Venangoland

Loved and Lost

2009-11-06T21:52:00.001-05:00

(News-Herald, November 5) Is it better to have loved and lost?
It’s cliché to call men commitmentphobic. There’s more to it than the picture of men as hungry buffet diners who won’t settle for just one food. Plenty of men, and women, too, fear commitment for the same reason some folks fear heights, water and pointy objects—something in their gut warns This Way Lies Danger and Hurt.
Hence the proverbial alternative to “loved and lost”—never to have loved at all.
Most of us would opt for choice three—to love and not lose. But that’s probably less likely. Not just because couples and love can fail; sometimes timing, circumstances, geography or courage fail. The only method guaranteed, the only way to be sure that you won’t lose, is not to love at all.
The benefits? Relative safety. Lack of danger.
Is that better than loving and losing? After all, loving and losing hurts. It stings. At its worst, losing leaves you reeling and torn open, betrayed by someone who had the keys to your heart (or your house, or bank account). You are left not only bereft of love, but doubting your own worth, your own senses, your own judgment.
But even the best losing leaves a curious emptiness, a place where someone once filled up a corner of your heart. Even if you are a happy, fulfilled person, a good love brings you happiness beyond what you can find for yourself.
Still, safety is way overrated. To begin with, it’s a lot harder to achieve than it seems in theory. And while “never love at all” could mean hiding in the basement, what it usually means is relationships that are safely half measures, a partner chosen precisely because they will never get close to your heart, or someone who is convenient and familiar. And that usually ends up creating a lot of hurt for which there is no justification.
Yes, losing love hurts. But if someone offers you a supremely delicious chocolate muffin, you’d be a fool to pass it up just because the experience of eating it will only last a few bites.
Love always risks loss, not only because things might not work out in the end (whatever “the end” is, exactly), but also because love, like everything else in life, costs.
It’s not just the time and effort that you put into it yourself. You pay costs in your relationships with other people, your availability, focus, attention. Commit to the person of your dreams, and you lose a little control over your own fate.
Love has an opportunity cost as well. Opportunity cost is an economic concept—spend a dollar on chocolate, and you give up the opportunity to spend it on pickles. Choosing to stay with one person means choosing to go without a whole bunch of other people. It takes a grown-up to make that choice, and some people grow up faster than others.
Once you’ve grown way up, you’ve accumulated much stuff in your life, and holding love can require a major rearrangement of the furniture. When you’re young, you don’t have much furniture, but you have a thousand future possibilities that have to be sacrificed to gain that one real, actual love.
So loving means you will lose something, and while the romantic ideal is that you’ll lose something you’ll never miss because you’ve acquired a priceless gem for the cost of a jar of pickles, it’s human to miss some of those things anyway. That’s why it’s wise to choose with your eyes open, fully aware of the cost, so you don’t second-guess yourself later and mess up the Good Stuff.
Love, at its best, makes you stronger and better, helps you grow, helps you become more yourself, teaches you how to help someone else do all that, too. That’s how you know it’s love, and not something smaller or uglier in faux-love mask.
Loving and losing stinks (just so we’re clear on that). But if you did the love part right, you are still stronger and better after it has passed, certainly more so than if you had never loved at all. And while losing is bad, the stupid stuff you do from fear of losing is far worse.
Love is not for the cowardly or the childish. In the end, death eventually does part us all. So there really is no question of whether we win or lose—only if we’re going to get in the game. Unlike some games, this one rewards the courage to risk losing.

For Monarch Park Fans

2009-11-01T19:33:00.002-05:00

William Passauer has created the definitive Monarch Park website, and I recommend it to all fans of local history.

As noted elsewhere on this blog, Monarch Park was a trolley destination park in Venango County during the first few decades of the 20th century. Today there are few traces left of this thriving amusement park that once served as Venangoland's playground.

This site features images (virtually every photo I've ever seen of the park is here) plus history, maps, and even modern views of the site. This is the best work of scholarship about the fabled park that I've seen to date. You should click on over and take a look.

Nearly Scary

2009-10-30T07:00:00.000-04:00

(News-Herald, October 29) It’s that time again.
I don’t mean election time. This round of elections reeks of dullness. In Franklin most races were settled in primary season, except for the city council contest. We have two candidates running for three seats, which means the field is ripe for some sort of write-in campaign. I’m not sure if the seat is for a particular ward or an at-large, but I’m going to suggest we all write in “Christian Marshall” for councilman, because I think we could at least count on him to make council meetings more entertaining.
But, no. I mean that it’s Halloween time again.
There are lots of things not to like about Halloween, starting with its newfound role as the kick-off holiday for the Christmas season. When Tim Burton put Christmas and Halloween together for The Nightmare before Christmas, the result was one of the best movies ever. When retailers put creepy plastic skeletons next to fake Christmas tree displays, the result is just disturbing.
But for people-watching, Halloween can’t be beaten. Get a big vat of candy, sit on your porch, and the parade comes to you.
Incredibly Cute Children are the bread and butter of Halloween, and there is something pleasantly heartwarming about how they are usually part of a family field trip. I appreciate the ambition of families who spend the night piling in and out of the car after cruising for the next street filled with burning porch lights. And I’m always encouraged by the large number of parents who gently remind their children to practice basic courtesy. Most of the customers actually say, “Thank you.”
Of course, that’s only the customers who can actually speak. There’s something vaguely unethical about using around a trick-or-treater who can’t walk, talk or chew as a Halloween prop. I wait apprehensively for the year that someone comes carrying a stuffed or inflatable child as an excuse to gather sweets.
Halloween has lost a certain amount of its brand identity. Theoretically, it’s the holiday to be scary, but costumes both in the stores and on the streets don’t stick to the theme very closely. There are certainly many traditionalists who trot out the fake blood and creepy faces, but in many cases it takes extra effort to scan for scariness.
Small children generally stick with cuteness. Little boys dress up as super heroes, which is not at all scary, while little girls frequently turn themselves into princesses. The princess thing will eventually be scary to those super-heroes, but not for another couple of decades.
Grown men are encouraged to simply give in to our worst fashion instincts. Plenty of costumes look suspiciously like the clothes that many of us wore on purpose decades ago. I freely agree that lots of that is plenty scary, but somehow I can’t quite associate vampires with disco and tie-dyed vests.
Grown women—well, in the costume section of any store, you can see a certain pattern emerge as you walk down the aisle: sexy nurse, sexy maid, sexy raggedy ann, sexy nun, sexy grandma, sexy cable repairwoman, and sexy sexpot. Any character you can think of in the pop culture world exists in a “sexy” version for women; as God is my witness, a woman can buy a sexy Spongebob Squarepants costume this year if she wishes, and I have to admit—that is a little bit scary.
The tough costume demographic remains the teenaged crowd. Of course, many prefer the traditional ski-mask and dark clothes ensemble. (Question for grocery store managers—are more eggs sold just before Easter, or just before Halloween?) For those who hope to grab a little treat with their egg-flinging trickery, the choice is usually a little face paint plus A) something ugly, B) something torn, or C) the same sports jersey that you usually wear on game day.
Occasionally one finds teens who will commit to looking fully ridiculous, but most are torn by the tricky issue of trying to beg for treats while still maintaining their dignity. It’s a useful skill that many will need later in life; I suppose that’s a bit scary, too.
Perhaps Halloween has become a time to just sort of let loose and act a little silly. I can’t argue with that. It can be scary to get out of your box, but sometimes when you do the really scary things, you get the biggest rewards.
And that’s why I’ll be writing in “Christian Marshall” for city councilman in Franklin.

