Monthly Archives: February 2015

And For Our Very Best Wildlife — the Tory Awards!

The deer have been coming down to the roads a lot lately, what with the deep snow, the high winds, and the low temperatures. That got me to thinking about memorable encounters I’ve had with deer, and THAT go me thinking about other encounters.
So just for fun (and for this column) I figured I’d make up a list, but keep it ONLY to encounters here in the 14-county Finger Lakes region. It has to be a good encounter (one I can look back on and smile), and it has to be with an animal truly in the wild… so an otter release, for instance, doesn’t count. Also, I pledge that I did not disturb or distress these creatures in the process. Since we’re in Academy Awards season, I decided to call my awards the Tories, since I once met Roger Tory Peterson. And the categories are…

WHITE-TAIL DEER: and the Tory goes to… a fawn we met while walking a trail at Ganondagan State Park near Victor. We were working through waist-high grasses where a meadow met a wood, and suddenly, there on the trail ahead of us, was a very young fawn – dry, but still a little unsteady on its pins. We all froze, meantime craning our necks for the mother, and quickly spotted her in brush a few steps off. The fawn spotted us and stumbled toward us for a few steps before suddenly panicking and lurching off toward mother, after which they made their getaway together.
Honorable mention A herd of thirty or so that our older son and I spotted driving a country lane, probably in Howard, on a misty summer’s night. They looked almost supernatural.
Curio A bi-colored deer I used to see along I-390 driving between Bath and Dansville. The hindquarters were all white, while the forequarters were the standard brown with large white dapples.
BLACK BEAR: and the Tory goes to… a yearling we all encountered shambling down a road near Buena Vista. It was (relatively) long and hangdog, and at first we thought it might be a mastiff, but quickly recognized it as a bear and coasted to a stop (car windows all UP). A few seconds later the bruin spotted us, raced to the side of the road, and leapt into a tree. This was a juvenile response, and it’s likely that the bear was a yearling that had recently been chased off by its mother – the size and the season were both right for that.
STRIPED SKUNK: and the Tory goes to… an utterly adorable TINY baby skunk who puttered into the path I was hiking around a pond in Owego. This was a great sighting, BUT the brush on either side was too high and thick to get around… and it was a LONG walk back. I racked my brains as to whether baby skunks could spray, decided that even if they couldn’t, their mothers certainly could. Deciding to trust myself to surprise I backtracked a few steps, then raced forward, vaulted over the baby skink, and raced onward, to no ill effects for anybody.
WOODCHUCK: and the Tory goes to… a delightful specimen that had is home in a high bank on Route 54 between Bath and Hammondsport. It had built itself a little parapet at it’s hole, about half-way up he bank. There it sat the livelong day, propped up on its forelegs, watching the cars stream by.
Curio A woodchuck near our house when we lived in Bath village. A local cat would stalk this woodchuck, and the woodchuck, which outweighed the cat by several times, was terrified. It would always run away and duck into its hole. I felt like I should give it lessons in self-esteem.
SHIRT-TAILED WEASEL: and the Tory goes to… a specimen at Twin Cedars near Avon. I was on the hillside, using binoculars to watch the waterfowl below, and had been standing still for quite a while. This weasel stepped out of the (relatively) all grass, sauntered across the path and almost across my sneaker, and vanished into the grass on the other side.
MINK: and the Tory goes to… a busy little number on the Geneva waterfront. I was at an onboard reception for the arrival of a sailing canal boat, built at Lake Champlain Maritime Museum, when I spotted a mink darting in and out among the rocks of the retaining wall. Pretty soon there was a small crowd of us watching the show on a lovely summer afternoon.

And that’s only half the list. We have something else planned for next week’s blog, but the Tories will be back the week after that!

