Monthly Archives: June 2020

Meet the Neighbors: Bald Eagles

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A week or so back, I beat the heat and humidity to take a short early-morning hike at Birdseye Hollow County Park, near Bradford. It was just a half-mile out and then the same back, on a blue spur from the main Finger Lakes Trail, which runs right nearby. Once I was back into the parking area I took a walk across the bridge and out onto the earthen dam, so I could have a look at the pond.

Birdseye Hollow likes to slyly dish out surprises. Our younger son spotted a fisher here once. And on one occasion as I was hiking close to the pond, I was suddenly enveloped by a burst of butterflies… and what could be better than being approved by butterflies?

On this morning, as I looked out over the pond, I watched a bald eagle circling overhead.

I never saw an osprey until I was a grown man, and I never saw an eagle until I was a father. Now I live in a place where both are annual nesters, and where they are, if not commonplace, at least a part of a typical spring and summer. Truth be told, I’ve seen them locally at EVERY time of year.

Why did their numbers crash? Shooting played a role, and so did habitat destruction.

But both of these very large raptors depend on fish for their diets, a fact that drove both of them almost to extinction. In the years after World War II we went on a DDT binge, insisting it didn’t harm humans (ha), and wouldn’t kill anything but bugs. We now describe it as a persistent broad-spectrum pesticide – it kills lots of stuff, and it doesn’t break down very well. It stays in the environment, where it keeps on killing, for a long, long time.

Over time it flowed downhill, collecting in the ponds and streams, where it contaminated the fish. The eagles ate the fish, and built it up in their systems. It thinned out their eggshells, so that only a tiny few survived to hatch.

Radically reducing use of DDT, and improving its handling, gave our national bird a chance to recover, and recover it has. You can watch one circling at Birdseye Hollow or Mossy Bank, along the Conhocton, Chemung, or Canisteo, and mention it at home as a pleasing anecdote. It’s not the once-in-a-lifetime experience… or the NEVER-in-a-lifetime experience… that it used to be. But it still lifts your spirit, maybe even the more so considering how close we came to losing them.

Back as recently as our nation’s bicentennial, the entire state of New York could locate only a single eagles’ nest… which failed every year because of the thin eggshells.

Scientists worked out a challenging approach called hacking. One of them would climb to the nest while the parents were absent, remove the doomed eggs, and substitute an artificial one. The parents would incubate for the normal period of time, after which the scientists made another climb, replacing the dummy egg with a chick from a captive-breeding program.

The delighted parents successfully raised the youngster, and did the same for the next two years. When the male died the female paired with one of the hacked youngsters; they returned to the nest, and raised hacked hatchlings for five more years, until a pair of the original fosterlings made the nest their own, and successfully nested on their own.

In the same period, eaglet cages were set up at Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge, where eagles had nested in the past, and where DDT was pretty much absent. Scientists hand-raised eaglets, working from a blind so that the birds didn’t become habituated to humans. The first two birds nested successfully near Watertown five years later, while others have returned to Montezuma to nest.

They like to be near fish, and in recent years have worked their way up our rivers from the south. Now our home is their home, and we’re neighbors with eagles.

“The Lodge” — Once a Staple of American Life

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Last week in this space we looked at two fraternal organizations – Masons and Grange – that have counted millions of Americans among their members, and have played a major role in shaping American life.

But there were MANY more fraternal lodges on the scene, both nationally and locally. What were some of the others, centering our look on Steuben County?

Knights of the Maccabees had “Tents” in Campbell, Canisteo, Bath, Savona, Hammondsport, Jasper, Wayland, Wayne, and Hornell. Ritual and nomenclature were inspired by the Maccabee warriors of ancient Israel, but the insurance aspect fairly quickly overshadowed the fraternal aspect. In 1901, after James Shannon was killed by lightning in his barn on Mount Washington, his wife got a $2000 Maccabees insurance payout.

They were fond of parades, and had substantial halls in Jasper and Hornell. They were whites only, had a Ladies of the Maccabees auxiliary, and endured into the 1990s, but eventually became “just” an insurance company. You’ll find their tents and beehives (for MaccaBEES) on gravestones and cemetery markers.

Knights of Pythias, which still operates worldwide, dates to 1864. Greek legend told of friends Damon and Pythias, each willing to sacrifice his life for the other. We have a photo of the only known Steuben group, in Bath.

Like most fraternal groups, Pythians today are philanthropic, especially supporting the American Cancer Society. Famous Knights include Louis Armstrong, William Jennings Bryan, Nelson Rockefeller, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Pythian Sisters are the auxiliary, with Pythian Sunshine Girls and Junior Order of Princes of Syracuse for youth. Their FCB symbol (often in a triangle) stands for Friendship, Charity, Benevolence.

Also known by a single group are the Modern Woodmen of America, noted in Hornell in 1883. Originally open to all religions, agnostics, and atheists, the goal was to build community and provide family security, but even well into the 20th century only whites were admitted. They also excluded the actuarily-worrisome, such as city dwellers, miners, railway workers, and aeronauts (sorry, Mr. Curtiss). Philanthropy, insurance, and fraternal life are still Woodmen priorities. A crossed axe and hammer is a common symbol. Sometimes there are very picturesque gravestones in the form of a tree stump, or stumps carved on a traditional stone, but I don’t know of any locally.

