Road Trip, Part 6

(The School House B&B in Rocheport, Mo.)

The drive west from Missouri was rough. We fought a gale from the northwest all day, and in eastern Kansas, the rain turned to sleet, and then hail smacked against the windows of our vehicle as we rocked down the highway through an ocean of orange grass.
From the journal:
We stopped for gas and to add a quart of oil, and the force of the wind was almost enough to take the hood off. I had to hold the hood with one hand while I poured the sluggish oil with the other. My fingers became numb in just a few seconds.

Our vehicle was a Mitsubishi Montero, the older, boxy 4-wheel-drive model with the straight-up windshield. Against that wind, I figured we were getting barely more than 10 miles to the gallon.
We drove into Russell, hometown of U.S. Senators Bob Dole and Arlen Specter, late in the afternoon. A squall had passed through before us, leaving on the streets three inches of wet snow that melted quickly in the sunshine just breaking through the clouds in the immense sky. Dole was definitely Russell’s choice to be president of the U.S. at the time, even though it was obvious that this poor town had never received a smidgen of pork from its favorite sons in Washington.
At dusk, we pulled off the highway and traveled gravel roads across the prairie to Thistle Hill, a bed and breakfast sheltered from the wind by an enclosure of cedars, about seven miles from Wakeeny (population 2,300). Our brief experience there would be unforgettable.

(The Dream theater in downtown Russell, Kan.)

Road Trip, Part 5

(Abandoned barn off Rote 40, Clayton, Ind.)

Beyond Indianapolis, Route 40 gets even lonelier: a straight and seldom-used highway interrupted ever 10 miles by a village. There are some gentle hills in eastern Illinois, but the road is as straight as a yardstick.
When they buy cars out here," I told Alice, "steering is just an option."

We reached Vandalia, Ill., which is the western terminus of the National Road, by early afternoon and had lunch at the Old Fashioned Soda Fountain, cater-corner to the Madonna of the Trails monument (left). The statue is identical to the one near Richeyville, and there are 10 others just like it across the country, all installed by the Daughters of the American Revolution to commemorate the pioneer spirit.

From the journal:
Arrived in Rocheport, Mo., at 4:40 p.m. and asked the proprietor of The School House B&B if we could get a room for the night. She said there had just been a cancellation and gave us the Spelling Bee Room, which is delightful, with a four-poster bed and a seven-foot-tall wardrobe. We went for a walk along the KATY Trail, a 190-mile rails-to trails path that took us between the bluffs – white cliffs with caves 40 feet above the ground – and the Missouri River.
There was another note in the journal. Seems we ate at a place in Rocheport call Le Bourgeois Bistro – "Excellent meal, great vegetarian dishes, 3 glasses of wine, bill was only $28," I wrote.
Ah, but that was 1996.

Today's gripe

Call me a stickler, or call me a dinosaur, but I have a respect for the Parts of Speech. I get awfully irritated when I hear the expression, "My bad." I'm sure that if we could alter the vocal chords of chimpanzees to enable them to talk, even they would probably come up with a more comprehensible way to say, "I'm sorry, that's my fault."

Road Trip, Part 4

(Lantz House proprietor Marcia Hoyt making quiche for breakfast)

From the journal:
After Columbus, the road became straight and flat, and we rolled through the monochrome landscape – made even more colorless by the cloudiness of the sky – almost alone on the highway.

We stopped for lunch in Lafayette at the Red Brick Inn, an historic tavern where the atmosphere is pleasant and the food simple and good.
How far is it from here to the Indiana state line?” I asked our waitress.
“Indiana? I don’t have any idea,” she said. No one ever uses this road to go there. It’s, like, real far. Three or four hours, maybe.
In fact, it took us less than two hours to reach Indiana, and 30 minutes later, we were in Centerville, where we planned to spend the night we had made a reservation at the Historic Lantz House, one of the town’s treasures, now run as a bed and breakfast.

Built in 1835, it was the home and shop of wagon-builder Daniel Lantz. Lantz built the Conestoga wagons that carried pioneers westward. During the Gold Rush, Centerville was awash in travelers. Their tales of riches for the taking finally became to much for Lantz, who at the age of 47 abandoned his business, wife and five children to join the company headed for California.
Poor Dan Lantz never made it. Along the arduous trail, he contracted dysentery and died in southwestern Wyoming, not too far from the Great Salt Lake. The fact that I, then also at the age of 47, had embarked on a foolish journey west to the Great Salt Lake and was sleeping in this man’s house and following in his footsteps sent a shiver up my spine.
But what was I worrying about? If Dan Lantz had a recreational vehicle and 2,000 miles of pavement in front of him, he would have lived to write about his trip, too.

Road Trip, Part 3

(A bad-hair day at the National Road Museum)

We passed the S bridge at the intersection of Routes 221 and 40 at 8:05 a.m. on that damp and chilly morning of March 27. About 20 minutes later, in Triadelphia, W.Va., with Alice behind the wheel, we had our first argument.
“If you don’t chill out and quit stomping on the invisible brake, I’m going to turn this car around and go home!” she said.
I did chill out, sort of. But we never argued again for the next 4,135 miles. After our return, someone asked Alice if we’d taken a gun along, for our protection. Good God, no, she told them; if we’d had a gun in the car, someone would have been shot before we reached Wheeling.

I wrote this in my journal:
Our impressions of the road today – shabbiness and neglect dominate, particularly through West Virginia. “This looks really bad,” I said. ‘It looks like West Chestnut Street (in Washington),” Alice added.

The National Road – Zane Grey Museum in Norwich, Ohio, just east of Zanesville, is a pleasant surprise. In addition to a colorful and thorough history of the road, the museum offers exhibits about the life of Ohio native and American West author Zane Grey and an impressive collection of commercial pottery produced in the area.
The life-size figures in the exhibit are a little scary, though, and if they are really true to history, then the frontier must have experienced a critical shortage of hair stylists.

Road Trip, Part 2

The National Road had its start before the birth of the nation. George Washington was among a company of men who blazed a trail from Cumberland, Md., to the Monongahela River. That route would be followed a half century later when, in 1805, a proposal was put through Congress for “a road from Cumberland… within the state on Maryland, to the river Ohio.” Begun in the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, the highway would become the only one ever built directly by the federal government.

The road reached the Ohio in 1818, but it had not gone nearly far enough to serve the needs of pioneers pushing westward, nor the needs of farmers shipping produce eastward from the newly settled territories. By 1839, the road had reach Vandalia, Ill., where construction halted for good over a route dispute.

From Vandalia westward, the history of Route 40 (not to be confused with Interstate 40, which takes a more southerly course across the country and incorporates much of old Route 66) is not as old but just as rich. From the Mississippi, the road parallels the railroad tracks, which in turn follow the Smokey Hill Trail to Denver, along which Fort Hays, Fort Russell, Fort Wallace and other outposts of the U.S. Army were built in the 1800s.

From Atlantic City, N.J., to Park City, Utah, Route 40 today is a commercial route. It is used by shoppers, by local people, by school buses and farmers. But there are few travelers.
It was a road built and used by people brimming with optimism, and it is a road littered with the debris of their ambitions. This was our first impression as Alice and I set off on this road one dreary March morning in 1996.

Road Trip, Part 1

It seemed like a crazy idea at first: Hop in the car and drive west on Route 40, to the end of the road.

U.S. Route 40. The National Pike. The federal highway begun during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson and over which pioneers plunged into the unexplored wilderness on Conestoga wagons. I had traveled the route eastward toward Cumberland, Md., many times, but the farthest west I had traveled had been just over the state line into West Virginia, 40 years earlier, when as college students we frequented bars like Morgan’s and Gebhardt’s to slake our thirst with 3.2 beer.

