Monarch Park

(News-Herald, February 21) The dead of winter may be the perfect time to remember our own little oft-forgotten Venangoland garden spot. Once upon a time, Monarch Park, our own little amusement park, existed out near what is now Deep Hollow Road, along the back half of the giant trolley loop that connected Franklin and Oil City.

The park was opened in 1896 by Mr. Smithman, who had many large plans, including the development of a small lake. In 1901 the whole business was turned over to the Citizen’s Traction Company and Smithman Park became Monarch Park (operated by a corporation named the Monarch Park Hotel Company).

The park became the major draw of the area. On major holidays, both Franklin and Oil City were virtually empty—everyone was at Monarch Park. It was a location that was designed to serve the entire family.

A large open-air playground kept small children entertained, while nearby there were flowing brooks and large gardens and wandering paths for the more sedate grown-ups to stroll. There was a bowling alley for those who wanted some mild exercise. An auditorium hosted many renowned speakers and performers, and a dance pavilion, complete with spacious open porches, featured both local and nationally known bands.

The park was prodigious employer of Oil City and Franklin’s top musicians. In some years the house band would provide four or five concerts over the weekend, plus a three-hour dance on Saturday night.

Looking back, it’s hard to grasp just how modern the place was in its day. In 1902 the park premiered its electric tower, a 120-foot structure covered inside and out with electrical lights (the first Presidential Christmas tree with electrical lighting had only just appeared in 1895). The outside lights shone throughout the park, while the inside ones illuminated windows of colored glass.

In 1913 the park added the Whirlpool, a typical fling-the-capsule-around-the-circle ride, except that at rest the capsules rested on the water in a pond. The other big addition of the season was the Thriller, a roller coaster that would seem tame by today’s standards, but which represented an impressive level of excitement and thrill for the time. A café provided foods of wide varieties, and the White Way featured an ever-changing assortment of booths filled with treats and games.

People loved the place. It’s hard to imagine folks heading out to simply hang around the park for a day, taking picnic food, and strolling about the grounds, a small valley oasis in the middle of the Pennsylvanian woods.

I’ve always been intrigued by that isolation—there were eventually roads that ran to the park, but by all accounts they were awful. The only real acess was by streetcar. Once you were there, you were there. More than the gardens and ponds and carousel and light-up buildings, that says something about the pace of those days. Imagine any situation today where hundreds of families would put themselves in a situation where they could not leave at any moment.

In Franklin, the death of the park is often associated with the destruction of the Big Rock Bridge in 1926, but by then, the park was already in trouble. 1924 was a slow season, bad enough that the park was leased to another management company in an attempt to make it work. A few changes in entertainments were tried, but even an outdoor movie theater in the old band shell was not enough of a draw.

Perhaps it was the rise of the automobile that made it easier for people to pick and choose their destinations, to come and go as they pleased. Perhaps it was simply that the 1920’s, even in Venangoland, were a whole new and different and faster world from the pre-Great War era.

By 1926 the trolley company announced discontinuation of the Oil City-Franklin route. In April, the Citizens Traction Company put many of the park buildings up for sale. It was picked apart bit by bit. The dance hall became lumber to build three houses. The bowling alley was dismantled and sold. The Thriller became lumber for building a warehouse. I’ve heard from many old timers that the carousel animals were purchased moved to Conneaut Lake Park, though I’ve never seen any corroboration.

In the 1930’s the Izaak Walton League bought the land and still owns it today. I’ve been out there to poke around, and traces of the park are still visible—stones marking a foundation, the whirlpool pond, some concrete pillars and bits of the old brook. It had lasted barely thirty years, and perhaps that was long enough. Something may not last forever, but that makes it no less beautiful and gracious while it lives.

PA Graduation Exam Dopiness

(News-Herald, February 14) The state board of education has decided that Pennsylvania school students need more tests, and so we now face the prospect of graduation exams for commonwealth students—ten (yes, ten) of them. If dumb ideas were top forty hits, Harrisburg would be Elvis.

Let me stress—it is in no way dumb to expect quality from schools. Schools should be accountable to the taxpayers who foot the bill just as any branch of government should be answerable to the electorate. People should be able to get some idea of whether or not schools are doing what they’re supposed to be doing. Folks should be able to find some sort of answer to the question, “Are my schools any good?”

Standardized tests are an exceptionally poor way to get an answer to that question.

In the ed biz, this is not news. Prior to the eruption of No Child Left Standing, the hot trend in education was Authentic Assessment. Ed biz experts announced that the best way to know if a student could do something was to have the student do it. In other words, if you want to know if Johnny has learned how to make foul shots, you don’t give him a multiple choice test—you hand him a basketball and tell him to shoot. Teachers across the nation greeted this revelation with a resounding, “Well, duh!” We put away our standardized tests, but then NCLB arrived.

Standardized tests are the lazy way to evaluate students, but they aren’t totally useless. If a school is achieving a ten percent proficiency rating on the PSSA, that’s probably a safe indicator that something is wrong. But it does not follow that a high rating means that something is right.

Say you wanted a quick, easy way to evaluate a basketball team’s performance. So you checked after each game to see how many points they scored. If they were scoring fewer than ten points per game, you’d know something bad was happening. But if you knew they were scoring over seventy points per game, what would you really know?

You wouldn’t have enough information to know how they were doing. What did the other team score? And was the other team a really good team, or did the team get their score up by scheduling games against a kindergarten wheelchair team?

Think about everything you’ve ever considered valuable about your own education, everything about school that influenced and helped you in life. How much of that could best be measured by multiple choice questions?

There are two false premises at the heart of the More Standardized Tests proposal. First, that standardized tests are a good measure of anything other than students’ ability to take the standardized test. If the tests were merely a bad measure, that would be bad enough. But by making a standardized test the measure of educational success, the bureaucrats send a clear message—any kind of higher order thinking, expression, understanding and exploration is an unnecessary and unwelcome frill. The tests don’t measure what they claim to measure, and they demand a steady diet of mediocre pablum from schools.

The second unproven premise is that our schools are in some state of disaster. Pittsburgh Superintendent Mark Roosevelt wrote for the hearings in Harrisburg, “For far too long, local education agencies or school districts have been permitted to issue diplomas to students that are not worthy of the paper on which they are printed.”

Really? Really?!?! The industries of the commonwealth are packed with hires from other states because Pennsylvania grads are unemployable? Pennsylvania grads can’t get into college, and when they do, they all flunk out?

I don’t imagine that our schools are pillars of perfection, but the fact is, nobody has any useful data about how successful we are, because politicians are too busy trying to generate short, simple numbers that will fit conveniently in sound bites and press releases.

If we want to know how well we’re doing (and we should), here’s a thought. Elementary schools are supposed to prepare students for middle school. Middle school students are supposed to be ready for high school. Graduates are supposed to be ready to be successful students, citizens and workers.

If that’s what we’re supposed to be accomplishing, let’s go check it out. We can certainly follow the students through school, but let’s not stop there. Let’s survey students five, ten, fifteen, even twenty years after graduation and see how they’re doing. Ask them. Did we prepare them for a job? Did we get them ready for college? Did we get them ready for life? And if any of them say, “I just wish you had taught me more about passing a multiple choice test,” I will eat my hat.

It's Goat-skin Thong Time Again

(News-Herald, February 2002) Well, it’s Valentine’s Day again. Is there any other holiday that so aptly harnesses love and guilt in a stew of commercial blackmail? Christmas has too many different shades of meaning attached, but on Valentine’s Day there’s no room for doubt—if you didn’t send a present/card/heart-bedecked token it can only mean that You Don’t Really Care. Want to keep your relationship (or prospective portion thereof) alive? Then fork over some money at the store of your choice.

I felt moved this week to do some actual research. It would be easy to assume that Valentine’s Day is purely a creation of cardsellers and florists, but in fact it has a history long enough to be vague and mysterious.

Some authorities link VD to the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia. This festival was celebrated February 15 to coincide roughly with the coming of spring (the calendar has shifted a bit since those days) and, depending on your authority, was meant to either A) chase away wolves and/or B) ensure fertility of flocks, fields and folks of Rome.

Goats and dogs would be sacrificed on Palatine Hill, after which Roman men would run through the streets with thongs cut from the fresh goat-skins, lashing women in the streets as they went. I have no idea how such a fun tradition was lost over the years; perhaps one of the local Chambers of Commerce would like to revive it locally.

Somehow we get from Lupercalia to St. Valentine, who was any one of three martyred saints.

One story associates Valentine with illegal marriages. The Emperor Claudius II allegedly outlawed marriages in order to increase the supply of single men for soldiering (he felt that married men made lousy soldiers, though it seems to me ancient Roman single guys would have been preoccupied with goat-skin thong flogging). Valentine stood up for True Love by marrying folks in secret.

