, the defendant answers by saying "No," just as how usually the aforesaid one gender member responds to the other by saying, "Stick a cork in it, pal."

On Thursday, however, the young man from Staten Island surprised everyone, including his attorney, Assistant Public Defender James McMullen, by allowing that yep, he'd consumed what Beldar Conehead on "Saturday Night Live" used to refer to as "mass quantities" of beer. And not only that, but he'd smoked marijuana not three nights before, too boot.

The third and last thing you need to know to fully understand Riley's muttering is that it is not the first time someone has shown up in his courtroom under the possible influence of alcohol in the past few months. It's not the second time, either, or the third. Showing up under the possible influence of alcohol in Judge Riley's courtroom is getting to be a somewhat regular occurrence. Things have gotten to the point that Ken Webb, one of Riley's tipstaffs, treats walking the defendant down to the Adult Probation Office, where they view PBTs as just so much office equipment, as part of the job description, like showing defense lawyers from Philadelphia how to fill out continuance requests.

The young man from Staten Island followed Webb out the door of the courtroom and came back a little while later with a report that he wasn't currently under the influence, and his sentencing was able to proceed without any further ado. He got probation, a lecture from Riley about why drinking six or seven beers before coming to court might not have been the best option to consider, and a handshake and best-of-luck wishes from McMullen.

And although he may not have been serious about actually bringing a PBT (Portable Breath Tester) to court for future emergencies, Riley may want to think again about the whole PBT (Proton Beam Therapy) thing. Might come in useful for those defense lawyers from Philadelphia.

Park Here

This column originally appeared on Sunday, July 19, 2009

Stop what you’re doing.

Put down the remote control, and turn off the Wii. Set aside the hedge clippers and quit cranking the lawn mower. If you’re in the car on your way to the mall, hit the brakes and turn around (making certain you use the turn signal; we don’t want you to get 1) rear-ended or 2) a moving violation citation.)

Why? Because there are about eight parks in East Bradford that deserve your attention, and with the weather doing its best impersonation of mid-May there is no time to waste to get to them for a little outdoor recreation.

Walking the sidewalks of West Chester we have found is a fine thing to do, and we are not about to start complaining about it. Sidewalks make a community livable because they bring people in contact with one another – either in the active sense of using them to get from one place to another all the time running into people you know, or want to know, along the way to whom you do not owe actual money, or in the passive sense of sitting on your front porch and watching as your new, or old, neighbors pass by with either a friendly wave and a kind hello or, if you are truly lucky, with a blueberry pie they baked for their Aunt Hester but decided to bring it over to your house instead.

But walking along paths that meander through the woods or along the peaceful banks of the Brandywine Creek is something that is not to be sniffed at either, and that is why we say that the parks of East Bradford demand your attention. They have both of those options aplenty, and other amenities to boot, like picnic tables and soft meadows, and shady trees and the Valley Creek. Not to mention the odd rope swing.

In fact, it as a rope swing that got us thinking about the parks in East Bradford in the first place. We saw the photos on the front page of our favorite daily newspaper last week that showed a gang of teenagers using a rope swing to douse themselves in swimming hole in the cool waters of the Brandywine, and though to ourselves. They looked as though they were having the time of their lives, if their lives had been lived in a Norman Rockwell universe of about July 1947, we thought. Teenagers, we thought, are not supposed to use rope swings to douse themselves in cool water in the 21^st century. Teenagers in the 21^st century are supposed to use rope swings to tie up their parents so they can spend an hour or two more playing WarCraft on the Dell without interference. Cool water and teenagers only come into contact when the latter needs something to drink after falling off their skateboards, and the former is available in plastic bottles.

And we wondered where in the world there still existed something akin to a “swimming hole,” which we understood once was available in every Chester County backyard until the developers started to use them as stormwater detention basins. So we did what all good newspaper reporters do when confronted with a question we had no ready answer to: we asked the photographer involved. Newspaper photographers may not actually work for a living the way normal people do, but we are certain they have an answer for just about any question you put to them.

So they told us: The swimming hole is down the road at Shaw’s Bridge Park. On South Creek Road off Route 842. You know, in East Bradford.

And we remembered visiting Shaw’s Bridge Park last year when the weather was just hot enough to make you want to take a dip in the Brandywine Creek, west branch, and watch kayakers float by. We remembered that we smiled at a young woman who had taken her babysitting charges to the bench at the park that overlooks the creek and that the children looked like they were having fun circa 1947, splashing in the water and skipping rocks across to the other bank. And we remembered that we liked parks that had real names, like Paradise Valley and Harmony Hill and Timbertop and Sugar’s Bridge and Shaw’s Bridge, names that conjured a place and ambiance instead of a generic designation.

And so we stopped what we were doing and turned off the laptop and made haste for Shaw’s Bridge Park. And we listened to the wind in the trees, felt the cool water on our feet, and heard the ripple of the creek over the rocks. And for our attention to the parks of East Bradford, we were rewarded.

Walking the (Clifton) Walk

This column originally appeared on Sunday, June 14, 2009

I don’t normally get involved with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I tend to steer fairly clear of organizations in general – the words “organization” and “newspaperman” not wholly fitting together – and have also for several years given wide berth to any group whose formal name contains the word “disease.” So don’t go getting the idea that whatever issues the boys and girls down at CDC headquarters decide to promote go straight to my mass e-mail list. I know they’re doing good work, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to put down my iPod every time the CDC wants to talk about bio-terror emergency preparation or mold prevention strategies.

But I do want to thank them for coming up with their KidsWalk to School Program, which teaches parents and community leaders how to encourage the practice of kids, well, walking to school. The idea is that kids who walk to school are healthier, more energetic, friendlier and less inclined to grow obese or, worse yet, watch “reality TV” programs like “Viva La Bam” or “Kendra.” I think the goal of getting kids to walk to school is laudable for a variety of reasons, but they have more to do with collecting four leaf clovers than staying slim. I’ll explain why in a moment.

The walking to school issue rose to national prominence recently because, frankly, I began communicating with kids I went to elementary school with back in the days when nobody envisioned a black president, Hispanic Supreme Court justice, or $4 a gallon gasoline. They are, of course, not kids anymore, but apparently have reached the same conclusion as I about life in general, and that is that practically everything was better then than it is now. Including, you guessed it, walking to school.

We all lived in a neighborhood called Clifton in Cincinnati, Ohio, through which Clifton Avenue ran past two schools, “old” Clifton Elementary School and “new” Clifton Elementary School. (Curiously, the “old” building still stands, while the “new” building was torn down a few years ago for a new “new” building. Go figure.) The schools were adjacent to one another, and within an easy half to three-quarters mile from our homes. It took 15 minutes to half an hour to get to school, depending on how far away you lived and often and for how long you stopped to look for four-leaf clovers.

A friend named Paul Patterson, you see, had started this obsession with finding four leaf clovers in the front yards of the homes that lined Clifton Avenue. He developed such a knack for it that he claimed to have 20 or more of the good luck charms encased in plastic display boxes in his room. I did not doubt him for an instant, nor did any of the other kids in our class, who, I remember, when once asked on a test to use the words “four, leaf, and clover” in a sentence, all connected them with Paul Patterson, to a boy and girl.

