NCLB & the Texas Miracle

(News-Herald, January 2004) Okay, if it seems sometimes that I’m a little cynical about the current wave of education reforms, let me tell you a story.

One of the selling points of “No Child Left Standing” (or “Behind” or “In Public School” or whatever we’re calling it these days) was that it was a national version of highly successful reforms already proven in Texas. In 2000, Bush cheered the “Texas Educational Miracle.”

Since then, word has slowly been emerging that the miracle is slightly less miraculous than when your Uncle Floyd pulled a nickel out of your ear. But it does provide a good view of how this drive for “accountability” plays out in the field.

In Houston in February of this year, an assistant principal in Houston was surprised to discover that his school had a 0% drop-out rate, even though a freshman class of 1000 had become a senior class of 300.

There were a variety of accounting techniques used to achieve this effect (remember, this is Texas, home of Enron, that we’re talking about). Students were reportedly encouraged to take a hike; an independent audit of the school system found that roughly 50% of the students who did not graduate should have been labeled dropouts, but were not (“Um, Johnny just moved out of the district, as far as we know…”). That was about 2,300 students.

The drive behind all this was, of course, the push to make good numbers. The superintendent put the principals back to single-year contracts, and they could be terminated “without cause.” Those principals were given mandates: “The district-wide dropout rate will decrease from 1.5 percent to 1.3 percent.” In other words, their job was not to educate students, but to “make their numbers.”

When that same Houston superintendent took over, the success rate for the state’s tenth grade math test in one school was a measly 26%. The year he left, the rate was 99%.

How do we accomplish such a thing? It’s remarkably simple, actually. Houston’s technique was to keep low ability students in the ninth grade; after two or more years in ninth grade, they were bumped directly to twelfth grade. So the worst students in Houston simply never took the assessment test. In the year of the miraculous 99% success rate, there were 1,160 students in ninth grade and 281 in tenth grade.

Houston schools were also under pressure to keep their safety numbers in line to avoid being labeled “persistently dangerous,” another tag that triggers vouchers and loss of funds under the new rules of the game.

How do you keep those numbers down? Schools stopped reporting rapes, stabbings, and assaults as “school crimes,” because those students were arrested by the police and sentenced by the courts, not suspended by the school.

Over a four year period, the in-house police force recorded 3,091 assaults. In its report to the state capital, the school district reported 761 of those.

The Houston system was supposed to be the flagship school district for the country, and it certainly provides a fine example of how the sort of corporate malfeasance that has shot holes in the private sector can be effectively applied to school systems.

You tell your underlings that you will reward them for the appearance of success and crush them for the appearance of failure. It would probably be a better world if lots of people stood up to that sort of bullying, but when a bully holds a gun to your head and demands that you act like a supporter of Jefferson Davis—well, most of us will start whistling Dixie.

A survey of teachers by (take a deep breath) the National Board of Educational Testing and Public Policy at Boston College (phew) found that in states that use high stakes testing (like, say, the PSSA tests in Pennsylvania) 70% of teachers said that the test leads some teachers in their school to teach in ways that contradict their ideas of good teaching. I imagine that problem, of being pushed to do what you know is wrong in your job, is even worse for principals.

Now, none of what I’ve talked about this week is arcane or secret knowledge—it’s all taken from published reports in reputable papers like The New York Times. But my story is not quite over.

Who was this superintendent who led Houston schools through an exercise in cooking the books in order to give the appearance of compliance with the law, while actually avoiding it? And did anything happen to him when it was discovered that he had been thumbing his nose at the regulations?

He’s doing fine. He’s Rod Paige, George W. Bush’s Secretary of Education. This would be the part where I become cynical about government reform.

Going Through the Motions

(News-Herald, April 18) What could be worse than Going Through the Motions?

Sometimes students want to GTTM. The favorite question to justify GTTM without becoming involved is “When will we ever use this in real life?”

The sarcastic teacher would like to answer, “What? You mean, when will you ever have to use your brain in life?” Unfortunately, the sarcastic teacher knows that there are many opportunities for people to go through life without using their brains or becoming involved.

People who focus on GTTM usually become focused on what minimum motions they need to go through, and hitting that minimum estimate is a skill in itself. A bad under-estimator would be the student who observes other students writing and thinks that the minimum requirement is to wiggle your pen around while making random marks on paper. Even teachers who are themselves going through the motions may require more than that, but not by much. I suspect many students can tell a story about the time they inserted the words to, say, the Pledge of Allegiance in the middle of an essay, and the teacher never noticed.

People in any organization hate bad leadership, but often what we call bad leadership is really no leadership at all, and no leadership at all most commonly takes the form of going through the motions. The non-leader isn’t involved, isn’t engaged, and never has a large goal in mind other than simply Going Through The Motions. The minimum required motions are generally defined as enough “to avoid breaking the law, being sued, or receiving angry phone calls.”

It’s not just a matter of picking a low number of motions. GTTM is easy, but becoming really involved or really trying to get the job done often requires effort. Faced with the actual goals they should achieve, the GTTM person replies with some version of the age-old complaint, “But that would be haaaarrrd!”

If we’re going to do more than go through the motions, if we’re going to say what we mean and then behave as if we really mean it, life will often call our bluff and require us to step up. This is where all those clichés about rubber meeting the road and giving 100% and putting and/or shutting up could mean something (spouting clichés and platitudes is a great way to GTTM).

GTTM is also easy because we don’t have to bring our own compass. We just follow someone else’s directions, do as we’re told, copy and paste from someone else’s text. Because having to think things through yourself is haaarrrrrd. The enemy of the right thing is not the wrong thing—it’s the easy thing.