Another story has Valentine in prison, falling in love with a woman who may or may not have been A) blind and/or B) the jailor’s daughter. Supposedly he sent her a note saying “From your Valentine.” At any rate, Valentine was dispatched around 270 AD. Pope Gelasius tagged February 14 with his name around 498 AD.

February 14 has carried a number of charming traditions. At one point, the bachelors of a city would draw single women’s names from an urn, thereby acquiring a partner for the following year; that was eventually outlawed as un-Christian.

February 14, back when it was the beginning of spring, was thought to be the day that birds chose their mates. In keeping with the bird theme, another belief was that if a woman saw a robin fly overhead on VD, she would marry a sailor. A sparrow signified a poor man, and a goldfinch meant a millionaire.

If she was really brave, she could go to the graveyard and run around the church twelve times at midnight, chanting. A less ambitious maid could stand at her window on VD morning; the first man she saw walking by either was, or resembled, the man she would marry within the year. My sources don’t say anything about whether he had to be carrying a goat-skin thong or not. There is also no record of any VD tradition calling for bachelors to sleep till noon.

Charles, Duke of Orleans sent the earliest valentines to his wife while he was locked up in the Tower of London. Commercially created valentines first appeared around 1800. Early versions contained such romantic zingers as “My orb of day departs with thee.” Esther A. Howland started cranking out mass-produced American cards in the 1840’s. Today an estimated 1 billion cards are sold each year (second behind 2.6 billion for Christmas).

Canada, the UK, Mexico, France and Australia celebrate VD; in many Islamic countries, it is illegal, but celebrated quietly underground.

My favorite VD treat, those little candy hearts, have been factory-made since 1902. NECCO, the current manufacturers, regularly rotate the little sayings. New sayings for 2002 include “IN STYLE,” “DIVA,” “WHAT’S UP,” and “URA QT.” NECCO notes that some outdated sayings over the years have been permanently retired, such as “DIG ME” and “YOU ARE GAY.”

My box included “HUG ME,” “PAGE ME,” and “MARRY ME.” Plus one with a smiley face. Before being factory-made, candy hearts were made with paper notes inside with classy sentiments such as “Please send a lock of your hair by return mail.” It’s no “My orb of day departs with thee,” but it still beats being flogged with a goat-skin thong.

So Long, Conneaut Lake Park

My apologies to my regular on-line readers (both of you), but after resurrecting the old column about the park, I couldn't resist revisiting the topic for the newspaper column. A bit redundant, I know, but the completist in me requires that the new column be included here.

(News-Herald, February 7) When the Dreamland Ballroom at Conneaut Lake Park burned down last week, stored in the maintenance department underneath it were most of the major mechanicals for the remaining rides. The park has perched for years on the brink of oblivion, and I suppose one more miraculous escape is possible. But it seems more likely that this is the final kiss of ignominious death for the park.

The ballroom itself was actually the second in the park’s history; the first ballroom burned down in 1908 and the Dreamland Ballroom was opened in the 1909 season. The park, like Cedar Point, Waldameer, and Venangoland’s own Monarch Park, was built as a destination park, set up by a transit company as a way to sell train tickets.

Like most grown-ups in the region, I have fond memories of the park. In the eighties, I played in a Dixieland band that performed on the midway every summer Saturday night. The park paid us a modest stipend supplemented by free food during our supper break. (Management eventually wised up—Bob and Fred Frye were in the band and for what the Frye boys could eat in an hour, the park could have hired the entire Philadelphia Symphony for a week.) It was a great job; I don’t think any other job allows you to see so many people, particularly little tiny people, dance around just because they feel happy.

The food was fairly decent park food, with better than average fries. The rides weren’t eye-poppingly enormous, but made up for it with a certain dangerous edge. Was there ever a time when riders did not suspect that the Blue Streak or the Wild Mouse might actually collapse at any moment?

My ex-wife’s family used to take a yearly vacation by renting a cottage at the lake. Some of my best CLP memories are from those times; in the evening we would just stroll up to the park and wander about (eat some fries), play some games (eat some fries), and just watch people (and eat some fries). The park, at its best, was like a fireman’s fair that stayed open all summer.

I didn’t see the inside of the ballroom often—it wasn’t in use a great deal, and in some ways I think that saved it from being “modernized” too much.

For those of you still trying to remember where it was, here are the directions. As you walked up the midway, toward the lake, you eventually got to the last big intersection before the lakefront street itself. On your right, the fun house, and ahead on the right, the mini golf course. Ahead on your left, some sort of store or game on the corner, and on your near left, in the corner of the building, the entrance to the ballroom.

The ballroom was the entire upstairs of that building. In its prime it was advertised as the “largest uninterrupted ballroom between New York City and Chicago.” It was a big space with lots of arches, wrapped all around with porch space. In the thirties virtually every band that mattered played there.

The Park was eventually sold by its longtime owners. Big name parks were supersizing, adding new massive rides every year. New owners made the ludicrous choice to join the wave; they put up fences around the park and made everyone pay to come inside. They ripped out the cheesy old rides and replaced them with fewer cheesy new ones. It didn’t help.

For a while there were rumors that some Big Time Amusement Park People were buying the place. It also took a swing at becoming a great outdoor concert venue, booking acts like Steppenwolf and Bob Dylan, but there is an inherent problem with any NW PA business plan that uses the phrase “outdoor concert.” The park passed through a series of ownership deals involving some people who really loved the park and some people with, well, allegedly very colorful financial backgrounds.

The last time I set foot in the park was 2000. By then the place was just a sad shadow of its former self, and I’ve never been able to bring myself to go back. I suspect there are many folks who aren’t even sure they know how many of the last few summers the park has actually been open. But still—as long as the pieces and the real estate were still there, there was a lingering chance that somehow the park might be resurrected.

But like many slices of yesterday, the park had already surrendered a big chunk of its heart and soul. Sometimes you can go through a rough patch and come out the other side. Unfortunately, you can also just run out of time and money and luck.

From the files-- Remembering Conneaut

I wrote the following in the summer of 2000 after a return visit to Conneaut Lake Park. I have many fond memories of the place--an early iteration of the Bully Hill Brass used to have a regular Saturday night gig at the park (if you have a copy of the park history, you'll find a picture of my brother in a candystripe vest and plastic boater crouched down and playing trumpet for some small tyke). But by the turn of the millennium, things were looking pretty bad for the park. The recent fire that took the ballroom and the maintenance shed, where most of the machinery from the functioning rides had been stored-- well, that conflagration probably marks the end of things for good. It's too bad.

(News-Herald, July 2000) I love a good amusement park. Heck, I even love a bad amusement park. Amusement parks never pretended to any lofty purpose. The great parks from the turn of the century share the same pedigree with our own Monarch Park in Venango County. Monarch Park was started by the trolley company as a way to increase business-- if you give people a destination, they'll use your transit system.

Conneaut Lake, Waldameer, Cedar Point-- most all of the pre-Disney biggies were started the same way by a trolley or train company. They were full family parks, parks that served as a gathering spot for the surrounding communities. In the early 1900s, most picnics, reunions, and gatherings were held at Monarch Park. On holidays such as the Fourth of July, Franklin and oil City were empty, all of the citizens at the park, enjoying concerts, bowling, dancing, the carousel, the roller coaster, or at night the spectacle of the light-covered electric tower.

I'm partial to the old traditional parks. Waldameer is still a turn-of-the-century park at heart, with picnic pavilions and classic rides, but with a neat new water park on the side. Cedar Point has a beautiful setting and many, many great rides. A well-built ride is a work of art all its own. I know that seems like strong praise for a roller coaster, but heck, we ooh and ahh over structures like the ancient pyramids that are engineering marvels built to attest to the glory of individuals. Why shouldn't we be impressed by engineering marvels that exist to make thousands of people happy every day? That seems as worthwhile a purpose as any.

Cedar Point has always been my favorite, but I've always had a special affection for Conneat lake Park. A few of us used to play on the midway there every Saturday night for money and food. The park had a delightfully cheesy array of rides and the usual assortment of park eats including superior fries. It also offered uniqe period charm (including a ballroom once billed as "the largest uninterrupted dance floor between NYC and Chicago").

I was at Conneaut lake Park a few weeks ago, and it was painful, like finding an old friend wasted on Skid Row. I always felt Conneaut lake lost its way years ago when management put a fence around it and charged admission even to walk through. They removed many of the old rides and replaced them with "newer" rides, like their half-hearted attempt at a water park. They also tried to promote it as a concert venue (remember when Bob Dylan played there?), but rain got in the way. It all seemed wrong to me.