So the race was on for those of use who felt slightly jealous of and intimidated by Paul Patterson and his collection of four-leaf clovers. Watching him, it seemed easy enough to accomplish the same thing, after all. He walked up to a yard, stood over the grass, stared for a while, then bent over and picked up a fresh four-leaf clover and went home to do his homework and practice the violin. (Paul Patterson now plays second violin with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and although I am not entirely certain that luck did not play a pivotal role in his selection, would nor debate the point that talent certainly cannot also be dismissed.)

There must have been some other factor in the hunt for four-leaf clovers that Paul Patterson either neglected to mention or kept to himself because to this day I have amassed the grand total of only zero four-leaf clovers, a number I fear is approximately the same as my childhood classmates Mary Hoffheimer, Helen Richards, and Caroline Siegfried, with whom I began this reconsideration of school walking earlier this month. But in looking for the lucky charms, I at least began to get to know on a more intimate level the community in which I lived, and connected on a friendly level with people who 40 years later I can still talk to without having to explain what I mean when I reference the “old” school.

So thanks, CDC, for the effort to get kids to walk to school so that they are healthier, more energetic, and less like to grow obese. But you might want to also mention the part about the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. It couldn’t hurt.

A Lesson in LIfe

This is a revised version of a column that originally appeared Sunday, June 7, 2009

I remember seeing him in the surf at Cape Henlopen in Delaware, on what I imagined was his first visit to the beach. He kept his t-shirt on when he went in the water, even though it was not particularly cold. It seemed clear that he was enjoying himself -- a big smile played on his face -- but he also struck me as timid and careful, never ducking under the waves, always turning away from them, afraid of their spray.

He was shy and said little, the way teenagers will when surrounded by adults they do not know well. The language barrier between us perhaps made him even more bashful. He was friendly, the other way from teenage surliness, but hard to get a handle on.

How could I have known that just months before, this quiet young man had made one of the bravest, most courageous decisions that a person could make; that he had willingly put his safety in jeopardy, his life in peril, so that he could attend school? That he knew every day that gunmen were looking for him, or someone like him, to shoot in order to make an example? To put it plainly, how could I know that he had risked death, simply to have a chance to learn?

This winter, he asked me to help him proofread the essay that he would be sending to colleges that he was applying to, here in his adopted country. (I do these freelance editing tasks willingly as favors, since it is almost all I am capable of doing. Please do not ask me to help change the oil in your car; I am still paying for the seized engine from the last go-round.) The essay came to me as an e-mail, and this is what I read first when I opened it:

“As I sit here in my room in my second home, in the United States, I can still see their faces, their dirty clothes, and their guns.”

In striking detail, he recalled the day in June 2007 when he sat in his classroom at the Gifted Students School in his native Baghdad and a teacher came in to announce simply that: “They are here. Al-Qaeda.”

For months before he had walked to school in his neighborhood and seen the dead bodies piling up. “People got shot for being Shia, like me, in a Sunni neighborhood,” he wrote. “I saw something like that almost every day; it was very dangerous every day.” Now, the gunmen from Al-Qaeda were in the school office, asking if there were any Shia students in class. The teachers and staff tried to convince them there was not, that this school was Sunni. One and all were aware what would happen: if the children were found out: Any Shia student would be taken away and shot. No questions, no doubt. And so he sat and felt his teenage heart beat in his chest and thought, I suppose, of the few years he had spent on Earth. And, remembering later that cold grip on his soul, he wrote this:

“At that time, I felt that I was few minutes away from death, getting closer every second. I was scared, but not because I thought that I was going to die. I was scared because I was thinking about what might happen to my family when they heard that I got killed. My dad always told me, ‘Don’t go to school, your life is more important than your education,” but I never listened and I always argued with him because I believe that my education was important enough to take the risky chance.”

The gunmen entered the room, looked around, and went away. They stole some cars, but left everyone alive. “Those seconds felt like years, they were the longest seconds in my life,” he wrote. “I felt that everything was happening in slow motion. I can still see them, right there by the classroom door, looking at us.”

And the next day, he went back to school. And the next, and the next, never telling his family what had happened, because if they knew it would mean the end of his schooling. What parent, after all, would put a child in a situation where the alternatives are hoping to complete exams or staying alive? But he said he earned an important lesson as he walked into his school the day after the men with their guns had left. In his essay, he wrote:

“Education is an important factor for success in everyone’s life. And just like many kids, I took it for granted. But now I know how important it is and how valuable it is. There are things in life where we don’t understand their value until we either lose them or get close to losing them, and education is one of them.”

He graduated from Westtown School on Saturday. That day, I saw a photo of him with his classmates taken at the beach this spring. He is bare-chested and bold, playing beach volleyball in the sun like a Californian, with a smile as big as ever.

Congratulations, Ammar Al-Rubaiay. You are my hero. Good luck in college.

An Old Fogey Remembers

This column originally appeared on Sunday, May 24, 2009

This is an apology alert.

I am going to apologize to a section of the Chester County demographic for the column I am about to compose, and I wanted to let you know about it. I am going to apologize to that demographic – i.e. the 18 to 35 age bracket -- because I know what it is like to have inflicted upon you, meaning me, what I am about to inflict on you, meaning them. I am going to apologize because I am going to write what we in the ink-stained wretch biz affectionately refer to as “the Old Fogey Column.”

You know the type, I am certain. You know the type because you have read them as long as you’ve been reading newspapers. You know the type, but you may have also referred to them as the “back in my day column.” You know the type, because you’ve read them and either nodded your head sagely about the perspecaciousness of the writer, or shook your head and wondered what they pay people for putting drivel such as this in print.

This is the column in which the author gets to harrumph about some change he or she just woke up from their afternoon zizz long enough to notice, whereupon he or she promptly made a mental note to pontificate on the subject of how “times have changed” and then go back to sleep. This is the column in which the author proclaims the benefits of the rotary telephone, or transistor radios, or non-bottled water that was so commonplace when he or she was coming of age.

The subject of this column occurred to me Monday when I heard that the folks in the Chester County republican Party were not, repeat not, going to be gathering at a spot on the west side of West Chester to go over the returns from the Tuesday’s primary election. Rather than live it up at the Elks, Skip Brion and his merry bunch of Grand Old Partiers were going to hunker down at the headquarters on South Church Street.

A similar theme was relayed to me about the plans of some major Democrats. The days of gathering at the local Knights of Columbus having gone the way of the nickel candy bar, they were going to get together at somebody’s house to check the returns as they came in.

Watching Out

This column originally appeared on Sunday, May 31, 2009

You are being watched.

Ahem. Perhaps “watched” is not quite the correct word, since it means that a person is looking at you, observing you, studying your moves. Let me say instead that you are being captured by a camera’s eye, recorded on video, your image filed away for future reference, whether you know it or not.

It’s not entirely a Big Brother sort of thing, the surveillance of average people by the government as envisioned by George Orwell in “1984,” the telescreens there in every apartment waiting to catch the citizens of Oceana acting without the interests of their all-knowing leader at heart. No, we Winston Smiths are in this case watched primarily by business interests, rather than political bureaucracies. And entertainment colossusses.