PSSA, PVAAS and More Nifty Help from the State

2009-10-22T21:35:00.000-04:00

(News-Herald, October 22) This week I was schooled by the state about more awesomeness that is Pennsylvania’s System of School Assessment (the PSSA tests). This latest big vat of coolaid was served up, ironically, in the Hemlock Room at IU6. When the state lowers itself to send consultants to instruct the poor hicks who toil in local school districts, there is always lots to learn.
For those of you still following the PSSA’s, we are down to the crunch. Remember, No Child Left Behind mandates that in four years, every single American school child will test above average. Since this is only slightly more likely than pigs flying out of Ed Rendell’s nose, the ever-benevolent state has leapt to the rescue with—more statistical tools!
The number crunching is called the Pennsylvania Value-Added Assessment System. “Value Added” is a useful term from the manufacturing world. Simple explanation: If I take a ten cent piece of sheet metal and turn it into a two dollar widget, I’ve added a buck ninety’s worth of value.
What that principle has to do with testing or educating students is not clear, unless the state means to suggest that students are the same as sheet metal and widgets. I was prepared to argue that point, but it turns out that the state’s meaning is something else; words mean whatever they want them to. And I can call my bicycle a stealth bomber.
PVAAS uses a thousand points of data to project the test results for students. This is a highly complex model that three well-paid consultants could not clearly explain to seven college-educated adults, but there were lots of bars and graphs, so you know it’s really good. I searched for a comparison and first tried “sophisticated guess;” the consultant quickly corrected me—“sophisticated prediction.” I tried again—was it like a weather report, developed by comparing thousands of instances of similar conditions to predict the probability of what will happen next? Yes, I was told. That was exactly right. This makes me feel much better about PVAAS, because weather reports are the height of perfect prediction.
It was hard not to well up with that sort of sarcasm during the indoctrination. We were there to copy numbers from websites onto papers, as if the zillions of tax dollars had suddenly crumped out before the developers could add the capability of printing reports. The consultant veered between trying to bludgeon us with jargon-filled gobbledegook and patronizing us with explanations of words like “excelling” and “improving.” And assurances that if we just taught what the state wants us to, everything will be great.
The fallacy at the heart of the PSSA remains. A bunch of multiple choice questions are a lousy measure of the reading skills of live humans. (The PSSA, we were told, is not a standardized test. Okay. I’ll think about that while I pedal my stealth bomber to the store.) You can run numbers through statistical models all day, but if the numbers are near-meaningless to start with, a massage doesn’t improve them.
The intent of the state has not changed much since they first launched the PSSA’s—Harrisburg wants to write the curriculum for every district in the state. What has changed is their tone. Ten years ago they were still trying to gently con us; now their contempt for local districts is beginning to shine through. They are really tired of talking to all these yokels; they would just as soon simply roll right over us and whip us into shape.
So prepare next for the proposed Keystone Exams. Students currently in 7th grade may face ten exit exams in order to graduate. And because the state wants to wield a big hammer, the exams will count for a full third of students’ final grades.
The process remains a two-handed slap in teachers’ faces. On the one hand, we’re treated as if we are the problem and that schools need to be rescued from us by brave bureaucrats and consultants. On the other hand, we are pushed to do things that we know are professionally unsound. Imagine suits going into hospitals and telling doctors, “You are making all these people sick. Stop using pointy scalpels and start operating with shovels.” High stakes multiple choice tests are bad education.
And the final indignity is that after these sorts of sessions, one on one in the hall, many of these consultants will freely admit that they’re selling poisoned punch, but hey, they’re well paid and they’ve gotten used to the taste.

More Bad Managers

2009-10-16T17:52:00.000-04:00

(News-Herald, October 15) Show me a chronically bad employee, and I will show a big neon sign pointing toward a bad manager.
Please note—nothing that I’m about to say removes one iota of responsibility from employees. An employee who is not doing the job should be making improvements, not excuses.
But if I am looking at the big picture and I see an organization with employee performance problems, the blame lies with the managers in the system.
In the widget factory, managers are the guys who do not actually work on widgets. Managers are not in any way directly involved in the primary mission of the company, which is to manufacture widgets.
Instead, managers have one primary function, and that is to get the best very best performance out of the people who work for them. That’s their entire job. And the performance of their employees is the most important measure of whether they are good managers or not.
Most bad managers have forgotten this principle. It’s not that they choose bad methods to get the best work out of their people. It’s that they have forgotten that getting that best work is the manager’s job.
They believe, for instance, that effort is a measure of their own job performance. But if the dikes are collapsing, it’s pointless to claim that you plugged some of the holes and you were going to plug some more but it was difficult to figure out how and actually plugging those holes would have been hard. The fact that you tried as hard as you felt like trying is irrelevant when the waters are up around your armpits.
Management is like most jobs in that the job is not done when you’re tired of working; the job is done when you’ve achieved the results you need to achieve.
Many bad managers have their favorite techniques, Management by bullying. Management by email. Management by think-I’ll-hide-in-my-office-and-hope-it-goes-away. None of these get any useful results, other than to set up the moment when the bad manager tells his boss, “Hey, I managed the heck out of that situation. If it didn’t get any better, it must be a hopeless employee or sunspots or drugs in the water. It certainly isn’t my fault.”
This is a dumb career move for the bad manager. If he’s announcing that he can’t actually manage employees, which is in fact the very job he was hired to do, his boss should be wondering why the organization is still paying him. Well, unless his boss is also a bad manager.
Bad managers will also protest that their techniques of choice Should Have Worked. But “should have” means nothing. When your car stalls, you can kick the tires and kiss your St. Christopher medal, then get back behind the wheel and claim that the car “should be” running—but you will still be going nowhere.
There is no doubt that some employees are a challenge. Most come with some particular quirk that, under the wrong circumstances, can invite disaster and chaos. Getting the best possible work out of them can require skill, talent and diligence. And that’s why the widget plant managers get paid more than the widget builders.
If an employee needs help and direction, it’s the manager’s job to see that it’s provided. If the employee can’t be salvaged, it’s the manager’s job to replace the employee.
Of course, a manager who wants to replace employees because he doesn’t have the wit to manage them will not exactly inspire loyalty or optimism in the employees. That’s why it’s useful to have a variety of techniques with which to salvage problem employees.
An entire cluster of employee problems, hostility and poor performance is a sure sign that bad management is loose in the workplace. Part of insuring that you get the best work from your people is helping them work well together. Bad morale, infighting, and widespread non-performance are sure signs that a manager either can’t do his job or just doesn’t want to.
None of this excuses employee bad behavior. Every employee should be responsible enough to stay on track, behave himself, and do what he needs to do without being reminded. In a perfect world all employees would be self-directed professionals, responsible and selflessly working together to fulfill the organization’s purpose every hour of the day. And in that world the managers would all be out of work because there would be no use for them.

What Do You Want

2009-10-10T07:12:00.000-04:00

(News-Herald, October 8) It seems like the easiest thing in the world to know what you want. And yet the world is filled with people who aren’t certain, don’t know, can’t decide. Even when we tell ourselves that we know what we want, our actions can suggest that we don’t really know what we’re talking about.
The grown-up dating world, for instance, is filled with people who “really want to be in a relationship.” Except that if you watch their behavior, their choices, the way they spend their time, it becomes obvious there are a hundred things more important to them than finding a mate.
Or parents who say that they want their children to grow up strong and independent, but who don’t allow their children five minutes of independent thought or action in a week.
Sometimes people grab what they don’t want and hold tight, because if their hands were free, they would have to risk reaching for what they do want. They might fail. They might drop it. Full hands keep their hearts safe.
Successful people say they want something and then behave as if they actually mean it. The Secret of Success isn’t much more complicated than that. Most of the people who are muddled and just getting by have missed some part of that formula.
They may “want” something only because they think they are supposed to. Shortly after college graduation the landscape is littered with couples getting married because they’re pretty sure that’s what they’re supposed to do next. It does not occur to them that they may not WANT to get married. Or rather, it doesn’t occur to them at that point—it often comes up later.
Some people discover that behaving as if they actually want what they want is hard. It may require hard work. It may require giving up things that, supposedly, one wants less than the Big Goal. Goals cost, and if you want them you have to pay. “I want a Lexus and I want to pay $1.50,” is no use. “I want this person as long as I don’t have to give up these others,” doesn’t buy you a functional relationship.
Some people are way too vague about what they want. “I want a better life” doesn’t really give you direction. It could mean a higher paying job or better hair.
Sometimes people want things they can’t have. It’s positively un-American to say, but people have limits and those limits affect what they can accomplish. If your IQ is 50 and you want to become the world’s top rocket scientist, you are destined for disappointment. A shlumpy, middle-aged guy will never become an NBA starter.
Some people want things that can’t go together. Then they have to decide which they want most. This can lead to whiplash-inducing waffling. It’s not just confusion; met needs do not motivate. You can be really driven by hunger, until you eat. You’re at the beach and you want to sunbathe and you want to swim in the water. While you’re in the water, you’ll really want to go lie on the sand. While you’re lying on the sand, you’ll really want to go dash into the waves.
Sometimes what you want comes in an unexpected package; if you’re not clear and alert, you may miss it. You may even reject it because you don’t like the wrapper. That’s why you need to know what you want—so that you can recognize it no matter what shape it comes in. “I want chocolate,” you declare. But if you only recognize chocolate when it’s bar-shaped, you’ll miss a tasty chocolate bunny while gnawing on a chocolate-colored bar of soap.
In Venangoland, we find lots of people who say they want economic resurgence. And yet. Some of them don’t want it badly enough to actually do anything about it. Some of them want it to happen by a rebirth of industries that aren’t going to be reborn here or anywhere else. Some want the region to somehow get “better.” Some want the region to get what it needs as long as they don’t have to sacrifice anything they want.
Too many people are more concerned about the package and not the actual economic improvement. Pushing economic development around here would work better if folks really wanted it—without a long list of Only If’s attached. The rule for regional success is no different than that for personal success. Know what you want, and then act like you really want it.

