In the movie “Smoke,” Harvey Keitel plays a kindly and slightly eccentric cigar store owner who spends his days talking with customers and his mornings taking a single snapshot of the same corner in his Brooklyn neighborhood. The photos he puts in an almost endless series of scrapbooks, page after page of pictures of the same street corner.
My guess is that the watch had something to do with it.
That is, I just purchased this new Casio watch and it has functions that my Uncle Harry Redborg, whose Elgin watch I was given as my first wristband timepiece, could not have imagined if he had lived to be 150 years old. The watch not only tells the time and date, but also has a picture of the phase of the moon, presumably for werewolf protection. It has a component wherein I can tell the best time of day to hunt or fish for any particular date between now and, well, eternity for as much as I can figure out. And more.
It has a stopwatch and an alarm, and graphically tells me how much daylight is available. It has four buttons that do things I have not figured out, and a way of lighting itself if I turn my wrist just so. I believe it also predicts tomorrow's Dow Jones Industrial Average, albeit not as accurately as you might like if you were thinking of sinking your life savings into Tastykake stock.
But the function I spend the most time fiddling with is the screen that tells me the time of the day's sunrise and sunset. And this is what I was getting at earlier: being able to see just when the sun was expected to rise and/or set has got me thinking about those daily occurrences, and how much people enjoy them.
I remember once walking home from the Daily Local News and turning around to see the sun setting over Sam's Pizza on Hannum Avenue. The shades and the clouds and the sunrays were so dazzling, I picked up a pay phone and called back to the office to tell anyone who was there to step out the back door and enjoy. Which they did. That's the way it is with sunrises and sunsets; you see a really great one, want to share it with people. So I asked some former Daily Local colleagues if they could recommend really good places to enjoy the sunrise, since I figured my watch would give me the opportunity to plan ahead on when to go if only I knew where.
I had an idea that the best places would be near water. I remember once seeing the sunrise over the Octorara Reservoir down around Nottingham, by Camp Tweedale. It was picture perfect, and the reflections of the reddish yellow clouds on the surface of the calm water made it doubly enjoyable. But Octoraro is a 25-minute drive from my house, longer if I don't avoid the state police speed trap on Route 1, so I was hoping for a place a little closer to home.
Kyle suggested Valley Forge National Park, which he said offered an overlook of the upper stretches of the Schuylkill and had the enjoyable ambiance of the rolling hills that make up the start of the Great Valley. But Kyle pointed out that much of the panorama is made up of Route 422 and the nearby malls, and by the time he had finished enumerating the defects of the view he had pretty much talked himself out of the whole thing and gone back to bed.
Melissa weighed in by suggesting that the Stroud Preserve in East Bradford provides a particularly good viewpoint over the East Branch of the Brandywine Creek, which happens to be my personal favorite of the two branches. I have spent a good enough amount of time wandering the stretches of the former Georgia Farm there to know that it would offer some particularly pleasant vistas. But it also offers a significant amount of Canada goose guano, and that is something I try hard to avoid in the near darkness of early morning.
Christine offered visual aids in her advice that a stretch of the Route 30 Bypass near the Chester County Airport gave her the most memorable sunrise in her recent memory. According to Christine, she was on her way to work in the early morning from her home in Sadsburyville when the sun rose spectacularly over the flat road where the airport stretched out ahead of her. The picture she shot of it from her camera phone was impressive, I admit, but I have a hard time accepting that anything good can come of something if the word "Sadsburyville" is attached to it.
The watch on my wrist Saturday morning said sunrise came at 6:50 a.m., and so I dutifully rolled out of bed a half an hour beforehand to go sunrise hunting. But rather than drive for miles in my quest, I climbed instead to the top of the Chester County Justice Center Parking Garage, conveniently located behind my apartment.
And as I watched the clouds brighten and the shadows disappear and the color come back into the red brick sidewalks of my beloved hometown below me, it occurred to me that any sunrise you live to watch is the best one. Even from a parking structure.