The thought of this ubiquitous video presence occurred to me some time ago, when I wrote of the case of several young men who were arrested and charged with a home invasion robbery at one of the apartment complexes in West Chester. Police were able to make a compelling case against the men in part by the use of videotapes taken from security cameras at both the apartment building where the robbery took place and a local Wawa, where the co-conspirators -- as we enjoy calling folks who decide that committing a crime is the best way to solidify a budding relationship -- gathered before and afterwards.

The men knew there were security cameras in the apartment hallway, and tried to disable them. But they did not realize that they were also being filmed as they stood outside the Wawa, their disguises in the apartment having discarded. Police were able to watch the Wawa video and match each man up to the images of the hooded and masked men who came to ransack and rob.

So, too, I believe, was the Buck County woman who faked her own kidnapping last week unaware that she would be spotted by a security video walking through the Philadelphia International Airport on her way to a luxury vacation at Disney -- a vacation albeit shorted somewhat by the delivery of an arrest warrant for false reports by the FBI. She apparently was not aware of the scope of the modern Big Brother’s presence.

And neither would I be. When I shop, I don’t consider that my movements, and inadvertent impulse purchases, are being filmed for general viewing purposes. When I walk down the street, I don’t imagine that a camera is going to catch me secretly scratching my nose. Or worse.

But I am perhaps among a select group who do not desire their lives to be filmed and broadcast, even though it may show those lives disintegrating into cheesy drama. I am referring of course, to the news that the Berks County couple who have become known far and wide as simply “Jon & Kate,” are now having marital and, possibly, legal problems.

According to the Associated Press, Jon, Kate and their eight children have attracted a huge TV audience, screaming tabloid headlines and, now, a state labor investigation.The Pennsylvania Department of Labor says it's looking into whether the hit reality show "Jon & Kate Plus 8" is complying with child labor laws.

The show drew nearly 10 million viewers for its fifth-season premiere Monday following reports of trouble in the Gosselins' marriage. Labor Department spokesman Justin Fleming tells The Associated Press that the department is looking into a complaint against the show. So now the poster family of fertility has the potential to find itself a symbol of child exploitation.

People must realize that the presence of cameras has unintended consequences, and rather than define reality, alters it. Recall the example of the All American Loud family in the early 1970s, whose idyllic family life ended in surprising divorce as the Public Broadcasting System cameras rolled. The impact of an ever present lens is why courtrooms in Pennsylvania don’t allow cameras, and why I am certain that the Chester County commissioners’ meetings are soon going to start featuring some classic “American Idol”-type moments, now that the meetings are being videoed. People, any good newspaperman will tell you, turn into different characters when the camera starts rolling

Perhaps the best consequence of this video presence is that eventually those potential criminals will realize that their every movement is on tape, and they’ll simply burst into a version of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miz, ala British reality-show chanteuse Susan Boyle, instead of carrying through on that carjacking.

I’d watch.

Connecting The Dots With Cheryl

This column originally appeared on Sunday, May 17, 2009

My friend Cheryl has this theory about the universe.

Cheryl, who close friends refer to as The Wise Woman of West Vincent, frankly, has a lot of theories about a lot of things, including, for example, but not limited to, the restorative benefits of black and white commercial television circa 1967, and I am glad she does. Generally having her around relieves me of having to develop my own theories about the universe.

My feelings about Cheryl’s theories are similar to a relationship I heard that developed between the writer Calvin Trillin and his beloved late wife, Alice. In their marriage, she took responsibility for keeping on top of certain world current events, such as the war in the Middle East or monsoons in Bangaladesh, allowing him the freedom to concentrate more on finding a very good bagel shop in East Lansing, Mich. With Cheryl, she’s got the spiritual nature of the universe covered while I’m free to focus my attention on getting a nice cup of hot chocolate with whipped cream at Penn’s Table.

Cheryl’s theory about the universe goes something like this: If you have question about something, you just pose it in your mind, wait awhile, and the answer will eventually come to you out of nowhere. The universe will deliver it, free of charge.

If you wonder, for instance, how Indian children can eat the sort of spicy food that you can’t get your 8-year-old to swallow at gunpoint, at some juncture you are going to turn on the radio and some author from Mombai will be telling an NPR host how she used to train herself to eat cayenne pepper curry when she was 4 so she’d be ready for the “adult food.”

Her husband, Jamie, refers to this theory as “interconnectedness,” and has developed his own corollary that sort of goes like this: if something cross your mind for no particular reason, someone else is going to mention the same thing to you without you asking. You’re going to remember a night you spent in a fire house in Asa, Oklahoma, and two minutes later the phone is going to ring and the sports editor of the Daily Oklahoman is going to be on the other end.

Now, the truth be told, I don’t hold with a lot of this “curve of binding energy” mumbo-jumbo stuff. I’m not a New Age, crystals and pyramids sort of guy. I’m actually an Old Age guy, who more or less believes that many of the answers to the world’s mysteries can be solved by ordering another cup of hot chocolate with whipped cream at Penn’s Table. But occasionally, I give in.

Case in point: I recently drove up Bell Tavern Road in East Caln on my way to Cheryl and her husband’s house for dinner, and passed by a unique street lamp along the side of the road. It reminded me of the gas lamps that lighted the street on which I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. Quietly, I wondered if those lamps still existed, or had been replaced by some electric arc-light monstrosity such as the ones that illuminate my bedroom at night, free of charge, from the roof of the Chester County Justice Center Parking Garage. (Thanks, commissioners!)

Two days later, I opened a package that arrived from my aunt containing a book of photographs of Cincinnati, Ohio, that she had found at a library book sale in Lawrenceville, N.J., and thought to send to me. Leafing through its pages, I turned to a photo of one of those aforementioned gas lamps, framed in snow, with accompanying text that spelled out how residents of the neighborhood had fought for years to keep the lamps trimmed and burning in the face of increasing costs. And the more I looked at the photo, the more I recognized the scene –the very street that I grew up on.

An I sat on the edge of my bed and thought about those nights when I would sit in an old broken down Volkswagen Microbus my next-door neighbor’s father owned but didn’t drive, dreaming about the day that I would be old enough to drive a stick-shift car, my revelry illuminated by the glow from those gas lamps. And I wondered what had become of my neighbor, who had played in the street with my sisters as I sat in that bus, on those warm Cincinnati nights as the sun went down and the gas lamps lighted up.

And the next day I turned on the television and watched the movie star Sarah Jessica Parker describe her new “Lovely” perfume. And I thought, “Oh, so that’s what happened to her.”

Paying Attention

This column originally appeared on Sunday, May 10, 2009

There are people in any community who go about their lives in a quiet fashion, ruffling no feathers and roiling no waters. They fly mostly under the radar, out of either conscious choice on their part or studied indifference on ours. They make a difference in the world, surely, but in a low-key, self-conscious manner. Like the fictional Willie Lowman in “Death of a Salesman,” when they are gone, perhaps we look about and wonder why we didn’t notice them before, and kick ourselves for not paying attention to their quiet contributions.

This isn’t about one of those people. It’ s about John J. Duffy.