This issue distinguishes different types of malcontents. I disagree with most everything Ray Beichner has ever said publicly, but I totally respect that he doesn’t simply go through the motions. On the other hand, some of our local Grumpy People appear to fire off letters and lawsuits as a way to demand that others stop thinking and get back to GTTM. Dealing with people who are thinking and doing and actively trying to do what it takes to pursue goals—well, that’s just haaaaarrrrd.

Certainly everyone switches on autopilot now and then and just Goes Through The Motions. Sometimes you just need a break. But overall, I think life is not best served by GTTM.

One of the drawbacks of GTTM is that it eventually becomes hideously boring. If you never invest yourself in something, never awaken your passion and involvement, life can be a grey, dull, featureless expanse of blandness. Therefore, GTTM folks eventually want to skip over motions they find boring or unpleasant. “I wish it were the weekend” becomes “I wish it were next month/next year/ a decade from now.” This is spectacularly self-defeating, since such skipping ahead only brings you closer to the end.

Throwing away days because they are filled with dull GTTM instead of something to excite your passion is like throwing away twenty-dollar bills because they aren’t hundreds. Actually, it’s worse, because unlike money, our days can be invested with as much value as we care to put into them. Earlier this week hundreds and hundreds of people stopped by the funeral home to pay respects to Robert Porter. They didn’t do it to honor a life spent GTTM. At the end, no one ever says, “Well, at least he never tried to do anything haaaarrrd.”

Professional Politicos

(News-Herald, April 10) There are lots of reasons to argue against the slow but steady intrusion of government into every nook and cranny of modern American life.

We could talk about the meddling, the separation of those who make decisions from those who must live with the consequences, the tendency of bureaucrats to get things wrong, or the way that government oversight makes endeavors stiff and inflexible, poorly positioned to deal with change.

Each of those is a valid complaint. I’ll probably get around to each of them sooner or later. But that’s not where I’m headed this week.

One problem with ever-spreading government is that it has created a widespread need for professional politicians.

My own profession is as good an example as any. Teaching has always been tied to government and bureaucracy; since we are an arm of government, that seems only natural.

Nowadays, the state and federal government make decisions about what I’ll in my classroom beyond anything we’ve ever seen before. Harrisburg and DC make choices about what I will do in the everyday-to-day practice of my profession.

But when politicians want to talk about education, they don’t want to talk to teachers. They want to talk to other politicians. And so we have the PSEA and the NEA, groups of politicians who are hired to go talk to politicians about education. I’m not a big fan of either group, and I often suspect that they feel a stronger allegiance to their fellow politicians than to the people who hire them.

But the bottom line is that politicians in Harrisburg or DC are not going to talk to me, not even if they have a question about teaching high school English in Venango County. So if I want to have any sort of voice in the decisions made about my profession at all, I need to hire politicians to speak for me.

My profession is by no means unique. Virtually every walk of life in this country has to hire rows of professional politicians. Doctors, lawyers, grocery store clerks, people of retirement age, left-handed basket weavers—if you want to be heard as politicians make decisions that change the shape of your life, you must hire a politician to speak for you. Employers and employees and customers don’t settle matters with each other; they send their hired representatives to battle it out in a capitol somewhere.

We call them lobbyists, but they are simply hired politicians (often retired from elected office), and each one is there because when politicians start deciding things, they want to talk to other politicians.

There was a time when Americans found their solutions locally. Problems were addressed by family solutions or neighborhood solutions or business solutions. Financial missteps and moral misjudgments were viewed as personal human problems. Now we treat them as political problems. If an issue needs to be addressed, we call for the hand of government. But any government solution is a political solution.

There was a time when we trotted out political solutions only for large problems, like the secession of half the country or massive widespread economic collapse or destroying the ugly legacy of segregation. But after discovering how effective that big club can be, we can’t resist picking it up for every little thing, and now we call for political solutions for smoking and bad salesmanship and dry cleaning chemicals and restaurant signage and spelling.

We don’t think we’re clamoring for more politics. We imagine that we are calling on the heroic figure of a good and just elected leadership. But whenever we call on the government, what we get is that guy-- “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you fill out these forms.” I hire my politician to go sic the major politicians on the people I think are the problem, and hire my politician to protect me from the politicians that other people have sicced on me.

The days where one could quietly stay in his corner and do a good job and be respected for that are fast fading. Doing a good job is not enough any more. You have to be able to sell it to a politician. And to have a voice in even the most simple parts of your own daily work and home life, you have to hire a politician to stand up for you, because no one else can.

My Sister's Birthday

(News-Herald, March 2003) My sister turns forty this Saturday. She is the baby of the family (let’s not reflect on what her crossing the big four-oh checkpoint means to my brother and me).

I distinctly remember wanting a sister. I don’t remember my mother being pregnant, but I do remember staying with friends, waiting for my folks to come back with a new child.

Apparently I found my sister interesting at the time. There are many pictures of the three of us, highlighting her legendary hair. For the first several months of her life, it appeared that my sister’s hair was never actually going to lie down, but simply keep growing straight out, like an overachieving porcupine of a chia pet run amok. Even though she was too young to understand, my brother and I still made fun of her for it. It is never too early to start.

By the time we all moved to Franklin, we had learned how games like the running away game; some of you parents will recognize this as a more active version of “La-la-LAAA-I’m not listening!” It all evened out, because she had learned to get us in trouble for things we may or may not have done.

My sister is six years younger than I am, and six is a big number when you’re young. By the time she was in high school, I was off to college.

There are disadvantages to being a youngest sibling, I hear. Your older siblings may have acquired reputations of one sort or another and you face frequent comparison. As the oldest, you just follow your interests and abilities wherever they may lead; as the youngest, people expect that you’ll be good at this or belong to that. I know my sister wrestled with some of that. But there were compensations.

