April 3, 2008 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Opinion

Two weeks more for fiction/poetry, 50 years of the Local

Allow me to ramble.

This space was intended to introduce the Second Annual Fiction Edition in this issue of the Local. Instead, I’d like to announce another two weeks of an open call for submissions. The new deadline is Wednesday, April 16. The issue will be published the following week, Thursday April 24.

While received some good material, material that is well worth publishing, we received far less than we did for our inaugural fiction issue last year.

So please get those stories and poems dusted off and in to see your work in print.

Send to the Local, or e-mail your submissions to me at pete@chestnuthilllocal.com

With that out of the way, I can discuss something else.

Most of you (faithful readers) have probably noticed that the front page of the paper has sported a special 50th anniversary logo. Believe it our not, the Local has been published now for 50 years.

The first issue was published on March 5, 1958. That year, Dwight D. Eisenhower was president. In July, he’d sign an act making Alaska a state. It’s also the year NASA was formed.

In Chestnut Hill, the issues of concern were closely related to the issues today: preservation of the Hill and smart use of its land.

The Morgan Tract development, currently the site of Chestnut Hill Village apartments and the Super Fresh shopping center was the hot zoning topic of the day. Temple University, which had purchased the land in the hopes of moving the university from North Philadelphia to Chestnut Hill had met resistance in the community and had sold the land to developers.

The developers had just reached an agreement with the Community Association and 800 people reportedly attended a meeting at the Water Tower Recreation Center to review and ultimately vote on the proposal (imagine 800 people in one place in Chestnut Hill today and with a chance to vote).

In the next issue, June 5, the top story is of the association hiring two planning experts to develop a comprehensive plan for Chestnut Hill.

“These gentlemen will work out of the staff offices at 8419 Germantown Avenue,” the article reads, “Their study will include traffic, land use, population, transportation, health, shopping, housing, zoning, and other related aspects of the long term planning of the area.”

It’s interesting to see the threads that still run through a community. And the Local has been there since 1958 to document them.

In the coming weeks, we’ll offer our readers glimpses and pieces of coverage from this paper over the last 50 years. And in May, we’ll have a special section reviewing the paper’s history.

Stay tuned.           

Pete Mazzaccaro

Opinion: For the CHCA, self-mutilation for the common good
by Ed Budnick

For the record, I have always doubted that a “full and complete” audit would do much ... but it may be necessary. “No pain. No gain.” From the mouthwash that “tells you that its working” to runners “feeling the burn”, there must be sacrifice to have improvement. It is not uncommon to apply painful actions to your own body for some noble goal.

If you had an infection, say from a nice hardwood splinter, wouldn’t you use consider using a knife to cut it out? Without wanting to be “gross,” consider the remedy of burning an area to remove a tick. Bottom line, you’ve got to get it out, otherwise the infection will get worse, and you will die ... at least that’s what parents said as they inflicted the pain. And when you get older, you develop the strength to self-inflict the cleansing pain.

Most old westerns showed the need to get the bullet out at all costs and the hero always lived. Tom Hanks used an ice skate to remove a tooth, passed out from the pain and awoke perfectly fine. We have an abiding faith in our body’s ability to heal as long as the foreign material and the infection that comes from it are removed ... and a little pain is a bonus from either the puritans or the priests.

The story line gets better when there is risk. Most medical dramas include episodes where the doctor has the choice of “If we remove it, the patient might die, but if we let it alone, the patient will be forever paralyzed.” Of course, there are countless people who walk around every day with some object in their body ... so who is to know the right answer?

I used the medical analogy, but you could consider the war ... any war or on a strictly political analogy ... impeachment. The theory is that you have to fully expose and destroy the evil before you can “move on.” The problem with all of these is that at some point, the populace loses interest, time runs out and we learn to live with it.

So there are those that want to take the CHCA to the Attorney General, but would the Attorney General really care? Perhaps for their own purposes, but not necessarily ours. While the CHCA is a “million dollar corporation”, so are many households (both fueled by real estate values). Are there secrets to be found? Of course: there always are. Have laws been broken? Likely.

But the odds are, in the end, it won’t do much. I doubt we’ll even see a real sex scandal. But as has been said, if there is no smoking gun, then why the objection? I guess it comes down to time, money and embarrassment.