Part of the park's charm was that it was part park, part neighborhood. In the old days, the park blended into the cottages and homes around it. Now you can stroll for free again, but the damage seems done. The edges of the park seem empty, like the places where weeds have started to encroach on a flower garden. The grand old hotel and the beach club restaurant/lounge are still there, but rather empty and forlorn. Big chunks of buildings have been razed. The Wild Mouse has gone, and nothing has replaced it but a vacant lot.

The attendants have the relaxed attitudes of folks who spend a lot of time doing nothing. The bench seats have been refitted to make do with three slats instead of four, so you can't set your food down beside you. The park closes at 7.

I don't mean to be hard on management; I'm not sure there is a way to make money with a park like this in a small, modern market. Many parks folded in the '20s. Conventional wisdom says that Monarch Park was killed off by the destruction of the Franklin trolley bridge by ice, but the newspaper record shows that Monarch Park was already struggling by the time the bridge went down. But the automobile meant that families no longer traveled to the park toegther. Each family, and even each family member, could choose a separate destination and activity. Monarch Park was doomed.

So maybe it's just a miracle that Conneaut lake Park is still there at all. But it's still a beautiful setting, and I left thinking that it would be fun to stay a weekend at the hotel. And while I was ruminating about its faded glory, Junior Park Tester Caleb (age 7) was running excitedly from ride to ride, pleading with his mother for the opportunity to ride th Blue Streak just fifty times more.

It helps me remember that while a sense of history is nice, sometimes it's better to just hush and let folks enjoy what they find now and remain blissfully unaware fo what's been lost.

Renting the West Unit

(News-Herald, January 31) Tuesday morning, when I read Rod Bedow’s slightly hysterical missive about the county commissioners’ meeting (about “silent dictators,” the need to “pray in fear” and “indenture servants”—I think he meant “indentured”) I knew I’d have to go to the meeting and see what all the fuss was about. A real reporter covered the evening confab for the newspaper, so you already know what happened. Let me give you my biased account of what it was like.

The meeting was to discuss any questions about the county’s plan to lease the old West Unit from ORA as a place to house the county Human Services departments.

Chairman Tim Brooks kicked things off with a very stern tone, saying there would only be asking the board questions about the lease, laying out some rules, and expulsion for misbehavior. Bedow’s hired attorney further set the tone by immediately standing up and threatening the commissioners with a lawsuit and suggesting that the previous commissioners were crooks who “foisted” this deal on the current set.

Had the Forest County attorney been any slicker, he would barely have kept from sliding out of his seat. He did a great deal of talking at first, loosing such gems as “I would hate to see this degenerate into a lawsuit” and expressing his “hope of engaging you in conversation to avoid triggering a lawsuit” as if the lawsuit were a wild dog that wandered into the room and not a gun that Bedow has chosen to point at the county’s head.

Bedow brought a variety of arguments with him, including the suggestion that residual radioactivity might well be loose in the old hospital building.

What exactly are the major objections? One appears to be that when Bedow spends government money on something, he wants to own it. His point was that businesses lease because they may want to leave, but county government will not move to Tennessee. He wants the county to own a building.

This touched of a period of great confusion (i.e. several people with strong opinions supported by nothing but opinion and hearsay). That was ended by the attorney, who gave a long condescending answer that wasn’t really an answer, but I think it sapped everyone’s will to continue down that path.

One important question was unanswered—if the government owns a building, what can it do with the equity? Can the county take out a home equity loan on the courthouse, or is government-owned property a big unconvertible asset? This would be useful to know, but I still don’t.

Eventually the attorney, with a fairly simple question to which he surely knew the answer (“what is a stipend”) opened up the can of worms that many people had wanted to take fishing in the first place—the ORA.

There are a few separate objections to the ORA. One is that they deal in real estate—some people are certain that economic development is concerned with machines to make stuff, but not places to put the machines.

Everyone agrees that such an outfit should be self-sustaining, but to some people that means a timeline of many years (e.g. Franklin’s Third Ward incubator) and to some it means tomorrow. And, as often the case, some people object to paying employees a salary. One audience member asked ORA head Randy Seitz if he was paid a salary, demanding a yes or no answer as if we were uncovering a deep, shameful secret.

Government should own the real estate. People should work for the greater good and not for money. I had no idea that conservative Venango County housed so many communists.

Numbers were thrown around, most in a manner that was meaningless and didn’t prove much of anything. A few folks got heated up. The attorney dispensed some more threats. (“If it turns out I’m right, you’ve got real problems.”) Bedow delivered one more oration, and the meeting—not so much informational as a great chance for everyone to share and vent—broke up.

By the end of the evening, everyone was behaving amicably and politely (Randy Seitz could teach master classes in shmooze). I’m still not entirely sure why some folks are so agitated. Bedow declared he could build a suitable new building for five million, so perhaps he just wants the business. Afterwards, one opponent allowed “I get angry when I see government handing something to some low life who isn’t willing to work,” so maybe we’re just mad at the human services department.

Personally, I’d much rather spend my tax dollars on ORA than on law suits. At least the ORA is doing what very few have done for the region in the last thirty years—something.

Alpha Women

(News-Herald, January 24) By now we all know about alpha males, big manly testosterone-spewing arm-flexing studly mountains of leaderliness. But what is the female counterpart of an alpha male?

Men and women, according to a wide assortment of learned sociologists and regular humans, communicate and socialize differently. Men, it’s said, tend to organize themselves in hierarchies. Like dogs and other pack animals, when you put men together, they strut or bluster or act commanding or just butt heads until everyone sorts out who stands above whom in the pecking order.

Men are pretty comfortable with this. That’s why we have the oft-repeated movie image of two men who punch the daylights out of each other, get up, brush off their clothes, and go get a drink together. Once they know how they stand with each other, they can be friendly. The man who tends to land furthest up the food chain is the alpha male.

But that, according to the learned sociologists, is not how women work.

Women socialize by networking. They don’t keep score by knowing who can whip whom, or who occupies the steps above and below a certain position. If the male social model looks like a ladder, women’s looks like a giant web.

Women get points for their connections. Women in this traditional model gain status by knowing more people, being close to more people, being the hub around which the wheel of their social circle turns.

This means that men and women compete differently. Men will bluster and boss each other around and push and shove and throw their weight around until the top dog is clearly identified.

But women compete by trying to make connections, collecting social ties like baseball cards. And it’s a competition that can get rather ugly at times.

Not that these competitions are always evident. Much of the working world is set-up to follow the male model—the organizational chart tells us who the alpha dog is. And traditional workplaces are not kind to women who try to play this game—often they are often given a dog-related label, but it isn’t “alpha.”

Still, we know what alpha dog competition looks like. Because you can’t beat people into being your friend, women’s competition is less obvious.

But sometimes it can be very visible. You’ll often find it, for example, after someone dies, and people compete for the role of Chief Mourner. They’ll play “Can You Top This” with a litany of special moments they shared with the deceased, special confidences that only they were privy to.

In a workplace where alpha females are competing, you’ll see a more subtle version of the same. Often the competition centers on information—you prove you’re closer to a co-worker by proving that the co-worker has told you things that nobody else knows. That’s why workplace gossip can be so important—not because it proves you Know Things but because it proves you’re the one that people talk to.

The appearance of a new face in the workplace can also trigger alpha female competition for the right to claim the new person for rival alpha networks. That’s why new people in the office can seem very popular, at least until they declare their allegiance.

The competition also plays out in family settings. In many traditional families, you show respect for the alpha female by respecting her right to be the hostess for holiday family gatherings. That’s why “Gram, why don’t you let us help with Thanksgiving this year” is often greeted with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. It’s not viewed as help, but as a challenge, on the order of one man walking up to another at a bar and saying, “Let me help you out by dancing with your wife.”

When the alpha female in a family passes, it often gives rise to as much chaos as the death of a mafia don. How many extended families have stopped gathering at the holidays because Grandma passed on, and the females of the next generation could not negotiate a new alpha.

Not all men feel the need to thump their manly chests when any other male comes within fifty feet, and not all women feel the need to own and operate a personal network of friends and associates. Likewise there are women who thump and men who network. But both varieties of alphas are worth recognizing, if for no other reason than to make sure you don’t cross them.

And yes, I’m aware that this column is full of gross gender generalizations. I’m not sorry I did it; I just want to let you know that I know so you can avoid the trouble of writing to tell me so.

The AFA Today

(News-Herald, January 17)Oddly enough, I’m often asked what Diane Gramley and the AFA are up to these days. I am not an expert on the American Family Association. I did interview Mrs. Gramley years ago, and I can report that she does not have horns, does not breathe fire, and does not brandish stakes and torches. I found her intelligent, articulate, and pleasant.