My parents never threatened to be the kind of permissive overly lax parents that messed up so many baby boomers. But by the time my sister was growing up, somehow all rules had disappeared from the house. My brother and I had a list of approximately six billion rules to follow, while my sister had roughly three. Our curfew was 8:15 pm; hers was mid-June. She and my parents will deny this, but my brother can back me up. The baby of the family always gets away with murder.

As the brother Off At College, I enjoyed a certain halo effect. When I would come home, my sister was delighted to see me and would defend me vigorously from any and all challenge, assault, or inconvenience. Well, for about the first forty-eight hours, anyway.

I was back at Franklin High School as a substitute during her senior year. It’s excellent training for a substitute teacher to try to get cooperation from someone who still remembers when you hid her toys and called her “pickle puss.”

She went to college at Mount Union and became a Marching Purple Grape (I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the official name, but it’s all we ever called them). She fell in love with a man who played lacrosse, a game, as near as I can tell, in which players beat the daylights out of each other with webbed sticks while referees occasionally stop the action to administer first aid and announce random scores (I may have missed some of the nuances). She went to graduate school at Rutgers to become a librarian.

She got married, and they had a couple of sons; this was no small achievement, as she is one of those women for whom childbearing didn’t come easily. They lived in a variety of places, including a rather grubby corner of New Jersey. My sister is tougher than she looks.

Now they live in State College. My brother-in-law has one of those University computer sub-contract for the Defense Department “I can’t tell you what I did at work today” jobs. My sister spent years as an at-home mom; now she runs the Christian Education program at a church.

It is true that my sister can be a bit of a den mother. She once scolded me for walking outside in the rain in my bare feet. I was forty-three at the time.

But my sister is one of the handful of people on the planet that I actually admire. It’s not just that she’s family, though I think it’s true that no one ever knows you quite like a brother or sister. I feel bad for those who have lost that connection; I know that there are toxic siblings, just as there are toxic spouses and parents, but I don’t think you can’t lose the connection to a sibling without losing a piece of your own past.

Somewhere along the way my sister became the responsible adult dependable rock solid nurturing member of the family, and I want to be like her when I grow up.

Surprise Surprise

(News-Herald, April 3) Everywhere you look, you can find people who are surprised.

I notice it, for instance, in the grocery store. Frequently, while moving through an aisle, I find myself behind someone who parks in the middle of the aisle and slows to a speed that I would describe as glacial, except that these days we are told that glaciers are melting a few feet per year, which makes them much faster than my shopping roadblock.

Eventually the puzzled shopper registers the collective death stare of the half-dozen shoppers he has trapped, looks up, and is surprised to discover that other people are shopping in the store! Imagine. And many of them want to use the very same aisle!!

I can actually sympathize a bit. Many’s the time I have found myself transfixed by a particularly lovely piece of packaging (fruit and pasta are both delightfully arty). Since my son began his side-career in late-night grocery stocking, I have learned a certain professional appreciation for a good facing job (Facers are like little grocery store elves who toddle into the store in the dead of night to make sure that each shelf presents a full and lined-up front that hides gappage behind it; facing is a sort of consumer-based sculpture that captures the battle between chaos and order, human accomplishment and existential angst, oreos and fig newtons. When you decide you won’t buy the cheesy puffs after all, and stick them in between packages of soap, you’re making work for some facer).

At any rate, I can see how grocery displays might lead one to absently forget about the traffic around. But then I meet the surprised people in the check-out line. These are the folks who are, apparently, surprised that food costs money! They unload their food, watch the checker ring it up, and then, only after the checker has announced that the customer will, in fact, be asked to pay for the food, does the customer begin to consider how the transaction might be completed. Does she have money in her purse? Might she write a check, or could this be a plastic kind of evening?

It’s a suspenseful moment, best appreciated by people in line who had no hopes of going anywhere soon. I pass it by imagining the conversation later at home. “Yes, dear, I got groceries. I thought I might not have to get out money this time, but it turned out they charged me for the food again!”

Probably the biggest class of surprised people are the folks who are constantly surprised to discover that they are not the only human beings in the world.

Grocery stores, the mall, the highway—you can find them everywhere, acting as if it had never occurred to them that they might be sharing space with other slices of humanity.

You can find a full herd of them in just about any school parking lot at the end of a sports event or other post-scholastic activities, bobbing and weaving and honking and being rather surprised that they are not the only person there to pick up Junior. Other people want to drive past the school entrance? I should park my limited edition custom land cruiser athwart the traffic lane? That’s just crazy!

Some people manage to be surprised by the events that unfold in front of them. The best way to experience this sort of surprise is to simply ignore history. It took a real willful ignorance of history (both Iraq’s and our own) to be surprised by the hash of events in the Persian Gulf and the failure of USA style democracy to quickly take root and bloom.

Likewise, one would think that local leaders, trying to accomplish anything quickly and quietly, could hardly be surprised that people A) catch on, B) jump to conclusions and C) become cranky. Nor could any of us be surprised any more than the result of some local crankiness is that some folks will hit the speed-dial code for their lawyer faster than a junk yard owner can yank his bad-mannered attack dog out of its shed.

I think we’ve all caught on to most of that. And yet, I can already smell the preamble to that inevitable moment when folks are shocked and surprised that Two Mile Run County Park & Cage Match ends up costing county taxpayers money. Surprise!

1960's Newspaper Nuggets

(News-Herald, February 2004) There’s nothing like reading newspapers to give you a sense of historical perspective. For example, I recently read a series of articles about middle-eastern troubles. Seems the Kuwaitis deployed soldiers because Iraq claimed that Kuwait belonged to them.