Applefest '09

2009-10-02T08:01:00.001-04:00

(News-Herald, October 1) This week I’d like to talk about a guaranteed path to true love and peace for all the people of the world.
Ha! Just kidding. The only thing I could possibly be writing about this week is the 473rd Applefest in Franklin. Crowds may not top one million, though a large turn-out is anticipated for the launch of a moon rocket containing the bones of Col. Drake, followed by the Beatles reunion concert.
Okay, still just kidding. Generally the only way to say something new about Applefest is to make stuff up. As a pretend journalist I’m certainly not above that, but I am reluctant to do so when 100,000 fact-checkers are expected. (Disclaimer: the above details were exaggerated for effect. The Beatles will not be at Applefest, as far as I know.)
Every Applefest brings small variations on past festivals, mild mutations that have allowed the original small celebration to evolve into a sprawling monstrosity in the same way that single-cell organisms eventually led to more complicated structures capable of sitting on a couch, eating pizza and hollering Jeopardy answers at the tv.
So, yes, there are some new wrinkles. There’s the wedding, some new musical offerings, probably some new tchotchke shops. But let’s be honest. If you wanted new things at Applefest, you’d start your festing by first visiting all the stuff you never got to last year.
Applefest is festival comfort food. There is something pleasant in the consistency. We look forward to the music, the pancake breakfast, the race, the show at the Barrow, the cars, our favorite shops, the carved stumps and the seashells painted with Jesus and Elvis—it’s so much like visiting with old friends that visiting with actual old friends seem perfectly suited to the occasion.
However, if you are a mildly wild soul looking to spice things up just a bit, let me offer some suggestions for new Applefestian adventure.
Franklin Pizza Challenge: Next to churches and bars, we have more pizza sellers than Dunkin’ has donut holes (and why can’t we have one of those again, huh?). So—can you eat pizza from every pizza place in town before the weekend is over? (Disclaimer: note that I asked “can you”—the question of whether you should is one I’m not going to raise. The moral, ethical and dietary issues of the pizza challenge are ones that every person can only answer for him/her-self.)
Create Marketing Ideas: The Chamber needs ways to market Applefest like I need hair ribbons. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some good ideas out there. For instance, Pittsburgh folks might be interested to know that Applefest is going to be way more fun than the G-20 summit. No demonstrators terrorizing local businesses and citizens, no local police terrorizing demonstrators. “Applefest: No Tear Gas Here” may not seem like a natural slogan, but I bet once it’s on a few t-shirts it will grow on people.
Cell Phone Games: Years ago, I suggested cell phone tag. To play that game, you call your pursuer and give hints for finding you. Back then, cell phones were mostly for talking. Now, of course, cell phones can be used for texting, photographing, and performing minor surgery.
So, for modified cell phone tag:
Team I starts by picking a location and taking their picture there. The picture location can be easy (by the fountain) or hard (by the roof slates painted with pictures of fish). Send that picture to Team II, who now have to find the location and take their own picture there and send it. Then Team II picks a new location and sends a picture to Team I. Rinse and repeat until it’s time to eat another funnel cake (approximately 30 minutes). Time stamps on the phone and math skills will tell you who found the locations fastest. Winners pick the place to eat supper; losers buy.
Cell phone teams may also compete to collect the largest set of pictures of incredible Applefest sights, from the above-mentioned Jesus seas shells to a ferret on a leash. Each special sight can only be claimed once—first team to send a picture to other teams gets the point.
(Disclaimer: If you don’t know what I’ve been talking about for the last two paragraphs, you should not attempt to play these games. Instead, just move along the sidewalk at a leisurely pace and when you see someone using a cell phone, shake your head and mutter, “Kids these days!” Then go get some pizza.)

New Enterprises in Franklin

2009-09-25T21:26:00.001-04:00

(News-Herald, September 24) I took a quick trip through down town Franklin last weekend to get a peek at some of the new projects there.
First I made a stop at the Liberty Galleria. The newly refurbished space on Liberty Street has a small but interesting assortment of goodies. Chocolate from Foxburg, toys from Cochranton. Some pet stuff. A great assortment of heat-rendering ingredients for people who like to make food that bites back. And all the way in back a freezer loaded with baklava.
Most intriguing is a toy that is part building block and part marble track. The possibilities seem far more intriguing than the name (Block N Roll), and I was surprised to see that it’s produced by a toy company headquartered on Third Street in Franklin. I’ll do some research and get back to you on that one.
The Galleria also includes glass stuff, assorted jewelry, pet goodies, and a lot of empty air. There’s plenty of space left for fledgling entrepreneurs (if I had money to invest in inventory, I’d set up the Venangoland authors bookstore). And they’ve done a nice job of rescuing the building and turning it into something than any sort of business could happily locate into.
But I was just passing through the Galleria as an appetizer to the main course; Sandy Baker had agreed to give me a peek inside the old Franklin Club.
The club was originally called the Nursery Club; the actual organization dates back to the late 1870’s. But the Nursery Club didn’t buy its clubhouse until a decade later. That structure, previously a private home, was purchased for $8,000. Adding a ballroom and expanding some other facilities cost another six grand. Costs have gone up a tad during the 120 years the club has perched there.
The “Nursery of Great Men” slogan had caught on for a while in Franklin; it’s actual origin was Erie politician Morrow B. Lowry, who was trying to make fun of us. We took the line and ran with it, aggressively mocking him right back.
But eventually the attraction of the odd motto faded (as a school sports nickname, “Fighting Nurserymen” raises a variety of disturbing images). Eventually Franklin athletes became Knights, and the Nursery Club became the Franklin Club.
The Bakers have been busy inside the old building, though long-time club fans will not be alarmed by what they find. The first and second floors are newly recarpeted and wallpapered. The ballroom doesn’t get new wallpaper (thereby preserving what may have been the single ugliest feature of the club), but it is getting a reproduction tin ceiling. Most of the bars are being rebuilt. If you never spent much time in the club, things will seem largely unchanged when you walk in. It still gives an atmosphere of muted elegance and accessible class.
The biggest changes, ironically, are in the area that most local folks never saw—the exclusive basement rooms. This was the members-only bar and restaurant that ordinary civilians never got to see.
Now it will be McGinnis’s, an Irish pub. Basically, a three-room affair. One room will be the actual bar, one a genteel sitting-in-leather-chairs area, and the old restaurant will now house tables, bookcases, and a private corner in the back. The old carpet has been replaced with hardwood floor, the old ceiling with more reproduction tin ceiling. It is hard to imagine a more warm and inviting space. I don’t drink, but the picture of sitting in such a pleasant cave with a book and some good company—well, maybe I can just buy a glass of something and let it sit there for ambience.
For the pub project, the Baker’s have enlisted a co-founder of the popular Molly Brannigans pub chain, and they’ve hired their key personnel for the whole operation (I’m not sure what to call it now—it’s not a “club” any more, but “restaurant/pub/event center” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue).
The new name will be The Commons at Franklin (there’s a website). The bowling alley is still there, though not up and running just yet. The men’s room halfway down the steps to the bar is going to be a ladies room. A couple of wall displays will preserve and honor some of the Club’s early history.
I know many people have wondered what is happening, what we’re going to end up with. It appears that we’re going to get the return of an honorable old Franklin landmark, hopefully better managed and more accessible to the general public.

Goring Some Oxen

2009-09-18T18:53:00.001-04:00

(News-Herald, September 17) I have a whole library of subjects I’ve put off because, as much as I’d like to write about them, I know that I’ll just be asking for trouble. But this week, I’m clearing out that trouble file all at once, like pulling off a bandaid in one quick jerk (only this week, I’ll be the quick jerk). I can stop procrastinating and start collecting grumpy mail.
This is not the South.
Ignore for a moment the offensive things that a Confederate flag represents. This is Pennsylvania. Back when people waved that flag for real, they were trying to kill people from here. A Pennsylvanian with a confederate flag on a house or truck or t-shirt makes about as much sense as a black man in a pointy white sheet.
Cheerleading is not a sport.
Yes, cheerleading has changed over the decades. In my youth, cheerleaders stood in front of fans and led cheers (how else did we learn to spell “success”). Now they put on acrobatic displays and create giant sculptures made out of people. I do not blame cheerleaders for the decreased time spent leading cheers; modern sports fans are tv-trained lumps, and only the band will actually cheer.
But cheerleading is not a sport. I know it requires physical skill, and that cheerleaders have competitions. The same is true of dancers, and dancing isn’t a sport, either.
What bothers me most about cheerleading calling itself a sport is—why does it WANT to? Does cheerleading suffer from some sort of low self-esteem that it thinks it’s not good enough if it is “just” cheerleading and not a big old sport?
Do football players say, “Hey, we have a ball and we run around, so we are basketball players, too!” No. Why do that instead of just saying, “Basketball, shmasketball—we play FOOTBALL!”
I understand this is NW PA, and for many folks if it isn’t a sport, it doesn’t matter. And some school districts have finagled their way around various regulations by declaring cheerleading a sport. But cheerleaders should be bigger than that. Cheerleaders should be proud to be cheerleaders.
Toddlers should watch parades, not carry batons in them.
There is no reason to put a small child in a spangly outfit, stick a baton in her hand, and make her march/trundle/stagger through an entire parade. None. I cringe every time I watch a troupe of small children dragging themselves miserably down a street, surrounded by a staff of adults who act as though they are masterminding the Normandy Invasion.
I have heard all the arguments.
“The child is learning skills that she’ll use for years.” No, she isn’t. She’s mostly learning to hate the whole business, so that any hope she might have pursued it, enjoyed it, and done well at it when she becomes old enough is erased in the heat-addled haze of senseless parading.
“The child really loves it. Really. She wants to do it.” She’s a child. If Mommy sat in front of her and said, “Hey sweetie, you’d really like to roll in the mud with smelly pigs, wouldn’t you?” she’d say yes. If she did it once and received a giant wave of parental love and approval, she’d keep on doing it as long as she could stand to, or at least until she was old enough to understand big words like “emotional blackmail.”
“It’s fun.” Really? Because usually there isn’t a person out there who looks like they’re having fun. Not the miserable, confused little girls, not the harried over-serious adults, not the guy driving the vehicle with the blaring tin-can speakers, not the brother who has been forced to “come help out.”
End (Some) High School Sports.
The private sector is ready to take over. A variety of leagues, sponsored by the Y’s and the AAU, have sprung up. These involve some very fine motives (more playing opportunities for young athletes) and some not-so-fine motives (more Being In Charge opportunities for adults).
It was one thing when these programs augmented school sports, but now some of these private leagues are actually competing with school programs for athletes. Meanwhile, fewer school sports are actually coached by school employees, giving them even less connection to the school. One of these systems can go, and while I’m partial to school sports, saving some taxpayer money might be popular. So let’s keep the sports that are still truly school sports and get rid of the ones that are now duplicated.

