Ed Gildea and the Valley Gazette

Ed Gildea and I worked together at The Evening Courier in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, in the 1960s. I remember him as low key and a very good interviewer and writer. I once went on an assignment with him to the site of a forest fire where he interviewed a homeowner, a double-amputee, about how close the fire had come to his house. Ed was very good at getting people to talk, even in a high-stress situation such as a fire, using such “tricks” as nodding and saying “uh-huh.”

Ed died recently at the age of 82.

A 1952 Penn State journalism grad, Ed eventually left the Courier to become editor of the Times-News, and in later years he and I engaged in a scholarly exchange about journalists running for public office. I was somewhat shocked when his publisher returned one of my epistles, saying Ed no longer worked for the paper.
Ed, then in his mid-40s, had been fired.

While working at the newspaper, he started a monthly devoted mostly to history, although he included a story about the occasional current issue that wasn’t being covered by his own paper. The Valley Gazette was printed at the Times-News. At some point, Ed objected to an increase in his bill and one thing led to another. He admitted later that he had “nibbled at the hand feeding him.”

In his new life, he also started the Weekly Gazette, which focused on current issues. He was a crusader for transparent government, a clean environment and a healthy lifestyle. To that end, he was also a fervent runner. Ed didn’t just cover the issues; he became part of them. He would write letters to, say, a school board demanding answers and then publish a story about the request.

He loved consumer complaints and would name names when he could. If he couldn’t, he’d publish the address of the state consumer board for others to file a complaint.

In a story I wrote for the Penn State Journalist in June of 1974, Ed said:
“Sometimes I’ll get personally involved in a story, then stand back and write about it as though somebody else was writing it—in the third person. We have few active civic groups—no taxpayers’ associations—in the Panther Valley, so I’ve perceived it as my duty to act as a public citizen and develop issues, ask questions, initiate complaints if they seem justified and bring unprecedented light into some of the darker corners of local government. If I hear about some shady thing, I’ll dig into it and get the story if I can—and if I can't, I'll tell who won't give it to me. I keep looking for stories behind stories, and if I run into a blank wall trying to find something out I'll write a story about that.”

I don’t recall how long the weekly lasted. Ed set his own type and pasted up the paper in his house. He relied on advertising to make a modest profit, and he did admit it was modest. At some point, someone told me he had gotten a full-time job. That’s not mentioned in his obituary, but the obit does mention the Gazette.

That’s as it should be.

The speech Obama should have given

My Fellow Americans:

It’s time to bite the bullet.

I’ve decided not to extend the Bush tax cuts or unemployment benefits. All we’re doing is running up our debt and that will hurt us more in the long run than a tax increase for everyone will hurt us in the short run.

We’ve lived too long on credit in this country; it must stop now.

I have decided to dedicate my presidency to reducing the federal debt. I embrace the Bowles-Simpson deficit-reduction proposals and will work with them and others who want to reduce our long-term debt and end tax loopholes.

Finally, I will not seek re-election. Everyone in Washington seems to focus on the next election. Bad decisions are made because of that. Because of the election cycle, we’d endured minimum oversight of our economy and maximum greed.

I want to focus on what’s best for the country. Lowering our debt and simplifying our tax code are two worthy goals. Let us together move forward toward those goals.

Thank you.

Mine Rescue Redux

The other day when a news anchor said that the mine rescue in Chile brought back memories of one in Pennsylvania, I expected something about an event in 1963. Instead, the story was about a rescue of nine miners in Somerset County in 2002, the implication being that it was the model for the rescue in Chile.

But not mentioned in the report was the model for Somerset County, the first time rescuers drilled into a mine from above and pulled out miners. That happened near Sheppton, Pennsylvania, in 1963. It was quite the operation and I had the privilege as a journalist of visiting the site and seeing the rescue operation under way, although I was not present when two of the three miners were pulled through a tube to the surface. (The third miner’s body was never recovered.)

The atmosphere around the site was mixed. I remember sad family members of the trapped miners sitting glumly under a tent awaiting word. Elsewhere, a local caterer had set up to serve the rescuers and the press. I remember bumping into some of my fellow journalists, including Ray Saul of the Hazleton paper.