I read that in newspapers published in June of 1961.

In my continuing efforts to reconstruct the history of the Franklin Silver Cornet Band, I’ve read through miles of newspapers on microfilm. I’ve recently been working through the early 1960’s. There are plenty of other interesting non-band items that turn up.

For instance, I never really appreciated just how controversial the moving of Franklin High School was at the time.

The early sixties were a big time for building in the area. Venango Campus of Clarion, Venango Christian High School, the airport expansion, and numerous elementary schools were built in that time, all with great fanfare about moving Venango County forward.

There was even a major push to raise money for a Fort Franklin reconstruction. An editorial in the News-Herald said of that project “This project will succeed or fail in 1961. It may well mark the turning point in the future of this city and this area.”

But when the joint board for the area school districts proposed that a new Franklin High School be built out on Pone Lane, there was massive squawking.

A Citizens’ Committee was formed to oppose the move. It addressed the Chamber of Commerce, and even took out a full page ad in the paper, listing all the school directors by name. Oddly enough, none of the coverage that I read of this group’s activities lists names associated with this opposition group.

Letters to the editor were frequent and spirited. Writers insisted that the move would be bad for the city, that having the school in the middle of town was an essential part of life in Franklin. One writer claimed that the children would be at risk going up “that treacherous hill.” Another pointed out the school’s proximity to the newly expanded airport “poses a real threat.”

Other writers replied that the school was a joint project, and that many of the rural students already had to ride buses and that the wimpy city folk should stop whining (I’m paraphrasing a little here).

This was all accomplished before the various school districts were merged. That merger vote came in the spring of 1963. Those figures were fun to stumble across as well. Canal and Mineral township actually rejected the merger (Canal voted 109-39 against, Mineral 39-37), while in downtown Utica, they went for it by 74-16. Polk joined up with a 106-16 vote while Sandycreek hopped on board 213-49. The City of Franklin itself was less enthusiastic—merger passed in town by 1179-817.

But nothing I stumbled across regarding the school system could top the fun of finding a full-sized feature story about the Warren Light Center. Out on Creek Road (aka the back way to Utica), the WLC has long been a source of myth and mystery.

According to the article, the Warren Light Center, headquartered in Newton Falls, Ohio, bought the 130 acres in 1954. In covering their seventh annual solstice, the paper noted that it was a “new thought religious group” that based its studies “on astrophysics and cosmic science.” Members studied “archaeology, religious philosophy, magnetic currents, and a variety of other fields.”

Writing about the 1962 solstice observance, the paper continued: “ Last Saturday night a campfire meeting was highlighted along with the sky watch. Several groups scattered to different parts of the property to watch for spacecraft. They reported seeing several such craft, describing them as ‘friendly forces.’” Inspired, I checked the internet for WLC references to spacecraft, but found only someone’s childhood memories of watching fairies dance near French Creek.

People had come from Ohio, Sharon, Miami, and Los Angeles for the celebration. 170 were present for a dinner at the Elks Club to hear an Egyptian Coptic Master speak.

Said one of the local leaders, “There is nothing prescribed—we take truth wherever it’s found.” Asked how he determines what is truth, he stated that it can be sought out by going directly “to the root of the matter.” Oh. Well, that explains it. The group anticipated a golden age on Earth in about the year 2000. Allowing a fair margin for error, it might be too early to declare them wrong.

The Dems Come to PA

(News-Herald, March 27) Tuesday’s paper noted that the number of registered Democrats in Venango County is close to surpassing the number of Republicans. I’ll have to check, but I’m pretty sure that’s one of the signs of the Apocalypse.

Of course, they aren’t real Democrats. I don’t begrudge them that—I’m not a real Democrat, either; I realized a while back that being a registered Independent shut me out of the primaries, and in Venangoland, the primary is often the only election that really matters.

These newly minted Dems are intent on enjoying the fun of a Democratic Presidential Primary in Pennsylvania that might actually matter. I’m not sure I share their excitement.

I am what’s called a super-voter; I have voted in every election I ever could, which means I’ll likely vote this time, which means time spent harassing me is better spent than chasing after somebody who’s only going to vote if he’s heading out to buy cigarettes that day and the polling place is on route.

So I anticipate plenty of phone calls, a nice assortment of annoying recorded baloney from the campaigns to mix on my answering machine with the notifications about my car’s warrantee and invitations to timeshare.

But I figured we would mostly be left alone. I figured the candidates would deduce that their time was better spent speaking a rallies of thousands of big-city voters than talking to the fourteen card-carrying Democrats in Venangoland (though I suppose they could cover it by taking us all out to one quick lunch). If we’ve rounded up enough Democrats (real, converted or faux) to attract attention, that would be too bad.

In a way, I can see why this race would be attractive to Republicans.

On the one hand, we have a candidate who feels entitled to office, will pull any political streetfighting tactic to win, and claims that anything thwarting the campaign is the result of a malignant conspiracy between Evil Forces and The Media. On the other hand, we have a candidate whose policies are easily criticized as vague or seriously wrong-headed, but whose rhetoric is inspiring and uplifting, reminding us of all the good things we want to be as Americans.

In other words, Clinton vs. Obama is actually Nixon vs. Reagan.

True, the “First Woman/Black President” marquee muddies the water. It would be nice if we could have the election without gender or race being an issue, but we’re not quite there yet.

It’s hard to tell where we are, precisely. I believe there are plenty of people dumb enough to vote against Clinton because she’s a woman or against Obama because he’s black. But it’s a much smaller number of people dumb enough to say so out loud. So that part of the campaign travels underground, expressed through code, indirection, and internet lies and distortions.