I have not known John J. Duffy all my life, but there are times it feels like it. He is as much a part of the landscape of the Chester County I have come to know and appreciate, if not adore, as the clock tower on tip of his beloved courthouse or the waters of the Brandywine Creek. He is as noticeable and brash as the neckties he favors. Among the legal circle I associate myself with on a professional basis, there are few who do not, when you ask them, have a ready, distinct, certain opinion of John J. Duffy – good or not so good, affectionate or antagonistic.

That is to say, you may not like John J. Duffy, but you must acknowledge him. He is no shrinking violet, no silent witness, no unseen face. He is a criminal defense attorney and a proud, accomplished one, who has battled his way through countless trials and rubbed those across the aisle from him more than one wrong way over the years.

So the very fact that this coming week John J. Duffy will be called to stand and be honored by those people he has battled – judges and prosecutors, for starters – is remarkable. On Friday, the Chester County Drug Court will present John J. Duffy with its Osceola Wesley Award, given to a person who has aided in the recovery of people gripped by addictive demons. He does not want the award –there are between 11 and five other people, depending on who he’s telling, who deserve it more – but he’s getting it anyway and that’s a hell of a thing.

John J. Duffy is perhaps as well known for his battle against, and continuing triumph over, alcoholism, as for his courtroom skills. Years ago, researching his back-story for a piece I was putting together before one of his trials, I read all about it: the angry, booze-tinged fall from grace, much of it in the public eye, and then the eventual redemption. It made fascinating reading. Most of all, the tale demands wonder at what became of the John J. Duffy who was. Not content to keep his sobriety to himself, John J. Duffy has since his recovery gone on to share it with as many people as he can fit into a 24 hour day -- without ticking off the missus.

“John wears his recovery on his sleeve,” a woman who knows him well told me while we stood in a hallway of the Justice Center last week. If a ride to a meeting is needed, or a referral to his treasured Caron Foundation is required, or simply a person to stand by while the addiction is still holding sway is necessary, John J. Duffy has been available for countless lost souls, she said.

Judge William P. Mahon, the county’s recovery court champion, told me that John J. Duffy’s life and work in helping people regain their lives was nothing more than “extraordinary.” He said that John J. Duffy had gone out of his way to provide assistance for those in recovery, with no thought for himself.

Except once, the judge remembered.

When still in private practice, a client of Mahon's was facing his fourth DUI charge. Or was it his fifth? No matter, the man’s life was a wreck, careering out of control like the drunk driver he was. Sitting in court while Mahon asked a judge to continue the case so that everything could be tied together, John J. Duffy heard the story and approached. “I’m not trying to steal your client,” he told Mahon, “but tell him to call me.”

A year later Mahon attended his client’s 12-month sobriety anniversary. John J. Duffy had shepherded the man through the recovery process and helped negotiate his life back to a clean and straight course. In return, however, the client, a professional fitness trainer, helped John J. Duffy lose weight. And for a time, at least, John J. Duffy approached being svelte.

Osceola Wesley, the Coatesville man and recovered drug abuser for whom the award he will receive was named, came from a world different than John J. Duffy’s. North Philly versus West Philly; Army service in Korea versus law school at Villanova; African-American versus Irish American. But, as Mahon pointed out to me last week, their worlds converged around how they dealt with their addictions. “Both came out of those experiences determined to contribute back to the recovery of others,” he said.

Attention must be paid, someone once said. And so now it will be.

For The Love of Downingtown

This column originally appeared on Sunday, April 26, 2009


Maxwell Perkins, the New Jersey man who edited Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Lardner and Wolfe, was married to the same woman for 37 years. Louise Perkins and Max raised five daughters and honored one another faithfully until his death.

But Louise was not max’s “ideal woman” and at some point he met and fell head over heels for a Virginia born beauty named Elizabeth Lemmon. He wrote her constantly, viewed a visit from her as an occasion better even than the Fourth of July or his birthday, and carried on a platonic love affair with her, under the accepting gaze of Louise, for 25 years – again, until his death.

Which is a roundabout way of saying I’ve been spending a lot of time in Downingtown these days.

Look, we all know how I feel about West Chester – the county seat, the home of the Henderson Warriors, the only place I know where you can eat a hot dog you bought from a guy who can stop a table fan with his tongue in the shadow of a statue named “Old Gory.” I love this place. I honor it daily. I have lived and paid parking tickets here for longer than max knew Elizabeth Lemmon.

But, well, sometimes things change. Eating even the best mint chocolate chip ice cream for dessert every day can lead one can lead one to gaze expectantly over at a bowl of Rocky Road. I started going to Downingtown on a regular basis when I began attending the Quaker meeting there. Then I started eating breakfast on Sundays there, and doing a bit of shopping there, and getting my car serviced there, and well, before you know it, I’m going to be entering my own duck in the annual Good Neighbor’s Day Rubber Duck Race along the Brandywine.

It is not as though Downingtown hasn’t caught my eye before. Downingtown was one of the first places I ever visited in Chester County, and I can still recall the sight of the Trestle Bridge as I drove into town on Route 322 in 1979, listening to the Phillies blow another game on my friend’s car radio. (“If these pitchers hang another slider over the plate, I’m going to stop listening to them for ever,” my friend promised me. He lied.) My dear friend and colleague, the late Elene Brown, lived there pretty much all her life, and she loved it so much she didn’t move even after she tried to drive the family van though a flooded section of town and ended up replacing the engine.

I have even suggested in this space that it would be advantageous for West Chester to switch places with Downingtown, since we have no navigable body of water and it does. I wrote, “We get the East Branch of the Brandywine Creek, they get the Goose Creek Waste Water Treatment Plant. We get an easy drive to Wegman’s, and they can have the entire campus of West Chester University, kegs included.” Idea hasn’t gone too far forward, truth be told, but I’ll be willing to give it time.

Here’s what I know about Downingtown:

It was initially called Milltown because it had a lot of mills. The name was switched in 1812 to Downingtown, because one of the mill owners was named Thomas Downing. The Quaker settlers in the borough were, I suppose, hewing to their spiritual quest for simplicity and so didn’t see the value in coming up with a more, shall we say creative name, like Elk or Toughkenamon or Tweedale, but when you live in a town that dropped the vivid moniker “Turks Head” for the bland “West Chester” (“We’re WEST of CHESTER, see, and CHESTER is EAST of us and, well, oh never mind…” ) you can’t really throw stones.

Theobald Wolfe Tone, the Irish patriot and martyr, lived in Downingtown for a while. Jim Croce lived up the road from Downingtown in Lyndell, so technically he had a Downingtown mailing address when he was writing “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.” I think if you asked a teenager today who was more famous, Jim Croce or Theobald Wolfe Tone, they would not be able to hear you because their ears had been permanently damaged through repeated iPod use.

Lincoln’s funeral train passed through town, which is somewhat convenient since Downingtown is located along the Lincoln Highway, which is strangely referred to mostly as Lancaster Avenue by the folks who live in Downingtown from what I can tell, but Abe was dead at the time he passed through so I don’t believe he was put off by the slight.