People in these parts have mixed feelings about being targeted by Mrs. Gramley and the AFA. A few years back they mounted a campaign against a production of “La Cage Aux Folles” at the Barrow; it was the most effective publicity campaign ever, filling virtually all the seats.

Still, more than a few school districts have turtled up when they’ve seen Mrs. Gramley approaching. It’s not just that the AFA stirs up supporters, who by and large seem to be happy to stay quietly a home while Mrs. Gramley sallies forth to raise a ruckus in their name. (Like the ACLU and the Moral Majority, the AFA is more a network of sympathetic individuals than a club that gathers members for meetings.) Like most strident and extreme groups, the AFA stirs strident and extreme opposition.

But Mrs. Gramley has moved up in the world, which may be why things have been a bit quieter on the Northwestern PA front (it could also be that we’ve all become better people, I suppose). Previously responsible for Northwestern Pennsylvania chapter, Gramley now heads the AFA for the entire state. She is responsible for keeping an eye on the whole commonwealth, including all the naughty folks in Philadelphia. Along with tax money and legislative attention, it seems that the big city also gets an extra share of moral correction.

The national AFA espouses a variety of causes, from anti-pornography, to generally making gays and lesbians go away, to making advertisers use the word “Christmas” in seasonal promotions. AFA never met a boycott it didn’t like. Some work, some don’t. AFA takes credit for chasing smutty magazines out of 7-11’s, but when it tried throwing its weight at a major bookstore chain, it was sued instead.

AFA has backed off some of its edgier stances. They now endorse values from the “Judeo-Christian tradition;” a few decades ago founder Don Wildmon was suggesting that immorality in the media was a Jewish plot to drive Christianity out of American life.

Mrs. Gramley has mastered one basic trick of press release writing. If I send out a news release reading, “The squash festival will be the best event in world history…” no newspaper will run it. It’s an ad, an editorial, and not news. But quoting somebody—that’s legitimate reporting. So I just quote myself: “Squash Appreciation Society president Peter Greene announced the upcoming festival. ‘It will be the best event in world history,’ said Greene.” A quick google of Mrs. Gramley turns up a variety of press releases in which the AFA announces what she has to say about something.

She’s also producing a weekly radio program, usually featuring a telephone interview with a medium-prominent speaker or author.

Like, I’m sure, many people, I actually agree with some AFA positions. Smut and pornography aren’t good. Many elements of popular culture are toxic. Illegal drugs are bad. In the education biz, government occasionally tries to poke its nose where it doesn’t belong.

But I am naturally suspicious of people who have complete certainty that they know the mind of God, and I am doubly leery of people who believe that Being Correct gives them the right to bully people who are Very Wrong. The national AFA seems to attract those sorts of folks both as allies and as foes; in addition to its own attacks on others, you can find ugly attacks against the AFA from people who are certain that the AFA is dead wrong and so should be denied any decent treatment. I don’t buy this argument no matter how it’s applied. No footnote to the Golden Rule says “Do unto others, unless they’re wrong, in which case go ahead and treat them like garbage.”

I suspect that much of AFA’s agenda has more to do with politics and culture than with God (as Rev. Gene Carlson recently said, “When you mix politics and religion, you get politics”). But I’ve been on the receiving end of their disapproval, and I seem to have survived. Dissenting voices are an important part of a free society. I appreciate Mrs. Gramley’s willingness to sign her name to her opinions and assume the non-traditional-family role of lady political activist. It’s too bad she doesn’t have as much time for Venangoland any more, but I’m sure there’s a way to get AFA supporters to speak up.

Being a Good Audience

(News-Herald, January 10)Audience misbehavior has always been a challenge; it’s not just Kids These Days. The Franklin Band once threatened to stop holding concerts unless people got their children under control; that was in the 1930’s.

I’ve been both in and in front of many area audiences over the years, and there are plenty of highs and lows. For many years Oil City audiences were the worst, as if large groups had stepped into the OCHS auditorium to chat and were angry that folks up on stage kept trying to interrupt. They’re much improved since those days. Choir director Doran Gilhousen is legendary in Franklin for his lessons on proper concert decorum. Probably the best venangoland audience members are the red hat ladies; I know few performers who aren’t happy to see rows of red and purple in the audience.

There are some simple rules to remember. Be on time. If your child doesn’t have the concentration for anything longer than a short cartoon, leave the poor child at home. Leave the Items in Crinkly Wrappers there, too (which sadistic candy maker decided to wrap little pieces of candy individually in twelve layers of cellophane?). But the biggest issues deal with audience participation.

Less is not automatically better. One unnerving feature of many Sunday matinee audiences at the Barrow can be their unflinching politeness. They will later assert that they had a great time, but during the performance it seems they are reluctant to interrupt by clapping or laughing or otherwise showing signs of life. This can unnerve performers; a bit of audience reaction is the only sure way to know whether you’re doing a good job or not.

Audience participation must also take into account the occasion. I have always loved Franklin High graduation in the park downtown. But the open air setting invariably encourages a few folks to hoot and holler as if they were at a NASCAR rally.

It is not that an audience is not part of a show. If it weren’t, performers would do their thing in big empty halls and ceremonies like marriage and baptism would occur in silent sanctuaries. But some of us in the fifty-and-under age bracket seem to have lost track of what the audience’s role is.

You can see this in televised performances such as music awards shows or even the weekly concert segment on the Today show. The band is playing, the crowd is hollering and dancing, and as the camera swoops across the audience, people turn their backs on the performers so that they can wave and gesture for the camera. The performer could be presenting an awesome milestone, a memorable musical moment, but the camera-fixated audience will never know it. Enjoying the concert takes a back seat to putting on a little show of their own.

Well, here’s the only rule you need to remember when wondering about audience participation: if you are in the audience, the performance is not about you.

That’s why wedding audiences (most of the time) behave appropriately—because there’s no question who is the star.

In any kind of modern concert situation, hollering will occur. Hollering that occurs because an audience member is so excited and transported by the music that he just has to holler—that’s good hollering. The audience member who hollers because he would like to get everyone in the room to pay attention to him—that guy needs to go home and stay there.

This rule also applies to sporting events. Cheering, hollering, getting caught up in the excitement of the game—that’s all appropriate behavior. But if you’re not wearing a team uniform, relax-- the game is not about you.

Oddly enough, this is also all true of the performers. A performer who steps out on stage for no purpose other than to proclaim, “Hey, look at me!!” is not destined for greatness. A player needs to be about the game, an actor needs to be about the character, and a musician needs to be about the music. That’s why audience misbehavior is a problem—it takes the performers attention away from where it needs to be.

It’s as true now as when we were children—it is rude to interrupt (whether “interruption” would require poorly time clapping or a flamethrower).

Oh, and for folks in the fifty-and-older group, there is another issue, and I mention it here because the people close to you don’t know how to broach the subject nicely. But when you’re sitting in the audience, sharing comments, questions and reactions with your seatmate, you aren’t nearly as quiet as you think you are. Just one more reason the Kids These Days are not the only audience members in need of training.

Schools and Difference

(News-Herald, January 3) We’re at the beginning of that winter school stretch, the long grey road that runs from New Years to Easter, where the natives become restless and start to get on each others’ nerves. In the ed biz we’re expected to be sensitive to that mutual irritation in the school setting, given the tendency of many irritated students to grab either a gun or a lawyer to better express their irritation.

The cluster of issues most often turns up under the heading of “tolerance” or “bullying.” It would be a mistake to ignore them, but it’s not always easy to address them.

I believe teen bullying really is different from adult oppression. The beginning of an adult assault, whether by an individual or a nation, is to prove that you’re under attack. Virtually every charge in history begins with some version of, “The Mugwumps are a threat to us. Therefore, we must fight them.” Sometimes the threat is real, sometimes imaginary, but before we are okay attacking someone else, we need to know we are Just Defending Ourselves.

Teens do use that rationalization. But teens can also be completely comfortable deciding that someone Just Deserves to have something bad happen to him. “I can’t believe that kid wears fuzzy pink slippers! Who does that? It’s just wrong! Someone should punch him!”

Teenagers can be absolutely vicious, in ways and for reasons that are invisible to the adults around them. And the cycle of bullying can be even more complicated, because some students do, in fact, get an enormous payoff from being Victims. If I’m the butt of Mean Treatment, then my lot in life is everyone else’s fault and not my failure. And there can be an enormous rush of righteousness that comes from being Picked On Unfairly. Some people would much rather Be Right than solve a problem, and nobody is more Right than someone who is victimized by the mainstream. The fact that you’re picking on me proves I’m a better person than you—why would I want to give that up.