Elmira Faces — Part Two

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Last week in this space we looked at that wonderful billboard on Church Street, just as you enter Elmira from I-86. Seven famous Elmirans gaze benignly down on arriving visitors, and last week we looked at three of them – Mark Twain, John Jones, and Ernie Davis.
Of the seven probably two are pretty much instantly recognizable to the broad body of Americans: Mark Twain, and Brian Williams.
Brian Williams has been giving the news for many years. Unfortunately for the last few weeks he’s also been making the news, and not in a good way.
Williams was born in Elmira and lived there until his middle-school years. In adulthood he became a broadcast newsman, working his way through the usual round of local stations to the CBS flagship station in New York City, and then to network news on NBC. He got a Peabody Award in journalistic excellence for Hurricane Katrina coverage, and anchored the NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams for ten years. Walter Cronkite spoke warmly and admiringly.
Since New Year’s, though, he’s been placed on six months unpaid suspension for inflating personal experiences during our latest war in Iraq, along with other questionable statements.
As a longtime newsman myself, I agree. Mistakes happen and can be forgiven, but they’ve got to be honest mistakes, conscientiously arrived at, and they’ve got to be corrected when discovered. Only then can the public trust you.
At the same time, I cynically and sourly note that this never hurt, for instance, Ronald Reagan’s career. He continued telling stories to wild applause, even though both he and his applauders knew they’d been proven to be lies, and millions still consider him a secular saint. All the more reason for news reporters to be above reproach.
Another face may puzzle out-of-towners unfamiliar with it, though they may recognize his name: Tommy Hilfiger. The design and clothing magnate began his life and his career in Elmira, even losing his store (when he was 21) in the Hurricane Agnes flood. He appears at some length in the WSKG public TV documentary on the flood, and his observations really add color and depth. Since then he’s parlayed the business into what just about anybody could consider a pretty reasonable success.
There’s just one woman on the billboard, and that’s Colonel Eileen Collins. Born in Elmira of immigrant parents, she made herself useful at Harris Hill in quest of flying lessons. She graduated from Elmira Free Academy, Corning Community College, and Syracuse University – besides getting two master’s degrees – and joined the Air Force, eventually becoming a space shuttle astronaut.
Taking nothing away from Sally Ride, Valentina Tereshkova, and others, Eileen Collins actually piloted, and finally commanded, her spacecraft, making her the highest-flying American woman ever. There’s a special gratification to know that Blanche Stuart Scott of Rochester became America’s FIRST woman pilot with a 1910 flight in Hammondsport, neatly bracketing the first woman pilot and the highest woman pilot right here in the Finger Lakes.
I could have written these columns much earlier if I could have figured out who the seventh figure was. He looked like a chef… in fact, he looked like Emeril. Or maybe he was one of the local NASCAR drivers? My son Erik broke the logjam by just casually remarking one day, “Looks like a movie director.” Hal Roach!
Yes indeed, that master of magical movie mirth and mayhem was born (and lies buried) in Elmira. Arriving in Hollywood as far back as 1912, Roach started as an extra but was soon directing and producing, most notably with Harold Lloyd, Will Rogers, “Our Gang,” and EXTRA most notably – Laurel and Hardy. He was shrewd enough to make a strong early move into television, producing new shows and retailing his old movies. He was just short of 101 when he died. His Wikipedia article points out that he had outlived many of his “Our Gang” child actors. He’d also brought the world a lot of laughs, and what could be a better epitaph than that?
So… a social critic, a freedom fighter, an athlete, an astronaut and pilot, a designer and entrepreneur, a news reporter, and a pioneering producer of comedies. All of them welcome you to Elmira, their old home town. Really, that’s a delightful billboard. Well done.