If you go to the “Downingtown” page on Wikipedia, you get a picture of marsh Creek State park, which is not in Downingtown, is located a good five miles from Downingtown, is closer to Dowlin and Glenmoore than Downingtown, but does have a Downingtown address. I suppose now the Wiki folks are going to start putting photos of Longwood Gardens on the Modena page as an illustration to dress things up a bit, and I don’t blame them. But there’s the Log House, circa 1705, just sitting there screaming to be pictured, and they go to a man-made lake that destroyed an entire village.

If you type “Maxwell Perkins Downingtown” into Google, you get a link to the JoBlo.com movie site. Don’t ask me why.

Every Day Is Record Store Day

This column originally appeared on Sunday, April 19, 2009

The time was 1969. The place was Air-Waye Records on Ludlow Avenue in the Clifton neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. And the album was “Disraeli Gears” by Cream.

There you have the basic facts behind my first solo purchase of a record album, and the start of a spending spree at local records stores that has continued unabated to this very day. I just picked up copies of Radiohead’s “OK Computer” (Remastered Version)” and Lady Gaga’s “The Fame” (don’t ask me why) on Friday at Mad Platter Records on West Gay Street in West Chester.

I’d like to encourage you to join in my consumerism. Yesterday was Record Store day across the United States and Great Britain, a day set aside to celebrate, promote and sustain the local independent record stores that still exist in this age of downloads and file sharing. Although lots of such retailers have shut down in recent years, about 2,000 are still putting music out there for us to gather up, and many—like the Mad Platter -- are thriving. Maybe you should go out and see.

Record Store Day was the idea of Chris Brown, a long-haired, goateed music guru from Bull Moose, a chain of 10 record stores in Maine and New Hampshire. Now in its second year, Record Store Day is being celebrated at more than 1,000 independent record stores in the U.S. and in 17 countries.

"I wanted to have a fun kind of party event at Bull Moose where we could thank our customers and just have a fun time," he told the Associated Press.. "I realized that it would be a much better party if we got the other stores involved, just make it a national thing."

I like the idea of a day that gives me an excuse to do what I love doing anyway – going to a record store and shopping through hundreds of titles – but in a way I think it is a shame as well. In my mind, every day should be Record Store Day.

To be sure, I’ve spent a lot of time in record stores that could have been put to better use, but what of it. As they used to say about Midnight Basketball, lurking in records stores kept me off the street when I otherwise would have engaged in socially destructive behavior, like spray painting graffiti on neighborhood walls or studying for the law school entrance exams.
Air-Waye Records was about a mile from my home and I could easily ride the Schwinn there with my friends. Before “Disraeli Gears” with its “Sunshine of Your Love” hit came along, I’d picked out dozens of 45s to buy and badgered my parents into picking up copies of the latest Beatle or Beach Boys album, so my life was not without the sounds of the ‘60s before then.

The phrase “kid in a candy store” does not begin to describe the hours I could spend at Air-Waye thumbing though the racks of LPs, trying to imagine what it would be like to own each and every one of them. Those were the days when album art covers were just starting to come into their own as a cultural medium, and I am sure the owner of the store got used to the sight of me flipping the albums over and over the better to read and stare and contemplate the figures on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” or the Bob Dylan painting on the cover of “Music From Big Pink” by The Band.

Not that I’m obsessed with the subject, but I can tell you that I still remember there were two prices for LPs at Air-Waye -- $4.19 for new releases and $3.49 for older ones. Don’t ask me why. When folks of my parents’ generation start moaning about how they knew the country had gone to hell in a hand basket when a gallon of milk went above $1, I smile knowingly and think of the number of albums I could buy with a $20 bill and some loose change these days if we’d stayed out of that hand basket.

I understand that we cannot as an economic system cling to businesses that are outdated, and that sometimes things just don’t last. I haven’t seen too many haberdashery stores opening along the avenue lately, and frankly I’m not sure I care. But if record stores are going to disappear from the face of the earth, I would simply rather that they do so after I’ve shuffled off my mortal coil so that I won’t have to know about it.

Meanwhile, I think ‘m going to stop by Mad Platter and ask Debbie if she’s got an extra copy of “This Mortal Coil.” It’s not “Disraeli Gears,” but then what is?

Turning Over An Old Leaf

This column originally appeared on Sunday, April 12, 2009

Keeping life simple is a concept that many people try to embrace, even though that can be somewhat problematic in a world in which pirates suddenly reappear among the various and sundry dangers that travelers must gird themselves against when going overseas. But I aspire to that lofty goal and put it at the forefront of both my long term and everyday decisions.

My list of New Years’ resolutions, for instance. I try to keep them simple and thus easy to attain. “I promise this year that I will not take a dog’s temperature in church,” is one I have found easy to adhere to. “I will avoid giving my neighbors a gift of Haggis for Easter,” is another. "No space travel for me this year" is a sure winner. I realize that you will consider these to be an example of stacking the deck, but since I’m dealing the cards only to myself I feel no shame in loading the aces on the top.

I will now, given the events of last weekend, be able to add another such resolution to the list: “I promise not to attend the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington D.C.”

Do not get me wrong. I have nothing against the blossoms themselves. They were wonderful. Delightful. They were everything you would want a blossom to be. And the venue for their blossominess was a treat as well. As many times as I have visited our nation’s capital, I never found the opportunity to walk the Tidal Basin area. As basins go, I’d rank it up there among my favorites.

The trip to Washington last weekend also gave me a chance to stop by the Vietnam Memorial, a place I had avoided in the past out of fear of being overcome at the stark emotion it might give rise to. But I found it inspiring in its beauty, and stood in awe of the imagination that must have gone into its creation. The connection it offers to both the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument made me think about how we now recognize that the ordinary among us are as worthy of timeless respect as the extraordinary.

But unfortunately for me, I had to experience all of that in the presence of a crowd that I would conservatively estimate approach one billion, many of them speaking loudly into cell phones. It was the time of the season – peak blossom time, I’m told – as well as the blue of the sky and warmth of the sun that brought everyone out and I can’t blame them. But in their presence I was once again reminded of that snippet of conversation between Wanda and Henry in the film “Barfly,” when she asks him if he hates people. “No,” Henry replies. “But I seem to feel better when they’re not around.”

When Yogi Berra said, apocryphally, “No one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded,” the person he was referring to was me. Some people recharge their emotional batteries in a big group of strangers they can turn into friends; others do the same by themselves. I belong to the latter.

Now, don’t get the impression that my resolve never to attend the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington D.C. again will have any impact on my cultural and/or aesthetic development. In the cherry blossom department, I’m pretty much covered.

You see, I live on what has been proclaimed by pretty much everyone I have talked to as the second most perfect flowering tree spot in the country, West Miner Street. Take a drive down my way sometime this week and you will see what I mean. Spring along this stretch of road simply bursts with blossoms pink and red and white and variations in between. In a short while as the wind picks up and the blossoms loosen their grip on the boughs, the street looks like a colorful snow squall had struck.

And I’ve got a little bit of the Washington experience right outside my front door. You see, back in 1912, U.S. Rep. Thomas Stalker Butler received two Japanese sakura, or cherry, trees as a gift, from the same lot that ended up being planted at the Tidal Basin. He took them home with him and planted them in the front yard of his home in the 200 block of West Miner where one has grown fat and fit and tall and its blossoms bountiful and beautiful.