Small People; Local Politics

2009-09-15T21:09:00.000-04:00

(News-Herald, February 2005) The old conservative-liberal division no longer makes sense; too few conservatives or liberals understand what their respective labels actually mean, though they’re certainly divided over something. There seem to be no politicians who believe in a pluralistic society; all our parties agree that the role of government is to force people to do the right thing, and everyone has a narrow view of what the right thing is.
Small town local politics are generally free of such ideologues. Instead, we get politics infected by the Small People. Sometimes the Small People are in power, and sometimes they’re hectoring elected officials from the sidelines. But the Small People always have certain tell-tale characteristics.
Small People have tiny vision, cramped and selfish spirits. They see themselves in battle against most of the rest of the world, a world populated by Those People.
The Small People have contempt for those beneath them socially or economically—Those People who live in the Arbors or line up at Community Services. The Small People believe that money = virtue, so people who don’t have money obviously lack virtue. Handouts are bad for them. (But Small People know their family and friends are virtuous, and anyway, what point is being in office if it doesn’t help you get your way?)
The Small People resent those beneath them. They resent it when Those People act as if they’re entitled to the same money or respect or shot at political post and advantage that the Small People have. How dare Those People act as if they have a right to hold an elected office without the Proper Connections.
Small People also resent the people above them. Someone smarter or more eloquent than they are makes them feel their smallness. People who have power over them enrage them. Small People can turn vicious in a power struggle, and bitter after losing. What right do Those People have to take control of this board/committee/group?
It’s impossible to move the Small People with an eloquent statement or well-reasoned argument, because they refuse to see anything larger than their own cramped aspirations or petty concerns. Every disagreement is personal; it never occurs to Small People that their opponents might have a legitimate point. Their response, whether to your face or whispered out of the corner of their mouth, will be cutting or condescending or cruel, to bring you down to size and to reassure themselves that there is no one in the world better than the Small People.
They refuse to imagine anything bigger than themselves, and assume everyone operates from the same selfish motives. A truth that disagrees with their own tiny view must be a lie. A person who makes a kind or wise gesture must be faking it to manipulate events for his own benefit.
Even their friends and allies are not immune to their withering sniping, because friends and allies must stay smaller than the Small People. Foolishly materialistic people may want to keep up with the Joneses, but Small People want to force the Joneses to stay down with them.
The Small People aren’t found just in elected office—church, volunteer group, school politics all attract Small People. Small People never see these positions as a way to serve or give back to the community. To them, politics is an avenue for putting Those People in their place (and making the Small People feel less small.) Sometimes they retreat from office because they sense that it will just highlight how Small they really are. Sometimes if they don’t get their way, they take their ball and go home to sulk.
We sometimes elect Small People because we think their definition of Those People matches our own. But we love some local politicians precisely because they are anything but Small. Guy Mammolite was an easy mayor to make jokes about for everything from his pageants and awards to his creative mangling of the language. But Guy was not a Small Person; he saw himself and his city and the people in it as part of something bigger, and he was always looking for ways to make it bigger still.
We’ve often been fortunate that way in Venangoland, though it irks the Small People to hear a Mammolite type praised. Whether in office or in the peanut gallery, Small People are the great bane of local politics, because they want to hold us all down to fit in their tiny, ever-shrinking world.

Hopeless Health Care Debate

2009-09-12T10:29:00.000-04:00

(News-Herald, September 10) The health care debate highlights how hard it is can be for Americans to get things done.
Health care is a complicated business, a highly technical field with a vast body of knowledge, plus a complicated delivery system and an entrenched business model that has become only more convoluted with time. And of course the health care biz is now smothered in the health insurance biz, one of the most deliberately complicated businesses in history.
The chances that an ordinary civilian can navigate this tangle, let along trim, cut and re-organize it – well, that seems as likely as chipmunks building a thermonuclear device in my back yard.
This type of work requires experts, people with years of experience with the ins and outs of the industry. Trouble is, these people have a vested interest in the industry. Getting these experts to help is like consulting a wolf on the best way to guard sheep.
Americans love the idea of gifted amateurs. In the movie, “Dave,” a small town shlub takes over the role of President and brings in his buddy, a small town accountant, to fix the federal budget in a day or two. That makes a swell movie, but is as likely as somebody being able to rebuild an engine because he’s always liked cars and he’s a good person at heart.
At times like these, some folks like to turn to the academics. Call in some college professors or think-tank whiz brains!
I’m not completely opposed to that notion. Academics have produced some fine results over the years (the internet is a good example), but experience in my field makes me suspicious. Education is filled with collegiate “experts” who wouldn’t last five minutes in an actual classroom but who can always land a government consulting gig. Then again, I may be an education expert, but I am heavily invested in my field and job. It’s possible, even probable, that my perspective makes some things very clear to me and keeps me from seeing other things at all.
That same thing is true of health care, but more so. If we’re going to pick apart the health care industry, whom do we trust? Who is in position to have good perspective on this monster?
Certainly some things are obvious to the average shmoe. Denying people health care because they’re ill is backwards. Spending a gazillion tax dollars we don’t have is unwise. Many businesses that I deal with keep track of me with stalker-like devotion. Yet the health insurance industry repeatedly makes regular customers approach like strangers. Do not tell me in this technologically advanced era that health care insurers need a system that is slow, cumbersome, inaccurate, and paper-intensive; surely it’s no coincidence that this system guarantees that they will pay slowly, hang onto money longer, and encourage customers to give up entirely. The health care biz is unique as an industry in which the economic incentive is to avoid doing the job that it’s there to do.
Democrats and Republicans are both historically happy to hand over the regulatory writing instrument to the industry facing regulation. I don’t automatically assume this proves corruption—inside the industry is where you’ll find the people who know it best. But we also can’t give the wolves the keys to the pasture. The economic meltdown is a fine example of how badly that can end.
And this balancing act must happen against the backdrop of the public shouting match loudly led by all the folks who have been suckered into shilling for the health insurance industry, and reform boosters with a seemingly-endless supply of Really Sad Stories.
How to navigate this mess. More actual thought and less noise would be good. It’s probably costing us too much as a country to just leave the industry alone; the wolves are already feasting on mutton daily. Market forces? Market forces say that a lot of sick unwealthy people should just die. Legislate a “right” to health care? Quick—go plant the money trees now. Put the feds in charge? Why think they can run the health care industry—it’s just putting more wolves in charge, though maybe dumber, slower wolves.
We could hire the wolves to watch the sheep and slap a good set of leashes on them. Course, then we need someone dependable to hold the leash. Maybe we just look for altruistic vegetarian wolves. Maybe I’d better keep a closer eye on the chipmunks in my back yard.

School with a Purpose

2009-09-04T17:45:00.000-04:00

(News-Herald, September 3) First week of school in Venangoland, and already I suspect many people are starting to feel their focus fade.

As the first day approaches, parents and students (and teachers, too) ramp themselves up. They buy new clothes, new school supplies, nice pair of socks, clean new eraser. Resolutions are made about how this year will be filled with achievement and growth. And for a few days, it actually is. And then the noble goals start to fade.

You plan to worry about Important Educational Goals and end up worrying about how to keep your pencil sharp and where to sit at lunch.

It’s like steering a car. Focus two feet in front of the car and you’ll weave over the road, threatening the safety of all around you and alarming those traveling with you (this is a good time to apologize to my old drivers ed teacher, Mr. Shreck). You have to stay focused way out ahead. Eyes on the goal.

Parental focus is challenging because we have so many kid-related worries, and sending them off to school means we can no longer control every aspect of their lives. It’s not that we want to be puppet masters. We just want to master the impossible art of keeping them safe.

Some parents keep trying. They want to be right there, contacting the school regularly to make sure that their child is never sad or hurt or disappointed or upset or forced to deal with difficult people.

I completely understand the impulse. Parents do not want to see their children suffer, not even a little. Our strongest instinct is to protect our offspring from any threat. And there is no question that a parent should be a child’s advocate. I can’t tell you how heartbreaking it is to sit in a conference with parents who show no faith in, nor support for, their children.

Somewhere between abandoning the child completely and driving to school to cut up his food at lunch, there’s a wide gray area to navigate. When should you step in? When should you let junior takes his lumps?

For middle and high school students, I offer two guides: a three-month old baby and a cranky boss.

For every problem, take the long view. Each problem’s solution is a lesson in solving problems. Let’s assume that our goal is to prepare our children for life as grown adults, who may have to deal with a three month old baby and/or a cranky boss. Is my child learning an approach that will be useful then?

In school, students must sometimes deal with people who are demanding, unreasonable, and completely insensitive to what those students want. Lots of parents want to leap into these situations.

But who in the world is more demanding, unreasonable and insensitive to others than a three-month old baby? When your grandchild is crying and complaining at 3 AM, which of the following responses would you like your adult child to use:

“This is completely unfair. I really want to sleep. It’s unreasonable; I’m not doing it.”