After Columbine it was fashionable to suggest that if other students had just been nicer to the shooters, they wouldn’t have picked up those guns. I don’t believe it; they got enormous emotional payoffs from seeing themselves as Outsiders, and I don’t think they were about to give that up just for the chance to eat lunch with the homecoming court. And, despite adult romantic imaginings to the contrary, Outsider kids can be just as judgmental, prejudiced and mean towards others as those others are towards them.

Bullying and the sheer meanness of the school years can be a complicated and ugly dance.

Some schools have had some success dealing with some of these issues. Some have not, and their failures are a fine example of the law of unintended consequences.

Starting with the Columbine aftermath, the nation wrung its hands and tried to figure out what the problem was. What they finally came up with was, “Some kids were picked on way too much because they were different. Fix that.”

The assumption was that schools would fix the picking-on part. Instead, many schools looked at the problem, analyzed it and concluded, “If people weren’t different, nobody would pick on them.” All we had to do next was just stop students from being different. Hundreds of schools outlawed long black trenchcoats on the assumption, I guess, that if the Columbine killers had been stripped of their trenchcoats they would suddenly have joined a 4-H club and run for Prom court.

There is some small justification for stamping out differences among students. Students who seek out the victim role need a way to draw targets on themselves and pull someone into singling them out. Outlawing self-inflicted targets could be a way to break the cycle.

Beyond that, though, it’s an approach doomed to failure. It assumes that all Different behavior is some pig-headed struggle against the natural order of things. You wouldn’t be different if you weren’t trying to be difficult. So stop it. And not doesn’t it stop bullies—it takes their side. “If you’re going to insist on being different, you’re just asking for it.”

People are different (and lets just not get into “different from what, exactly?”) because they are. Teenagers even more so, because they’re still trying to figure themselves out. For the sincerely different, “Just stop it” isn’t much help. For those after the rush of righteousness, being pursued by both their peers and school officials is just further glorious proof they’re In The Right.

Bullying is always wrong. I’d rather get through the rest of the year by assuming everyone deserves to be treated decently, different or not.

Happy Birthday, Jingle Bells

It’s a good things I stay alert for random factoids, or we would have missed an important anniversary this year. In 2007, the song “Jingle Bells” celebrated its 150^th birthday.

The song was written by James Lord Pierpont. He was the son of a Boston minister and somehow ended up being related to J. P Morgan. Sources differ on how, exactly, just as there seems to be some pretty heated disagreement about where precisely James wrote his musical contribution to the ages. It’s often reported that the song was written for a Sunday School program in the early 1850’s; some authorities seem to think that it was for a Thanksgiving celebration, but since Thanksgiving languished largely uncelebrated until the Lincoln Presidency, I have my doubts about that little tidbit.

Sources agree that he was thirty-ish and serving as an organist at a Unitarian church in Savannah, Georgia by the mid-1850’s. He made a trip back to Medford, Mass to (depending on whose version you believe) either compose or get an early reaction to his cute little song, entitled “A One-Horse Open Sleigh.” No fewer than four places claim to be the “home” of the song, with Savannah and Medford both sporting nifty “Birthplace of “Jingle Bells” plaques. At any rate, in September of 1857, he copyrighted the song.

James was an adventurous young man. He had run away to sea at age 14 and later headed west to the Gold Rush. He first married in Troy, New York, and left wife #1 in Medford with his father when he made the move to Savannah. She died there of tuberculosis, and he went on to marry the daughter of Savannah’s mayor.

James took the Southern side during the War Between the States, and composed several pro-South songs such as “Strike for the South” and “We Conquer or Die” which included the lines “The war drum is beating, prepare for the fight!/The stern, bigot Northman exults in his might.” He apparently got himself in some hot water during Reconstruction when he signed on for a plan to bring Scottish itinerant farmers in to work empty Southern farms.

James passed away in 1893 at the age of 71, having realized little fame or fortune from his venerable classic, though it had been popular from day one.

The original tune is a bit different from the one we know today—the chorus is a bit more formal. To my ear it actually bears more than a passing resemblance to the tune of “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas” (a song that authorities list as “traditional” and “origin unknown”).

The lyrics have come down basically unchanged, four full verses in all. It’s the third verse that tends to get left out—in that verse, our hero is blown off the road and laughed at by a faster rig. The only real lyrical oddity is that Jingle Bell scholars believe that the title is an imperative—in other words, we’re giving instructions, not identifying a type. It’s “hey, you bells, get jingly” and not “here we have some jingle type bells.”

Mostly the lyrics point to the big unanswered question, which is this—why exactly is “Jingle Bells” a Christmas song anyway?

It’s not even remotely about Christmas. In the first verse, we extol the fun of ramping around in an open sleigh. In the second, we add a girl (“Fannie Bright” not “Brice,” who didn’t some along until much later) and the get stuck in a snow bank where we become “upsot,” which is 1850’s slang for either turning upside down or becoming drunk.

The final verse is even more direct. “Now the ground is white/ go get it while you’re young/ Take the girls tonight/ and sing this sleighing song.” It also advises that you get a horse with “two forty for his speed,” a reference to a horse that covers a mile in two minutes, forty seconds.

In other words, “Jingle Bells” is nothing less than a 150-year-old celebration of the joys of a woman and a fast vehicle. How such a thing ever became associated with the baby Jesus is quite beyond me, but clearly there’s no reason we couldn’t keep enjoying it throughout the rest of the snow-covered winter season.

Not that all news for the venerable birthday song is good. A recent poll by Edison Media Research tested 579 Christmas recordings. Placing dead last was a song that was a big hit in 1955, created by a Danish sound engineer by the slow painful process of working with hundreds of collected recordings of animal sounds. Yes, “Jingle Bells” as rendered by the Barking Dogs has been judged the least favorite Christmas record of all. Happy birthday, indeed.

Christmas with the Family

(News-Herald, December 20) Plenty of pressure comes with the Christmas holiday. Selecting presents, eating food, shopping crowds, bad music—but for many people the greatest challenge is the dreaded family gathering.

I have reached that stage of life where my house is otherwise empty until people come home to it. I find that prospect pretty exciting, and I likewise look forward to the three of us heading off to my parents’ home for a massed clan onslaught. But I know that not everyone finds these sorts of prospects appealing.

Like many parts of Christmas, this tradition carries a high stress level because we expect that it will be acted out with all the polished treacly perfection of a Hallmark television special. Real live non-televised humans are considerably messier than the Hallmark kind.

When some people gather with family, they bring more issues than the simple desire for perfection. There are some other habits of mind that foster discontent during seasonal hearth gathering.

What have you done for me lately? There are people whose relationships ride the roller coaster of recent events. I’m not talking about major news, like discovering that someone you trusted has stolen your life’s savings. I’m talking about the person who was your buddy last week when you were shopping together, but yesterday she snubbed you at a party, so now you hate her.

When I close the book on a professional or amateur career, I would hate to have that whole span judged based on the last few chapters, particularly because our last chapters do not always find us at our best. We forget that, though, so there we are thinking that we don’t care if Uncle Duddly saved our lives years ago—right now he’s irritating and loud and he smells funny.

The eternal grudge. This is an absolute family pitfall, because families have a mountain of history. It’s almost certain that some time in the last fifty years everyone has done something unpleasant and painful to everyone else.

It doesn’t matter if it was the time Madge insulted your dress or the time your sister hit on your new boyfriend or the time Uncle Duddly hinted that your son is not very bright. You can select the wound and pick at the scab forever.

Grudge-holding is an absolute killer at Christmastime because everyone is supposed to be warm and happy. So the offender can make a show of being regretful and sad that he did a Bad Thing, thereby being a spirit-killing party pooper. Or he can get in the appropriate happy spirit, giving you the cue to quietly seethe—how dare he act as if he doesn’t care how rotten he was to you.

Sitting judgment. How is it that we can look at strangers and acquaintances and say, “Well, everybody’s entitled to make their own choices,” but when it comes to family, we feel the need to correct Errors in Judgment.

Cousin Ethel has adopted a diet that won’t oppress green leafy vegetables, and since we think that’s Horribly Wrong, we’ll make sure that we don’t do anything that might suggest we in any way approve. This makes use of that great old rationalization: “It’s not rudeness if I’m really right and she’s really wrong.”

Alpha battles. Christmas brings together many people who are used to being royalty in their own castles. It’s not always easy for them to spend time around someone else’s throne. Wrestling for the crown can involve anything from subtle discomfort to open combat.

Sometimes it’s not just you. Sometimes there’s a family member who really is a jerk. Really.

How can you cope with the extra drama of extra family togetherness? Well, you can focus on everything you ever loved about the ones you find difficult. It’s not really any harder to fixate on something you loved than on something that bugged you.