The man leading the rescue was a guy named H. Beecher Charmbury, who was the state’s secretary of mines and had been recruited from Penn State to run the bureau. He was credited with coming up with the idea of drilling a hole to the miners, using it to send down food and for communication, and then enlarging it enough to send a man-size cylinder to retrieve the two miners.

Shortly after the rescue, I joined the Navy and didn’t give the rescue another thought.

But I had the pleasure decades later of working with Charmbury, who had returned to Penn State and had become active in Republican politics. He was the chair of the county party and I worked with him on various events, including the annual chicken barbecue.

In the late 1980s, my wife and I formed a luncheon group called the Anthracite League and decided we would have speakers. Our first speaker was Charmbury.

He gave an excellent presentation and showed his own slides. The slides stood out because they were in black and white, which added a nice tone to his presentation.

As we cheer on the rescuers in Chile, we should remember Sheppton and Beecher Charmbury and note that a mine rescue in 1963 remains an important part of world history in 2010.

Travels With Sally

My wife and I recently embarked on a trip that lasted 30 days and 6300 miles. We visited friends in Missouri, cousins in Chicago, daughters (and grandchildren) in North Carolina and New York, and friends and family in Pennsylvania.

One person I didn’t expect to encounter was my oldest sister, Sally. After all, she died 18 days before her 62nd birthday—in 1998.

On my last full day at my mother-in-law’s, I was up early (as usual) and checking e-mail (as usual) and there was a note from my older sister in New Mexico forwarded from our oldest nephew, one of Sally’s three sons, informing me that the funeral director who had presided over her services had some remaining ashes (they’re called cremains) and could I pick them up?

(For reasons not clear to me, my sister’s wishes to have some of her cremains scattered at the childhood home were not followed. For other reasons not clear to me, I don’t know why the funeral director still had some of her cremains. And the background on why there was a sudden interest in scattering her cremains at the childhood home is family business and not fodder for blogs.)

The arrangements made, I called my nephew from my car after picking up the cremains and we agreed that I should leave some of them at the house where my mother, sisters and I lived with my grandparents after my parents separated. (Sally would have been about 13 then.) My grandfather was the caretaker of a company-owned reservoir, and while we didn’t live there more than five years it is the place from which we draw many of our fondest childhood memories. It was where uncles, aunts and cousins gathered and played even before we arrived.

I called my older sister and informed her of the plan and said I knew the place to scatter some of the cremains. I had been at the house a couple of days before, taking photographs (with permission of the owner), and had noticed a modest three railroad tie footbridge across the road. I remembered going over to the spot when I lived there and told my sister that’s where I would scatter some of the cremains.
“Oh,” my sister said, “that was Sally’s favorite place.”

I had no idea.

Later that day I scattered some of Sally’s cremains under a baby pine tree. When I reported that I had accomplished the mission, my older sister said it was probably Sally’s happiest day.

Mine, too.

Harriet and Mr. Nobody

The dust jacket for Harriet and Mr. Nobody

I'm pleased to announce that the memoirs of Mike Casino, who grew up in Tamaqua, graduated from St. Jerome's, and retired from a long journalism career as an editor at the Philadelphia Inquirier, has been published by Coal Cracker Press and is available at www.lulu.com. Here are comments from the publisher and a friend of Mike's.

From the publisher

When I worked at the Evening Courier in Tamaqua right out of high school in 1961, I was told about Mike Casino and how he had once worked at the Courier and now worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer. The point was that you could make it to the big newspaper from the little newspaper. (And eventually I did spend a summer on the Inkie’s metropolitan copy desk as a faculty intern but Mike had long been retired.)

Fifty years later I was surprised when reading one of my hometown newspapers to learn that Mike was still alive, had just celebrated his 100th birthday and wanted someone to publish his memoirs. I immediately sent him a letter volunteering to do that through an online print-on-demand publisher.

A few weeks later I got an e-mail from Francis Clifford, whom I knew from my days in Tamaqua, and who was a friend of Mike’s (and you’ll learn more in these pages). He had Mike’s manuscript and was interested in my proposal.