“Mom, come here. I don’t wanna take care of this baby; it’s so haaaaaarrrd. Fix it for me. ”

“Well, this is inconvenient, but sometimes in life you just have to suck it up and do what needs to be done.”

How many times do you want your adult child to change jobs in a search for a boss who treats him like Mom always used to?

Some real research says that a major predictor of success, both in school and life, is resilience, the ability to bounce back from disappointment and defeat. Unfortunately, some parents are determined that their child should never experience disappointment or defeat. So when young people should be doing heavy lifting to build emotional strength for the years ahead, some parents are making sure Junior never grabs anything heavier than a twinkie.

A major cyberschool advertises itself with the question “Is your child happy in school?” I don’t think students should be miserable, but I don’t believe that the best preparation for adult life is a childhood without tests or sadness. The absolute worst reason to cyber- or home- school is to insure your child years of never having to do anything hard, deal with any difficult people, or experience disappointment.

This is the challenge—to make sure that we don’t get so worried that child’s life is so happy now that we forget to lay a foundation for the future.

Attention to Detail

2009-08-28T10:21:00.001-04:00

(News-Herald, August 27) I love the stone skipping contest. It makes for such a finely focused afternoon (particularly in better-organized years like this one). I’ve judged the event basically since its Franklin inception, and I often hear the same question—how do you count all those little skips?

The big complicated answer is something about the audible tips, the little splashes, the rhythm, the patterns of ripples, but the short answer is simple: you pay attention. From a distance, a row of stone skips may just look like a line of splashy water. Everything looks different close up.

The common, simple image of a river is that it’s flat and flows steadily downstream. But even a kayak duffer like me quickly sees that’s not so. I’ve spent many hours out on the river this summer, and it is a beautiful place. But what looks like a large, flat rolling ribbon from a distance is considerably more complicated close up.

Sometimes the river really is a flat ribbon. But in some places it suddenly plunges into a deep hole or over a submerged stone step. There are places where ridges split the river lengthways and the water flows sideways, spilling over a lip almost too slight to measure. The river will stand with lake-like stillness until it drops, suddenly, and the water springs to life. It can race, cut through itself, even swirl in little pockets that hit the kayak as if it had landed on top of a big spinning ball.

Where French Creek and the Allegheny come together there’s always something interesting going on. Sometimes the river runs a bit higher than the creek, and the creek’s waters pile up against it. More often the river runs a bit lower, and you can see the slightest of mini-waterfalls at the creek’s mouth. As flat as we expect water to be, a river is filled with dips and rises and steps and hills.

Ditto for the bike trail. Certainly no one would mistake the bike trail for one of those alpine peaks in the Tour de France, but pedal up and down enough times with your gear cranked up to somewhere between “Wow—we’re zipping along now” and “Wow—I’m definitely getting older” and you can see (and feel) the trail dip and climb.

The same phenomenon is evident through many parts of life. It is probably the mark of true love for something to see all the little details and variations.

If you don’t like polka music, pretty much every polka sounds like every other polka. But polka fans know the differences, can hear nuances and changes and distinctions and can tell the difference between Polish and Slovenian polkas.

All parents who hate their children’s music are certain it all sounds exactly the same, even though the children who love the music are quite sure it doesn’t.

Pursuing and mastering a passionate interest often involves learning to see the small distinctions, the little details, and understand them. It’s the way a sports fan learns pages and pages of trivia. (I am proud to say that I am not a fair-weather fan of the Penguins; I maintained a steadfast indifference to hockey through the entire Stanley Cup proceedings.) Those who love the game can go on at great length about the details, specifics, techniques, strategies, and finer points (I know—I heard them all everywhere I went). But to me, hockey just looks like a bunch of guys on skates batting a puck around.

If you hate small towns, they’re all the same. If you hate cities, one urban mess is just like every other. Refusing to see those distinctions is how many people keep something at arm’s length and avoid developing interest or understanding. If you don’t let yourself really look at it, you can avoid learning to love it. Sometimes being forced to come up close to something is how you learn to love and appreciate it in the first place.

It is one of the benefits of staying in one place for many years. A good, long hard look shows you the patterns, the shapes, the intricate little details that are woven together. Sometimes it takes many years, many views to have that moment of discovery, the uncovering of unexpected beauty.

In a world where we demand that everything be scrubbed down to quick simple microbursts of experience, it’s no wonder that so little satisfies us. That scrubbing removes everything rich and interesting, the details that move the spirit and awaken the heart.

Monarch Park photo collection

2009-08-27T19:03:00.003-04:00

Monarch Park photos on flickr.

Here's a batch of Monarch Park post cards, plus a photo of an original map.

And if you don't know what this is all about, you can look here for a brief history.

Car Shopping

2009-08-21T20:52:00.000-04:00

(News-Herald, August 20) I hate car shopping. I try to arrange to do it as rarely as possible. But my old car, which had always displayed a certain amount of character, had lurched past “character” into “personality disorder.”
This was not my car’s fault. On our semi-annual jaunt to Maine I forgot to account for the car’s oil mileage (roughly 200 miles to the quart). On the way home, the oil light came on and clunky noises were heard. (In the interests of full disclosure, I admit that there’s a part of the story where I technically set fire to the engine, but while that was alarming to my daughter, I don’t believe it upset the car.)
In the following weeks we moved from subtle death rattle straight on to the sound of marbles in a washing machine. I could no longer avoid car shopping.
I was prepared neither financially nor mentally for my car’s unplanned expiration, so I had to do my online and car lot homework. I learned some things have changed since I was last in the used car market, a decade+ ago.
First, car manufacturers are all making the same car, a sedan that’s about as bold as tadpoles in the Allegheny. These identically boring vehicles come mostly in colors like Grey and Beige. I don’t care much about appearance, but if cars were meals, every dealer would be selling tuna fish salad on white bread. With extra mayo. There’s a handful of fun and exciting looking cars out there, but based on what I’ve read, I conclude that the auto industry has decided that a car may not both look good and work well.
Second. If you’re my age, you probably remember “energy crisis” and “gas rationing,” which led to “cars that don’t have lousy gas mileage.” It seemed for a long time that all automotive genius was aimed laser-like at the issue of fuel efficiency. Apparently the more recent word on the hunt for fuel efficiency is, “Never mind.”
Third. Every used car lot must include at least one Chevy Malibu. I have no idea why. Maybe it works like the box of baking soda in the fridge.
We learned other things. I say “we” because my brother, who enjoys this stuff, came along to keep me out of the weeds. (Together, we can play bad buyer/confused buyer.)
We learned, for instance, that car dealerships aren’t all that excited about cash for clunkers. “There’s a perfectly good car and I can’t even sell you a hubcap from it.” Cash for clunkers manages to combine two of history’s great lies so dealers get to be on the receiving end of “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you by sending you a check that is, I swear, in the mail.”
C4C has also caught the used car market in a giant vice, reducing inventory and driving up prices for those of us who can’t afford a brand spanking new tuna fish sandwiches.
Used car dealers remain cartoon versions of themselves. (At one dealership, the salesman in the next booth told his cellphone “Yeah, so I feel slimy. But it was one of those deals they force you to make.”) Pushy, manipulative, inappropriately friendly—what I hate about the car shopping process is that I start out feeling like a velociraptor’s lunch and end up feeling like a sucker. The best was the guy at 4yourcarconnection in Seneca, who talked with me like we were both real live human beings. But in the end, I did not buy a car from him. So while I enjoyed talking to him, I have to admit that he didn’t get anything out of it.
The place I did buy my car was in the classic vein. My salesman, clearly trained in a variety of sales “techniques,” eventually had to “go talk to the manager,” and when my brother began to whisk us out the door, the manager came to deal directly with us, acting as offended as if we’d claimed his sister was working in a Mexican brothel. So there was more posturing and totally-not-straight talk pretending, badly, to be straight talk.
In the end, I bought the car. I owe my brother one more large favor and I owe the bank a stack of money. I bought a Ford Taurus, respectable grown-up transportation, and while I don’t shop for color, I ended up with burgundy, so it’s a tuna salad sandwich with a slice of tomato.

