A Sabbatical in Santa Fe

We had just told a writerly luncheon group I belonged to in Pennsylvania that we were moving back to Pennsylvania when one of them asked me what living in Santa Fe was like.

It was, I said, just like a sabbatical.

Actually, it was not like the two sabbaticals I had had as a college professor. I spent one of those at home writing a monograph on John O’Hara and serving an expert witness in a defamation case and I spent the other teaching journalism on English-speaking graduate students in China. But both of those sabbaticals were my idea.

When my wife, Paulette, first proposed that we retire to Santa Fe, I did hesitate. After all, I’m a ninth-generation Pennsylvanian whose ancestors arrived in colonial Philadelphia a decade after Ben Franklin had come down from Boston and my plan (if I had any) was to have my ashes scattered somewhere in the commonwealth and be done with it.

Now, after nearly eight years in Santa Fe, we are, for family reasons, moving back to Pennsylvania. In addition to being closer to my mother-in-law, I have calculated other benefits to returning, including a greater chance of seeing all of our seven grandchildren at least once a year instead of only on Skype.

But I’ve also reflected on our time in Santa Fe and can list many benefits to having lived here.

A lifelong but only superficial student of photography, upon arriving here, I immediately signed up for a workshop or two at Santa Fe Workshops. But for one of them, I needed to know a desktop publishing software I was not familiar with, and when self-teaching didn’t get me to the level I needed to be at, I turned to Santa Fe Community College, where I took a series of courses in the particular software and branched out into typography, drawing, photography-related courses and strength training for seniors.

In the meantime, my creative wife enrolled in a variety of painting courses both at the community college and Valdes Art Workshops. We each found other workshops that enabled us to get better at our artistic pursuits. Eventually, we felt confident enough in our skills to develop a joint approach to our work, which we trademarked as Pixels and Bristles® and started self-publishing books and calendars that combined my photographs and my wife’s paintings. We have others projects in mind.

We came here to retire and are leaving as business partners, something totally unexpected.

And so as we head back to Pennsylvania, we feel our best creative years lie ahead—thanks to a sabbatical in Santa Fe.

To the Cloud

When I told my wife I had bought a book about clouds, she was thinking of a television commercial, not the sky above us. The book is The Cloud Collector’s Handbook by Gavin Pretor-Pinney and is an official publication of the Cloud Appreciation Society, a British group.

The book is nicely formatted with each entry getting a two-page spread, usually with one thumbnail photo on the even-numbered page and a larger photo on the facing page. Frequently, that is followed by a full-bleed two-page spread. If that’s not enough, there is not only a standard index but also an image index, which I turn to first.

The content is delivered in a casual tone and Latin words are translated, which makes it easier to see how a particular cloud got its name. The author also has a sense of humor. For example, in writing about pannus clouds, he says: “Loitering in the saturated atmosphere just below rain clouds, they resemble some sort of cloud version of hooligans, killing time outside McDonald’s on a Saturday night.”

The only criticism I have is that the book comes in a hard cover, which makes it difficult to lie flat next to your computer as you sort through your cloud photos (which I’ve been doing for the past two days). A spiral-bound book would have been much easier to use.

Lovely just the same.

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.