Some have an insatiable need to get to the truth — or is that a sadistic need to inflict pain? It will all come down to the condition of the knife. Will the knife be of fine surgical steel, properly sterilized or will it be old, rusty and dull? I guess it depends on the ultimate goal ... to harm or to heal.

And if you think I am going to take a side, you will be disappointed. I don’t have a dog in this fight. I summarized my position in the first line. The audit may be necessary to appease those threatening a legal action, but I doubt it will do much.

Mistakes have been made and actions have been taken to cover them up. The documents are there but there is a curious lack of will to cause any action. Why? Because an organization generally protects its own. Following the efforts of an “independent prosecutor” or “auditor,” someone or some people would need to resign for this to be effective. I doubt they would do it and I doubt the association would, or could, force them to do so.

Why write then? Well that’s because the editor laid out the stark alternatives [in the March 20 Local, “No matter the means, it looks like the end]. Will it be audit or investigation? Peace or war? And, if war, will we get war trials by the Attorney General? In the end, will there be the desired pain, blood and healing? In any case, Pete’s right, it’s been two years, let’s get on with it.

Ed Budnick is a former CHCA board member and a former CHCA Community Manager. He lives in Chestnut Hill.

Opinion: The cucumber tree of Andorra
by Alma Sojourner Wynne

For more than three centuries, you have lived atop this hill surrounded by other hills that roll like waves of a great ocean. For much of your life, you were the sentinel overlooking the valley-ward plunge of one boundary corner of a thousand-acre plant nursery, which parcel by parcel became farms, estates, ball fields, schools, a golf course and a town.

The story that unfolded on your other flank was quite different. You were already about a half-century old when shouts, cries and gunpowder-scented smoke wafted up through the valley as a new nation was being birthed. 

During the first half of your long life as your branches reached sunward and your canopy and trunk broadened, the virgin forest that lined the valley hillsides was cut and hauled away. Most of those ancient trees were older, wider and taller than you are now. Some were cut to build houses, bridges, inns and mills in the valley.  Most of the rest were sucked in through the mills and hauled away in wagons pulled by horses to be building materials for our new nation.  Before long the valley was an industrial wasteland.  The magic and beauty were gone.

In your middle age, the people in the growing city beyond realized the boulder-bubbled water in the stream at you feet was vital for their survival. You watched as they dismantled more than 40 mills and other buildings, replanted trees and made a park. Eighty or so years later (a long life for many trees), the CCC boys of the Great Depression came from all over our country to shore up sagging hillsides, building shelter pavilions and bridges. Many came to love the park so much that after serving as soldiers far away they returned to the powerful solitude of this forest to heal and raise their families nearby.

Through it all, you stand as a universe unto yourself, as is the nature of all trees. You are an ecosystem of water and nutrients captured from air and earth and shared with countless millions of creatures seen and unseen. 

After a time, only several dozen acres of the old nursery remained. These were bequeathed to the park as sanctuary for learning about the magic and mysteries of wild living. Now more than half a dozen trails converge on your hilltop, and countless thousands have marveled at your huge size and powerful beauty. People loved you so much that they put a lightning rod up along your flank into your highest branch to protect you.  You have endured lightning storms, blizzards, droughts and more. 

Last week for the three hundred–umpteenth time, the March winds blew through your magnificent crown. This time your huge old trunk broke off at ground level revealing the gaping, decaying wound that had been hidden for years by your thick, crusty bark, the hallmark of your true, enduring nature. You came crashing down with what must have been the force of a breeching whale. Indeed, you look very much like a beached whale in the gaping hole on your hilltop. Your trunk diameter is as tall as a man; the girth of your branches more than arms can encircle. The lightening rod still clings to your length as a reminder of our tribute and our pathetic human attempt to stave off the inevitable. 

Sap run season has begun, and your buds will likely leaf out once more. But sadly, we have seen the last cucumbers from your magnificent branches. Your roots held strong. Perhaps in coming months or years those centuries old roots will yet send a new shoot skyward.  Meanwhile, in your trunk and canopy birds and squirrels will give way to moss, fungus and lichen. You will inhabit a new universe of your own making which will eventually build new soil and nurse new trees. 

Thank you, old friend, for your humble bridge to the past and future and for all the awe-inspiring moments in between.