“How far does it go?” my wife, Alice, asked.
I thumbed through my road atlas, my finger tracing the thin black line through Wheeling and into eastern Ohio. Across Ohio, the line goes back and forth across the thick artery of Interstate 70 but remains its own road. On through Indiana and Illinois it meanders, cutting through the middle of every single town in its path.
Just before St. Louis, Route 40 merges with I-70, but it does not end there. It shares the pavement with the superhighway through Missouri and eastern Kansas, before splitting off into a two-lane secondary road. In western Kansas, it winds south on its own course, joining the interstate just east of Denver. In the foothills of the Rockies, it abandons I-70 for good and snakes across the Continental Divide through a pass almost 12,000 feet above sea level. From there it slithers across the vast expanses of western Colorado and eastern Utah, through the Uinta Mountains.

“The Great Salt Lake, that’s where it ends,” I replied. “It just sort of hits Interstate 80 and disappears.”

It would be a long trip – about 2,000 miles to Salt Lake City, mostly on two-lane road with who knew how many stoplights, through the heart of America, on a route that once stretched from Atlantic City to San Francisco.
We departed with the hope that in driving down Main Street of countless towns we would traverse not just distance but time, and witness a living history of our nation and its people, but we really had no idea what to expect.
Such is the intriguing nature of the Road Trip.

A new story

Thirteen years ago, my wife, Alice, and I decided to get away from Western Pennsylvania for a while. We liked the idea of a road trip. We got this crazy idea that we'd hop in the car and drive west on Route 40 – the National Road that we traveled almost every day – and follow it west to the end.

So, on a rainy day in March 1996, we left our house, cut over the hills to the S Bridge and turned left on U.S. Route 40. Less than a week later, we were in Park City, Utah, where the road now ends and joins Interstate 80. Along the way, we experienced a part of America beyond our imagination. We stayed in bed-and-breakfasts along the way and met some awfully nice people, and I wrote about the trip in this newspaper's Sunday magazine upon our return.

Just the other day, I checked on the Internet and discovered that all those B&Bs are still in operation and are still run by the same people, so it is still possible to recreate the same experience. So, I'm going to dig out my journal and retell that journey. I am hoping that some of you will e-mail me photos and accounts of your own favorite road trips, just like some of you did for "Forever Cars," and I will insert your chapters between the chapters of my story.

We'll call this one "Road Trip," and it starts Monday.

Comments and complaints

C: Your policy of honoring mothers on Mothers Day is commendable, but why exclusively choose mothers of large families?  Is the value of a mother determined only by the number of children she has produced?  There is a wide variety of mothers raising children. There are widowed mothers and single mothers struggling to raise one or two, there are foster  mothers and adoptive mothers raising children who were not born to them, there are grandmothers raising the children of their ill or absent adult children and there are stepmothers raising "blended" families.  Next year, please consider honoring all mothers in your celebratory addition. Where would families be without them? - M.K.

A: I have to assume that you are a new reader of our newspaper and unfamiliar with the Mothers Day stories we've published over the years. We've written about foster mothers, about foster grandmothers, about mothers of adopted children and children with disabilities, about single mothers, and, most controversial, about moms behind bars – criminal mothers incarcerated on Mothers Day. We've written about mothers from their children's point of view, and from the perspective of their husbands, friends, siblings, parents and themselves. This year, the "hook" for the story was moms with big families.

Next year, our writers will undoubtedly find another hook on which to hang a Mothers Day story. You'd think they'd run out of options, but society keeps coming up with new variations to write about. Who knows? Maybe this same-sex marriage business will open up a whole new box of hooks.

Forever Cars, Part 10

By Caitlyn Burroughs

My first car had been in the family for over half of my life before it became mine – a 1986 silver-blue Honda Accord with standard transmission (similar to the one above). It pops up in my childhood memories here and there – being in the passenger seat, emerging from the Fort Pitt Tunnel with my Mom as she spilled her drink all over the stick shift and was so frustrated that she declared, “This is the WORST day of my LIFE!” I remember not understanding why she was so upset about spilling some Pepsi, but looking back, I am sure there were other factors contributing to her bad day, including having to drag her “sick” kid to work in Pittsburgh with her. I also have a vague memory of standing in the driveway and sticking skinny little twigs in the key holes on the doors of that car, and then breaking them off so that they were flush with the lock – I don't think I even knew why I was doing that as I did it, but I do know that it made my dad madder than all get out.

Once I was older, there were the torturous lessons in learning how to drive a stick. After having taught me enough that I knew what was supposed to happen, my dad left me in the car at the bottom of the driveway (which is on an incline) and said, “Just keep trying, and when I see you at the top, you will know how to drive stick.” He was wrong. When I finally arrived at the top, it was on foot, stomping up and crying… “I CAN’T do it. I’m NEVER going to learn how to drive a stick!” Of course, I did eventually get it, and the car was officially deemed mine at some point when I was in college.

The sad part for me is the ending of my story. For graduation, I was excited to get got a “newer” used car – and picked out a teal 1990 Acura Integra. Despite my attachment to the old Honda, I couldn't help but be smitten by this slightly newer and fancier car, despite the fact that it was an automatic. I don’t think I realized that I would miss the Honda until the day after we traded it in, when I drove by the dealership on the way to work and saw it sitting in the back parking lot, looking betrayed and abandoned. To make matters worse, three months later I decided to move to New York City, which meant I had to sell the Acura. I wasn’t too sad about losing the Acura, although it was a fun car for the short time that I had it, but I sure wished I had just kept my dear Honda for a few more months.

Forever Cars, Part 9

By Brody Burroughs

It’s hard to forget a car that bursts into flames as you’re pumping gas into its tank, and I’ll never forget that faded blue ’74 Saab 99.

It was purchased for $25 when both the car and I were 15. While awaiting resurrection at the local mechanic’s shop, it was struck by my newly licensed buddy, who plowed his parents’ wagon through the mechanic’s lawn and into the lot of cars awaiting repair, totaling a Trans-Am and smashing my taillight.

His insurance company gave me $350 for the damage, and that was enough to get it rewired and road-ready, and for a year we roamed from Prosperity to West Alexander in the bliss of newfound freedom.

Driving it was like driving a car you just found somewhere, abandoned – the thrill of what should not be. It soon developed a heavy smoking habit, and on the way to trade it in the fire happened. I had barely heard my father (the G.O.E.) cuss, let alone scream profanity as an alarm to all. After calmly extinguishing the fire, the attendant loaned us the extinguisher for the day and we went from dealer to dealer, parking around back in case we had to put the fire out again.

Photo gallery

OK, you guys had a lot of fun with the photo of my Polish relatives, so here's another one to talk about. This photo was taken by my father with a Polaroid camera at a party in our basement in October 1961. The 12-year-old girls here are trying to avoid being photographed. Aside from how different their attire is from what pre-teens wear today, what I like about this shot is the kitsch in the background - how 1950s! And how about the returnable glass Coke bottle. (This one did not make it into the book.)

Whine, whine, whine

C: During wrestling season, we would like to see more articles about wrestlers/wrestling. It seems as though this sport no longer receives the coverage it once did. - T.F.

A: There was a time – 35 years ago – when wrestling was THE sport in Washington and Greene counties. Thousands packed gyms and spilled into the halls and outdoors for big matches.Today, some of those schools have trouble finding wrestlers for half the weight classes, and other schools have dropped the sport altogether. There have been dual meets at which only a couple of dozen spectators have shown up to watch match after match be forfeited for lack of an opponent. Naturally, the newspaper coverage of this sport has followed this trend.

Today, there is much more competition for readers' and spectators' attention. Scholastic girls sports, particularly basketball, soccer, volleyball and softball, have attracted attention they never had 20 or 30 years ago. Football has emerged as the No. 1 high school sport in Southwestern Pennsylvania, and newer team sports like lacrosse and hockey have elbowed their way into scholastic athletics.

Nevertheless, wrestling still receives (my own opinion here) a disproportionate share of space in our sports section. I challenge you to find another daily newspaper in this state that devotes more space to wrestling than the Observer-Reporter, or that can boast of a more experienced and respected wrestling writer than Joe Tuscano. And don't forget, Mat Matters, Joe's Internet blog, covers a great deal more about the sport here than could ever be squeezed into the newspaper.

Shameless, shameless!