Hildegarde Dolson: Final Thoughts

2009-08-14T09:01:00.000-04:00

(News-Herald, August 13) I don’t often spend three weeks on one subject, but this month is the 101 anniversary of the birth of Hildegarde Dolson, hometown girl who made good, and I think she deserves the attention.
There are plenty of things to learn from her story, including the most obvious. Here’s a young woman who left the region, went to New York City with nothing but her wits and talent, arrived at the worst possible time, and managed to create a lifelong career as a successful writer.
It’s worth noting that her small town origins weren’t an obstacle to her success, but integral to it. Her small town girl in the big city voice was part of what created her success.
She appears as a character is most of her work, remarkably consistent in her self-view. A small, mousy woman, not physically exceptional (though she credited the character with nice legs), not always at ease, sometimes self-centered and frequently naïve.
Beyond the autobiographical character, certain other characters reappear. There’s the male artist, gifted and selfish, talented and undependable as a friend. And there’s the flashy woman—outgoing, elegant, drawing men like moths to a flame, but callously using and discarding them.
Flashy Woman is the closest thing to a Dolson villain, often stealing the man from the Hildegarde character. FW wants attention and victory in the field of amorous battle, suckering men who lack the insight to see the more sincere and heartfelt affection offered by the Hildegarde character.
But I oversimplify, and Dolson doesn’t. While Dolson can draw characters with brutal honesty and scathing detail, she also understands what drives them and what admirable qualities they possess. There are no truly evil people in Dolson’s world, not even in her murder mysteries; even when a character is not very nice, Dolson understands why friends and family still love that character.
I admire Dolson as a writer, combining the clear sharp prose of a journalist with the keen conception of a fiction writer and, as a bonus, an apparent fearlessness about mining her own life for material. But I admire Dolson the woman for her clear-eyed positive view of the world and the people in it. She did not ignore the flaws, and even saw pettiness and self-centeredness in herself. But somehow the flaws were not as important as other things.
Her resistance to marriage lasted most of her adult life (she once wrote an article entitled “Why I’d Make an Awful Wife”). It wasn’t that she didn’t like men; it’s clear that she did. But she was busy. She had work to do. She didn’t exactly reject the role of a wife—she had some clear ideas of what a wife was supposed to do and she knew she lacked time and, perhaps, aptitude for the role. She didn’t want to renegotiate the role; she just didn’t want to quit her job as a writer to take a job as a wife.
When she did finally marry, she was fifty-seven years old. She married author Richard Lockridge, a widower who was well-established mystery writer.
Lockridge wrote a must-read for Dolson fans. In One Lady, Two Cats he tells the story of convincing Dolson to marry him. Neither Lockridge nor Dolson offer in their writings a clear picture of how they fell in love, though it’s clear that it was somewhat unexpected and the onset was quick—two people who had known each other but suddenly found themselves in love. When they had to attend to separate business in separate places, she told him that had never known it was humanly possible to miss somebody so much.
In Lockridge’s book their wedding is a small formality in the midst of the story of an independent minded woman very much in love learning how to adjust to a man and his cats. Yes, he’s a man in love, but it’s hard not to feel what he feels, to be struck by how smart and understanding she is, how kind without being mush-headed she is.
Dolson died in January of 1981; she was only 72. It’s on my “if only” list—if only I’d discovered her back then, I would have written to her, asked to meet her. A reminder in the present to be alert for things today that could become “if only’s” tomorrow. Dolson seems to have avoided “if only” in her full and successful, if unconventional, life. She remains on the page, another fine Venangoland success story.

Hildegarde Dolson Reading List

2009-08-07T10:42:00.000-04:00

(News-Herald, August 6) Last week I re-introduced successful Venangoland author Hildegarde Dolson. This week, I’ll offer a short reading guide.
This is not comprehensive. Local scholar Mike Dittman decided to tackle a comprehensive listing of Dolson’s works; this turns out to be one of those projects that starts out looking like a puddle and ends up more like the Grand Canyon, and I wish Mike all the best on his journey. For our purposes here, we’re going to stick to her books.
How About a Man (1938). A short breezy guide to acquiring male companionship. Frank and funny, some aspects are dated (gloves) and some are not (sex). Reminiscent of Thurber and White’s Is Sex Necessary?
We Shook the Family Tree (1941) Accounts of growing up in Franklin, attending Allegheny College, and starting out in Depression-era NYC, including her brief stint in vaudeville. Dolson’s most successful and best-loved work. Required reading for Franklin resident.
The Husband Who Ran Away (1948) Addison Stubbs is so henpecked by his wife and her mother in the small town of Bracklin, PA, that when he breaks his mother-in-law’s heirloom clock, he first hides under the porch and then runs away to NYC. The literary equivalent of a screwball comedy, this is probably the most over-the-top wacky piece that Dolson ever wrote.
The Form Divine (1951). Lucilla Webb decides that the best way to deal with her lackluster husband and her own skinny frame is to sign up for a beauty spa. Light comedy.
Sorry To Be So Cheerful (1955). The first of Dolson’s collections of short pieces. This really highlights her light, witty style. The account of her interview with Emily Post is worth the price of admission.
A Growing Wonder (1957). Dolson called this her favorite of her own works. The unnamed narrator is a single writer in NYC who comes from a small town in western PA, and she has front-row seats for a love triangle involving an artist, two very different sorts of women, and a small but talented boy who becomes collatoral damage. Still funny and sharply observed, but with more serious drama and depth than her previous novels.
The Great Oildorado (1959) (published in Britain as They Struck Oil). Required reading for all Venangoland residents. This book actually owes a debt to Herbert Asbury’s The Golden Flood, but Dolson’s breezy style, her sharp eye, and her familiarity with the area make this the most readable and enjoyable of any works ever written about the local oil boom. If you want a sense of what the fuss was about, this is where to get it.
Guess Whose Hair I’m Wearing (1963). Her other collection of short pieces. Also fun.
Open the Door (1966). A book editor, still smarting and isolated from a previous bad affair, is drawn back into life and love by two children of a family that moves in upstairs. There is a love quadrangle, an old adversary, and new love with an intriguing writer. Since Dolson herself had just married a writer, one suspects some biographical spin here.
Heat Lightning (1969). Here Dolson really uses her eye for the social patterns and interactions of life in the exurbs—the social ins and outs, the politics of committee work, the patterns of privilege—and applies it to another unconventional love quadrangle as a community tries to prepare a mammoth Fourth of July celebration. Truthfully, not a great deal happens, but her eye for the interactions and character is great.
Her keen eye for life in that Connecticut small town (like the place she had settled with her new husband) was apparently just getting warmed up for her four mystery novels. Written in the seventies, they feature Lucy Ramsdale (a sharp-edged illustrator and widow) and Inspector James McDougal, retired and bruised by life (his wife left him).
The mysteries are classic drawing room—in the first portion of the novel we meet a cast of interesting characters. Then one of them is killed; detecting ensues. Any one of these would make a Murder She Wrote episode, except that Lucy is more interesting than Jessica Fletcher.
To Spite Her Face (1971), A Dying Fall (1973), Please Omit Funeral (1975), and Beauty Sleep (1977) should be read in order to watch the arc of Lucy and Mac’s relationship. I will note that Dying Fall includes gay characters, and while those characters are handled well, the characters around them treat them in ways that might be a bit jarring.
Most of these can be found in local libraries or at on-line used booksellers.

Hildegarde Extra

2009-08-04T12:09:00.002-04:00

Because I have spent the summer developing a massive Hildegarde Dolson crush, I've started a blog just of Dolson quotations.

I figure thousands of people will read them, become interested in her writing, start buying up old copies of her books, which will prompt publishers to re-issue her catalog, leading to a massive world-wide resurgence in her popularity. At least, that6's the rough plan.

I've started with How About a Man and The Form Divine because those are the two I don't own, and the library will want their copies back soon. I'll get to the rest eventually.

At any rate, you can get your almost-daily dose of Dolson right here.

Hildegarde Dolson

2009-07-31T10:47:00.000-04:00

(News-Herald, July 30) Hildegarde Dolson would have been 101 this August; I’m ashamed to have missed her centenary. I’ll be correcting that oversight.
Dolson, born and raised in Franklin, graduated from FHS in 1926, then attended Allegheny College. She never finished there; instead, she embarked for New York City. She wrote that she arrived on October 24, 1929 (Black Thursday). Whether this is precisely true or not, her timing was certainly imperfect.
She worked as a copywriter for several big stores, lived in Greenwich village, and began scoring freelance writing sales to bigtime magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal and the New Yorker. Then, fewer than fifteen years after her big move, Dolson published We Shook the Family Tree. The book chronicles her youth in Franklin, and it became her most enduring hit; picked up by Scholastic Book Publishers, it stayed in print for over three decades, and generations of school children grabbed it as a TAB paperback.
I set out to meet her, figuratively, and decided I’d try to do it through her writing.
This seems appropriate because Dolson was such a personal writer. She was primarily a humorist, a story-teller who worked from her own life. She sometimes found herself in odd situations (e.g. hanging around the dressing room of a 17-year-old stripper), but events as simple as a trip to the store, a visit from a political canvasser, or reading a book could trigger a few hundred words of Dolson’s wry, observational wit. Her stories about interviewing Emily Post and Doctor Spock are more fun than the interviews themselves.
Dolson never left Franklin far behind. In addition to Family Tree other pieces covered topics as diverse closing up the family home after her parents’ death and finding herself rendered in egg (next to an eggy John Wilkes Booth) in a store window. She always and often referred to her home town by name. Never “a little burg I come from” but “my home town, Franklin, Pennsylvania.”
Her writing suggests that she was pleased to be from Franklin, but happy to live in the Big City. In her early comic novel The Runaway Husband, the main character runs away from his home in Bracklin, PA (a town near Oilburg and Titusdale) and ends up in Greenwich Village working for a major department store. “Bracklin” is portrayed kindly, but at the end of the novel, the husband has no epiphany that he needs to get away from the big city and return to his roots. Her later novels are set in a wealthy but small Connecticut much like the one where she settled with her husband, writer Richard Lockridge. In all of these settings, Dolson seems to find charm and humor.
Dolson stayed single for much of her adult life, a self-described spinster, yet a steady stream of men move through her writing. Her voice is an odd hybrid, a sort of discretely frank Presbyterian Bohemian. While there is never a hint of lewdness in Dolson’s writing, her characters are well aware of sex and occasionally have some, and not necessarily with the benefit of marriage. The heroine of Open the Door is a middle-aged book editor who has just ended a bad affair and is falling for a writer.
Dolson’s own singlehood was deliberate. She chose writing as a profession early in life and felt that the solitary, focused life of a writer left no room for looking after a husband. She reports her four-year-old nephew’s analysis: “I know why you don’t want to get married…It’s because a husband would talk to you and interrupt you when you wanted to think.”
Children appear in Dolson’s novels as agents of change. She manages to write about them as all her characters, without patronizing or idealizing them. I suspect that Dolson made an excellent aunt.
Her high school yearbook photo shows a young woman who’s not physically imposing (she described her hair color as “drab” and never gave a weight greater than 95 pounds). Her hair is cut in a stylishly wild bob, and she looks through her bangs with an unaggressive intelligence (reminiscent, somehow, of Breakfast Club Ally Sheedy). Her grown-up book photos show that same intent gaze with a hint of smile.
Dolson had the essential writer’s gift—a distinct and pronounced voice. She was the quintessential big city woman with small town girl roots. She was sophisticated and witty without becoming cynical or dismissive; she was able to see the ridiculousness of people and places without losing her love for them. Next week: Dolson reading recommendations.