You can focus your attention on a relative that you particularly love, someone you would give the greatest gift in the world if you could just afford it. Your gift to that person can be a peaceful, stress-reduced Christmas gathering.

Or you can just imagine that your family members are dead. Yes, that’s an awful thought, but stay with me.

Where’s the one place that bygones are bygones and the family is loving and supportive without hesitation? The funeral home. When do we let go of the worst of someone and grab onto the best with unconditional love? When they’re dead.

Well, if you can do it then, you can do it now. So before you walk up that snow covered walk to the house, remember how much you would miss the folks inside if they were gone. Put love first. Have a Merry Christmas.

Harold Pixley Remembered

Hard to believe that it has only been seven years since Harold Pixley died. This is the column that ran in December of 2000. Like many of the old columns about people, I run this to give him a little bit of presence on the web. Who knows who might be looking for some little cyber-trace of him.

Harold Pixley died this week. I know I'm not the only person in Franklin who will miss him.

Pix came to Franklin in the summer of 1943 when the school district was looking to fill the gap left by the departure of Richard Stocker. Pix came originally from Centralia, Illinois. He graduated from Oberlin College and had played first chair clarinet with the New Philadelphia Ohio Symphony Orchestra. The school district selected him from a field of ten applicants; he was thirty-one years old.

Those of us who come to teaching with even a small amount of idealism dream of becoming the kind of teacher that Pix was. His influence in Venango County is beyond measuring.

He built up the Franklin High School Stage Band. This may not seem like a particularly radical notion, but it was the forties and a teacher who tried to bring swing music into the schools was viewed about as a teacher who wanted to start a school rap ensemble. That's they were called "stage" bands-- "swing" was too naughty.

With both the stage band and the full bands at Franklin, Pix was a master at selecting music that audiences would enjoy. Pix was not the kind of musician who believed in "pure" music, music that musicians and academics would love but which would give average audiences headaches. Pix never played the national anthem too slowly. One standard Pix saying was, "Give the audience a treat, not a treatment."

Pix could push students without insulting them. And he was not the stereotypical band director who required his students to make him proud, to make him look good. He wasn't all warm and mooshy and fuzzy, but he was always a gentleman. "Practice at home" was another standard Pix saying.

Pix set the regular format for the annual Musical Broadcast, the FHS variety/talent show. Pix's Broadcasts were legendary for their length-- Pix gave every performer an encore, whether they deserved it or not. And even in the last years of his teaching career, Pix never became hidebond and set in his ways. He really didn't get rock music, but he knew "the kids" did and that was okay.

Pix's influence went beyond the high school. He was the first director of the Franklin Silver Cornet Band to have actual formal musical training. In the years when the band nearly died for lack of members, Pix helped bring high school students into the fold, including students who broke the great gender barrier (women in town band---gasp!!)

Pix was for years the music director at the First United Methodist Church. It was Pix who conned Steve Anderson and me into singing in the youth choir there, with absolutely no reason to suspect that either one of us had a hint of vocal skill before he recruited us (and precious little afterwards, either), but it was Pix's way to keep building. "He may not be good for the band," he once said about a student. "But the band will be good for him."

It was Pix who handed over the reins at church to a new young guy, just back in the area, so that John McConnell could begin his many productive years of making that church into a musical leader in the community. And it was Pix who recruited Ed Frye for town band, where he began the longest tenure in band history as director. Pix was not one to jealously guard his turf.

I've never seen anybody who could work so hard and look so relaxed at the same time. I never saw Pix look harried or stressed or under the gun. I can remember him sitting next to me in board meetings for town band, hard of hearing and not quite catching what was said. He'd just smile and turn to me and say, "What's he talking about, Pietro?"

And I can remember the long hard years of his wife's illness, the medical prognoses that gave her a few months to live. Those months stretched to years, and caring for her became a full-time difficult task; we didn't see him out and about often.

He told me once in that time that he supposed he could put her in a home, but he didn't think that was right. She was his wife, and he had made a promise that he would always take care of her, and so he did, although he was not a young man. I wouldn't have thought any less of him if he had felt trapped, or regretted giving up so much of his own life to care for her, but he explained it all in the same simple way that a man explains why he eats and breathes.

I will always admire Pix. He was kind, gentle, dedicated, and quietly strong. He was a man who found a place for himself and filled that place without flinching or complaining. He made thousands of friends who always loved him, and touched thousands of lives for the better. All of us will miss him.

Information Vacuums

(News-Herald, December 13)Nature abhors an information vacuum. Where information is missing, nature always finds way to pick up the slack. This is a simple principle, easy to grasp, but often forgotten. People, particularly when occupying sensitive positions of power or bureaucracy, seem to have an overwhelming urge to “manage” people by withholding information.

“What they don’t know won’t hurt them” is the operating principle, and it’s true, as far as it goes. But the oft-forgotten rest of the saying is “but it will surely come back to bite you in the butt.”

On some level, we all know this. It’s a principle that has been celebrated endlessly on television. If the first part of an episode involves a husband deciding that he will avoid trouble by keeping some piece of information from his wife, every tv viewer over the age of six knows that hilarity will ensue as his secrecy breeds disaster.

The problem with an artificial information vacuum is not just that it’s hard to control. The problem is that when you refuse to tell people things they want to know, they will invariably just start making stuff up. Nobody ever EVER walked away from a situation like that saying, “Well, they aren’t talking, so I guess we’ll just never know.”

All of the great wrangles in these parts have featured this principle at work. From the Hospital Merger Fiasco to the endless Two Mile Run Drama, confusion and mess have been sown by folks who figured they could keep a lid on things and avoid further squawking.

In the murky uncertainty of the merger of the Oil City and Franklin hospitals, a thousand imagined outcomes were conjured up. The Oil City Hospital is going to be closed. The Franklin Hospital will be closed. A thousand nurses will be laid off. The Oil City building will be encased in concrete, then blown up. Patients will be dragged to the Franklin facility and then forced to live within the Franklin City limits.

It’s not that the complete truth is always greeted with a warm fuzzy hug. Had the merger plans been laid out in detail from day one, there still would have been plenty of people hopping mad. But by trying to avoid that scenario, honchos managed to still get all of that anger PLUS a bunch more anger about things that weren’t even going to happen.

And if that isn’t messy enough, an information vacuum provides opportunity for deliberate abuse. Hypothetically, a physician who was worried about having his golden applecart upset by the merger would have been free to fill the vacuum with whatever tale he chose to spin in order to stir up people for his own purposes.

Two Mile has often offered more of the same. We could go back through the years, but let’s just set the wayback machine to last summer.

All the park authority ever needed to do was issue a simple sentence beginning with the words, “It’s necessary to close the park for the season because…” and finish it in fifteen words or fewer. Instead, we got gobbledygook that was, perhaps, intended to soothe the savages. It didn’t—it just left everyone in the county free to invent their own reason for closing the park.

So many stories have been made up about the park that the average shmoe doesn’t have a hope of figuring out what the heck really went on. That’s how it is with an information vacuum; before you know it, you’re trying to prove that forty-seven different things didn’t happen and answering questions like “When did you stop beating your wife?”

That’s why it’s worth it to tell people you don’t have an answer—if you tell them nothing, they’ll guess that you’re keeping the truth hostage for nefarious purposes. That’s why it actually makes sense for news outlets to keep reporting “Nothing new has happened at this time.” The truth may be boring, but it still fills the information vacuum.

Sometimes information has to be held back. It would have been nice to have regular updates on the saga of the Crook Who Stole Venango County’s Money, but the feds asked our local authorities to keep a lid on it and that seems like a hard-to-ignore request. Troop movements, contract negotiations and medical tests are better handled without widespread public scrutiny, balanced by the knowledge that the results will ultimately be revealed.

It should also be noted that it is not an information vacuum when the information is right there for all the to see, but people are just too lazy or cantankerous or attached to what they’ve already decided is the truth. If you insist on remaining unbothered by the facts, the only vacuum is between your ears.

Gifts of Time and Money

(News-Herald, December 6) One of the thorny issues of the Christmas season is the business of gifting, the large-scale dispersal and redistribution of whatever we have that passes for wealth. It’s a pretty shaky proposition to start with the birth of the baby Jesus, the Creator of All manifest in frail human form, and then draw a line from there to a mad dash to buy home appliances, jewelry, toys, and the latest dvd’s.

The conventional answer is to enshrine gift-giving as a tradition begun by the magi bringing their gifts to the manger. It’s a nice thought, even if it does give short shrift to the shepherd who showed up with full hearts but empty hands.