And I resolve to enjoy them again next year when they come again.

Saturday Night (Flashing) Lights

This column originally appeared on Sunday, April 5, 2009.

“So who’s the cook?”

To tell you the story behind that quote, I’m going to have to tell you another one first. Stay with me here. That Villanova score isn’t going to change anytime soon, and you’ll still be able to turn to it in the sports section.

In 1977, I worked for the U.S. Forest Service in the Uinta Mountains of northeastern Utah. We, a bunch of students from Earlham College and counterparts from schools in Utah, worked in the Wasatch National Forest about 100 miles east of Salt Lake City. Although some of us did heavy-duty forest service work, like cutting down trees, my job was mainly to empty trashcans from the campsites in the area.

But on July 16, a Saturday as I remember, we were told that we would be driving a few hours to the south to help fight a forest fire that had gone out of control in another forest – the Ashley National Forest. The fire was near the Flaming Gorge, quite a tourist attraction.

When we arrived at the scene, we were handed Pulaski fire tools to carry and fire-retardant shirts to wear, and given sleeping bags made out of paper and told we would be heading out to the fire scene soon, ferried there by helicopter. But we were also told that there had been a tragedy before our arrival: Three firefighters had been killed when the fire turned back on them and blew over the top of the tree stand were they were standing. They tried to outrun the blaze, but couldn’t.

I did not know their names then, but do now – thanks to the wonder of the Internet: Gene Campbell, Dwight Hodgkinson and Dave Noel. Even though none of s had known them before that day, they were all we thought about as we went about the business of containing that burning forest. I was just 20, and never thought until then that I could have such admiration and fear at the same time.

So on Saturday, March 28, 2009, I was at home reading when I decided a snack would be nice. Something simple and easy to make. A piece of toast. About half way though the process I noticed that there was an unusually large amount of smoke coming from the toaster – which would be nice in a barbeque pit but not in a third floor apartment. Somewhat experienced with smoking kitchen equipment, I opened the nearest window and the hallway door to get the smoke cleared. Which is about the same time the fire alarm went off.

I had noticed the alarm bell when I moved into the apartment a few months ago but hadn’t real paid it much mind. I imagined that it was there left over from some previous incarnation; what did I need with a bell, after all? I had smoke detectors. My first thought was to muffle the bell while the smoke cleared and everything went back to normal and I could finish my toast. Which is where the landlady found me, on the landing, gripping the metal clanger, when she ordered me out of the house.

We gathered on the street in front of the apartment, my landlady, fellow tenant and I, as I learned that the alarm was hardwired into an emergency service that would contact the fire company, which would be here soon. “But al I did was burn a piece of toast!” I explained, sheepishly. I don’t know whether my fellow evacuees’ laughter was directed at me, or at the situation. Nevertheless, that’s what they were doing when the pumper truck arrived.

A person I can only imagine must have been the chief --- since he stood about 14 feet tall, six feet wide and built, as they say, by the same firm that did Stonehenge – got off the truck and walked into the building like he owned it. I tried to stutter something about the toast, but it seemed he had more important things to do, like make sure the building wasn’t on fire.

It seemed as if hours passed as I stood on the sidewalk thinking how I was going to explain this one when the firefighter finally emerged from the house, having ascertained the level of my stupidity and shut off the alarm.

“So who’s the cook?” he asked, a wry smile crossing his face. I raised my hand. I explained the situation, he gave me some advice about what to do the next time the toast gets too crispy and then said, “Friend, you are not alone.” He walked back towards the truck, and we turned to go back inside.

There’s been a lot of news in the paper these days about firefighters, and some of it has not been great. But as the fire truck left the scene, all three of us turned to those who were inside and said, “Hey. Thanks. You guys do a great job.”

Who Ya Gonna Call?

This column originally appeared on Sunday, March 29, 2009

This column comes with a warning.

I generally respect my readers and try not to demean or offend them, so I’m letting you all know right off the bat that I will be writing about toilets this week.

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that all of a sudden, when you were least expecting it, here is the Daily Local News turning into the Howard Stern Show. Here’s the finest example of journalism printed within spitting distance of the Downingtown Interchange of the Pennsylvania Turnpike all of a sudden joining the potty humor crowd. Here’s the Voice of Chester County letting go with a good long belch.

That’s why I warned you; I didn’t want it to come as a shock. If you’re offended, you can feel free to skip the rest of this column and go straight to the box score of the Villanova-Pitt game. (Repeat after me: “Even if every man woman and child held hands together and prayed for us to win, it just wouldn't matter, because all the really good looking girls would still go out with the guys from Penn because they've got all the money! It just doesn't matter if we win or we lose! IT JUST DOESN'T MATTER!” Thank you, Bill Murray.)

But for those of you sticking around, what I’m about to tell you is not meant to offend or insult or demean. It is meant to inform.

There’s some “ghost flushing” going on at the Chester County Justice Center.

I know what you’re thinking. You Are thinking that you haven’t heard a good ghost-flushing story since October of 2007, when the news about the library in Kent, England, hit the wires. You remember, the one about the librarian at the Gravesend Library, ex-Royal Marine Gordon Jenns, who asked the local council to pay for an exorcist to solve the mystery of his haunted water closet. Jenns, it was reported at the time, “believes that the loo is inhabited by a ghost, who flushes the toilet after everyone has gone home.”

"I'm absolutely certain the toilet flushed itself,” Jenns told his local newspaper reporter, who I assure you could not wait to get back to the newsroom as soon as he could and tell his editor about his scoop. “The door was locked and the cistern was still filling up when I went in. It even happens when the loo door’s locked,” he added, calling the matter, “off-putting.”

Be that as it may, when you go to the men’s loo on the Fifth Floor of the JC, there will come a time when the toilets around you start flushing away, every few seconds, even though you are the only person in the room. The toilets have those modern motion sensor gizmos that are supposed to react only when you leave so you don’t have to go through the trouble of pulling the handle. But instead they go off with the slightest provocation, or with no provocation at all. So there you are, all alone with your thoughts and the latest Daily Local, and all you hear is a symphony of rushing flushes, timed perfectly, one after another, whooshing away nothing but pure, clean water. It’s off-putting, you might say.

Not wishing to raise the specter, so to speak, of having an exorcism performed for the ghost flushing at taxpayer expense, I made discreet inquiries about the matter. Seems like I was not the first to knock on that door.

County Director of Facilities Extraordinaire Steve Fromnick told me that he has had his people working on the problem for some time now. One of his assistants wrote to say that: “Originally, we had to go through and calibrate the flushometers to zero them in. We believe now we’re getting ghost flushing because of cleaning agents being used on the sensors. How much of this ghost flushing is happening we’re not sure, but we are in contact with our custodian contractor to educate them on the correct maintenance procedures.”

I’ll bet the folks in the White House Press Corps would give their Blackberries to be able to use the word “flushometers” in a sentence.