More shameless self-promotion from the Grumpy Old Editor...
The above photo is of some of my relatives in Poland, taken sometime in the 1950s. It's one of 68 photos included in my book, "Enter, With Torches."

If you didn't already buy the book online, you can still do so (click on the ad at right). Or, if you live around here, you can buy it at these locations:
- Border's Book Store, Bethel Park
- W&J College Book Store
- Bounce Back Books, S. Main St., Washington
- The Book Exchange, E. Maiden St., Washington
- World West Galleries, N. Main Street, Washington
- Sri Yantra Yoga Center, Houston
- Observer-Reporter offices in Washington and Waynesburg
- The Almanac, Valley Brook Road, McMurray

Today's gripe

OK, this is really picky, but have you noticed lately that television broadcasters seem to be having more and more trouble synchronizing the audio and visual components of their programs?
I just can't stand to see someone's lips moving a half-second behind or ahead of the words they are speaking. It's like watching a poorly dubbed foreign movie. It's confusing and distracting. So, fix it, already.

We get mail

The snail mail we receive here at the newspaper has diminished in recent years, but we still get plenty of it. Much of it is costly promotional material that goes straight into the "circular file," as we call the waste can. For instance: This morning I received a brochure from the National Watermelon Promotion Board. This organization's slogan is, "Make every day a picnic with watermelon."

As I read this aloud with a chuckle, one office wag suggested that a watermelon a day will keep the doctor away, or at the very least, dehydration.

Forever Cars, Part 8

By Nancy Bennett

The first car I bought myself was an Austin-America. It looked just like
the picture above, except it was blue. The only problem I had with
it was the hydraulic suspension. Every so often I would lose it on one
side of the car, which made it look lopsided. I took it to British
Motors in San Diego (run by an Englishman), and after my third trip in for the same problem, I asked him why this kept happening. He said,
“Remember when the colonists dumped the tea in the Boston Harbor? Well, this is the way we are getting even.”

When I got married, my husband wanted to get rid of it right away. He called it a death trap. I thought it was cute and fun to drive. Needless to say, we traded it in for a “safer” car.

Forever Cars, Part 7

Well, it looks as if no one else out there has a good car story, so I’ll just add one more anecdote and leave the door open in case anyone else wants to walk in with a car story sometime in the future.

Around 1977, we couldn’t manage anymore with just one vehicle, so I bought another. I didn’t have much money to spend and ended up with a 1969 GMC pickup truck (similar to the one in this photo). Its color was a sort of rust brown, which was great, because that made it difficult to see the real rust. It was as basic as a truck comes: V6, standard transmission (“three on the tree”) and no power steering.

One day, I was in West Alexander and needed to get to our newspaper’s office in Waynesburg. Rather than take the interstates, I decided to find a shortcut on the back roads through “the Finleys,” as the sparsely populated townships of East Finley and West Finley are called locally. Little did I know how steep and twisting those back roads could be. Driving across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan would have been easier.

That night, my right arm began to ache and swell. By the time I climbed into bed, the pain was excruciating, and I had to sleep with it propped up on pillows. The next morning, I looked like Popeye the Sailor Man. I was sure it was broken.
My doctor and an intern following him around examined me. The intern said it must be broken. My doctor disagreed. “Tendonitis,” he proclaimed, preparing plaster for a cast. “What the hell were you doing?” he asked me.
“I was in a fight,” I said, “with my truck.”

Complaints and questions

"Did you notice the glaring error on the front page this morning?" a caller asked a few minutes ago. Well, yes, I nearly spit my coffee onto my newspaper at the breakfast table, as a matter of fact.
The headline on the story about the new casino at The Meadows stated, "Permanent venue rakes in $175M in first two weeks." The headline writer pulled the wrong figure from the article; it should have read "$15.3M."

The new casino cost $175 million to build. Even in their wildest fantasies, the casino's owner could not have imagined paying for their new complex in just two weeks!

Forever Cars, Part 6

Word came the other day of the impending death of the Pontiac, one of the makes that General Motors will ax next year. This can’t be a shock. Anyone who’s ever owned a GM car or truck has wondered about the redundancy of its brands. Still, it’s hard not to feel a shiver of nostalgia.

My second car was a Pontiac. My father was a little worried about me driving back and forth from home in New York to college in Washington, Pa., in the old Karmann Ghia, with not even a radio to help keep me awake, and not enough pickup to get me out of the way of tractor-trailers barreling along the Turnpike. And so I found myself heading back to school in a 1968 Pontiac LeMans. It was goldish-green (they called it “champagne”) with a black vinyl top, a 326 V8 delivering 250 horsepower under its enormously long hood. No problem getting out of the way of trucks.

I was never caught speeding in that car, but I did get a ticket, which is a story worth telling. Two friends and I were heading to our fraternity’s rented farm house in the country for a party. We were hauling a couple of boxes of potato chips and a half-keg of beer, in the trunk. I did not notice the red light at the intersection of East Maiden Street and Route 19 and was pulled over by a state trooper. (About 35 years later, a state police cruiser and another car would be involved in a tragic collision at the same intersection.) The trooper saw the potato chips in the back seat and asked where we were going. We told him the truth, that we were asked to take the chips to the party. “Anything in the trunk?” he asked. “Nah,” I lied. I had to. I was only 20 years old. No one in the car was of legal age.

The trooper asked me to follow him to the office of the Justice of the Peace, Evogene Smith, just up the road. The trooper told her what I had done. She picked up a gavel on her desk, banged it down, and said, “Guilty! Thirty-five dollar fine.” My friends and I pooled our money and paid the fine and left, driving away slowly and carefully, all the way thanking the Creator for allowing us to get away with one and keeping us out of jail.

Forever Cars, Part 5

By Dave Molter

My first car was a 1951 Cadillac hearse. No, I am not descended from a long line of undertakers, nor am I particularly morbid. But there is a story behind my purchase. In 1967 I was 18 years old and newly graduated from high school. I was also in a rock band, and it was by no means cool to show up at gig in my father's 1965 Rambler American. One of my friends hauled around his band's equipment in a 1956 Cadillac hearse, and it was love at first sight. I found my ride in a vacant lot behind our singer's apartment. Unfortunately, I never took pictures of my hearse, but it was pretty much the same as the one pictured here, with one big – and, to an 18-year-old, great – difference. The guy I bought it from had a venetian blind repair company, and he had stencilled above the windshield, in huge, white block letters, “THIS DRIVER IS BLIND MAN.”

I paid $35 for what many people called my "deathmobile." Because hearses don't drive very far, it had only 15,000 original miles. It was an eight-cylinder with a three-speed stick on the column. Black leather interior with red leather headliner in the cab, red velvet in the back with rollers for a coffin. I loved the toothy metallic grin of its grille.

My one venture into morbidity – it was unintentional – took place when I parked across from my high school to pick up my girlfriend, who was two years younger than I. I was happily sitting behind the wheel minding my own business when a man dressed in a suit appeared at the driver's side window.
“Perhaps you think this is amusing, but I don't,” he said. “I own this business,” he added, gesturing toward the sidewalk.
I realized that I had parked in front of the funeral home catty corner to the school. I drove away sheepishly, never to park there again. My hearse served me well for more than a year before my mother made me sell it because I could no longer find anyone willing to insure such a behemoth. But I have many fond memories of hauling equipment slowly up the West Virginia hills – this was before I-70 and I-79 had been completed – and of turning heads wherever I drove.

Forever Cars, Part 4

By Margaret Conaway

My husband’s truck was in the garage for repairs and I drove him in my red VW fastback to pick it up. As we left the garage I was in the lead and decided to show him a short cut through some back streets. To my surprise a construction project was in progress at the first main intersection on West Chestnut Street in Washington that I had to cross. The construction was pouring concrete at the entrance of the street I wanted to enter. Instead of going straight across, traffic was being routed left, right, then left again to run around the newly cemented entry.

Due to the construction, and the fact it was high noon, traffic was backed up. I was concentrating on a break in traffic to allow me to pull out. I did NOT take notice of WHY the street was barricaded or the cement finisher who had just risen from his knees and was surveying a job well done. I DID notice the street was only two-thirds barricaded and that my small car would fit in the one-third that was NOT barricaded.

