October 19, 2006 Issue                                       

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©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

Local Life

Quilt stamps recall terrifying civil rights days
by LINDA HUNT BECKMAN

Mt. Airy resident Linda Hunt Beckman (left), seen here as a civil rights worker in Alabama in 1968 with her friend, Nancy Scheper, from Queens, New York (she is now Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a rather famous anthropologist), and Robert Rembert. “When I last heard from Robert long ago,” said Linda, “he was working as a security guard in Buffalo, married and doing well.”

At the post office the other day I saw that they were selling “Gee’s Bend” stamps. Each has an innovative, abstract quilt design on it in bold colors. The originals were made at a 10,000-acre farm community that dead-ends at a bend in the Alabama River in Wilcox County, Alabama. Some of you may know about the Gee’s Bend quilts since there was an exhibit that toured various museums around the country, winning media attention. The exhibit explains that this community had long made unusual quilts, remarkable because their colors were so bright and their designs so modernist that they reminded the curator of painters like Frank Stella.

Hill resident: ‘The things I learned from my dad’
by CASSANDRA SLAVEN

This photo with Cassandra, her twin sister, Missy, and brother, Sean Thomas Slaven, was taken in West Virginia a couple of months after his birth, approximately in June, 1972. He was born in April of 1972. Today Sean lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. He is a technical consultant and a screenplay writer. He is single and has no children other than his English bulldog, Oxford.

My father, Thomas Leonard Slaven, like many baby boomers growing up in the 1950s, did what he thought he was supposed to do: he went to school, joined the Air Force, got married, was apprenticed to a carpenter, became a carpenter himself, and, together with my mother, raised three children.

My father joined the Air Force in 1964 and was out in the fall of ’68. He decided not to re-enlist because my identical twin sister and I were getting ready to be born in February of 1969. My father always told stories of how he was relieved that there was just two of us because sonograms were not around yet. Therefore, doctors made certain determinations by heartbeats, and the doctors told my parents they heard at least two heartbeats, so my parents were prepared for triplets! My full name is Cassandra Lyn Slaven (they nicknamed me Cassy), and my sister’s full name is Melissa Ann Slaven (nickname is Missy, married name Warren).

My dad was stationed at a couple of bases in Germany, and I am probably going to get the first spelling wrong, but it was something like Spangdalem, and the other one was Bitburg. When he came back to the states, he and my mother were married while he was on leave; then he was stationed at McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita, Kansas.

Tribute to AIDS victim to benefit Wyndmoor hospice
by AUDREY LEVINE

The jacket of Laura Thomae’s new fundraising record for Keystone Hospice.

“If you feel that night fall dark upon you/With no hope anywhere … Let music be your prayer.”

Laura Thomae’s beliefs about music are immortalized in her new single, “Alleluia,” which she wrote as a tribute to a friend of hers who died from AIDS, and as a remembrance of a special therapy session she had with her group at the Keystone Home Health and Hospice in Wyndmoor.

“Music is my vehicle to process what I am going through,” said Thomae, a musician and coordinator for the therapeutic arts program at Keystone Hospice. “Even as a child, I knew it was a powerful force in my life.”

Flourtown ‘angel’ helps children with problems ‘you can’t imagine’
by LOU PERSEGHIN

Donna Carson is an angel to the kids at Carson Valley School in Flourtown. (Photo by Lou Perseghin).

Donna Cogan, 64, is intensity personified. Since she can remember, Cogan has relied on what she considers a universal truth: that we are all part of a common humanity, and all the other things in life, possessions, titles, etc. are superfluous. Her work has taken her to many jobs, and has ultimately led her to the Carson Valley School in Flourtown, where she has worked for six years in the Office of Agency Advancement.

Carson, as Cogan explains, is an alternative school in the sense that “we have children who have not been able to make it at other places.” Carson’s nearly 100 students, ranging from 11 to 18, come from home lives marred with tragedy, abuse and neglect. Without the school’s intervention, their tenuous families would likely fall apart.

New pastor at St. Paul’s sees ‘gateway to service’
by PAULA M. RILEY

The Rev. Cliff Cutler, the new pastor at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, invites community members to experience “The Thyra Course,” a mystical introduction to the Christian faith. This is one of many new programs Cutler is sponsoring to get people more connected to St. Paul’s. (Photo by Paula M. Riley)

For Reverend E. Clifford Cutler, returning to Philadelphia has been a real ‘homecoming’. After serving for 21 years in Cohasset, Massachusetts, Cutler began his new assignment as pastor at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Chestnut Hill earlier this year.

A native of Whitemarsh and graduate of Germantown Academy, Cutler served as vicar of St. Luke’s Church in Lower Kensington from 1978-1985. “Now I’m on the other end of Germantown Avenue,” Cutler says with a smile. He loves the location of St. Paul’s and sees its position on the top of the hill as the “gateway to service.”

Hill maestro, 87: ‘glowing warmth’ at St. Paul’s
by MICHAEL CARUSO

A ‘TASTE’ OF HILLER’S MUSIC: Chestnut Hill resident Jimi Odell, a jazz guitarist and vocalist who has played in Philadelphia area clubs for 37 years, will perform with a three-man rhythm section on Wednesday, October 18, 7 p.m., at Ogontz Grill, 7152 Ogontz Ave. in West Oak Lane, under the same management at Chestnut Grill. More info: call 215-248-1098.

The Bach Festival of Philadelphia launched its 2006-07 season and commemorated its founding 30 years ago with a pair of concerts performed in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church last weekend. Chestnut Hill maestro, Jonathan Sternberg, led two programs that re-created those concerts conducted by the late Michael Korn, the festival’s founder and guiding spirit, during that inaugural weekend in 1976. On hand to join him in the music-making were members of Korn’s other musical creation, the Philadelphia Singers, some of whose choristers sang in those first events.

Saturday evening’s program of choral works by Johann Sebastian Bach brought back a flood of fond memories of Korn’s peerless contribution to the region’s classical music scene. When he founded the Philadelphia Singers in 1974, it was America’s first all-professional chorus. Two years later, the choir and the former Concerto Soloists of Philadelphia (now the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia led by Chestnut Hiller Ignat Solzhenitsyn) became the founding ensembles of the Bach Festival of Philadelphia.