Venango Museum of Art, Science and History

2009-07-28T19:07:00.001-04:00

(News-Herald, July 23) In Venangoland, we are so soaked in oil history we sometimes forget that most communities are not. In most places “oil heritage” makes about as much sense as “weasel heritage” or “toupee heritage” or “spam heritage.” Except, of course, that weasels and toupees haven’t changed the course of civilization (you might make a case for spam).
To warm up for this week’s extravaganza of oil heritaginess, my daughter and I made a visit last week to the Venango Museum of Art Science and History. It’s been a while since I’d been, so I was interested to see what there is to see.
The first thing we noticed about the museum is how absolutely slick and professional its presentation is. It’s not unusual in such “small market” museums to find displays and signage that looks as if they were done by the curator’s niece with some magic markers on her kitchen table.
But the museum looks good. Really good. There are wall-sized illustrations that are eye-catching and impressive, and signage is completely professional. You can pooh-pooh these things as mere cosmetics, unrelated to the actual content of a place, but these design elements set a tone. The eyewash in the Venango Museum says, “We are serious about this stuff.”
Visitors to the museum are greeted by some nice graphics and a coin-fed arcade wizard (like the one in Big) who introduces himself as the “Wizard of Black Gold or Black Magic.” “Black Gold or Black Magic” is the title of the current exhibit; not exactly poetry, but it gets the idea across.
If you don’t feed the wizard, you’ll be greeted a few feet further in by another recorded voice. Warning: this voice is triggered by a motion sensor and people (like, say, middle-aged English teachers) who are being distracted by other exhibits might be startled into a loud reaction that invites teasing from other visitors (like, say, my daughter).
There are many nifty, informative exhibits. There’s a great display of memorabilia related to Rattlesnake Pete, one of the region’s most colorful characters. This is a great batch of stuff and may well be worth the price of admission all by itself.
For that matter, admission is worth the price of admission. If this big beautiful building were sitting there empty, it would be worth a few bucks just to tour it.
Also worth the price of admission is the 1920’s era Wurlitzer theater organ. The console is a beautiful piece of art in its own right, but the music it makes is also a rare treat. Be sure to ask to hear it when you visit; modern technology means that no actual organist is required in order to hear this gorgeous instrument.
Another display shows a mannequin version of Ida Tarbell at her desk, briefly explaining her importance in the history of both oil and journalism. It even underlines how deliciously ironic it was for Ralph Nader to own the Transit Building in Oil City.
There is a really nice car, a Cord Phaeton. The museum’s website says it’s a 1935 model. It also says that it’s a 1937 model. The notes I took from the sign in the museum say 1930, but maybe I made a mistake. At any rate, a beautiful car from 193-something.
There are displays about the oil industry itself; how informative they are depends on how little you know to start with. If you are hosting someone from outside the area who wants to know what the big oil deal is around here, the museum is a good way to get started. For locals, some of this is not exactly news, but some is kind of cool. For instance, they have a nice working mini-model of the pumphouse-driver-well set-up that we’ve all stepped over the pieces of in one section of Venangoland woods or another.
There’s also a giant dinosaur sort-of-skeleton and a gift shop with plenty of oildom memorabilia. Though it has “Venango” in its title, the museum is mostly Oil City-centric, but that makes it a good fit for the next few days of oily celebration. It doesn’t take a great deal of time to tour the museum, and it doesn’t take a great deal of money to get in the door.
The Venango Museum is certainly a facility we can recommend to visitors with pride as well as a place that locals don’t visit as often as we ought to. While you’re celebrating oil heritage days, make it a point to stop in.

Good vs. Great

2009-07-18T08:59:00.001-04:00

(News-Herald, July 16) I am a big fan of excellence, of the pursuit of what is great and extraordinary. But at the same, time I don’t like it when that pursuit becomes extreme and unhealthy.
How can it be bad to pursue excellence?
There’s a saying about the good driving out the great; people’s willingness to settle for the merely good keeps them from pursuing what could be great.
I certainly see plenty of this in my classroom. Students routinely create essays that are okay, but if they had kept working and hadn’t settled for “okay” they could have produced some really excellent work.
But sometimes the reverse is true. In our desire to settle for nothing but the very best, we overlook some of what is really good. Some folks become so pathological in their quest for absolute perfection that they miss out on Very Good Experiences.
In severe cases, these people become perpetual dropouts, leaving homes, jobs, spouses in an endless search, fueled by the belief that somewhere out there is a job/town/person who is just so totally awesomely perfect that nothing else will do.
You can spot these folks by their use of the word “settle” as if settling were both tragic and contemptible. They say “I will not settle” in the same tone you’d use for “I will not stick my head in the septic tank.’
At its worst, this desire for Only Excellence leads to people bound and determined to convince themselves that what they’re experiencing is titanic, monumental, awesomely great beyond all cosmic levels of intergalactic awesomeosity. This inflationary appreciation cheapens everything.
I am a standing ovation scrooge. I stand and applaud only when I’ve seen something exceptional and extraordinary. If I explain this, folks look at me as if I am a big fat meany, as if it’s cruel NOT to tell a performer that he just gave the best performance in the history of the universe.
At what point did “You did a really good job” become an insult?
Overpraising not only cheapens the praise, but it calls into question the judgment of the person delivering it. Suppose I’ve just played a session of jazz trombone. If you tell me you really enjoyed it and think I did a great job, I’ll be pleased and flattered. If you tell me that I just played the most awesome jazz trombone you ever heard in your life, I’ll be thinking that you have A) a sad life and B) little knowledge of jazz trombone playing.
It really is okay to be “just” good.
The Franklin Silver Cornet Band has performed thousands of concerts. Only one of those could be the Best Concert the Band Ever Played. Franklin Civic Operetta has presented hundreds of shows. Only one of those can be the Best Show that Civic Ever Put On. Pride should come from a consistent level of excellence, not a focus on one single peak.
I’ve lived through roughly 19,000 days so far. Only one of those can be the Best Day of My Life. Now, I could focus on that single day, or I could keep crowning a new champion Best Day Ever, but either way, I’m passing over 18,999 perfectly good days (okay, maybe 18, 253 perfectly good days—some of them weren’t so hot).
I think those who constantly carp about our region suffer from a touch of this problem. If we can’t tout Venangoland as the Greatest This or the Best Ever That, the reasoning goes, then this place must just stink.
Well, there’s something to be said for settling. Still push for your best. Still strive for excellence. But people who refuse to marry anyone but the Most Perfect Partner will die grumpy and alone. Parents who insist their children be The Most Perfect Ever will drive those children away. People who think every day must be the Best Day Ever will have many, many bad days. People who must live in a Perfect Place will move a lot, and die either disappointed or deluded.
Sometimes Really Good is good enough. There is no shame in living a life that is just as good as you could make it, even if it’s not the Greatest Life On Earth. There are so many reasons to be proud of our corner of the world. There’s no excuse not to keep trying to move forward, make things better. But there’s also no excuse not to settle for a place that’s really good, even if it’s not the Greatest Spot on Earth.

