It is early on Sunday morning, August 28, and Stephanie Stokes, 45, assistant city editor of the Times-Picayune in New Orleans is packing: her clothes, the children’s clothes, some food, some water, in sharp contrast to the pleasantries of the day before when she had been overseeing a birthday party for 6-year-old daughter Catie. Now, at 6:46 a.m. with bags, Catie, 8-year-old D.J., and Yertle the turtle settled in the car, she drives away from the home where the family has lived since 1998.
Husband Dan, 47, is staying behind, moving special furnishings and keepsakes to safety if possible, putting away the outdoor furniture, the flag, the porch swing. Then he’ll head to the newspaper, where as managing editor, he along with the staff will face the once-in-a-lifetime challenges of this particular hurricane.
Stephanie, my daughter, will drive for five hours, amid four lanes all moving out of the city. Her destination, a friend’s home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where she had found hospitality once before in September 1998, ahead of Hurricane Georges (which spared the city). Foremost in her thoughts is the first day of school, coming up fast on the calendar. What are her options for a school for them? At first she thought of coming back to Philly, where I was able to work out a temporary rental for her. She even investigated three schools, whose headmasters sent literature to me for her. Later, however, as we know now, those plans became unrealistic.
She drove on, knowing she and the family were safe but feeling heavy of heart as they contemplated what would happen to their home, to the city itself and especially to the thousands of New Orleans poor who would surely be stranded there, deprived of shelter, food, water and their already meager belongings.
One of of the nation’s most accomplished close-up magicians, Cy Keller, 77, died on Sept. 9 at Keystone Hospice in Wyndmoor. He had lived in upper Roxborough before entering the hospice.
A “sleight-of-hand master, a true gentleman and gifted raconteur,” according to Eric Henning, president of the Yogi Magic Club of Baltimore, Keller started doing magic 68 years ago while growing up in Baltimore. An aunt gave him a book about doing card tricks, the beginning of his foray into the world of magic.
“In his slow-moving hands,” said Henning, “cards simply do the impossible, apparently without any intervention. Cy is unforgettable.” When word spread in the magic community about Keller’s battle with Non-Hodgkin’s Disease, he received calls and visits from magicians all over the United States, from those he mentored over the years.
Jeff Altman, a regular on The Late Show with David Letterman, met Keller while a student at Johns Hopkins University and credits Keller with teaching him how to entertain. “That was his gift,” said Altman, “being entertaining, because as you know, 95 percent of close-up magiciaans are boring as plain toast.”
At 15, Keller did his first formal magic show for an audience of 300 at his high school. But later, Keller did not do shows for kids. “Kids have a short attention span, and for many of them, these tricks become a battle of wits. That takes all the fun out of it,” Keller said in an article in the Local two years ago. “I do close-up and platform magic, not illusions."
For the past two decades, I’ve spent most of the time between the end of teaching the summer session at both Bryn Mawr Conservatory and Settlement Music School and the start of the regular teaching season by visiting a friend in South Florida. Despite these visits always taking place during the height of the hurricane season, my path never crossed with one of theirs. I had almost come to the point of wishing that our paths would cross — just for the sake of the experience.
Until this year.
I flew into Ft. Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport early Wednesday morning, Aug. 24, and was informed that the minor tropical depression that had unexpectedly become tropical storm Katrina was expected to make landfall late the following night as a category one hurricane. The initial forecast placed that landfall in the vicinity of Palm Beach, farther north along Florida’s Atlantic coast. As it turned out, hurricane Katrina hit land with 90 mph sustained winds smack along the border between Hallandale Beach in southern Broward County and Golden Beach in northern Miami/Dade County.
Until this past March, the friend with whom I’ve stayed during these summer trips lived in a condominium in Hallandale Beach, a literal stone’s throw from Golden Beach. His new home is only about four miles south of that dividing line, right on Route A1A, what is called Ocean Drive in Broward County and Collins Avenue in Miami/Dade.
In other words, just close enough to watch from his 16th floor north-facing balcony the very eye of the hurricane pass directly over the site of his previous home. The full breadth of the storm took every bit of 12 hours to make its progress, turning Thursday evening through Friday morning into a “live” performance of a program on the Weather Channel.
On a visit to Pennsylvania’s death row, you might not expect to meet an award-winning poet, welterweight boxing champion and former resident of Mt. Airy. But that is just what Reginald Sinclair Lewis is.
Born in Richmond, Virginia, Lewis grew up in Philadelphia during the 1960s and 1970s, living with his family in Lower Kensington and with his grandmother in Mount Airy. Although Lewis always loved language, for many years he put his dreams of writing on hold while he became increasingly involved with the dangerous 12th and Oxford Street gang.
A shoot-out put Lewis in Rahway prison for several years, and when he was paroled he tried pursuing both writing and boxing, but began drifting without direction. His discovery of himself as a writer did not come until a few years later, when he found himself again in prison, and this time facing a death sentence.
by PAT STOKES