I’m not lobbying against gift-giving. It’s an honorable tradition, and it gives us the opportunity to reflect on something at the core of honorable, devout and ethical behavior. And that’s the simple matter of acting on what we believe.

People, whether as individuals, or as parts of organizations or governments, usually have their stated priorities and their real priorities, and they don’t always match. To find out the real priorities, simply watch how someone spends two resources—time and money.

Time and money are the resources that matter because they are absolutely limited. You only get so much of both, and that in turn means that every expenditure of time or money is a choice. The hour I spend talking to you is an hour I don’t spend doing something else; the dollar I spend on a chocolate cupcake can’t be spent on fresh twinkies.

People try to identify priorities with talk, but talk is cheap. It costs you nothing. One common trait of the presidencies of Slick Willie and George Junior is grasping that if they said what people wanted to hear, many folks will not pay any attention to what actually happened.

Most working folks have experienced the Pep Talk. This talk (apparently taught in Manager School) involves some boss standing in front of a room full of widget twiddlers. “Widget twiddlers,” he says earnestly, “are the heart and soul of this organization. What you do is so very important, and we just couldn’t function without you.”

Managers, here’s a clue. If you can’t right now think of ten real, substantive things that you’ve done in the last year that could be used as evidence of your commitment to widget twiddling, you should just shut up, because nobody in the room will believe your motivational words. On the other hand, if you can name ten things, you probably don’t need to talk about your commitment, because your people already know.

Here’s your management lesson for the day. If the only way people will know what you value is that you tell them, don’t bother. A) Nobody will believe you because B) it isn’t true.

If you are telling folks you’re all about your home life, but you’re rarely at home, you’re not very believable. If you tell your kids they come first, but you spend all your money on Beanie Babies, while the kids make do with one pair of jeans and a t-shirt each, your kids likely suspect that they aren’t number one.

What we say we “can’t afford” is always a clear marker of our real priorities. We can always find money for the things that Really Matter; we can always find reasons not to pay for what doesn’t.

Sometimes priorities are real. There are people in this world who really can’t afford cable tv because they really need to buy food instead. And there are people who have to sacrifice most of the hours in their week to make that money. But most of us are neither that poor nor that busy. We just make a lot of choices in a hurry, without thinking much about what we’re choosing.

But every year as Christmas rolls around, we become deliberate gifters. We choose who to give to, how much, and how carefully to choose. And that’s a part of the holiday we can learn from.

If we consider keeping local workers and businesses worth supporting, we can choose to spend our money here at home. If there are people and organizations and events that matter to us, we can choose to spend our time on them.

And it doesn’t stop on December 26. Every day we trade away bits of money. Every day we give away twenty-four of our precious hours. We can toss them away impulsively and support priorities that we don’t even realize we’ve chosen, or we can choose to give them in ways that we truly value, like carefully selected seasonal gifts. That would be Christmas every day.

Remembering Grassy

(News-Herald, September 1998) For a quick lesson in how people took care of each other once upon a time in this country, there is no better subject than Alonzo Nichols.

Lonnie was born in 1865 in Williamstown, New York, and moved to Franklin when still young. At a fairly early age he became a bootblack, the profession he stayed with for most of his life.

It's doubtful that Lonnie was ever in school. Accounts from print and oral tradition indicate that he was at best, slow, and at most, what we used to call "retarded."

But newspaper accounts of the day never apply so much as "simple" to his name. In 1901, the Evening News said, "he developed an elastic imagination that has been constantly stretched until today its extension is unlimited..."

Early on in life, he developed his own dance, which he called the grasshopper; consequently, he was known through most of his life as "Grassy."

He knew everyone in town, and proclaimed himself at various times the mayor, police chief, and fire chief. He attached himself closely to the Franklin Band; his only residence for much of his life was the band room in City Hall. That address is duly noted in several town directories.

Grassy was not a perfectly picturesque town character; he was not sentimental Hollywood cute. He was pushy about asserting his "rank," frequently insisting on delivering speeches at public events, and often made life a bit difficult for others. Band lore includes tales of various times that Grassy had to be moved out so that the band room could be fumigated; hygiene was not one of his virtues.

At one point, irritated city fathers gave him the option of going to Erie to live with relatives or undergoing evaluation for a room at the institute in North Warren. Grassy did go to Erie occasionally, but his heart never left Franklin.

His loyalty was legendary. When the band left on a trip to Buffalo without him, he was seen doggedly trudging up the railroad tracks after them.

He was devoted to the Elks and their minstrel show, and was often featured as a "character comedian" or as "Blondin, King of the Tightrope."

Grassy's father died in the poorhouse; his mother in Erie did not seem interested in him. The city of Franklin was his family.

There is no hint that any of his public appearances were greeted with mockery, or that he was ever viewed as an object of ridicule. The band included him in at least one group photo. The newspaper regularly published accounts of events in the life of "the Chief."

When he became upset over the state of his resting place in the band room, the mayor and police chief bought him a new cot. The Elks let him carry the purple banner for them in an important parade in Erie, with no apparent fear that he might somehow embarrass them.

In 1910, the city sent out postcards to invite folks back for Old Home Week. The cards featured drawings of favorite landmarks such as the courthouse. One featured a picture of Grassy wielding a gigantic key to the city and inviting folks home.

Nor did the city treat him as incompetent. Newspaper accounts suggest that folks did keep an eye on his comings and goings and even his bank balance. When he would leave town for a "vacation" and end up arrested for vagrancy (while claiming to be the mayor of Franklin), someone would go fetch him back. But it appears that no one ever tried to control his activities or finances, or steer him to an "appropriate" life.

There was never an attempt to take away any of his freedom, not even "for his own good."

Eighty years ago, in September of 1918, Grassy hopped onto the running board of a fire truck headed for the Third Ward. On the way, the solid rubber tire broke and struck Grassy and one of the firemen. Shortly thereafter he died.

The Mayor and City Controller agreed that Grassy should have a first class funeral at the city's expense. Hundreds called to pay final tribute; the funeral procession, led by the mayor's car and including the Elks and the Franklin Band, was viewed by hundreds who stood in the rain to pay their respects. Grassy' pallbearers included Elks, city councilmen, and the fire and police chiefs.

Wrote the News: "While the going of Grassy was greatly regretted, all of the circumstances of his death and burial seemed fitting. He met his death in what he considered his line of duty, and the show on the occasion of his burial was in keeping with his whole career."

What, one wonders, would happen to Grassy today? Perhaps we would all turn our backs on him, secure in the knowledge that professionals would take care of him. He would be their problem, not ours. Social services would find him an "appropriate job" and train him to "properly" handle his money.

Perhaps with the aid of people who could help him find his "proper place" in (or out of the way and to one side of) society, he would even have a life today more satisfying and fulfilling than the one he enjoyed so long ago, but somehow I doubt it.

The summer after this column ran, the Franklin Silver Cornet Band corrected a longstanding oversight and placed a marker on Grassy's grave.

Diet Screts

(News-Herald, November 29)We are told, with increasing frequency, that we are a nation of fatties.

Like many folks, I see plenty of anecdotal evidence to support that. And this is a time of year that increases our awareness. Holiday shopping allows us to see the many examples of folks carrying a heavy helping of heft, and holiday eating gives us plenty of chance to join them.

So what are we to do? To read the articles, watch the tv shows, or listen to people talk, one would think that weight loss requires some sort of scientific breakthrough more elusive than brain transplantation, curing cancer, or the unified field theory. It’s a deep and difficult secret.

Of course, before you can hear the secret, you have to be mentally prepared for it.

You can’t hear the secret if you are still in denial. If you’re still claiming that you are merely big-boned, fluffy, glandular, or a victim of a peculiar optical illusion created by poor clothing choices, you aren’t ready. If you think having your child carry an extra fifty pounds to match the extra two hundred you’ve got is a personal matter with no consequences for the people who love you, you’re not ready.

Nor do you get off the hook by acting as if the only other option is to become a walking q-tip. Being seriously underweight is not a desirable option.

You can get off the hook by being honest about your size and being okay with it. The media ideal for build is bizarrely wispy. Women seem to seriously over-estimate the sexiness of visible bone structure. Go pop in a Marilyn Monroe movie. There’s fairly widespread agreement that she was a fairly attractive woman, and she was no waif-like frail flower. Plenty of us are carrying what current health charts would call a few extra pounds. And not just a few as in “a few people ran for county commissioner” but “a few people went deer hunting.” Some of us are fine with that.

But perhaps you have found your physique more aggressively ample than you care for, and you’re ready to shed a few ounces. What’s the secret to weight loss, the mystery that millions pursue through infomercials and the Enquirer?

Burn more calories than you take in.

Too simple? Move around more, and eat less.