Yep! You guessed it! Kerplop! Into the fresh concrete I dove with my front wheels. My face was as red as my car. (Where was the O-R photographer?)
The workmen merely smiled; I had made their day. What a story they would have to tell about a woman driver. My husband of many years simply drove off and left me there to suffer my embarrassment alone. I really couldn’t blame him. He later described his reaction: “As soon as the clutch was out, I knew where she was headed, so I hollered WHOA! When I realized that wouldn't work, I just prayed. Oh, Please... not all four wheels.”

I backed my little car out of the wet concrete, and as the construction crew held up traffic and directed me out, one of them shouted, “OK, Lady! Give’er hell! See if you can get all the way across this time!”

Forever Cars, Part 3

By Margaret Conaway

My first and favorite car was a 1953 Mercury sedan purchased used in the late 1950s. I drove it for about 10 years, all the while staving off my husband’s male wish to trade it.

My Mercury had a flathead 8 with a dual downdraft carburetor. That was not a car. It was an Automobile! My son (just a kid then) tells me that he and his brother loved when we entered the four-lane, when I tramped on the gas and the engine gave out that whoosh sound.
My husband nagged me constantly to trade my Mercury, saying, “I can’t understand what you like about that car!” My response was “I like the word PAID that is stamped on the title.”

Came a weak moment when I was talked into trading my beloved 53 Merc for a used fire-truck red’63 Ford Country Squire station wagon (above). I suspect it was wanted for camping trips. What a comedown! Straight 6, standard three-speed on a tree, NO POWER STEERING, and I parallel parked it on city streets. How in the hell did I do that?

I hated that boat, and one day when I tired of parking it I went to a VW dealer (with no advice or help from anyone, meaning my husband) and traded that monster for a’68 VW fastback. This was my first car bought NEW. It did not last long as my son, now a high school senior, totaled it two days before his graduation. (He was not hurt).
It was replaced with a’69 VW fastback and this is the car in which I suffered my most embarrassing moment...
(Continued tomorrow.)

Forever Cars, Part 2

By Bob Von Scio
I turned 16 glorious years of age on a sunny October day in 1999. I had already obtained my learner’s permit and soon I would be a licensed driver. Due to a decent collection of savings bonds, I was able to go “car shopping” at some area dealerships, but the selection was limited to vehicles that were… past their prime.

I settled on an atrocious vehicle – a 1993 Plymouth Duster (not mine in this photo).
I think two years’ worth of insurance exceeded the purchase price of the car. The new water pump, electrical relay, radiator, front bumper (snow-crash), rear bumper (parking lot crash), three sets of tires, cam seals, overdrive thingamabobber, assorted belts, and windshield (rock) essentially doubled that once more.

I drove that sunovabitch like I stole it, and it returned the favor by acting as if I had it hostage.
My wife fondly recalls the day we went for a drive and the timing belt broke out by the Copper Kettle.
I recall the gallon jug of water I kept in the back seat for trips of more than 5 miles because the water pump was as water-retentive as a burlap sack.

I didn’t learn how to fix anything with that car. No, that would be left to my next one – the one that I would modify, pimp, slam, learn to take apart and put back together.
No, with THIS car, I learned how much all the individual component parts of a car cost. I learned that a 3.0liter V-6 with 119 horsepower was more than enough to shred cheap tires as long as you were flooring it out of a turn. I learned that a plastic wood dash insert doesn't take superglue very well when it snaps in half. I learned that sunroofs retain their hermetic seal for only three months into their second owner, and then leak like a basket full of milk.

I learned to appreciate and value a car that reliably starts when you turn the key; to appreciate cars that can operate at highway speeds without vibrating or pulling further to the right than Sean Hannity at a gun show in a church basement; to appreciate a car that accelerates without question, without hesitation, and with the confidence of a bullet-proof German shepherd.
I recall that car fondly, the way an old man recalls the nuns who would slap his knuckles with a ruler.

Don’t get me wrong, though... I would NEVER want to drive one again, and I feel that all of the surviving models need to be euthanized immediately.
But, it was my automotive purgatory.

Whine, whine, whine

C: We only get your biased paper for the obituary (sic). The editor/owners are horrible.

A: This comment appeared on a subscription form, the subscriber being not an individual but a labor union. Exactly what our bias is supposed to be, I don't know. During the Bush administration, we were accused more often of being a left-wing mouthpiece for the Democrats. Now that the Democrats are in power and the harping on the editorial page is coming from the right, I suspect that we will be most accused of sympathy with Rush Limbaugh and his ilk.

Truth is, newspapers make a habit of being a pain in the butt to those in power, regardless of their political affiliation. It's our job to question authority.

Now, as for being "horrible"...
Well, it is a fact that babies tend to cry the moment I look at them. Maybe it's the scars, the bolts in the side of my neck and my green complexion.

Forever Cars, Part 1

One spring evening in 1961, in the suburbs of New York City, a gentleman who normally took the train home from the city each day instead pulled into his driveway in an odd little car, purchased that very afternoon.
The man’s family came running out of his house, and neighbors came from across the street to examine the Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. The dark gray car with its bulbous snout and rounded fenders was not much more than half the size of the family’s other car – an Oldsmobile station wagon. Few people in the neighborhood owned more than one car, and no one owned anything like this.

Five years later, the man’s son, now 17, after taking his driving test in the little gray car, waited anxiously each day for the arrival of the mail, and the results of the test: Would the letter announce another failure, or would it contain a license to drive? The letter arrived. Ecstasy! On a bright, cool day in June, he slid onto the rust-colored vinyl seat, started the 40-horsepower motor and shifted into first gear, then rolled out the driveway and onto the road to freedom, at last, with an excitement not far from sexual.

A couple years later, the boy returned from college in the old Ghia, its right fender crumpled, its hubcaps missing, its faded body now decorated with two wide racing stripes the boy had fashioned from vinyl cupboard liner with a floral design that he had purchased at Kmart. The boy’s father stood in the driveway and considered the condition of the car and the length of the boy’s hair, and not being able to decide which made him angrier, raised his hands in exasperation and retreated to his house.

The boy returned to college the following fall in another car, a bigger, much safer one, and the little Karmann Ghia was relegated to the garage, later to be sold to a friend of the family, and never seen again.

The boy was happy with the new car and its power, and the fact that it had a radio. He forgot about the Ghia. Years later, he would wake in the middle of the night, full of regret. In his sleep he had heard the whine of its little air-cooled engine, felt its vibration through the shifter, and suddenly he realized that he had ignored, and then lost, his first love.

A differnt story

Boys love cars. It starts in the crib and never stops.

Oh, sure, some girls love cars, too. When they grow up, some give their vehicles cute names. And I’m sure that there are some girls who know more about the mechanics of automobiles than their fathers and brothers. But generally, it’s different with boys.

When it comes to cars, women are practical, cost-conscious and sensible. They prize convenience and comfort. They like to sit on heated seats and steer. Men are impulsive and irrational. They like style, power and personality. They wear their cars like clothing. When they drive, they are connected to the machine through their feet and their backsides.

Men never forget, never stop loving their first car. The middle-aged man has this dream: He has forgotten that he owns a garage; he goes there and finds his first car, covered in dust but still in existence; he says, “I’d forgotten I still had this. This is great – I could fix it up and drive it again!” and then he wakes up, realizing there is no old car, his youth is gone, and life is cruel.

Do women have this dream, too? I don’t know, but I’d like to find out. So we’re going to start another story, but this one will be different. You’re going to write it.

I will write the first chapter, about my first car. Then you e-mail me your stories and photos of your first car, or vehicles that you’ve owned that will forever be popping up in your dreams. I’ll sort them out in a rough chronological order, and in the end, we might have a successful narrative of that special relationship – call it love if you will – between human and machine.

History R Us

Ever since "200 Years," our newspaper's history book, was published last year, I've been getting calls from folks asking me to assist them in their research. I could tell them that I'm too busy to do their work for them, but the truth is I enjoy it.

