Monthly Archives: July 2016

Taking a Trip to Tioga

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A couple of weeks ago we visited Tioga County Historical Society, where it was opening day for a new exhibition on manufacturing and advertising in Tioga. I was thrilled to see a Monarch motorcycle. The company had been in Addison and in Elmira Heights before moving to Owego, and was pretty much contemporary with Glenn Curtiss.

*We were both very impressed to see how MUCH Tioga County has manufactured over the years. IBM, Lockheed-Martin, and Endicott-Johnson are all modern-day manufacturers. But in addition to their products, and in addition to motorcycles, Tioga folks have made farm machinery… iron bridges… dairy products… household implements… ladders… furniture… chairs… carriages… and swords for the movie “Braveheart.”

*They also had a substantial business providing seeds.

*The extent and variety of manufacturing in what’s actually a small county (both geographically and in terms of population) may reflect Tioga’s location between the cities of Binghamton, Elmira, and Ithaca, not to mention the proximity of Binghamton University and Cornell. Combine these advantages with good road and rail routes, and you have a recipe for success.

*Tioga’s legal history goes back to 1791, when it was split off from the then-huge Ontario County. Broome and Chemung would later be created from Schuyler, as would parts of Chenango and Schuyler.

*Owego is the county seat, but Tioga also has Spencer, Candor, Nichols, Waverly, and Newark Valley – among others. In 1957 prominent Mafiosi gathered for a summit conference at a private home in Apalachin. When they noticed a state trooper keeping watch nearby they panicked, despite the fact that there was nothing illegal about the gathering in and of itself.

*Police soon rounded up (we could even say rescued) dozens of smartly-dressed city boys whose suits and wingtips just didn’t serve in the woods and the cornfields. They said that they had heard that the host was sick, and had all just coincidentally arrived at once to bring him good wishes. This public spectacle forced J. Edgar Hoover to admit the existence of the Mafia, something he had roundly denied up till then.

*Apalachin is also home to the Blue Dolphin, a justly-popular restaurant at Exit 66 on I-86. We eat there whenever we can contrive an excuse.

*John D. Rockefeller lived in Richford as a small boy. Walter Taylor, founder of the Hammondsport winemaking dynasty, was brought up in Owego. The Bodine family of NASCAR fame all graduated from Waverly High School. Another native-born Owegan was Tom Platt, U.S. Senator and powerful Republican boss of New York. His much-younger second wife (whom he disinherited) became a student of Glenn Curtiss, and one of the first woman aviators.

*The Susquehanna River flows right along the edge of Front Street in the county seat of Owego, and overflows badly from time to time. There were catastrophic floods in 1935, 1972, and 2011. Sullivan’s army ravaged its way through Tioga during the Revolutionary War.

*Tioga Downs is in Tioga County. A standardbred course, Tioga Downs also offers flea markets, concerts, and “racino” gambling opportunities, recently being expanded under new state action.

*Interstate 86 crosses through Tioga from east to west (and the other way, of course).

*Tioga has at least 55 listings on the National Register of Historic Places, and at least 35 state historic markers.

*The county is rather bigger than Chemung, but has a population a good deal smaller… about equal to the combined populations of Elmira City, Corning City, and Bath Town. There is one state park (Two Rivers, near Waverly), but numerous town and county parks. It’s in the state-identified 14-county Finger Lakes region for purposes of tourism promotion, but doesn’t actually touch any of the lakes. (Neither do Wayne, Monroe, or Chemung.) Like much of the Southern Tier, Tioga is good deer and turkey country. The Finger Lakes Trail goes through the Town of Richford.

*Tioga County is a good place for a nice, quiet visit. It’s a shame it’s so overlooked, among its bigger neighbors. Think about stopping by. We like it. Maybe you will too.

Meet the Neighbors: Black Bears

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This summer I’m hearing multiple reports of bears getting into bird feeders. None of them surprise me.

Twenty years ago, scientists figured that there were about 50 bears in western New York, all close to the state line. The numbers are a little higher now. In fact, they’re a LOT higher.

I guess I can’t say it’s official, but it’s actual; we live in bear country.

Fifty years or so back, when so much land was still cleared for farming and pasture, New York bears didn’t have much habitat outside of the Catskills and Adirondacks – our small western New York population consisted on outliers from Pennsylvania. As the forest has come back, the bears have charged back with it.

Bear cubs are in danger from adult males, so when the D.E.C. had two cubs to release in 1997, they did it in High Tor, near Naples. High Tor seemed like good bear country. It was also, they figured, still a couple of years ahead of the advancing population line, which would give the cubs a chance to grow up and hold their own.

Not too long after that bears were being spotted within shouting distance of Lake Ontario. Bears have turned up within the built-up sections of Naples, Bath, and Elmira. They’ve expanded their range so much that our three separate populations – Catskills, Adirondacks, and western New York – now overlap.