There’s a reason that so many diet supplements have fine print about following an eating plan—it’s the eating plan that makes the difference.

Not that it makes the difference they show you. Those nifty before and after pictures? Here’s how that works, according to some of my internet sources.

Find an athlete who’s about to have some serious surgery that will lay him up for a few months. After he’s been stuck in bed a while, take a “before” picture of his newly pudgy self. Then, once he’s up and around, he can resume his usual athletic level of activity. After his body bounces back to its original trim and muscular shape, take your “after” shot. Oh, and don’t forget to sign him to a contract that requires his secrecy on the matter.

So the bad news is that your physical awesomeness will always be limited by your genes and history. No amount of exercise can turn Wally Cox into Arnold Schwarzenegger. Your body makes the rules about what it will and won’t put up with.

But most diet plans will work, for a while, because they make you think about (and therefore limit) the food you eat. I could go on the Vowel Diet: Mondays I only eat three foods with the letter A, then on Tuesday only three with letter E, and so on. I would lose weight, because I would stop throwing any sort of food within reach in the general direction of my big, open mouth.

The real trick is to pick something you can live with. I once jump-started weight loss with the clinical depression diet—I do not recommend it as a long term approach. But I have picked up a few healthier tricks.

When choosing diet versions of food, pick versions that you don’t usually eat. If you don’t love Thousand Island dressing, the diet version’s taste won’t be a let-down.

I also discovered that I can do nothing while sweating on exercise machinery as easily as I can do nothing while sitting on a couch.

And dieting is the perfect time for positive procrastination. There are foods that I can’t give up forever, but I can put off just about anything for the next twenty-four hours.

Eat less, exercise more. There are worse problems than not liking your weight, but not many that are easier to fix. Love yourself. Take care of yourself.

The Trouble with Tourism

I'm yielding to the urge to reprint some columns from even earlier. This was one of the first I ever ran, and I'm much less grumpy now, thanks.

(News-Herald, June 1998) The trouble with tourism as an industry is that you have to put up with tourists.
I think those who tout tourism for our area sometimes forget this.
My family's roots are in the seacoast region of New Hampshire, an area that benefits financially from tourism, even though the major attraction is the Atlantic Ocean, a body of water that can only be comfortably entered during a two-hour span on a single Wednesday afternoon late in July.
The rest of the year it appeals only to small children, who will play in the waves for hours, then look up with big eyes and blue lips saying, "Wh-wh-what d-d-d-do you m-mean we're g-g-going home?"
Because the ocean is largely inhospitable, tourists in the area resort to the more common tourist activities: getting in the way, behaving rudely, and spending money. It is only their devotion to the latter that makes putting up with all the former at all palatable.
One of the benefits of quasi-rural life as we enjoy it here is that people basically leave each other alone.
Tourists extend no such respect; they consider your home their theme park. And if you are truly committed to having them return repeatedly with their uncles, cousins, boyfriends, and money, you smile sweetly and act as if you have no purpose in life but to make them feel at home.
So, having experienced Venango County's service industries for years, I have some doubts about our readiness for dealing with tourists. In the public interest, let me offer this little quiz. Take it and see if you are prepared to participate in the Oil Region Heritage Stuff Tourist Boom.

1) A customer enters your shop. You are busy with an important magazine article. You should:
A. Wait on him.
B. Ignore him for a while.
C. Ignore him until he goes away.

2) You work in a restaurant. A customer comments thaat his meal was not well-prepared. You should:
A. Apologize and offer to tear up the bill.
B. Give him a free mint.
C. Say, "Yeah, our chef really sucks, huh!"

3) You are trapped on Route 322 behind some elderly folks with out-of-state license plates. They slow down frequently for no apparent reason, turn their signals on and off raandomly, and generally gawk in an obstructive manner. You should:
A. Chuckle gratefully and feel proud of the beauty of Venango County.
B. Honk angrily and gesture expressively.
C. Run them off the road into a beautiful Venango County ditch.

4) One day a woman enters your place of business and offers to pay you half price for an item because it's really garbage and she's "having a terrible time because people in this hick town are so stupid." You should:
A. Smile sweetly and thank her.
B. Take the item in back to wrap up and never return.
C. Point out that you may be stupid, but at least you're not wearing a butt-ugly outfit like hers.

5) A complete stranger drives his car onto your lawn and has a family picnic. While his children play ball in your garden, he rips Aunt Ethel's memorial forsythia out of the ground, knocks on your door, and offers you five bucks for it. You should:
A. Offer to throw in an authentic oil-soaked country rag from your garage for another five.
B. Tell him about a great antique shop up the road and send him to your in-laws.
C. Shoot at him.


If you chose A's, you're ready to strike it rich. B's and you'll at least enjoy yourself. If you picked C's, perhaps it's time for you to write the county commissioners in favor of something less obtrusive than tourism, like a nuclear waste dump.

Reviving Thanksgiving

(News-Herald, November 22)There are plenty of signs that I am becoming an old fogey. There is plenty of new music that I feel signals, at the very least, a terrible loss of sense and good taste among the young and, at the very worst, the decline and fall of civilization as we know it. Even when I hear teenagers listening to music that sounds as good now as it did when I heard it thirty years ago, I want to accuse them of not listening to it properly.

I think My Space looks like a programmer ate too much fruit cake, drank too much punch, and threw up into a neon piñata. I don’t get the appeal of tattoos. I think pants should ride high enough to cover underwear (which in turn should be made out of something more substantial than colorful dental floss).

But while I may well be in a well-advanced state of fogeydon, I don’t think my feelings about The Holiday Season are fogey-related. I think the advanced decay and general ugly mess are real.

A Martian arriving in the US with no prior study might well conclude that The Holiday Season begins in October when Vampires, Licensed Action Heroes and Sexy Nurses travel door to door announcing the imminent arrival of the Baby Jesus, ushered into the area by Santa, who eats a last enormous meal in November to fortify himself for a month-long orgy of shopping in an attempt to mark the arrival of the baby by building a mountain of merchandise visible from space (the Baby Jesus Himself is needed only for a brief cameo).

Our celebration of these holidays is seriously out of whack. Yes, I know people have been complaining about this forever. But really. You’re reading this only because you managed to find a newspaper buried in the fifty pounds of advertising delivered to your door. And God bless the News-Derrick for organizing a campaign to collect and distribute food for Thanksgiving, because in most US media we have finally reached the point where more coverage is devoted to Friday’s shopping than the barely-recalled holiday on Thursday.

Black Friday used to be the day after Thanksgiving. Now it seems to be the main event; Thanksgiving is just the day that comes before it.

I do believe there’s an upside to this, however.

For a long, long time, Thanksgiving was an almost reflexive holiday, a set of traditions that anyone could observe without employing a single brain cell. One could go through the motions of Thanksgiving without a moment’s thought, appearing thankful without ever once considering what that meant.

Fifty years ago, going with the Thanksgiving flow meant sitting and talking and playing with the family long into the evening; now it means saying goodbyes early so that you can squeeze in some sleep before trying to beat the 3 AM rush at the outlet mall. These days, celebrating Thanksgiving requires a deliberate choice, a purposeful decision to observe what you believe the holiday asks of us.

We could do the lazy person’s version of the holiday and feel like we were living up to the spirit. But now in order to celebrate the spirit of the day, we have to make an effort to swim upstream, and that’s probably good.

Thanks and gratitude ought to be thoughtful. We need to think—really think—about what we have to be grateful for.

It is far too easy to take the blessings that we enjoy for granted. Worse yet, it is easy to take them as deserved, to imagine that the good things we enjoy are only what we’re entitled to.

There is nothing that shows less gratitude than to look at the friends or family or community or Creator who gives us a series of awesome gifts and say simply, “Well, of course, you’re giving me this. You should. And by the way, couldn’t you have put it in a nicer wrapper.”

We are among the wealthiest, healthiest, safest, most comfortable people who have ever lived on Earth. There is not a one of us who does not have something to be grateful for.

So I think the screwed up mess that our holiday has become is an opportunity for us to choose gratitude, to stop and deliberately take stock and mark, in whatever way suits us best, those things and people and circumstances and blessings in life that we enjoy. If we can plan a shopping trip and search out bargains, we can certainly plan a moment to search out our own grateful hearts. There has to be more to this season than simply trying to Get Stuff, and it has to be good for each of us to figure out what that something more is.

Further note:
See, here's the thing about writing a weekly column while living the rest of your life. Sometimes I can't quite get it to where I want it by deadline, and this was a particularly frustrating example. Busy week plus minor headlock kept me from tagging the point I ultimately wanted to make, which is this:

If your holiday season is a horrible mess of consumerism lacking the true spirit of the occasion, it's your own damn fault, and you should do something about it.