Got a call yesterday from a man in Wheeling who has silverware engraved with "Henry Clay Tavern" on it. He said the tavern was on Old Route 40 between West Alexander and Claysville and was a posh place in the 1920s and '30s. He was looking for more information about it and perhaps some newspaper advertisements.

A quick Google search revealed that Leon "Chu" Berry (right), a premier tenor saxophone player, was playing with a band called Perry's Broadway Buddies, which was a fixture at the Henry Clay Tavern in 1928. Berry was born in Wheeling in 1908. He went on to play with many of the great figures in jazz and was a member of Cab Calloway's Cotton Club orchestra when he died in an auto accident at age 33 in 1941.

I took a gander at a bound volume of The Washington Observer from 1928, searching for advertisements for the place. There were none, and it became obvious to me why very quickly. The headlines in the papers were about G-men taking axes to barrels of whiskey; these were the days of prohibition. More than likely, the Henry Clay Tavern, located far out in the sticks, hosting wicked jazz jam sessions, was very likely a speakeasy. The last thing its proprietors wished for was publicity.

If anyone else out there has information about this place, please chime in.

Gripe followup

Some people have been sending me gardening tips. A good friend has suggested I read Ruth Stout's "No Work Gardening Book."

First of all, I don't believe the title of this book. "No work gardening" is when someone goes to the farmer's market, buys some produce and then gives it to you. Anything else involves work.

She must be the same person who wrote "Death Without Dying," "Never Pay Taxes" and "Eat All You Want, Never Exercise, and Lose Weight!"

Today's gripe

Some of you who have followed this blog for a long time might remember my problems with groundhogs. There was the time when one of them crawled into the engine compartment of my truck, ripped the insulation off the hood and chewed my rubber hoses. Unlucky for him, he was still in the vicinity of the fan when I started the truck one morning. Took a mechanic an hour to extract his corpse. Serves him right.

Then there was the ground hog who lived under my deck, who, when he wasn't chewing the siding off my house, was eating every last vegetale from my garden. Not a single tomato made it to my plate that summer. I tried to shoot him, but he was a quick little bugger; I never got a shot off.

This year, I'm putting in a garden, but I've learned my lesson. I've surrounded it with a 4-foot-high wire fence with a gate... a locked gate. I'm also considering pounding re-bar into the ground all around it to create a subterranean fence to prevent the furry fiend from burrowing in. I'm stopping short of surveillance cameras and a security guard.

I'll let you know how it turns out.

Complaints and questions

C: Let's have more coverage from the Fredericktown area! - E.C.

A: This comment was written on the survey that readers fill out when they resubscribe for home delivery. We receive comments just like this one all the time from small communities all over our coverage area, which encompasses Washington and Greene counties. With 89 municipalities in that area, it is impossible for a small staff of reporters to cover everything that might be going on. Fredericktown is a 45-minute drive from our main office in Washington, and it's not on the way to anywhere, so it is often overlooked. Not a great deal happens there that is of interest to the rest of the circulation area, but it's not as if nothing happens in Fredericktown. We could do more.

We did do more, years ago, when the newspaper had "country correspondents" who mailed in columns with information about who was in the hospital and who was visiting from out of town. They were called upon to cover breaking news when that occurred, too. The correspondents disappeared, for a number of reasons: That sort of social news fell out of fashion; people became more reluctant to have their private business publicized; the number of people willing to be correspondents for little or no money dwindled.

But the Internet is changing things. Newspapers are struggling to hold on to subscribers and to serve new readers with online editions. Newspapers are beginning to realize that their future is in being "hyper local," and they are now recruiting "citizen journalists," to serve areas their own reporting staffs cannot. The Internet has made gathering and disseminating community news much easier, and more people are willing to spend time doing this.

It's more than likely that the enormous changes newspapers are going through will benefit small communities like Fredericktown, and that's a good thing.

Will there be jobs?

Last night, I was at Washington & Jefferson College speaking to a group of students about what they will do when college is over. I was a panelist for a discussion called, "What Can I Do With an English Major?" I was asked to participate because I am a W&J gad who was an English major and managed to find a job in which my education was useful.

While the other panelists talked about graduate school and internship, I scanned the faces, detecting here and there a wince or a widening of the eyes that betrayed bewilderment, even dread. It's understandable; it's a tough world out there now, where no one seems to be hiring.

These kids are under a lot of pressure to choose a course in life. Many of their parents are insisting that their college education be practical and vocational. I was there to defend liberal arts, to talk them out of switching their majors to accounting.

I told them how lucky they were to be able to learn about so many different things – languages, history, psychology, art – and that they should soak up all of this that they can. As English majors, they will go out into the working world as effective communicators, so necessary when abbreviated text messages just won't do. And as English majors they study literature, and in doing so they learn so much of the human condition. Anyone who is an effective communicator and has a good understanding of the human condition can do anything he or she chooses.

I'm not sure I got my point across; in the end, there were few questions. But if they take advantage of all the knowledge that's offered to them now, and if they are willing to start work at the bottom, they'll be just fine. Even now, when things seem so bad.

Honest, you will be OK.

Today's gripe

Today isn't one of them, but on warm days in spring, it's a given that the peace will be disturbed by someone driving up Main Street with the stereo up full blast, the bass speakers creating vibrations that imitate an earthquake, and the lyrics are the staccato obscenities of gangsta rap.

It's not so much the volume that bothers me, but the message. Ever listened? Here are a few lines from the rapper Mdc:

Let's kill all the cops and throw 'em in bags
Set it on fire on a pile of rags
Time for a little anarchy on the streets
Doesn't really matter if we all get beat
'Cause the world is really going to hell in a handbasket...
So let's kill all the cops, kill all the
cops, kill all the cops today
Let's kill all the cops it has a certain ring
They are not really real human beings
They got a job a uniform and a gun
Of course they are stupid and devoid of fun...

Oh, what a world we live in.

Complaints and questions

C: I am writing to you about your biased reporting on the gamblers that your paper has crucified. Their names have appeared in your paper so many time you make them sound like thugs. They are good people who didn't pay enough taxes. They never forced anyone to bet and yet their names have appeared more than any murderer, any rapist, any drug dealer. - A.C.

A: Believe it or not, we stock no crosses and nails here. And we don't have the power to charge and arrest people, or try them in court. In this case, it was the state police and the Internal Revenue Service who filed the charges, and the federal court that did the sentencing, which, by the way, fell a little short of crucifixion.

We report the activities of the police and courts. We have suggested before in editorials that the enforcers of the law might spend a little more energy pursuing murderers, rapists and drug dealers, rather than concentrating their efforts on crimes in which the victims, if you can call them that, are at least willing. Nevertheless, these are the criminals they choose to pursue, and so we report that.

Fathers, Part 15

(Four generations, photographed in 1977)

Some families are made differently. In them, a business is started, and it is handed down for generations. This newspaper is a good example; right now it is being run by the fourth generation of family members. Some editors in this 200-year-old business have ended up sitting in the same chairs once occupied by their fathers.

If there could be an opposite to this, my own family would be an example. In keeping with tradition, what I have passed down to my children is a path NOT to take. They chose instead to follow their mother. After college, both went to work and then put themselves through graduate school, both earning master’s degrees in fine arts. They live frugally, as painters must do.

Had things worked out a little differently, they might not have to worry so much about money and might not be so burdened by their grad-school loans. After all, the Burroughs family at one time had great wealth, way back before 1929. There was still a considerable estate left after the death of A.H. Burroughs and the market crash, but my wayward grandfather was effectively disinherited and benefited little. Nothing of that fortune trickled down to my generation or to our children.

In the early 1950s, Woodlawn, the estate in Irvington, N.Y., was sold and Florence – A.H. Burroughs’ widow – moved to Ashville, N.C., where she died at the age of 97. Woodlawn was demolished and replaced by an apartment complex.