I don’t know if I actually want the problem solved because it is, after all, somewhat relaxing to hear the sound of whooshing water going on around you when you’re otherwise occupied. I accept the fact that ghost flushing is most likely wasteful and environmentally unsound. Still, I remember those days when I thought that pure joy revolved around nothing more than flushing the toilet over and over again.

But we all graduate college at some point. Even ‘Nova students.

My Hero, The I Choose Hell Guy

This column originally apeared on Sunday, March 22, 2009

Everybody should have a hero, and George Kalman is mine.

I know what you’re saying. I know, for beginners, that what you are not saying is: “Why couldn’t you have chosen Chase Utley, or Barack Obama, or even Joe Dirt, even though he’s a fictional movie character brought to life by the guy who is not Chris Farley, as your hero?” I know, as well, that you are not saying: “Why don’t you choose as your hero somebody really important, like the inventors of Facebook, which has done more towards the efforts of Americans who want to substitute frivolous time-wasting activities for actual productive tasks than anything since the invention of the personal telephone call from the office?’

No, I know that what you are saying is: “Who in the name of Joe Dirt is George Kalman?” I understand the sentiment behind that question, because up until about four hours ago, I did not know who in the name of Joe Dirt George Kalman was either.

But thanks to Samuel G. Freedman of The New York Times, I do know who George Kalman is, and now he’s my hero. But not for the reason you might think.

George Kalman is the East Brandywine man and independent filmmaker who has filed a lawsuit in federal court in Philadelphia to overturn Pennsylvania’s blasphemy law. He did so after the state in 2007 turned down his request to name his film production company I Choose Hell Productions L.L.C., a choice meant to emphasize his belief that even if life can be hell at times, it is better than committing suicide.

Yes, I know what you’re saying: “Pennsylvania has a law against blasphemy? Then how did they get the permission to build those awful looking homes in Upper Uwchlan? And don’t even get me started on the Coatesville City Council!” Actually, the anti-blasphemy statute it is not a law like those weird codes that outlaw women in Florida from falling asleep under a hair dryer, or ban animals in California from mating within 1,500 feet of a day care center, or restrict locating a sexology shop in West Chester, Pa., within 300 feet of a church. No, this is a statute that maintains that corporations in the Commonwealth cannot have as their names any words that would “constitute blasphemy, profane cursing or swearing or that profane the Lords’s name.”

Leaving aside for the moment the notion that there is such a thing as “non-profane cursing,” we should point out that the state bureaucrats who are in charge of sorting out the blasphemes from the ordinary words in corporate Pennsylvania have not always been as diligent as they were in Kalman’s case when they denied his I Choose Hell Productions L.L.C. name. According to the Times article, there exist in the state corporations that use the handle Devil Media and Vomit Noise Productions, so somebody was apparently paying too much attention to his or her “Which Overly Restrictive State Red Tape Functionary Are You?” Facebook Quiz when those applications came across their desks.

But thank (not to drop names) God for providing Kalman with the wherewithal to bring the matter to the attention of the courts, where hopefully someone with the requisite understanding of the Constitution will see that the Pennsylvania’s anti-blasphemy statute makes about as much sense as not being able to play professional baseball in Philadelphia on Sundays (law repealed in 1933) or being forbidden from buying a bottle of “Two Buck Chuck” wine at the nearest Trader Joe’s any day of the year (law still on the books.)

But even though I think his mind is in the right place, his legal challenge to the law is not the reason why Kalman is my hero. No, he is my hero because of what he told Mr. Freedman of the Times.

“When you read the First Amendment, this is something you can be proud of,” he is quoted as saying. “If you care about the human condition, then you care about the First Amendment.”

I think even Joe Dirt would agree.

Build A Lake, And I Will Swim.

This column originally appeared on Sunday, March 15, 2009

Whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword has not been paying close enough attention to my column.

I have written in these pages as advocate for a number of what I consider perfectly worthy causes, and to date have had exactly none of them come to fruition. Cincinnati chili parlors in West Chester? Nope. Chadds Ford relocated into Chester County? Sorry, Charlie. Public swimming pool within easy walking distance of my home? Fuddegaboudit. Cloaking device to keep West Chester shielded from more drunken tourists? What’re you, kidding?

I am not doing well in the mightier-pen department, you might say. If I were a presidential candidate, I’d be Dennis Kucinich (2008 campaign: 25 months, 12 days. Delegate total: 0). If I were a Major League shortstop, I’d have a batting average worse even than Mario Mendoza (Nine seasons, three teams, .215 lifetime batting average.) If I were the melting point of ice on a temperature measurement scale, I’d be Celsius (0 degrees).

But what I am not is unpersistent.

Let me put that another, less grammatically incorrect, way. What I am not is a quitter (See above: “Kucinich”). I persist in these campaigns, whether they are successful or not. Once I have taken up arms, I do not stop the just just because someone has lopped off my hands from the shoulders down. I do not take my role as an advocate lightly, especially when it comes to Cincinnati chili or cloaking devices.

So once again I hurl myself into the breech. Staring today, I am officially urging the Army Corps of Engineers to begin blocking up whatever body of water is available to create a lake somewhere in West Chester, preferably within walking distance of the childhood home of Smedley Darlington Butler, of which, as has been established previously, I am a neighbor.

The thought that we need a large body of open water here occurred to me as I visited Marsh Creek State Park one recent sunny afternoon. Marsh Creek Lake is one of the most beautiful man-made sights in northern Chester County, and brings with it a sense of tranquility and ease. It is a spot for boating or fishing, sunbathing or kayaking, or simply just gazing across its grand expanse of clear blue water. (It is also a spot for surreptitious swimming, as I once discovered when a friend of mine slipped over the side of the boat we had rented for a cool dip, even though such practice is technically illegal. I say this because I am fairly certain the statute of limitations on aquatic offenses is safely behind me.)

I am also certain that having a lake somewhere in the middle of West Chester would provide a number of financial benefits to the borough that it has heretofore not enjoyed. There is the possibility of a windsurfing franchise, for example. There would be a great opportunity for a bass fishing tournament that we could conceivably spin off of the latest television episode of “Viva Le Bam.” It would make a nice swimming location as well (See above: “Cool dip”), which would not exactly conform with the sort of economic stimulus that the papers all say our nation is sorely in need of, but it would make my summers significantly more enjoyable, and what of it?

I am not at all certain how this flooding project would be accomplished, but questions like those are, as our newly inaugurated president once said, above my pay grade. I’m the idea guy, not the nuts-and-bolts guy. I lay out the strategies in broad stokes and let the Timothy Geithners and Lawrence Summers of the world fill in the details. I say we need a lake; I let someone else build the dam. If I were a movie character, I would be Bill Blazejowsky in “Night Shift”: (“What if you mix the mayonnaise in the can, WITH the tuna fish? Or... hold it! I got it! Take LIVE tuna fish, and FEED 'em mayonnaise! Call Starkist!”).

Look, I know that you are shaking your head in disbelief at my apparent naïveté that what I wish in these pages will somehow come true. In response, I point out that someone had to be the one to think of putting a lake in the middle of Upper Uwchlan. He or she probably got laughed at by all the residents of Milford Mills right up until the time the waters of Marsh Creek started creeping into their root cellars, and where are they now? I tell you where they are: Living on the banks of a 535-acre man made lake, that’s where hey are. So sing your song of impossible dreams to them.