Today, as many of you may know, is the annual West Chester Restaurant Festival, where literally hundreds of restaurants and funnel cake vendors descend on Our Fair Borough like so many Mongol Hordes and bring with them hungry interlopers in numbers not seen since the recent Teabagger protest in Washington, D.C.
For those of us who live in West Chester, however, today is not known as Restaurant Festival Day. It’s known as Get Out Of Town Day. Rather than fight the crowds and battle with the interlopers over parking on our streets, we choose to find something else to occupy our time, someplace else to go and enjoy the wonders of late summer.
Some of us choose to replicate the experience of the restaurant festival by finding the nearest traffic jam and joining the queue. Others of us offer up hundreds of dollars of our hard earned cash for mushroom-sized appetizers at the nearest convenience store, estimating correctly that the cost is equivalent to what we would expect on Gay Street, but the wait is far less.
Me, I’m heading for the hills. More specifically, I’m going to take a nostalgic drive up Route 282 north of Downingtown into the wilds of Wallace and the Nantmeals.
Route 282 is not the most picturesque back road in Chester County, but it does crack the top ten. It meanders nicely alongside the East Branch of the Brandywine Creek for miles and miles, passing through villages like Lyndell and Glenmoore, Springton and Cornog, until it terminates at an intersection between Barneston and Huntsfield.
It is nostalgic for me because it is the scene of one of the first prime assignments I received as anew report at the Daily Local News in the late fall of 1982. The news editor saw I wasn’t busy and told me in no uncertain terms to get out to the Cornog Quarry and find out what all the fuss was about.
What the fuss was about was a state police dive team searching in the murky waters for cars that had been dumped there. I wasn’t the only one who arrived at the scene to judge their progress, and wondered why so much attention was being paid to an operation to clear and otherwise unused former quarry of dumped cars.
It was not until after I had filed my piece that I learned that what police were really searching for were the bodies of the two young Reinert children, part of the eerie criminal case surrounding teachers at Upper Merion High School. The whole thing happened under my nose without my realizing it, and now wherever I wander up Route 282 and pass by that quarry, I am reminded of how little I really know.
But the ride up Route 282 also brings back more pleasant memories, of finding out of the way people who are as friendly and as open as the fields that developers like to gobble up in northern Chester County.
On one spring Sunday after a series of hard rains, I was sent out to talk to people who now had lakes in their backyards as the Brandywine overflowed its banks. I wandered up the road and made my way to Glenmoore, stopping along the way to knock on doors and interview the flood victims. Those I spoke with were open and forthcoming, if a little quizzical about why a reporter would be so intensely interested in the water level in their basement. I suppose that in those days before cable television and incessant news hounding the sight of a person with a notebook showing up on your doorsteps was still something you would face with a sense of excitement, instead of one of ennui.
I also like to slow down as I pass through Lyndell and look up on the hillside at the gazebo that sits on the property where Jim Croce once lived, and imagine him writing those faux folk hits in the 1970s that occupied so much of my radio listening time when I was in high school. I used to be able to sing a few verses of “Workin’ at the Car Wash Blue” at the drop of a hat, and wonder always if that’s where the idea came to him, on that hill.
So if you want my town, go ahead and take it; I’m planning on invading a few places of my own. Just make sure you have it back by 7:30.
So that we are clear about this, I will start today by declaring openly that I am not in favor of gluttony. However much you think that my adherence to the sin of sloth in my position as a professional newspaper reporter would ipso facto lead me down the road to wholesale acceptance of sins such as lust and greed and wrath, I would like you now to disabuse yourself of that notion. For me, gluttony is right out.
Michael P. Rellahan is the news editor of the Daily Local News. To contact him, send an e-mail to mrellahan@dailylocal.com
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 14th 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.”
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.
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 21st century. Teenagers in the 21st 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.
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.
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.
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.