Our local bruin is the black bear, smaller than the brown (or grizzly) bear from western states. Black bears are omnivorous. They don’t hunt much… they’re not really predators, though they’ll certainly take meat and fish when they can get it… even as carrion, but largely including insects that they scarf up along with vegetation. Vegetation is most of their diet by far.

They’re not really hunters, and they mostly try to stay out of our way. On the other hand they’re powerful, big, and FAST. If we do get mixed up with one, it’s not going to go well for us. Which shows why it’s a bad idea to let them discover bird feeders as a quick food stop. This almost guarantees run-ins, and those run-ins have the potential to be gravely dangerous for us – which also makes them gravely dangerous for the bear. Animal-control people have a saying that a fed bear is a dead bear. D.E.C. may have no choice but to find it and kill it before tragedy ensues.

The good news is that they hibernate in prime feeder season. A rule of thumb is to fill your feeders between Thanksgiving and Easter, and DON’T the rest of the year. And for heaven’s sake, don’t try to feed the animals yourself. They’re wild. They’ve never heard of Yogi Bear.

Bear attacks have also come from people trying to get close-up photos. Don’t. Those magnificent shots that you see in magazines are taken by experts with extremely expensive specialty lenses, working at VERY long distances.

Bear encounters are actually infrequent. In a lifetime that includes tramping woods from Virginia to Maine, I’ve only had three bear sightings: a yearling on a dirt road near Buena Vista; a mother with cub on Harrisburg Hollow Road near Bath; and, since I started his draft, a yearling or small female on Cold Springs Road in Urbana. My wife also saw one from our kitchen window between Bath and Mitchellsville.

Healthy adult males can weigh 550 pounds, while females usually top out around 375. You can’t outrun them, you can’t outdig them, you can’t outclimb them, you can’t outswim them, and you certainly can’t outfight them. You don’t have to be terrorized of them, but stay safe! Close up the feeder, give them a wide berth, and treat them with supreme respect.

A Trip to Ithaca

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Well, last month I drove two lakes over… past Hammondsport on Keuka Lake, through Watkins Glen on Seneca Lake… and made a trip to Ithaca, on Cayuga Lake.

*It’s always a good drive from Bath, through some of the finest countryside in the central Finger Lakes, and through hamlets such as Tyrone, Bennettsburg, Mecklenburg, and Burdett, past farms and vineyards and churches and cemeteries, between the “Little Lakes” and through plenty of forest.

*Everybody in my family likes to visit Ithaca, but it also makes a good place for me to go when I have to think things through alone. And overall, it’s just a good place to visit. We first did so back in 1995, when my parents sent us money and told us to go away for a few days before my wife’s (highly successful!) open-heart surgery. (This was also the first time we saw Watkins or Penn Yan, but that’s another story.

*In this space a few weeks ago we talked about my time in Sapsucker Woods, northeast of the city, and there are other very special places out on the fringe. It’s a nice level walk in to Taughannock Falls, with its straight drop even higher than Niagara’s. At Robert Treman State Park we once walked a beaver galumph down the terraces alongside another waterfall, then slip into the pool. And Museum of the Earth is definitely worth a visit.

*For me the beating heart of Ithaca is The Commons, the downtown pedestrian mall with its events, its eateries, its art galleries, and its wildly-varied shops. One World Market (formerly Ten Thousand Villages) has fair-trade crafts from around the globe. Alphabet Soup emphasizes imaginative toys and games. Outdoor Store has been purveying bikes, outdoor clothing, and other gear for over half a century. Titus Gallery carries watercolors, African art, and antiques from around the world.

*I myself never miss Autumn Leaves, that marvelous three-level used book store… OR Comics for Collectors, around the corner in Collegetown. Going to either of them always lifts my spirits.

*Moosewood Restaurant, just off the Commons proper, has been driving America’s interest in vegetarian cooking since 1973. Collegetown Bagels is always crowded, for very good reasons. Shortstop Deli opened up with a very simple mission statement: the best sub in Ithaca. It’s been open since 1978, so it seems to be meeting its mission. The State Diner started out as a manufactured designer eighty years ago, in 1936; having eaten there repeatedly myself, I can say that they are, in fact, doing something right.

*The Commons recently completed a multi-year renovation and is sort of sparkly right now, but will soon look lived-in again. A small section of the old trolley tracks is preserved, and an obelisk in the center of the Commons marks the start of the Sagan Planet Walk. This is a fun walk that ends up three-quarters of a mile away, at the Ithaca Sciencenter. The planets, the asteroids, and Pluto are spaced off proportionally to their actual distances, and represented in obelisks at their proportional sizes. If you really want to “go the distance,” the Planet Walk also includes our nearest star group, including Alpha Centauri, proportionally set in Hawaii.