As we settle into our role as the New Iowa, we’ll get to see and hear it all. If nothing else, this election will provide a windfall for media ad sales departments, sign printers and whoever manufacturers those vile, repugnant auto-dialing recorded message deployers.

I do feel marginally better about this election cycle than the decade’s displays of mud-wrestling between two sacks of trained weasels. McCain is the closest thing to an actual Republican we’ve had on the GOP ticket in a while, and I appreciate Obama’s attempts to act like a real grown-up. At the risk of tipping my electoral hand, I will admit that Clinton II embodies pretty much everything I find loathsome about DC politicians (whatever his rather large failings as a man, I thought Clinton I was an okay President).

I feel sorry for local candidates, who will have to try to buy the few seconds of air time not already dominated by Presidential politics. I know there are about 147 guys running for John Peterson’s spot. Somebody has hit the ground running with plenty of tv ads, but all I’ve retained from them is that A) this guy is ticked off about illegal immigrants and oil-rich countries that hate us and B) to my middle-aged eyes, this guy looks to be about twelve years old. I do not remember his name nor the office for which he’s running, so if I’m supposed to be part of the target audience, his handlers may want to refine their message. They don’t have much time before Clinton/Obama have sucked up all the oxygen in the room.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep hoping that the candidates will swing through in person. Maybe they’ll take a ride on the OC & T, or catch a fish on Justus Lake. I would be happy to host a picnic for them and Venangoland’s lifetime Democrats in my back yard. Just call ahead so I have time to get a few extra groceries.

For anyone keeping score, this has seventy-some more words than the newspaper version; the thin-sizing of the paper caught me by surprise and I sent this off before discovering that I would have to adapt to a new, shorter reality. After ten years, I'll be interested to see if I can now write in shorter takes.

Promoting Venangoland

(News-Herald, March 20) I had the pleasure of attending the premiere party for the Venango Chamber’s promotional dvd, and it’s a pretty good piece of work.

Traditionally, we’ve been pretty lousy at this sort of thing, stuck on one simple truth-- If you want to play the game in the big wide world, you have to play by the big wide world’s rules. We have had far too many people who insisted that we should be able to play the world’s game by our local rules. We’ll do it our way or not at all, some insist. It’s not much of a choice.

We have had some people over the years who got it. Guy Mammolite boosted Franklin so vigorously that it’s a wonder he wasn’t perpetually bedridden with multiple hernias. But he knew you had to shmooze the rest of the world. I suspect that at all those PA Mayors’ meetings there were plenty of mayors in the room thinking, “Oh lord, here comes that Guy again.” But they knew who he was, and they knew where Franklin was.

We have not always been good at branding. I am a major fan of the ORA, and I applaud them for trying to finally get us out of 1962 and into the twenty-first century. But “oil region” and “oil heritage” are not great pieces of branding. For that matter, “Franklin” and “Oil City” are not great brand name assets, either. A quick search on line will show you that these names are associated with a gumzillion different places. They don’t distinguish us from the pack.

Our best branding asset is the word “venango,” which is only used three other places in the USA, all of them small and not likely to draw attention away from us. It is odd, unique, and memorable—a built-in brand name. (I will happily chip in “Venangoland” as my cost-free contribution to local marketing.)

Franklin has made some odd choices in its quest for a nickname over the years. “The Victorian City” was, well, weird, given that in many places “Victorian” is not really a compliment. The new incarnation as “a small town with great festivals” is a step up, though somehow, I doubt that people in Pittsburgh, Cleveland or even Erie can be convinced that we are the only go-to location for small town festivals.

Oil City’s television ads also confuse me. These cable-placed commercials invite folks to “rediscover Oil City” and I can’t help wondering who they think has misplaced it. Part of what our marketing whizzes need to figure out is not how we view ourselves, but how an outsider could distinguish us from Mercer or Warren or Grove City.

Marketing does not start with the assertion that the prospective customers ought to want what we want them to want. It starts by figuring out what we have that might have broader appeal. This means that some businesses, good card-carrying, dues-paying members of many of our assorted Chambers of Commerce, must be willing to take one for the team, step back, and let the most alluring choices serve as our marquee attractions.

Marketing also must start with the belief that we do have something to offer. I am tired of people who have gotten bored looking at the same scenery for sixty years and therefore believe it is uninteresting, just as I am tired of those who believe that nothing less than a massive manufacturing firm is worth bothering with (provided that it is silent, immaculate, and in somebody else’s neighborhood). People who won’t stoop to pick up money unless it’s a hundred-dollar bill deserve to be poor. Many regions have achieved success with far fewer resources than we have here.

We have a beautiful outdoors. We have beautiful waterways. We have bike trails. We have people willing to work. We have a cluster of small towns that, taken together, represent everything that people imagine when they think about Mythic American Small Town Life. We can go outside at night, safely. We have an arts community large enough to have quality but small enough to have room for people who are not ready to go pro. We have the kind of recreation activities that city-dwellers spend millions to imitate, badly. We have a remarkably low cost of living, right down to homes that would cost ten times as much in any other market.

There are many reasons to want to live here. If you don’t believe that, you need to get on a bus and ride a hundred miles in any direction and look at the miserable conditions people settle for.

The people who made the dvd get that, as did the people who made the full-color flyer for Franklin. I can look at both and think, “Yeah, I’d want to live there.”

Jerry Frey

Hard to believe that it has been just over four years since Jerry passed away. Here's what I wrote at the time.

(News-Herald, February 2004)The Franklin Silver Cornet Band lost one of its stalwarts this week.

Jerry Frey had the longest tenure of any active band member. He held that rank by a matter of just a few weeks; shortly after he joined as a teenager in 1945, Jerry recruited Dick Eshelman to join the band.