Let Other People Be

2009-07-10T21:15:00.001-04:00

We cannot make people act the way we want them to. Over this unexceptional log a gazillion men and women have tripped.
First, other people do not necessarily feel the way we think they ought to. This irritant reappears repeatedly in politics. For eight years, many Americans were certain that everyone should be appalled by George W. Bush and upset that he was acting like a war criminal and starting stupid wars and trampling on everything that made this country great. Nowadays, instead, we have people certain that all Americans should be appalled by Barack Obama instituting Communism and lowering our defenses and trampling on everything that made this country great. Both groups are certain they know how everyone should feel.
Or we feel hurt, and we think the people around us should feel hurt, too. And yet, often they do not.
Second, even when people feel the way we think they should feel, they don’t act out those feelings as we think they should. This is the source of a thousand lovers’ arguments that begin with the phrase “If you really loved me you would…”
We figure that this one action would show that these people feel the way we hope/demand they feel. Sometimes these are not unreasonable (“If you loved me, you would not sleep with lots of people who aren’t me”) and sometimes they are (“If you loved me, you would not be upset that I sleep with lots of people who aren’t you”).
Often they are oddly unique, sometimes based on our own experience (“If you cared about me, you’d put my salad dressing on the side”).
Most troublesome are those that come out of our own temperament. We’re all wired to react to high stakes emotional situations differently, from those of us who explode outwards to those of us who turn inward, from those of us who leap to the front of the fray to those of us who sit and stay still, waiting and watching.
These responses are so basic to our nature that we have a hard time imagining different ones. When I get upset, my urge may be leap up and Go Do Something; why someone would just sit there? Or my response is to sit and think things through; why someone would want to go off half-cocked. I may really need to talk about things, or I may need to really NOT talk about things—either way, I can’t imagine how people would feel differently any more than I can imagine why some people would enjoy being set on fire.
So people may not feel the way I think they should feel, or they may not act on those feelings the way I think they should. That’s only the beginning; my problems really begin when I start trying to explain the differences.
If they don’t feel what I think they should feel, I may decide they don’t understand. The Bush Bashers and Obama Haters are certain that if they explain How Awful He Is just one more time, everyone will finally Get It and howl in outrage. If they still don’t get it, I guess they can’t understand—people who don’t feel the way I think they should just must be stupid.
Or I may combine the problems—if you really care about me, you’ll just know the right thing to do.
If I don’t see the actions that would “prove” your feelings, then that proves you don’t have them. That leaves a blank for me to fill in with what I guess your feelings are.
It’s as if we’re speaking two different languages. I did something that to me means, “I care about you,” but to you it means, “I think you’re a big jerk.”
It’s worse in times of stress and struggle; then we’re least likely to stop and ask ourselves “I wonder how this comes across” or “Can I put myself in their shoes for a second?” Growing up we (mostly) learn a common language of actions and behaviors that (most) people (usually) (mostly) understand. But in tough times we often revert to the behavior and actions that were wired into us in childhood. At those times it’s really hard to make connections between each other. A good first step is to remember that each of us has a heart that speaks a language of its own. We can’t force it to speak our language; we need to listen and be careful how we translate.

On the water

2009-07-08T16:49:00.001-04:00

sum09.38, originally uploaded by palan57.

I had a perfect night for shooting last week. I've inflicted these on facebook friends and you can see the whole set on flickr as well. But honestly, do I live in a beautiful place or what?

PA Budget Follies '09

2009-07-03T12:18:00.000-04:00

(News-Herald, July 2) In our universe, “deadline” means “the point by which a piece of work must be done.” If my editors say “Your deadline is 3 am next Tuesday,” I know that I need to have my work in to them BEFORE 3am on Tuesday.
But when the suits in Harrisburg talk about the “budget deadline,” they actually mean “the point in time at which we’ll START to seriously work on completing a budget.”
The time before the deadline, the period in which you or I (silly political amateurs) would be trying to finish a real budget—well, that’s the time that the folks in Harrisburg get busy posturing and positioning for the real budget negotiations.
Negotiating is a refined art in the best of circumstances; two parties must work out a mutually satisfactory solution, and they begin this journey toward mutual understanding by sitting down and telling big fat bald-faced lies. I want to end up with one fluffy bunny, so I demand a truckload of weasels. You want me to end up with only one fluffy bunny, so you propose to kill every pet I ever have or will own. And then we begin a series of conversations to gauge how big the lies are that we are telling each other.
Political negotiating is especially entertaining because the goal is to scare not just your opponents, but also all the innocent bystanders (aka “voters”).
Our problem is simple. The amount of money we would like to spend is a much larger amount than the amount of money we expect to have available. And because we lack the federal government’s ability to make money out of air while using a time machine to pick the pockets of generations yet unborn, we have to find a way to make those two amounts Not So Different.
Everybody knows there are two solutions. 1) Take in more money. 2) Give away less money. For individuals, there are good and bad ways to do both of these. “Get a better paying job” is a more useful solution than “Knock over a Kwik-Fill” or “Take out a fraudulent mortgage” for generating income. “Stop buying things you don’t need” is preferable to “Cut back to one meal a week” or “Stop paying bills.”
Republicans have floated a budget that slashes a variety of programs. A variety of economic/community grants, support for tourism, and arts money, as well as (depending on who’s doing the analysis) state parks, environmental protection, and legal defense.
Various affected groups are already out beating the bushes and raising the alarms. I get regular e-mails of panic about cutting arts funding to zero, which trickles down just about everywhere (even into Venangoland). Other critics say cuts would close state parks, shut down health care, and blot out the sun.
Meanwhile, Smilin’ Ed is proposing a whole bunch of additional taxes on everything that moves. Oh, and “temporary” income tax hikes. Critics suggest this would make PA’s lousy business climate even worse, send rich people running to Barbados, and blot out the sun.
To the panicked screeching on both sides, add smoke and mirrors. Federal stimulus money is in there, but in some cases, such as education, maybe not really. Like when your Grandma gave you an extra five dollars and then your parents cut your allowance by five dollars that week.
To sort it all out, you need someone who is 1) knowledgeable and 2) not trying to sell you something. Good luck with that.
Short of some really creative solutions (Sell Philadelphia on e-bay) the commonwealth faces hard choices, and I’d like to blame just the dopes in Harrisburg, but part of the solution is for the electorate to suck it up. It may be unfair that the state is in this mess, but here we are. The long term health of the state may require many of us to bite some short term bullets.
Selfish solutions (“Get the money from people who aren’t me”) aren’t an answer. And both “We don’t care what you cut as long as you don’t raise taxes” and “Tax anyone and anything as long as there are no cuts” are stupid solutions.
Scare tactics won’t help. Political posturing won’t help. Serious consideration of the issues and an honest view of the state’s future would help. Now that we’ve actually entered budget season, maybe some brains and vision will emerge soon, and those Harrisburg geniuses can start doing the job they were supposed to finish weeks ago.

DeBence Museum: Local gem

2009-06-26T10:01:00.001-04:00

(News-Herald, June 25) When you visit friends in some exotic far-off locale, they’ll tell you about all the sights they never see except when they’re hosting out of towners. Every place, big or small, has these underappreciated gems that locals never get around to visiting.
One Venangoland version of that is DeBence Antique Music World.
Don’t be put off by the name. At some point somebody convinced the DeBence folks that the word “Museum” is scary, so they became a “Music World.” Yeah, sure. They’re a museum, and that’s nothing to be ashamed of.
Most locals know the story. In a barn just south of Franklin, Jake and Elizabeth DeBence assembled the biggest collection of Cool Old Music Stuff that anyone has ever seen. When Jake died, Elizabeth was so committed to keeping the collection intact and local that she passed up chances to become a millionaire several times over.
Local investors and fans raked up the kind of money needed to keep the collection and to house it, creating a showcase that also rescued one of the better old storefronts in down town Franklin.
The collection includes old Nickelodeons, band organs, calliopes, plus an assortment of other oddities (a mechanical violin player?). Under the watchful hands of talented volunteers, DeBence has over 200 of these musical devices operating. These machines represent an era in music, not mention mechanical wizardry and inventiveness (historical side note—player piano technology became the foundation for beginning computers).
Creating a large collection of such amazing antiques requires determination and a certain amount of vision. Before something becomes a Valuable Antique, it’s usually just Some Old Piece of Junk. Most people don’t hold onto their junk long enough to see it become a valuable antique.
Several things make DeBence a museum unique not just in the state, not just in the nation, but in the world.
First, beyond the sheer size of the collection, there are machines here that are the last of their kind, the only ones left on the planet. Some are merely extremely rare. At DeBence you can see things you can’t see anywhere else.
Second—well, my father likes to tell the story of how DeBence contacted the Smithsonian for some assistance and expertise. All the DeBence folks ended up doing was upsetting the Smithsonian folks.
The Smithsonian’s idea is that these rare and valuable instruments should be wrapped in plastic and sealed in amber. Then the public should be allowed to glance at them through three feet of plexiglass.
The DeBence idea is that these instruments were built to make music, and so they should be played. There are other places where you can SEE some of these rare instruments, DeBence is the only place where you can actually HEAR them.
You can also watch them. DeBence is not only great for music fans, but for gadget fans as well. If you love seeing how things work, you will find the innards of these beasts amazing. Most were not mass produced, but were created from basic plans which the builders “reinterpreted” for each individual machine. This makes maintenance and repair an adventure.
Behind the scenes, the second floor has become a workshop that has become the go-to repair resource for amusement parks throughout the Northeast. And on the third floor, they have re-opened the only intact top-floor ballroom in Franklin (with the assistance of the ever-resourceful Rotarians). Once a month you can enjoy a DeBence mini-event in the ballroom, a small, intimate musical treat presented for free. They usually have cookies, too.
Until the end of October, the museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 11-4. On Sunday it’s 12:30 till 4. You can find information about DeBence online at www.debencemusicworld.com.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should acknowledge my stake in this; since my father’s retirement, he and my mother have been heavily involved with DeBence. Their children are pleased that they have found a new hobby (hobby defined as “job nobody pays you for”) that keeps them off the streets and too busy to fall in with unsavory companions.
Like most museums of its type, DeBence survives on copious volunteer hours and contributions. Admission fees cover a tiny part of costs; contributions and memberships are a more important source of support.
People come from all over the world to see and hear this unique collection. If you’ve never made the short trip to check it out, or even if it’s just been a while, this summer is a good time to enjoy this really cool collection.