(The Lynchburg house buned in August 2006)

Florence and her husband and the remains of several of their children, including my grandfather Alfred, are entombed in a mausoleum in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, right next to the old Dutch cemetery through which Ichabod Crane fled the Headless Horseman in Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

The grand, castle-like house that A.H. Burroughs built in Lynchburg, Va., suffered a long, slow deterioration. It was used for a while as a fraternity house, then divided into apartments. It was destroyed by fire just a few years ago.

So goes the march of a family through history.
As fathers, we are glad to have made the walk.

THE END

Letters from Siberia

You may remember Misha Zelenchukov, the former Russian journalist now working as a security guard, though infrequently paid, and living outside Novokuznetsk in an old house with no running water. Here's the photo I received from him today, with a note explaining that his dog had "perished," but that now he has this new dog.

Fathers, Part 14

Letting go is tough. It’s hard enough taking your kids to college and leaving them there, but at least they’re still living at home during breaks. It’s quite another thing when they leave for good. This column is from September 2000:

Cardboard boxes and plastic milk crates filled with shoes, clothing, books and makeup were piled on the landing and stacked at the top of the stairs. The man worked his way around them in the predawn darkness and entered his daughter’s room. At the foot of the bed he found and ankle and gave it a vigorous shake.
“Wake up!” he said to the sleeping lump beneath the comforter. “It’s time to go. Your childhood is over.”

The man and his wife were used to packing her off to college every fall, but this was different; college was over. Now she was moving away for good.
Had she been moving down the street or across town, or to another town in the same state, the event would not have seemed so ominous. But she was moving to New York, the great black hole of the American galaxy of cities, where the density of its 8 million souls is so great that not even letters home can escape its gravity.

The couple and their daughter drove all morning, mostly in silence, and in the static electricity of their anxiety.
Across the Delaware River and into New Jersey, the man began to feel the pull of the city, the traffic converging on ever-widening highways, swirling faster and faster in a vast whirlpool of speeding machinery.
Half a century ago, he thought, his own father had felt the pull of the great metropolis, too. To him, living and working in New York was what gave life meaning. And so, most of the man's own childhood was spent around the city. Maybe that's why, given the chance, he escaped from New York, fleeing on this very route to Western Pennsylvania and college, never looking back.
He raised his children in the country where, when the farm animals are not in an uproar, the nights as are quiet as death and the sky is a hood of black velvet sparkling with tiny diamonds; where there is solitude, where there is peace, where there are few people.
It’s no wonder she wanted to leave.

Just outside the Holland Tunnel, 16 lanes of traffic merged to two in the carbon monoxide haze of Jersey City. On the other side of the river, the traffic poured out of the tunnel and onto Manhattan Island, where signs for Brooklyn, Uptown, Downtown and Canal Street flashed by, and in a panic accompanied by a chorus of honking horns, he chose a direction, a ramp that dumped them into a maze of narrow, twisting alleys jammed with stationary cars and trucks over and around which swarmed a mass of people, racing about their business like fire ants.
For 40 minutes they inched through the steaming, teeming crush of the city.
“Where are we, exactly?” his wife asked. “I have absolutely no idea,” the man admitted. His knuckles became white as he clutched the steering wheel, and he fought an urge to leave, just get out of the car, leave it in the middle of traffic, just leave and find some movie theater or bar, or another job, and never, ever return.
“Why in the hell would anyone ever want to live in this place?” he fumed.

Eventually, they found their way clear of the mess and managed to get to the tip of the island, into another tunnel and on to Brooklyn. By the time they reached the apartment where the girl would be living with friends for a while, the man really needed to be restrained and hosed down.

But he calmed down. He had found a parking space right away. The apartment was on a quiet street, right around the corner from an outdoor cafe. There were kids zooming by on scooters, parents pushing strollers, people everywhere, different people of every conceivable color and nationality. This was a neighborhood, a place with a sense of community.
The couple knew they could leave their child in that place and not feel terrible about it. It was not their sort of place, but it was interesting. As they had shared their daughter's anxiety, now they shared her excitement about being young, about starting fresh in life.
And about living in the center of the universe.
And about not being a child anymore.

Fathers, Part 13

From a column published Nov. 11, 1990...

Oh, my father takes such delight in my parental misery.
I talk to him about teenager troubles. I expect a little sympathy, maybe a little advice. Instead, he rubs his palms together and grins. His eyes twinkle, and he has to suppress laughter. This is the joy of revenge.
I say: “I don’t know what I’m going to do with the kid, Dad. He wears combat boots and a motorcycle jacket. I think his role model is Sid Vicious. And his hair!”
My father snickers. He says: “You can’t imagine how good this makes me feel. Now you know.”
I say: “What am I supposed to do when I tell the kid he has to be home no later than a certain time – absolutely, not a minute later – and he shows up two hours later? And when I confront him, he puts on this puzzled look, glances at his watch and shrugs. What am I supposed to do?”
My father says: “Ha ha ha.”
He puts his arm around my shoulder, gives me a poke or two in the arm and says, “Now you know.”

Yes, now I know what the punishment is for being a troubling teenager: You goof on your parents, and 25 years later it comes around and hits you in the back of the head like some nuclear-age boomerang.
I can recall, back in 1965, a dinner-table exchange that went something like this:
Father: “If you would get that ridiculous hank of hair out of your eyes and off your face, maybe you could actually see what you’re eating!”
Son: “I can see just fine. We’re eating bourgeois food in a bourgeois house.”
Father: “There’s that communist talk again.”
Son: “Oh, Dad, the communists aren’t such bad guys. They’re just like us, and they want to be our friends.” (Yes, I really did say that.)
Father: “Oh, they want to be our friends, do they? And I suppose those things on top of their intercontinental ballistic missiles are just invitations to a garden party.”
Son: “That’s a typical imperialist reaction, but I can’t argue this anymore – the band is coming over to practice.”
Father: “Oh great. And I was looking forward to an evening of peace and quiet. Well, at least I can take off my socks and stand in the kitchen, above the basement, and get a foot massage from the vibrations.”
Son: “We have to play loud. The volume is the music, but I don’t expect you to understand that.”
(A long pause ensues in which the elder silently counts to 10.)
Father: “You’ll see. Oh, you’ll see.”

So, 25 years later, I see. I come home from work, put my hand on the doorknob and feel the tickle of vibration. I open the door and am blasted with noise from the stereo. I cup my hands to my face and yell, “WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO?”
He yells back, “JANE”S ADDICTION.”
I’m puzzled. “NO, I MEAN WHAT GROUP ARE YOU LISTENING TO?”
“JANE’S ADDICTION! THAT IS THE GROUP.”
I yell: “WELL, COULD YOU TURN IT DOWN A BIT?”
“WHAT?”
“OH, NEVER MIND!” I yell in disgust and storm out of the room. Then I turn, rub my palms together and yell back, “YOU’LL SEE!”

Fathers, Part 12

My father and I manage to see each other once or twice a year now. We’ve discussed that adventure in Biscayne Bay several times over the years, but I think my dad would rather forget about it; it was too embarrassing for him. But it will always remain a fond memory for me.

A few years after that, I began writing a column for the Observer-Reporter in which I frequently shared my experiences in raising our children. For 15 years, my kids had their personal lives exposed in the newspaper. Some of those columns were reproduced on this blog in the story, “Dreams of My Children,” which can be accessed in this blog’s archives.

Neither of my children chose to follow me into journalism. When they were young, I worked nights and long hours and saw them not nearly enough. When they saw me, I was often weighed down with the frustrations of my job, harried by angry readers, and they wanted no part of that. They chose, instead, to emulate their mother, an artist of considerable talent. (My children share deep roots in this area with their mother, whose family – pioneer Scots-Irish and Dutch – arrived her in the late 1ate 18th century.) They would develop their own talent and become artists themselves. Like all the other Burroughs children before them going back to the 18th century, they chose a different path than their father.

Fatherhood was a frequent theme of those old columns in the 1980s and 1990s. I’ll share a couple of them with you this week. Tomorrow’s installment first ran in 1990 under the headline, “It took 25 years, but Dad’s finally getting his revenge.”