Alas, Mike died in the meantime and we let the project go until last year when I contacted Francis and suggested we publish the manuscript lest Mike’s story perish. Francis agreed and you are about to read that wonderful story.

Mike wrote his memoirs in the third person and made his wife, Harriet, the lead character. That’s understandable, for surely, she was the love and rock in his life. Despite being in what we in Tamaqua would call a “mixed marriage” (a Catholic and a Protestant), Mike and Harriet had a marriage made in Heaven, one that will endure for eternity.

Beyond the personal story, I consider this a great Tamaqua story and a great American story.

R Thomas Berner

Santa Fe, New Mexico

From a Family Friend

For more than 30 years, I lived less than a hour’s drive from Mike and Harriet in suburban Philadelphia. My mother, Mary, who died in 1986, was still living on Hunter Street in Tamaqua where Mike grew up, would occasionally ask if I had visited them, but life with an active family of four children held me captive in Delaware County. Finally in late 2005 following my wife’s death, I learned that Mike had taken up residence at St. Mary Manor in Lansdale. I called him, introduced myself, and made arrangements to visit.

During that initial telephone call he told me about his memoirs. He had completed most of the text and had handed the manuscript to a typist for corrections and modifications. He sent me a copy of the manuscript, asking for my review. I circled a multitude of things for change or correction. During our first meeting, we spent more than three and a half hours going over every word and punctuation mark I had noted, he, at age 98, defending vigorously his position on each one during our sometimes intense, but cordial, exchanges.

I spent many hours with Mike from that first visit until the week before his death. I was also fortunate to have known his mother, whom I remember from my childhood, passing her house hundreds of times on my way to and from home just up the street. Until his death, he possessed a keen intellect, memory, and sense of humor, and we engaged in many topical arguments and shared many a laugh over a meal at his and Harriet’s favorite restaurant, Roy Ann’s on Old Bethlehem Pike in Sellersville, Montgomery County.

Marian High School is the unified successor to three church high schools in the area, one of which was St. Jerome in Tamaqua, Mike’s alma mater. I took Mike to Marian’s commencement in June 2007, where he had his photo taken with a young woman about to graduate. They were both valedictorians of their respective classes, but 80 years apart. What a moment to witness! I also had the extraordinarily rare opportunity that most people never experience in life —calling a person and extending good wishes on his 100^th birthday. I recited the Italian toast, “Cent’anni!” (May you live a hundred years!) when I served as master of ceremonies at his 100^th birthday party.

Francis J. Clifford, Esq.

Department of the Navy

Washington, D.C.

Postcards from my Father: A World War II Story

Under duress, I started downsizing through digitizing, going through box after box that I had hoped to leave for my daughters to be opened upon my death. Let them sort it out, I always said.

But my wife had other ideas and ordered me to downsize. Duress soon turned to joy as I found many things I had forgotten I had and I cheerfully scanned them into folders for my daughters and threw away all but the originals that predated me.

Then came one of the biggest surprises of all—postcards my father had sent to me during World War II. It was all the more surprising when you consider that my parents separated when I was 5 yet my mother kept several items that were my father’s with the intention that they someday go to me.

My father told my eldest sister in a taped interview that he had been drafted on March 15, 1944, five days after I was born. His induction papers are dated March 16.

He first went to boot camp in Virginia and then on to Fort Lewis in the state of Washington, and that’s where the postage-free postcards begin.

“I hear that Mommy upset you off of the sleigh. Did you get any snow in your face? I’d throw snowballs at her. Be good. Love Daddy.”

A few months later:

“What’s new Joe?” he asked in another, which is dated Jan. 12, 1945, and shows a garden in Chicago, which I’m assuming he stopped at enroute from Virginia to Washington. “I suppose by now you weigh 19 lbs. So you have been riding your dog. I suppose next you will want a pony. Be good. Love Daddy.”

Then the postmarks and the pictures change and there are scenes of France and a mark that says PASSED BY ARMY EXAMINER appears on every card. I know from the interview my eldest sister taped that he eventually ended up in Marseille, France (my ship stopped there in the 60s on one of my Med cruises, but I had no idea that another Berner had been there before me), and then was shipped via the Panama Canal to Clark Airfield in the Philippines after Japan had surrendered.