Or to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who, just by way of explanation, in his 1839 play “Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy,” coined the phrase, “The pen is mightier than the sword.” I’m sure he’ll listen.

25 Random Things About a Geo-Political Entity

This column originally appeared on Sunday, March 8, 2009

Hello Daily Local News readers. It’s me, Chester County.

Yes, I realize that it is odd to find that a geo-political subdivision of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is writing a column, but with modern technology anything is possible. Welcome to the 21st Century! Any moment now, wholly abstract concepts, such as “happiness,” the color “red” or “Andy Dinniman” are going to have their own Web sites and Twitter addresses, so my ability to interact with you is really just the beginning.

Which is my way of getting around to letting you know that I now have my own Facebook page and am hoping you’ll all sign up to be my friends. Considering there’s almost 485,000 people living within my borders, I’d say I have the possibility of establishing yourself as the Facebook “Friends Leader of All Time” if just a small portion of you sign up. I’ll try to provide a handy link later.

But just so you know that even though I’m more than 300 years old I still have a sense of what the hottest trends are in the modern world, I thought I would let you know that I do have prepared a “25 Random Things About me” list. Apparently, it is something you have to do to really get in the spirit of Facebook. After all, chain letters are so 1888.

This is my way of letting you know a few personal things about me that might have not captured your attention in the past. I’ve dug down and mined the bottom of my personality, my likes and dislikes, the bits and pieces of my life that will let you know why you might want to be my friend. Hope you like it.

1. Degrees of separation between me and William Penn: None.

2. My Official Seal shows a tall-mast ship at sail on the ocean. But I have no ocean. Don’t ask me.

3. I have 73 municipalities, but am hoping a recent diet I started will get me down to the mid-50s.

4. Favorite television actor: Dennis Weaver, as “Chester” on Gunsmoke. Duh!

5. I have never seen Cheshire County, England, who I am apparently named after. Don’t want to, either. More of a Wales guy, myself. (See, “Tredyffrin.”)

6. Used to encompass both Lancaster and Delaware counties. Felt bad about losing Lancaster (great outlet shops!) but OK with the Delco thing.

7. Favorite fungi: mushroom. Double duh.

8. George Washington slept in me.

9. Totally over Susan Richardson of “Eight is Enough.” Sort of have a thing for Tina Fey, though.

10. Motto: “Come in Gay, go out High.”

11. Did you know: The Hooters filmed a music video inside me at an old drive-in movie theater in Exton.

12. Number of “Hooters” restaurants located in me: Zero.

13. Loved “Witness.” Hated “The Village.”

14. I would trade 50 percent of the foxhunters I find traipsing across my verdant fields if I could just have one minor league baseball team located within my borders. Preferably in the Baltimore Orioles farm system.

15. Always knew that Thurgood Marshall fellow would amount to something.

16. Can recite “Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes at the drop of a hat.

17. I’ve got lots more fieldstones where those came from if you want to build a barn somewhere.

18. Favorite Herr’s snack food: “Salt and Pepper Potato Chips.”

19. Jim Croce? Meh.

20. Turn ons: Unpaved dirt roads. Turn offs: Route 202, Tuesdays, 8:30 a.m., between Boot Road and Route 29.

21. Secretly miss Courtroom One.

22. I actually only need one jury commissioner.

23. If you go to the Eagleview business and residential community in Uwchlan, you can’t actually see Eagle.

24. Politically, I’m feeling purple.

25. I have 3,730,000 hits on Google. Go ahead, try and beat me.

How to Fight The Winter Blues With a Black Robe

This column originally appeared on Sunday, March 1, 2009

I know how you feel. It’s finally March, but it still feels like February. You’ve been stuck inside since the last days of 2008 and the cabin fever is outdone only by the expansive boredom you and the spouse feel. The only words that come to mind during the weekly game of Scrabble are ennui, torpor and doldrums. The bi-weekly game of Monopoly has turned into a monotony. The movies offer only “Doubt,” “The Uninvited,” and “Paul Bart: Mall Cop.”

Even the high-strung Collie your neighbors asked you to walk while they vacation in Ibizia shows decided signs of dispiritedness. She’s more lassitude than Lassie. When your teenage son and daughter sigh that they have nothing to do, you sigh and say: “The line forms to the rear.”

Yo. Do what I do. Stop by Judge Thomas G. Gavin’s courtroom on the 7th floor of the county Justice Center for a taste of His Honor’s unique brand of wit and wisdom. Let’s join in while the program is already in session.

“You can walk this off if you complete the first year of probation without any problems, with the understanding that we won’t see each other again,” Gavin, the one time Marine, was telling a criminal defendant who has promised, essentially, “not to do it again" last Tuesday. “If we do, bring some reading material.”

In Gavin-ese, “bring some reading material” means don’t make any plans for the weekend: you are going to jail.

A Philadelphia sportswriter once wondered if he could get an entire column out of asking Pete Rose a single question about hitting. Two hours later, he’d filled an entire notebook. That’s the way I approach a day with Judge Gavin; sooner or later he’s going to say something worth writing down.

Like this advice to a West Chester University students who got arrested for underage drinking: “Part of being in college is that it is the last opportunity to see how stupid you can be.” Had I known that back in 1977 at Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., I’d certainly have afforded myself the opportunity to get in a lot more trouble than I did.

Judge Gavin has been on the bench for 23 years, and he’s slowly but surely approaching the mandatory retirement age of 70 that judges in Pennsylvania face. But although I heard one bright-eyed prosecutor who practices in front of Judge Gavin on occasion describe Judge Gavin as “world weary,” he still strides onto the bench every morning with a brisk, determined gait. He will bluntly tell you, if you have cause to appear in front of him, that he’s seen, if not all of it, then the vast majority of whatever “it” is. But he does not seem jaded or indifferent to what is happening in front of him.

“We’re going to be a little bit creative here because your client has been trying to make a new life for himself,” Judge Gavin told a defense attorney one day last week. “We’re going to make life easy for him. Bt the first thing we have to do is see the whites of his eyes.”

Unlike some who wear black robes to work, Judge Gavin isn’t tied to the strict formality of taking each case on the docket in order. He’s more of a “whaddaya got?” type of jurist, ready for whatever comes his way. I’ve also found that he’s not afraid to mix up his metaphors a bit as he tries to get the message across with as little ambiguity as possible when talking to a defendant.

“Hopefully the light will go on between your ears at some point,” he told a man who was one step away from a trip to the confines of a government-run hotel upstate. “But you’re the only one who can answer that.”

Some of those who appear before Judge Gavin consider him lenient on some criminals, and I am certain that there are enough examples of that to go around. But he is also capable of slamming the door shut and wiping his hands of someone who just doesn’t seem to get the message the first time.

“Your probation officer did everything she could for you. She bent over backwards and all you did was kick her,” the judge told one serial violator last week. “You didn’t take advantage of her help, and now you’re going to pay your dues. Hopefully, you won’t spend too much time in state prison. Have a nice day.”

Thanks, judge. I always do, and I’m never bored.