Fathers, Part 11

We had grounded our boat on the Featherbed Banks at high tide. As the sun dipped toward the western horizon, the water around us became shallower with the ebb. We radioed the Coast Guard. They would contact a private towing company to send a barge to pull us off the bar, but that would not be possible until the next high tide, at 3 a.m.

And so began our family excursion to Key Largo. It was the first time we had seen my father since my mother’s funeral. It had been a difficult time, but we seemed to be getting through it OK. In a way, this was our voyage out of mourning. We were anxious for it to continue. What if the barge did not arrive in time? How long would we be stranded? What would happen to us if the weather turned bad?

Darkness fell. In the faint light of a crescent moon, I could see sand poking above the still water off the bow. “I can’t believe the boat is still level,” I yelled to my father as I stood by the rail. “Look. You can see the bottom; it can’t be more than six inches deep here.” My father, wife and son came to the railing to see for themselves, and our weight was enough to cause the boat to list to starboard, nearly hurling us all into the bay.

We spent the rest of the night at a 30-degree angle, crab-walking the deck, the kids sleeping flush against the hull in the starboard bunks. My father and I did not sleep. We peered into the darkness over the stern, looking for lights, listening for the distant hum of engines.
The barge arrived sometime after midnight and anchored a quarter-mile away. My father conversed with the captain on the crackling marine radio. Slowly, the boat began to right itself. A couple of hours later, the barge moved within 100 yards, and men arrived in a dinghy to attach the tow line. And then, with a jolt and a hiss of sand against hull, we were free. Well, the rescue service was hardly free. The mistake proved to be a costly one.

We approached Key Largo as dawn was breaking portside, the two of us red-eyed and punchy from lack of sleep. It had been a difficult night, but we had come through it, and now everything was OK. And as we idled toward the dock the water was as still as a mirror, and the rising sun splashed its fiery light on the trunks of palms and through the portholes onto the faces of the children, still deep in sleep.

Fathers, Part 10

The wide, white wake of the boat is a foamy path reaching to the horizon, toward the tall buildings of Miami that have now set below the vast expanse of blue-green sea. We are cruising across Biscayne Bay under a cloudless sky. We pass the last shacks on stilts and are now surrounded by nothing but water and air.

My father examines the charts. It is a straight shot to the Florida Keys. He chooses a compass point and sets the autopilot.

It is March 1979. My son, nearly 5 years old, is playing with his Hot Wheels in the galley. Alice has taken our 9-month-old daughter, Caitlyn, to the aft stateroom for a nap. My father and I climb to the flying bridge. We converse in shouts over the noise of the rushing wind, the pounding of the hull against waves, the rumble of the exhausts. Since my mother’s death less than a year before, my father has devoted much time to the boat and the constant maintenance it requires. He has a new radar unit, which we are fiddling with as the boat steers herself south-southwest. He goes below to adjust something, and I am looking at the screen on the bridge.

It is then that I look behind us, and suddenly the wake is no longer white, but brown. In a panic, I yank back the throttles. The roar of the twin diesel engines dies; the stern lifts and we surf our own wake. I cut the engines, and all is quiet except for the ominous sound of hull sliding across sand.

Had I not noticed the brown wake we might have been fine, but in cutting the engines, I managed to place our 52-foot craft at the top of Featherbed Banks, a shallow area that becomes a sand bar at very low tide. This I learn as my father pores over the charts. “Dammit! How did I miss this!” he mutters to himself. We share the blame for our predicament.

I don a diving mask and jump into the water, surprisingly cold and not quite waist deep. In the murky dark beneath the stern, I see the propellers half-buried in the sand. We decide it is too risky to turn them. And with the tide going out, it will only get worse.

Here is the moment that has not happened before, when father and son look to each other for help, when the boy is no longer the son, and the man is no longer the father, when they are just two people, equally in trouble.

Fathers, Part 9

Three years after leaving boarding school, just after my junior year at Washington & Jefferson College, I was married. Alice and I moved to Florida, and then back to Pennsylvania in 1972. Two years later, our son was born.

We thought long and hard about a name. I had a boyhood friend named Broderick Washburn, Brody for short. We liked the sound of it. “Are you sure you don’t want to name him Alfred Parker Burroughs IV?” Alice asked me at the last moment. I was wavering, but I said, “No, he should have his own name, be his own person. Let’s call him Brody.”
We compromised, though, and gave him Parker as a middle name.

There was disappointment, even a little outrage in my family. Lulie – my grandfather’s sister – was in a huff. My mother was peeved. “How could you possibly name a child after that horrible, horrible man at the ranch in Mexico!” she complained over the phone when I called from the hospital.
“Who?” I asked, completely puzzled.
“That awful man with the scars all over his face, the body guard, the one who guarded our house, Brodie!” she said.
“I was too young to remem…”
“Broderick would have been OK,” she interrupted, “but now every time I see this child I’m going to think of that awful, awful man!”
Gee, thanks Mom.

The boy certainly looked like his own person. I could detect no resemblance. Of course, many people said the infant “looks just like his father.”
“What!?” I’d say. “Huh? “He weighs like 8 pounds. My nose is bigger than his face. How can he look like me?”

I never did see him as part of me, part of my body. From the beginning, I saw him as this wonderful little stranger that came into our lives. Maybe that was my inheritance, the fathering ways handed down to me from the previous generations. I was content from the start with him being his own person, with his own name.
And like all the other Burroughs men before him, he would find his own path through life.

Complaints and questions

C: Today's (Tuesday's) front page picture of the mobile home certainly added nothing to the story of the home invasion; the same picture showing all the junk in the yard was totally unnecessary. What a picture your paper paints of people who live in Greene County!
Also, while I'm on the subject - the featured story of the 2 pregnant sisters from Greene County in a recent Sunday edition glorified them and their (underage, I believe) pregnancies. Again, what a picture of Greene County residents.
I realize nothing noteworthy ever happens here (except the almighty Walmart's opening), but why do you always find it necessary to magnify our imperfections on your front pages? - C.S.

A: You know, it is what it is. Where the attacked couple lived is relevant; it's not exactly the most promising target for a robber. You kinda have to wonder. Murder is news, and what we do here is to cover the news. Social problems – like teenage pregnancy – are news too. We are a newspaper, not the Greene County Tourism Promotion Agency.

Whine, whine, whine

C: If a Letter to the Editor is sent, the whole letter should be published, not half of it like was done to my husband last year. Letters to the Editor are exercising Freedom of Speech. It's supposed to be a Democracy. Your Editor chose to discriminate. - T.M.

A: As we state on the editorial page, letters are subject to editing for length, clarity and taste. We also correct what might be considered embarrassing errors in grammar and spelling.

The newspaper is not a public utility. You have no constitutional right to express your opinion in someone else's newspaper. You do have a constitutional right to express your opinions, which means you can publish your own newspaper and say whatever you want in it.

And of course editors discriminate. That's their job: to decide what to print and what not to print. We take a tiny portion of all that is happening in the world and publish it each day. If we were not discriminating, the newspaper would be too heavy to lift and too expensive to buy.

Fathers, Part 8

(Boy Scout camp-out, 1959)

In April 1951, Al and Irene’s first daughter was born in New Haven, Conn. His work as a time-study analyst at Winchester enabled them to purchase a tiny, two-bedroom house in West Haven. After Winchester merged with Olin-Matheson Chemical Corp., Al was transferred to Manhattan and the family moved to New York, where they would remain until the late 1960s.

Unlike my father’s childhood, mine was as normal as peach pie, with loving, involved parents who stayed married to each other. My mother had a tendency to force me into activities for which I had little interest, like piano and ballroom dancing lessons. My father, though, preferred to allow me to develop my own interests and activities, and encouraged me by not interfering or offering instruction. He put up with the underground forts and tarpaper shacks I built in the backyard, biting his tongue rather than complain about the eyesores, or advise me as to how to dig a hole or hinge a door. Let him figure it out himself, he must have told himself many times.

I think he dreaded me entering Boy Scouts but put up with it anyway. His only error was in requiring me to play youth baseball beyond the time when I had lost interest.