Elmira Faces — Part One

The City of Elmira has a really cool way to greet visitors coming down Church Street from I-86. Just as you reach the edge of the built-up section, you find a billboard from which a number of interesting faces gaze down on you. These are a century and a half of famous Elmirans, welcoming you to their city.
One of these faces is probably recognized by just about everyone, although he’s been gone since the 1910 passage of Halley’s Comet: the face of Samuel Clemens. In Woodlawn Cemetery you can find his grave, topped by a column that rises in height to twelve feet – two fathoms, or Mark Twain.
Why should Mark Twain lie in Elmira, rather than in Hannibal, Buffalo, Hartford, or San Francisco? Mark Twain’s wife Libbie Langdon was an Elmiran, and the couple typically spent their summers here. The family built him a lovely octagonal study, which you can now visit at Elmira College. Here he wrote Life on the Mississippi, The Prince and the Pauper, and that titanic American novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Go to Elmira, spend the summer, write a book – that was Mark Twain’s routine.
It’s too bad that more people don’t recognize the connection. Jared Aiosa, at Heroes Your Mom Threw Out in Elmira Heights, recommended to me the stunning graphic novel series The Unwritten. A significant event in the first volume concerns a meeting between Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling, for which the artist created a large, detailed, lovingly-meticulous illustration of Mark Twain’s house in Hartford. The meeting DID take place historically, but it was at Quarry Farm in Elmira.
A few steps away in Woodlawn Cemetery is the grave of Mark Twain’s friend John Jones… also a figure on the billboard. John Jones worked at Woodlawn for many years as caretaker for the many graves of Confederate P.O.W.s, tending them with conscientious care and meticulous record-keeping. It was once a custom for southern visitors to honor the graves of their dead, then place a Confederate flag on the grave of John Jones in appreciation of his care.
No doubt he’d have appreciated their appreciation, but they apparently didn’t realize that a Confederate flag wouldn’t likely have been welcome. John Jones escaped from Leesburg, Virginia where he was a slave, freeing himself… as Frederick Douglass said, stealing himself… from the people, indeed the society, that classified him with the hogs and the chairs. He had no legal “right” to do so, and so lived for decades, even in New York, under the specter of being kidnapped and returned.
But he didn’t keep a low profile, becoming a well known figure in both the black community and the overall community. He figured that had personally helped 700 people escape. So he probably wouldn’t have been enthusiastic about those Confederate flags.
Mark Twain, when he was young and foolish, briefly bore arms for the Confederacy. In later years he was one of the few prominent white Americans who rejected and fought against the prevailing habitual fabric of white supremacy. So it’s quite a shock that when the Ku Klux Klan held a major regional rally at Chemung County Fairgrounds, one of the optional side trips they laid on was a visit to the grave of Mark Twain. Of course, they were never mistaken for deep thinkers. It’s just as well for them that he’d been dead for 15 years. His reaction no doubt would have been volcanic.
Also at Woodlawn we find the grave of a third figure from the billboard – Number 44, Ernie Davis. There are still those here who knew him and loved him… a standout athlete at Elmira Free Academy in the 1950s, and then at Syracuse University, where he became the first African American to win the Heisman Trophy as the most outstanding college football player for the year.
Mark Twain and John Jones helped forge opportunities for Ernie Davis, but if he had a starting point a little farther forward than he would have had a few years earlier, he still had to fight his way from there. George Marshall was marketing the Washington Redskins as “the” football team of the south, complete with rebel yells and Confederate flags, and he absolutely did not want a black player on his team. Pressure from the N.F.L. and the Interior Department (which owned the stadium) forced him to draft Ernie Davis, but Ernie solved his problem with a single straightforward sentence: “I will not work for that S.O.B.”
Marshall quickly traded him to the Cleveland Brown, where his story morphed from a saga to a tragedy. This incredible athlete was diagnosed with leukemia, and passed away without ever playing a professional game.
As a sports story, an Elmira story, and a civil rights story, the life of Ernie Davis would already be memorable. But by all reports he was a tremendous personality, and an outstanding human being. That’s really why his memory is so dearly treasured today. A couple of years back I took a New England group staying in Elmira on a trip to Sonnenberg Gardens. I told them local history stories on the way, after which one of the guests came up excitedly to say, “I was in R.O.T.C. summer camp with Ernie Davis at Fort Devens!” The fact that that brief encounter still meant so much, so many years later, speaks volumes about Ernie Davis.
So the billboard… and Woodlawn Cemetery… encapsulate much of the racial history of America. Next week, we’ll look at the other faces on the board.

Three Ordinary Lifetimes: World War, Baby Boom, Civil Rights, and a Trip to the Moon