*Get out from the Commons and the downtown area and you can find Ithaca Falls, plus other falls and gorges for which the city is famed. Cornell Plantation is a 175-acre arboretum and botanical garden, including lovely Beebe Lake.

*Of course we can’t talk about Ithaca without Ithaca College and Cornell University. Cornell is our state’s land-grant institution; its 1865 creation was a huge step in making college accessible to New Yorkers. A recent count showed 22,000 students at Cornell, plus three Nobel Prize winners, four Pulitzer Prize winners, and five MacArthur “Genius” grant recipients. In all 41 Nobel Prizes have gone to people who were either faculty or students at Cornell. All of this guarantees that a trip to Ithaca will find a zest, and even a goofiness, that offers a lot of fun. I like it.

The Fourth of July — Glenn Curtiss Style

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The Fourth of July in our region has seen some memorable moments. Slavery ended in New York on July 4, 1827. In 1863, news must have just started trickling in about Lee fleeing Gettysburg with his crushed army, and Grant marching into Vicksburg. What must that day have been like in 1946, with World War II victoriously ended, the boys back home, and America on top of the world! In 1972 people were still counting the dead and finding the living from the flood twelve days earlier.

*As soon as this day dawned in 1908 people started converging on Pleasant Valley Wine Company. They came by bike and they came by buggy. They rode on horses and they rode in cars. They came on foot, or erupted from “special” trains of the B&H Railroad. The army had an observer there, and so did the German government. The movies were there, and so were the newspapers. The Aero Club was there, and “Scientific American” was there.

*Before you knew it, a thousand people were milling about the grounds, thrilled to have a chance denied to almost every human being living, or any who had ever lived. They were going to see a man fly.

*Hammondsport’s own Glenn Curtiss, who had just turned 30, was working with the awe-inspiring Alexander Graham Bell to create and perfect airplanes. Working with three younger partners (plus a lot of kibitzing from anyone who was interested), they had already designed, built, and flown “Red Wing” and “White Wing.” Now they had a new aircraft – “June Bug” – with Curtiss as pilot and chief designer. The new machine had a new feature – tricycle landing gear, still widely used today. It also sported ailerons, invented for “White Wing” and still in universal use.

*”June Bug” was so successful that Curtiss was going to fly for the “Scientific American” trophy. This would require an officially-observed unassisted takeoff, a one-kilometer flight without any stops or touchdowns, and a safe landing. He’d picked the Fourth of July to be sure of getting a crowd, and now the crowd was ready and eager. “June Bug” was ready, and the officials were ready. But Glenn Curtiss wasn’t there.

*For all his well-deserved reputation as a daredevil, Curtiss paradoxically was a bear for safety. There were thunderstorms in the area. Air conditions weren’t good, and when conditions weren’t good, Curtiss didn’t fly.

*No official time had been set for the trial, but around noon the crowd started getting ugly. They had all come out to watch a flying machine. Examined closely, how likely did that seem? Were they all the victims of some gigantic hoax?

*The winery invited everybody in for an impromptu tasting and a cold collation. They all decided they could wait a little longer.

*By late afternoon things had improved, and Curtiss motored out to the winery. After conferring with officials he took his seat, revved up the engine, rumbled down the trotting horse track, and took off as his wife screamed.

*Generations of amused male chauvinists have made much of this scream, utterly overlooking the fact that Lena was right – she had instantly spotted the problem, and recognized its dangers. “June Bug” was shooting up higher than they had ever flown before, at an angle steeper than they had ever tried before. Curtiss was standing up in the airframe, leaning on the wheel, trying to get the nose down low enough to regain control.

*He managed, and soon discovered that the tail had been assembled at the wrong angle, forcing the nose upward. After disassembly and reassembly they wheeled back to the start line, ready to try again. As Curtiss looked down the course he saw a photographer setting up just short of the one-kilometer mark.

*He’d been having a bad day, and he later wrote to Bell that something snapped in him at that moment. This unspeakable shutterbug was all prepared to snap a picture of Curtiss just FAILING to reach his goal. So, he told Dr. Bell, just to spite the man he flew down the course, over the photographer, over the mark… and kept going… into the sunset of the Fourth of July… as a thousand voices cheered.

*He made just about a mile before landing to shut down his engine to prevent overheating. Back at the winery workers grabbed bottles off the shelves and rushed outside. The movie crew soon found that it had fine film – the first ever made of an airplane flying in America. An even bigger crowd turned out for more flights on the fifth, and Glenn Curtiss was launched on a spectacular career in aviation.

*He won that trophy again in 1909, and again in 1910, after which they retired it to him. You can see if just off the main entrance at the National Air and Space Museum, engraved with the name of Glenn Curtiss.