Getting people to do stuff was one of Jerry’s talents. He had a special knack for it. There are people who guilt or browbeat you into helping out. And there are plenty of people in the volunteer world who want you to become the supporting cast as they step into the spotlight. But Jerry was not a spotlight kind of guy.

Not that he couldn’t have been. Jerry played an unusual assortment of instruments, including trumpet, horn and tuba. Musicians can tell you what an odd personality mix that makes. Trumpet players are known in the band world for, well, a certain lack of shyness and humility. Horn players can be a bit high strung and diva-ish. But tuba players are the quiet clowns of the band world.

Jerry had played trumpet in his early years in the band. He told me once about showing up for a concert and getting a field promotion to lead trumpet because somebody didn’t show up. The band performed a particularly challenging piece, and Jerry afterwards swore that he’d never give up the peace and quiet of the tuba section again.

Jerry was a born supporter. Talk to the old-timers about the people who held the band together when times were tough, and Jerry’s name always comes up. For us younger players, Jerry was the veteran who always made you feel that he was glad you were there.

It wasn’t just band. I never knew Jerry to be slow to praise or express appreciation. Back when my brother and I anchored the Big Band Show on Saturday mornings, we could always count on Jerry or Norma Jean to call when they heard something they liked. Over the years he always had a spare minute to offer a word of praise or encouragement.

Jerry worked at a variety of jobs over the years, most notably out at Two Mile Run County Park. But for many of us, Jerry always seemed to be more clearly defined by how he spent his “free” time.

Jerry was a choir director, a Sunday School teacher and a Red Cross volunteer. He played in just about every band that existed in Venango County over the last sixty years. And in all of his activities, he would recruit other folks to come along and join in.

And Jerry was a real clown. I remember how excited he was about running off with the circus when he was already over sixty. It was exciting to imagine Elmo the Clown out touring the fairgrounds of America. I can remember watching Elmo work; a modern tv-jaded child would view him first skeptically, as if a clown were just too uncool for words, and then be slowly won over by his charm and humor.

It was always hard to remember that Jerry had been in band longer than any of us; it was hard, really, to think of Jerry as “old.” He kept taking on new challenges, staying active, getting out into the community. It was difficult, visibly difficult, when Norma Jean died. But just last Christmastime, I played with Jerry in a brass group for a local church service. He was as sharp as ever, and shared some more stories of the old band days.

Jerry was a good man. He gave hour after hour to so many groups in the community. He married into the kind of loving partnership that most of us wish for our own children. He brought people together, one or two at a time, throughout the area. And he provided a living example of faith in action.

The world has way, way too many people who seem to think that the measure of a person’s faith is how much noise they make about it, people who think that if they drop a mention of God into every other sentence, it won’t matter what a lousy job they do of acting out that faith in their daily lives.

In all the years that I knew Jerry, I don’t think I ever heard him try to tell me what a very devout Christian he was. And yet, I don’t think there was any doubt that that’s just what he was.

For me, Jerry’s life was a witness to a couple of important truths. One is that how you walk says so much more than how you talk. The other is that while we may not change the course of history, we can still each make a small but important difference in our own corner of the world. I miss him already.

John McConnell Tries Retirement (Again)

(News-Herald, March 13)The end of this month marks the end of John McConnell’s tenure as general manager of the Barrow-Civic Theatre in Franklin.

It is not an easy job. The Barrow has had several people in the position over the last fifteen years, and, to be perfectly honest, not every one of them had the chops to handle the job.

Managing a theater like the Barrow requires a multitude of skills. There is an army of volunteers who keep the place functioning, and managing volunteers is a special skill because, well, nobody is paying them to put up with anything they don’t want to put up with.

The Barrow has become the jewel of downtown Franklin, but that in turn gives it a responsibility to be an active member of the local commercial community. The general manager needs to connect, work with, go to meetings with, and otherwise connect well with the other area businesses.

And since it’s a theater, the general manager also has to stay connected with as many of the varied strands of the local artistic community. More contacts, more networks, more meetings, more egos.

But since it’s a regional resource, the Barrow also has to connect and compete with the larger world. And that requires a level of expertise as well. If you want to play the game in the wide outside-the-county world, you have to play by the world’s rules.

On top of all that, a manager of any regional theater operates forever on the edge of financial disaster. I can remember when the theater first opened and people would ask the question, “Well, how long until the theater is a self-sufficient money-making venture?”

The answer, discovered and rediscovered in thousands of regional theaters across the country, is “never.”

That’s not a bad thing. A theater is a big black hole of capital expense. There’s always something to be fixed or maintained, always new equipment that would be great to have. I can’t imagine any theatrical facility’s manager announcing, “We’ve got everything we could ever want or use. No need to raise any more money ever again.”

So you have to find contributors, sell memberships, figure out what the local breaking point is for ticket costs, and then guess what kinds of acts will be make back the money it takes to book them, all coordinated against the schedule of a thousand other local events (and figuring in the random factor of local weather).

Even if you were good at it, the general stress of operating check to check, booking to booking, depending on the public to support a service that many view as a luxury item—all that would be enough to give an iron man a permanent ulcer.

John McConnell certainly didn’t have to take the job on. In his career at Oil City High School he contributed as much to the growth and vigor of arts and music in this area as anyone ever has. Take that teaching career, add all the work he’s done with Civic Operetta, and he could have retired to play shuffleboard, drink exotic beer with funny names, and take cruises to far away warm places. Nobody would have said anything but, “He’s certainly earned it.”