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We observed two weeks ago that three ordinary lifetimes of 75 years each would take us back to the last year of Franklin Roosevelt’s second term as President; the last weeks of Lincoln’s first term; and then the first full year of George Washington’s Presidency. So essentially the whole life of our country under its Constitution has taken place in those three lifetimes, and that almost exactly includes the history of Europeans living here in our immediate area.
In our last two blogs, we looked at what had happened in those first two lifetimes. Imagine now a baby born on this day 75 years ago, in 1940. What has happened in that third lifetime?
In the first few months of that baby’s life Hitler crushed the forces of Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, and France, and took over their countries in a brutal rule. They savaged the British forces, which managed to get away and defend their island from Hitler’s onslaughts. Winston Churchill came to power, and Roosevelt decided to go to the voters for an unprecedented third term – this was, as Eleanor told the Democratic convention, “no ordinary time.” Relieved voters kept him on, and local young men began to be swept up in America’s first peacetime draft.
Local men and women were in Pearl Harbor when the bombs came down, and on Corregidor when it fell. Mercury Aircraft, which had had but a single employee, soon had 850 manufacturing on contracts from the army, which also built it new facilities. Schweizer Aircraft had a similar experience, and Elmira became an early center of glider pilot training. George Haley of Bath became a combat pilot with the Tuskegee Airmen, fighting his first of three wars and starting a climb up the ladder to lieutenant colonel.
Hitler and his cronies, impatient with the inefficiencies of butchering whole populations by gunfire, created gigantic killing camps, designed in particular to exterminate all the Jewish-extraction people they could lay their hands on.
Especially in the last year of the war, local soldiers started dieing in dozens. Voters gave Roosevelt a staggering fourth term, but he died just a few months into it.
Atomic bombs brought the war to an end. New President Truman pushed on with Roosevelt’s G.I. Bill, designed to make America a nation of college-educated middle-class homeowners. He also made sweeping moves to racially integrate the military, and federal employment.
In 1946, another major flood struck the Conhocton-Canisteo-Chemung River system.
In 1952, Thomas J. Watson and Governor Thomas Dewey were key members of a group successfully boosting Dwight D. Eisenhower for the White House.
Driven by the G.I. Bill, the infrastructure development of the New Deal, and overseas prostration, America’s economy boomed… along with its population of babies.
Local people formed the Corning-Painted Post Historical Society, and the Steuben County Historical Society. Drivers ran the first Watkins Glen race. The Corning Museum of Glass opened its doors. Railroad tracks in Corning were re-routed north of the city, and Erie Avenue became Denison Parkway. Corning-Painted Post School District came into existence, and Corning Community College. Old friends and colleagues of Glenn Curtiss opened Curtiss Museum in Hammondsport. One-room schools closed their doors for the last time. A group of visionaries began the long long work of carving the Finger Lakes Trail through western New York.
Birth-control pills became available, thanks in part to research funds raised by Corning-born Margaret Sanger. Despite fierce and even armed resistance, a peaceful Civil Rights movement changed America. The country convulsed over Vietnam, and over dramatic social changes. The murder of President Kennedy ushered in a decade of assassinations.
Drivers started cruising the Southern Tier Expressway. As rail traffic declined, two major carriers serving our region merged into the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad.
Legally-encrusted bigotry was swept away from our immigration system, forever changing the composition of our nation and taking a long step toward making America true to its ideals. We started to face the fact that we couldn’t just dump our waste and pollution into the environment.
Sixty-four years (almost to the day) after Glenn Curtiss coaxed a mile-long flight out of his ungainly airplane in Pleasant Valley, men walked on the moon. We watched them on television.
In 1972 Hurricane Agnes poured on yet another cataclysmic flood, which would have been far worse without the New Deal flood control measures put into place after 1935’s inundation. Elmira began a slow population decline (matched by much of the rest of the region). Corning re-envisioned its downtown area, and began creation of today’s Market Street and Civic Plaza.
Corning Glass Works re-invented itself as Corning, Incorporated. As industry in general declined, boutique wineries stimulated the agricultural and tourism fields. As small family farms went on the market, a population of conservative Amish and Mennonites began to grow… even creating a new system of one-room schools. As America became not much more than 50% white, 95% white areas like ours became bizarre curios.
Curtiss Museum got a new home. Rockwell and Corning Museums had major overhauls. As the 21st century dawned we began a boom in library construction and renovation.
Our ridiculous electoral college brought us our fifth major crisis and once again seated the man whom the voters had rejected as President, placing George W. Bush in the immortal company of Benjamin Harrison, John Q. Adams, and Rutherford B. Hays.
We came through the Cold War victorious, but somehow couldn’t think of a way to reduce military spending, and soon found ourselves locked into asymmetrical warfare, including highly-controversial invasions overseas. Terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center hammered the nation’s economy, and especially New York’s, producing severe downturns even way out here.
Voters elected an African American, young enough that the cruel laws of segregation had applied to him, as their President.
And on the day you read this, thousands of American boys and girls are being born. They will have their 75th birthdays in the year 2090. All of us will be gone. We wonder what they will see and remember, looking back, on our country’s (and our region’s) fourth ordinary lifetime.
*****
Hey — Carl Koehler will be doing a presentation on “Talking Trees: Guides in the Wilderness,” about how trees were trained and used as trail markers in days long ago. The free Steuben County Historical Society presentation is 4 PM Friday, Feb. 6 at Centenary Methodist Church in Bath.