Notes on the second anniversary of my iPod
by HUGH GILMORE

“Honk if you hate noise pollution.”

A little battery-operated drum beat generator will help you get through my opening today. Turn it on and imagine you are in what is called a “Health” club:

I am in a room … thump, thump. On a big machine … thump, thump… Runnin’ up the stairs … thump, thump … I’m the Master of the stairs … thump, thump … I am … the stair…Master!, The Master Blaster …the Fastest Blaster … on my Master … Here I go!

(Echo effect here) Thank you.

From the top of the Sisyphean Stairmaster to the bottom of the Eternal Elliptical machine, I look out over the future. Mine is the only head in the room — once again — that has ears. Twenty-two people are doing cardio, only my head would turn if you called, “Dinner!” Or yelled, “Chocolate!” Or complained about the economy. Once again, I am the only one not wearing headphones, also known as earphones, also known as brain numb-ers. Why is this?

“Ah,” you say, “they’re listening to music.”

And I think, They must have some pretty swell music in their world because so many people seem to make a full-time job out of listening to it. Well, that’s OK. I guess it’s good, in fact, because music is a wonderful part of this world.

But, then, I see them riding on the bus, or the train, or in airplanes, or walking down the street, or waiting, or sitting in a chair, or walking in the woods or on the track, or typing at a keyboard, or having a cup of coffee, or … I don’t really need to extend this list, do I? Everywhere there is not a law or prohibition against wearing headphones, you see people wearing them.

And I wonder: there are so many of them, am I missing out on something important here? Is life passing me by? Will I go to meet my maker (recalled because of some defect in my manufacture?) without having experienced enough of whatever it is the Headphone People are taking into their heads day and night? 

And I wonder if there’s some secret decoder I can’t access. If I ask by sign language for a podPerson to lift an earflap and let me listen, I lean forward and hear what sounds to me like the music from American Idol: pop music. It’s OK. Catchy, sometimes sweet or sassy, but never anything that makes me feel I should cable Henry David Thoreau: STOP. LEAVE WALDEN. MUST HEAR THIS. Hugh.

Imagine, now that I’ve broached the subject, that Thoreau had headphones at the pond. Would Walden read different in any way?

Such an easy set-up, eh? Shameless of me.

But listen, sometimes when I’m up on my lofty Stairmaster surveying the rest of the world I feel frightened. Not by the heights, but the depths. I imagine some evil force set about to destroy the American Spirit. Could they possibly have invented more fiendishly effective ways to dull the mind and kill the soul than they have with two everyday appliances? Television and the iPod?

You finish your schooling, the last time in America you’ll ever be required to think or read. Then they put you on the hamster wheel and tell you to run. You run. They pay you, then sell you mind-numbing “entertainment” that gets you through the long, lonely hours between wheel-sets.

Home from work: television all night. When you can’t watch, because you have to look at where you’re going, they stick little pods over your ears and fill your sulcuses with liquid mud till it’s time to watch again.

Oh, yes, you can argue that there are quality shows on television. And there are stunningly beautiful pieces of recorded music. I believe that.

What I’m suggesting here is that there are powerful forces trying to assure that you never encounter the world without an electronic gadget doing intervention. That includes nature, the cosmos, society, and even the weather.

Here, I’ll do my own intervention and mention that a few years ago I bought a blues collection, maybe about 300 CDs — Son House, Lightning Hopkins, Leadbelly and on and on. I was so happy.

Except, I couldn’t figure out when to listen to them. 

I brought up the problem at dinner with friends.

“Why don’t you play them when you write?”

“Too distracting.”

“What about when you read?”

“No, too distracting.”

“Well, then,” my friend said, “you should listen to them when you walk. You’re always taking long walks.”

I thought that was good advice. I bought an iPod Nano. The size of my thumb, sleek, cool and capable of holding thousands of songs. I came home from the computer store and decided to take a nice walk before starting to learn how to use the device.

On my walks, out in the open air, feeling a breeze against my cheeks, I always lift my face to the sun sometime in the first minute and remember my friends and family now departed from this sweet earth. I think of my son, Colin, now gone, and I tap my heart with my fist lightly to say “I’m thinking of you still.” And then I say my friend, John O’Brien’s, name and tap again. And my Mom and my Dad. And my Aunt Anna and Uncle Fred. And my sister Loretta, and my father-in-law, Jerome Goodman and then add, “And everyone who’s ever been kind to me.”