So having him at the helm of this important regional asset has just been gravy for the rest of us. Not since Toby Saltarelli oversaw the transformation of an empty shell of a building into a living, breathing theater has someone done so much to make the Barrow a model of powerful positive change in the larger community.

I don’t know who will be replacing him; I don’t even know who has applied for the job. I wish them luck, and not just because John’s shoes will be hard to fill. To stand up and take a leadership position in the region takes vision, determination, and a thick skin. Taking a stand and making a difference guarantees that you will be a target for everything from cranky phone calls to lawsuits.

The new manager will take over a facility that faces some enormous challenges but also possesses enormous strengths, including a wide web of connections to the community and the region.

Those strengths exist today both because of the gazillion hours of hard work by an army of volunteers (and a handful of people whose pay is only slightly greater than volunteer pay) but also because of the leadership and dedication of John McConnell.

So as the month winds down, there will be no better time to drop him a line at the theater and let him know that you appreciate his stewardship of this community treasure.

Self-Made Men and Other Myths

(News-Herald, March 6) I am tired of self-made men. I am tired of people grunting, “Well, nobody gave me anything. I’m a completely self-made man.”Well, no, no, you’re not.

I don’t for a moment discount the value and importance of hard work and good decisions. Life provides an endless supply of opportunities to choose wisely, or not. Everybody who ever lived has gone through a phase in which they refuse to make those choices, or make the choices and insist that they get the results they want no matter what choice they make. Everybody goes through that phase, but then they have their sixth birthday and, in the vast majority of cases, start to grow out of it.

Those people who still want to make bad choices without consequences, who want to take eat the meal but not pay the bill—those people desperately need to grow up.

People who have succeeded in life usually do so because they make smart choices, accept sacrifice when needed, see available options that other miss, and leverage their talents and passions into meaningful achievements. They work hard, make wise decisions, and put energy into their lives.

They deserve a great deal of credit and recognition. The accolades that they receive, the success and recognition they collect is well-earned and much to their credit.

But they are not self-made.

I don’t care who you are, what you’ve achieved, how much you’ve clawed your way up from the bottom, there is still a long list of factors outside your control that share the credit for your success.

Let’s start with the presence of a stable government in a peaceful society. A John D. Rockefeller who lives in a country where either rapacious government officials or angry poor folks with pointy sticks can take away everything-- that is a John D. Rockefeller whose great success will simply never occur.

You live in a country where you never have to worry about how you’ll get where you want to go or how you’ll talk to whoever needs talking to. Having food to eat and water to drink and power to run a houseful of gadgets are concerns that barely register on the consciousness and take little time or effort. I doubt that you have a hand in providing anything close to all of that yourself. At best, you pay other people to take care of that, and you can only do THAT because you live in a country where a stable economic system makes such transactions totally routine.

And we haven’t even scratched the surface.

Your health is somewhat under your control, but if you draw the short straw in cancer roulette, that’s out of your hands. If you’ve never had your life derailed by catastrophic illness or disease, that has nothing to do with how virtuous or hard-working or deserving you are. You can call it the grace of God or you can call it sheer dumb luck, but don’t pretend you somehow earned it. Plenty of folks have been hit by the hard health hammer through no fault of their own.

You don’t get to take any of the credit for whatever end of the gene pool produced you. A quick twist of a dna molecule here and there and you would have been born half as strong or twice as dumb.

And while we’re talking about grace and luck, let’s talk about all the stupid things you’ve done in your life that, fortunately or gracefully, did not result in a life-changing consequence. That’s not because you’ve worked so hard, either.

I won’t minimize for a second the lifetime of hard work, sacrifice, and good decisions that have brought you to where you are. People who don’t make the most of what they have, who don’t make the effort, who don’t keep plugging away at turning their lives into something—many of those people end up with problems that they have foisted on themselves.

But if you want to tell me you’re a self-made success story, I disagree. And if you want to tell me that you don’t owe anybody anything, I say that you are full of malarkey.

Given a whole day, you could never list all the people whose lives and works have made your success possible. Nor could you list every turn at which misfortune could have derailed your life, no matter how great your efforts and determination.

The very least we owe our country and community and universe and Creator is gratitude for the chance to become who we have become. The very least that such gratitude should awaken is a sense of responsibility to use our gifts wisely, and a sense of respect and responsibility for our fellow travelers.

The Relationship with God

(News-Herald, July 2002) For a columnist in an area like Venango County, addressing issues related to religion is a little like checking to see if the electric fence is on by licking it.

Every time I’ve licked that fence, the power has been on and I’ve drawn some rather spirited mail.

But what with the ongoing flap about “under God” and the various discussions about religion in America that have been stirred up, it seems like the fence is just itching to be licked again.

There are plenty of excuses for ignoring religion and the church. I think most of them are a crock. Some folks are partial to the old standard, “I have a personal relationship with God that I just work out in my own way,” meaning generally that they try to think God-related thoughts when the mood strikes them and they’re not too busy. Try running your marriage that way. The important relationships in your life require regular maintenance and a daily effort to hear the other person involved; that principle also applies to a relationship with the Creator of the Universe.

Another excuse is the observation that church people have occasionally turned out to be hypocritical and very unChristian. This is a hard charge to counter; I have absolutely no doubt that there are churches in this county that are some of the most unwelcoming, coldest spots a person could wander into. You would be better off wandering into a biker bar and ordering a milkshake than walking into some local churches as a Known Sinner. And certainly there is a well-documented list of big-time church leaders who turned out to be somewhat overwhelmed by their fleshier pursuits.

To which I say, “So what?” Some people get divorced; doesn’t mean we throw out marriage. Some people get food poisoning; doesn’t mean that I’m going to give up eating. Church people are human, which means we can predict fallibility will fall right in the 100% range. True, there are plenty of church people who forget that, but just because something can’t be done perfectly, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done at all.