There are no postcards after France, but thanks to my mother, there are the memories of things I was too young to remember.

The Man Who Left Too Soon: The Biography of Stieg Larsson. Barry Forshaw. John Blake Publishing, Ltd., London. 2010. 294 pp.

Like many others, I got hooked on Stieg Larssons’ Millennium trilogy when I first saw the Swedish movie “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” I immediately bought that book and the second, The Girl Who Played with Fire (and now a movie), and pre-ordered the third, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest (or as it was spelled in the United States, Hornet’s Nest). Likewise, when I learned that Larsson’s biography was in the works, I pre-ordered that too.

Sadly, I must report that The Man Who Left Too Soon: The Biography of Stieg Larsson is not Larsson’s biography. If it’s anything, it is a journalistic mish-mash of facts, interviews, comments and book summaries, with digressions on, among others, Sonny Mehta, Leonard Bernstein, deceased legendary writers of mysteries and several live Swedish writers.

Forshaw, identified as the author of British Crime Writing: An Encyclopedia and The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction, hedges his bets in the introduction by saying that Larsson’s biography “is, to some extent, to be found in his books—hence the concentration here on the three novels of his trilogy, with biography data built into these sections rather than hived off into separate chapters (though his life is addressed separately).”

So when Forshaw devotes three chapters and 151 pages (out of 294) to summarizing each one of the books and occasionally pointing out parallels between Larsson and his central character, Mikael Blomkvist, we are supposed to be getting biography. Blomkvist is anti-fascist and pro-feminist and so was Larsson. Because this biography is aimed at those who read the trilogy, this bit of information comes as no surprise. It didn’t take much to read into the first novel that Blomkvist, a magazine editor and crusading journalist, is Larsson’s fictional self.

Forshaw repeats himself so much that either he or his editor began inserting parenthetical or bracketed asides such as (as mentioned earlier) and [as noted earlier], so we know we aren’t getting new information. After a while you begin to think no one edited the book.

The book does not have a bibliography or an index. Most of it, according to Forshaw’s credits, is based on interviews, which he quotes extensively and uncritically. Contradictions are allowed to stand and thus detract from the book. One that stood out is attributed to Larsson’s significant other, Eva Gabrielsson, who claims that Larsson was not a workaholic. Later, others, including Larsson’s publisher, state that he was a workaholic, and Forshaw does not take sides, although the front inside flap of the dust cover, usually written by the author, states unequivocally that he was. Was he or wasn’t he? His biographer doesn’t say within the text proper. (And what’s wrong with being a workaholic?)

But (as mentioned earlier) this isn’t really a biography. After the three chapters of book summaries, Forshaw presents a chapter titled “Stieg’s Rivals: Scandinavian Crime Fiction.” I’m guessing he relied heavily on his previous writings for that chapter. It read like padding to me.

That chapter was followed by “The Millennium Tour: In Larsson’s Footsteps,” which also read like padding.

The penultimate chapter is titled “The Responses: Writers on Stieg Larsson.” This chapter could have been interesting, but it’s structured in such a way that it’s boring. Forshaw introduces a writer and his or her works and then quotes their comments on Larsson. The chapter goes on and on like that without any synthesis or analysis on Forshaw’s part. One of the more interesting things we do learn in all of this droning is that Larsson changed the spelling of his given name from Stig to Stieg so he wouldn’t be confused with another writer named Stig Larsson.

Those who have read the trilogy because they admire Lisbeth Salander will be pleased to know that Larsson, according to his father, may have used Larsson’s niece as a model. The niece suffers from anorexia nervosa, does have a tattoo, is dyslexic and is highly computer literate. However, she’s never interviewed by Forshaw.

Finally, there is the information that Larsson was actually thinking of writing 10 books. A friend and I discussed what the fourth book might be and we could only come with one or two possibilities and they would have been stretches. So let’s say that ending at three works well, although it is sad that it had to end because of Larsson’s premature death from a heart attack (because he was a workaholic?).

The bottom line for this biography of Stieg Larsson is that Stieg Larsson is all but missing. A real biography is yet to come.