And my little duty done, I walk on, glad to be alive and happy to feel I’m free to enjoy my thoughts. I have no fears of being caught alone with only myself for company. My heart and mind contain the wisdom of the people I’ve met and the books I’ve read and the things I’ve seen, and now’s the time to digest it all, to make sense of the world I’ve seen so far, to be alone without a machine between me and my self.

So, it is with only a small twinge of regret that I’ve come to report today that two years have passed since I purchased my iPod Nano on March 13, 2006 and I still haven’t taken it out of the box.

The ins and outs of America’s (almost) biggest sport
by ADAM SERFASS

My editor asked me last week, “Why the obsession with NASCAR?”

I wasn’t sure at the time. And I’m not sure now. Either you get it or you don’t.  Simple as that. 

When I came back to live with the family here in the Philadelphia area,  I let slip that I was into NASCAR. I was teased, ridiculed even, and often with a fake southern accent. 

The hillbilly thing is sort of fair … that’s where NASCAR got its start: moonshiners who needed to make some money and figured a fun way to do it was race cars in a circle. Yes, they do turn left. Most of the time.

It was first organized by Bill France Sr. and others at Daytona in some hotel, and was made to be the most watched spectator sport in America other than the NFL.

The reason I watch (and many others probably feel the same way) is for the drivers — the personalities and the drama.  There are those you race with and absolutely know you will not have a problem with unless provoked. Kyle Petty is a gentleman.  Right up until you hit him for no obvious reason. Ask Denny Hamlin about that. Those two once wrecked and took each other out of a race. Petty came out of his car and went after Denny who was still in his. Followed by some colorful talking to, Petty slams down Denny’s visor of his helmet and walks away.

Kurt Busch once got into it with Jimmie Spencer. Busch, a “young gun” at the time, acted on the racetrack as if it was his and took Spencer out of the race. After the race, Spencer went up to Busch and punched him.

Not all confrontations end this way, but when pushed, even the friendliest driver will push back. (I’ve seen many of you on the Avenue act just like this. It’s a wonder all of you aren’t NASCAR fans. You have a lot in common with the drivers. I’ve seen you drive, too. Good thing those baby seats are buckled down, that’s all I have to say about some of your driving.)

The other cool thing about NASCAR, obviously, is the car. If you’re into fast, powerful cars, NASCAR is for you. The car is 3450 lbs. including the driver.  The average family car is 3790 lbs. without the driver.  The race car has 850 horsepower with 9000 revolutions per minute. The average car has 303 horsepower with 5600 revolutions per minute. Those are just a few comparisons.

Then there’s the team.

From a fabricator (person who designs the shell of the car) to a crew chief (person who will make the changes on the car and will make the decisions during the race to make the car better),  sometimes there are a few dozen people on a team — of a single owned car — to a large multi-car team that has over 800 people on the team working to get the car ready.

Even though TV is a great way to watch the race, the only way to really see, and appreciate it, is live.

Going to the track allows a whole new experience to the fan.  Trucks outside the track sell merchandise of everything concerning NASCAR and its drivers.  Showing your “colors” is a big thing.  A fan loves to show who he/she roots for.

A fan is allowed to hear during the race what their favorite car is doing from a scanner. This will help the fan eavesdrop and know either what the car is doing or will do during the race to make it better. You are able to listen on the radio as well if you don’t have a scanner.

Then there is the pit stop.  This is a ballet of sorts.  You change two or four tires with five lug nuts each, add 17.5 gallons of fuel, change the car so it can drive the best on the track, clean the windshield, and get out of the pit stop in under 13 seconds. At times this will either make or break a driver’s chance at winning or losing a race.  There are only six men to do this. Sometimes seven to clean the windshield or assist the driver.  Plus there is a NASCAR official watching your every move to make sure you get all lug nuts on the tire and such, and he will prevent the car from going back onto the track until it’s deemed safe and done right.

So, yeah. That’s just some of the things going on during a race. I could keep going but, maybe I’ll do that later.

It’s a great sport.  A family oriented sport. A great challenging sport, for the teams and the fans.

Adam Serfass can be contacted at winstoncuplover@mac.com.