But it’s fallibility that causes me to part ways with conservative Christians. It’s not that I think God is a vague cloud of imprecise suggestions that change with the latest human fashions; I don’t. What I doubt is the human capacity to read the mind of God.

History is full of people who were 100% certain that they knew exactly what God wanted. They knew with certainty that God wanted people from different churches killed, women kept subservient and silent, and blacks kept in bondage. From the Spanish Inquisition to the Salem witch trials to the World Trade Towers, people who were absolutely certain of their knowledge of God have displayed some Very Bad Behavior.

Now, at some point, we have to catch on. If you keep telling yourself, “God has sent this fuzzy caterpillar to make me warm and happy,” and twelve times you’ve picked the caterpillar up, and twelve times it’s turned out to be a rattlesnake that bit you on the rump, this is not a failure of God or your relationship with Him—it’s a failure of your relationship with your own brain.

If you can sit there and say, “Well, over the last several millennia the people who were certain they knew exactly what God wanted turned out to be mistaken, but I know I really know what God’s thinking, so I will be an exception” then, well, I am in awe at the size of your self-esteem.

And if you are sure that your little human brain can completely encompass an understanding of the Author of All Creation, I’m disappointed by how tiny your picture of God is.

I believe that as human beings the best we can hope to accomplish, with time and effort, is to grasp a part of the Big Picture clearly, some other parts not so clearly, and some other parts not at all. And if we aren’t willing to humbly approach each day open to the possibility that we are flat-out wrong about everything, and to accept that some self-correction may be in order, I think we grasp even less.

So I am suspicious of people who are certain that they have the answer, and I am suspicious of people who believe that since the answer is hard to find, there just isn’t one. People make their own journey toward the truth in their own ways, in their own time. Sometimes it’s your day to put a fence up; sometimes it’s your day to tear it down. And sometimes it’s your day to check to see if it’s on.

Gramley vs. Wilson, Round 147

(News-Herald, February 28) Can’t we all just stay out of each other’s pants?

I’m talking about the unending flap over the recent appearance of Namoli Brennet in Oil City (and yes, I realize that I’m now contributing to its unendingness—but there are certain things I have a professional obligation to make fun of).

As might have been expected, Diane Gramley and the AFA sent a mass mailing out to protest—well, according to the letter, to protest the false advertising.

I’m not exactly sure what the “false advertising in promoting the event” was. Namoli Brennet was advertised as a Tucson-based folk singer. Gramley did not contest Brennet’s residence, nor complain that Brennet, instead of performing folkie music, launched into an evening of heavy metal polkas.

No, the problem seems to be that Brennet was not clearly identified by gender and sexual preference.

Brennet is what’s sometimes called “transgender,” born a man and self-identifying as a woman. Even I, a middle-aged white heterosexual male, know that “transgender” and “homosexual” are two different kettles of fish (other than it raises the confusing question—if a biological guy crosses the road to identify as a woman, but still likes women, is that a newly-minted lesbian chick or an unusually-dressed heterosexual dude?).

Well, Gramley apparently wants all this identified up front. I shudder to think what this means for future performers in the area, who will apparently be required to publicly declare their sexual preferences. This revolutionary approach certainly could have shaken up the entertainment industry had it been implemented sooner. Imagine the advertising for Liberace or Jerry Lee Lewis. And I don’t even want to begin to think about what kind of inspection will be needed to certify a performer’s gender before taking the stage.

Of course, across the aisle through this brou-ha-ha has been Joe Wilson, who has decided in recent years to make it his personal crusade to straighten out (you should pardon the expression) all us poor backward hicks in Venango County. His promos for the concert breathlessly announce the concert that “will blow the closet door off its hinges.”

So apparently both sides of the issue agree that mere exposure to someone who’s not traditionally heterosexual will cause everyone in the room to be affected by gay cooties.

Call me crazy, but if I’m going to see a performer, all I really care about is how well they perform. A singer, dancer, brain surgeon, tree surgeon—all I need to know is how well the person does the job. The only reason I can imagine caring about the sexuality of performers is if I think a part of concert-going is to imagine having sex with the performer afterwards—and if that’s the case, I’m far scarier than anything happening on stage.

I’m old-fashioned enough to believe that none of this stuff is any of my business, and personally, I tend to resent anyone who insists that I make it my business. I always thought that “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was a good start for a policy; I would just add one more and that’s “don’t pretend.”

I’ll admit my bias—I tend to think that asking someone not to be gay takes us back to the days when left-handed students were coerced into trying to switch hands. Didn’t do anybody any good; did many people a bunch of harm. At the same time, announcing “Hey, I’m gay” strikes me about as useful as announcing, “Hey, I’m blond.” Thanks for sharing, but what do you want me to do about it? I’m going to love you as much (or as little) as I ever did.

So I don’t plan to ask, and I don’t feel the need to have you tell me. However, I also don’t feel the need to ask you to pretend. Nobody should have to go through life pretending that a big chunk of who they are doesn’t exist.

Ironically, this is something I think homosexuals and evangelicals have in common—both often find themselves surrounded by people who wish they would just pretend not to be That Way. I have no interest in going back to the days when Cole Porter felt the need to fake marriage, nor do I think the world would be a better place if conservative Christians had to meet secretly in basements. If you live your life as the person you are, that will tell me everything I need to know about you.

It’s an imperfect balance, hard both to strike and maintain. I’d prefer to lock the Diane Gramley’s and Joe Wilson’s together in a room somewhere and let the singers, dancers, and plumbers do their jobs. And maybe the rest of us could just spend a little more time minding our own business.

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.