His idea about punishment was not to stress the painful consequences of bad behavior, but to teach responsibility. He could be moved to anger, but he never raised a hand to me or any of his children.

Hard work and business decisions, both wise and risky, proved fruitful, which made it possible for me to follow in the footsteps of both my father and grandfather, to leave home for boarding school.
My father’s experience at Taft had molded him. That is where he matured, where he developed confidence, where he established his independence. He wanted to offer me the same experience.

Although I would disappoint him and flunk out of his alma mater after one year, I would manage to get though the next three years at another boarding school. The experience was enriching, and I thought at the time that I would do the same for my own son, should I ever have one. But marriage and fatherhood seemed like such a long way off then.
Little did I know.

Fathers, Part 7

(En route to Connecticut from Mexico, 1951)

The younger Alfred became a ship’s electrician and ended up with the occupation forces in Japan at war’s end. After his discharge, he returned to Connecticut to marry Irene, the Polish girl from New Haven whom he had met while at Taft and who had worked throughout the war as a telephone operator.

They bought a small trailer, hitched it behind their old Chrysler and headed west. It was their first home, parked first in Bloomington while Al attended Indiana University on the G.I. bill, and later in Santa Monica, Calif., while he studied at U.C.L.A.

In January 1949, Irene gave birth to a boy. They named him Alfred Parker Burroughs III. That would be me, and the trailer was my first home, too. Later, we’d move to university housing. I would become sort of a mascot, an honorary pledge, of Delta Kappa Epsilon, my father’s fraternity.


(Al and his son on the plantation, 1950)

After graduation, we went to Agua Buena, Mexico, where my father would work for almost two years on the sugar cane ranch. By then, my grandfather had married for a third time, this time to a Brazilian bombshell named Dee. Among my mother, Dee and the Mexican nursemaid, I learned to speak in a mish-mash of English, Portuguese and Spanish.

By 1951, Irene was pregnant again, and the political and social climate in Mexico had become dicey. Unrest had crept close to the plantation, necessitating a guard armed with a Thompson submachine gun outside our quarters at night. Irene vowed she would not have her baby in Mexico, and so they loaded up the car and headed for Connecticut.

It was there that Al began making his own way in the world. He would eventually become successful as a business executive, stockbroker and capital investor, but he started out walking around with a stopwatch in the Winchester gun factory in New Haven.

Fathers, Part 6

(The Alfreds, junior and senior)

Soon after their divorce, Dorothy married Harry Achenbach, a career Navy man. The first of their four children was born in 1930. They called him Bobs. Wherever Harry was transferred, Dorothy and Alfred Jr. and his new brother followed – to Indiana, Illinois, California and Panama.

Meanwhile, Alfred Sr. abandoned the idea of practicing law in the U.S. and sought business opportunities in Mexico. He remarried a woman who, according to family lore, was a wealthy socialite – the complete opposite of Dorothy – and started the Agua Buena Sugar Co. in central Mexico. A daughter, Betty, was born in 1933.

The younger Alfred saw his father rarely, usually on summer vacation visits to the sugar cane ranch in Mexico. His family was constantly on the move, and it was difficult to form friendships when he changed schools so often. The death in childhood of his half-brother, Bobs, robbed him of his closest companion.

At age 13, young Alfred was sent to the Taft School in Watertown, Conn. His father thought it would do the boy good to be on his own and away from home, in a place where he could stay put and make friends, to experience independence and to grow up in an all-male environment that would prepare him for the world, as he had done himself at Lawrenceville.

For the next five years it would be Alfred’s home, except for summer breaks. It would be his home until January 1944, when he would enter another nearly all-male environment that would prepare him for the world: the Navy and the war in the Pacific.

Fathers, Part 5

(Alfred and his mother, Florence, in Holland, March 1930)

While visiting his brother’s mining operation in Seattle, Alfred enrolled at the University of Washington. He met a girl named Dorothy McCully, from nearby Bainbridge Island, and married her. They had a son, whom they named Alfred Parker Burroughs Jr., in September of 1925, and Alfred continued on to law school.

Alfred and Dorothy (right) were my grandparents. They died in 1983 and 1986, respectively, and the reasons for the breakup of their marriage in 1929 went with them. Their son – my father – was just 4 years old at the time of their divorce, and he would begin an odyssey around the country and Central America, accompanying his mother and her new husband – a Navy man – and visiting his father, who would seek adventure and fortune in Mexico.

The market crash of 1929 undoubtedly depleted the wealth that A.H. Burroughs had accumulated but had not obliterated it. However, Alfred would see little of what remained, having been for the most part, disinherited.

In 1930, the newly-divorced Alfred and his newly-widowed mother departed for Europe. Their tour of cities like Cairo, Venice and Amsterdam was a voyage of distraction, a time to forget, an opportunity to start anew.

Without the financial advantages of his older brothers, without a father to offer guidance, without a wife to lend support, he would need to make his way independently. But that, of course, was what his own father had done, and his grandfather as well. Independence was becoming a theme in the Burroughs line.

Complaints and questions

We received many comments on our Web site and several angry phone calls yesterday concerning our front-page story Sunday, the first installment of our "Teens Today" series.
The article was about the spike in teen pregnancies recently in Washington and Greene counties and was accompanied by a photo of two pregnant teenagers who are sisters.

One caller, saying that she represented "20 people here at the hospital," said she was appalled that we would write such an article "endorsing" teen pregnancy. She said she was afraid young girls would see this article and assume that it was perfectly all right to run out and have babies. She said that instead of promoting teen pregnancy, we should be writing about how to prevent it.

I pointed out that we do that on a regular basis – weekly, in fact – with Mary Jo Podgurski's column. Podgurski has for many years taught sex education here and runs Teen Outreach. "That hasn't worked," the caller insisted.

Sorry, lady, but it has. Podgurski is responsible for the dramatic decline in teen pregnancy (about 60 percent) from 1990 until just recently, when the numbers began to inch up again. The reason for that rise, Podgurski said in the article, is complicated by shifting social attitudes and economic conditions.

We hardly "endorse" teen pregnancy. I, and everyone I know and work with, is appalled by the idea of girls in middle and high school having babies. This is a problem, and it's our obligation to bring that problem to our readers' attention. Problems are never solved by ignoring them and pretending they don't exist, or by quietly tucking them on a back page of the newspaper, without photos, without thought- and anger-provoking quotations, where the information can be overlooked, particularly by those teenage girls so ready to throw their lives away at the direction of their hometown newspaper.

Fathers, Part 4

(The family at Meadow Wood Park near Roanoke, Va., in the summer of 1910, Clockwise from lower left, an unidentified servant, Lulie, mother Florence, Emily, Davis, Florence and Alfred.)

As the youngest of seven children, and with three older brothers – Ambrose, Whitney and Davis – it’s unlikely that young Alfred received much attention from his father, who had become chief counsel for the giant American Tobacco Co. Spoiled by the family’s financial circumstances and the doting of his much older siblings, Alfred, according to family lore, was a bit of a hellion.

In 1911, American Tobacco was broken apart by the government’s trust busters, and A.H. Burroughs moved the family to New York. His Fifth Avenue law firm handled corporate clients, and the family resided on a sprawling estate called Woodlawn, overlooking the Hudson River north of the city, in Irvington.

Alfred was soon sent off to prep school, to Lawrenceville in New Jersey. After that, he attended Princeton University, but was soon asked to leave (again, according to family lore) for staging a prank that went bad. Whether that’s true or not, Alfred’s behavior had certainly gotten his father’s attention. A.H. amended his will, leaving Alfred, for the most part, out of it.

Avoiding further conflict at home, Alfred headed west, to Seattle, Wash., to visit his oldest brother, then involved in a mining operation. Eventually, father and son would make peace, but before he had a chance to again amend his will, A.H. Burroughs died in June 1929 of pneumonia at age 70. Shortly after his death, the New York Times reported that he had left an estate of some $4.2 million, most of it in securities – a huge fortune at the time.

Four months later, the stock market crashed.