Cameron Mills, Hammondsport, Bath, and Wayland had Improved Order of Red Men “Tribes.” Inspired by the Boston Tea Party “Mohawks,” Red Men used pseudo-Indian ranks and terminology. The ladies’ group is the Degree of Pocahontas, with Degree of Anona and Degree of Hiawatha for youth. Founded in 1834, the Red Men are still active as a patriotic fraternity, with Alzheimer’s research as a national charity emphasis. At least three presidents (Harding and both Roosevelts) were Red Men. Their motto is “Freedom, Friendship, Charity.” The abbreviation TOTE (Totem of the Eagle) sometimes appears. There’s still a tribe in Watkins Glen.

Founded in 1877, the Supreme Council of the Royal Arcanum had groups in Bath and Hornell. While excluding Asians and atheists, otherwise their male membership was theoretically wide open. Loyal Ladies of the Royal Arcanum were the auxiliary, and the motto was “Mercy, Virtue, Charity.” A crown is a common symbol.

The Knights of Honor, founded in 1873, by 1891 had groups in Addison, Bath, Campbell, Caton, Corning, and Hornell. The Knights had a robust system of sickness and death benefits, and also assisted non-member victims of yellow fever. There seems to be no connection with the computer game of the same name, but the current Knights of Honor stress “a brotherhood of secret knowledge, self-improvement and mutual aid.”

The Ancient Order of United Workmen had groups in Addison, Bath, Canisteo, Erwin, Hornellsville, Howard, and Wayland. Founded in 1868, this fraternity developed insurance and benefits for workingmen – a startling idea at the time. The auxiliary was the Degree of Honor. In its early days, the Order was whites only. They often used the symbol of a shield and anchor.

Independent Order of Odd Fellows had their bicentennial last year. The Daughters of Rebekah are the ladies’ auxiliary, with Theta Rho and Loyal Sons of the Junior Order as youth groups. There are now 10,000 lodges worldwide – none in Steuben, though there were groups in Addison, Avoca, Bath, Canisteo, Cohocton, Corning, Wayland, Hornell, and Woodhull. The 1819 organization did not start out segregated, but split into black and white organizations in 1842. In 1910 African American men founded a lodge of the parallel Grand Union Order of Odd Fellows in Painted Post.

Odd Fellows halls were once prominent features of America’s landscape, including locally… they helped build the old Addison village hall, in exchange for use of the fourth floor. You may find chains of three links depicted on buildings or gravestones, and/or the initials F L T, for Friendship, Love, and Truth. The initials I.O.O.F. are also found, while “Rebekahs” or “Daughters of Rebekah” appear on a great many gravestones. Eleanor Roosevelt was a Rebekah, while Franklin was a Fellow, along with five other presidents going back to Buchanan. So were Robert Byrd, Charlie Chaplin, Charles A. Lindbergh, and Wyatt Earp. The closest lodge today is in Geneva.

The great days of “joining” seem to be over, and with them has passed the heyday of “the lodge.” But not too long ago, the lodge loomed large in the hearts and lives of Americans.

Masons and Grangers

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Americans used to be “joiners.” In the days when there wasn’t much social safety net, and you couldn’t even call a fire truck or an ambulance from the next village, you depended on your neighbors, and they depended on you. You also socialized with them, whether you liked them or not.
While some joined churches, fire companies, or literary clubs, many Americans enthusiastically signed up for fraternal groups. Besides their social function they provided for mutual aid and benefit… especially for sickness and funerals, which could quickly ruin a family. Groups often also assisted non-members in the community.
Many groups espoused a generic religiosity, and for some members that substituted for creed-driven denominations. Because of that vagueness, the secrecy, and the fear of lodges becoming political and economic power bases, some church denominations banned their members from joining. An early Bath mob attacked the Masonic lodge, burning their records in the alley and putting them out of business for decades.
Most groups enjoyed exotic regalia, portentous titles, and secret ceremonies, adding a dimension of entertainment to a community-service organization. This also entertained non-members, and “the lodge” became a go-to staple of comedy.
Unfortunately the secret aspects created a vacuum which suspicious, frightened, or hostile imaginations hastened to fill. Many early leaders of the United States were Freemasons, as were many early leaders of Mormonism, and of the French Revolution. An entire industry emerged to “reveal” (or invent) conspiracies by the secret societies.
Most groups were male only (with ladies’ auxiliaries), and whites only – though some had companion African Americans groups. The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s drew on long-standing lodges for its organization and practice. Some groups partnered with the Klan to sell real estate for whites-only planned developments in the Florida Land Boom.
Here in our area, the two biggest lodges were Masons and Grange.
Francis McDowell of Wayne was one of eight founders of the National Grange, and Grange listed 44 Steuben branches in their 1935 directory. The wheat sheaf is their symbol, and the words P of H (Patrons of Husbandry) also appear. Grange was co-ed from the start, and the youth arm is Junior Grange. Franklin Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Norman Rockwell were Grangers.
Looking just at Steuben County, the national website lists current Granges in Addison, North Cameron, Bath, Towlesville, Canisteo, Stephens Mills, and Wheeler, plus the county-level Pomona Grange. Grange has a strong presence at almost every county fair in America, and they operate the Steuben County Dairy Festival. You don’t have to be a farmer to be in Grange, but the association has been so strong that numbers have dwindled along with the agricultural population – locally and nationwide, many Granges are endangered.
Freemasonry (of various stripes) goes back to the earliest days of our region’s white occupancy. The 1891 Steuben County directory showed 28 groups, including nine (!) in Hornellsville and one each in such small towns as Rathbone, Troupsburg, Dansville, Greenwood, and Woodull. The nymasons.org site currently lists lodges in Avoca, Addison, Corning-Painted Post, Bath, Hammondsport (Glenn Curtiss was a member), South Dansville-Wayland, and Greenwood. They have their own building at Steuben County Fairgrounds, but the former Scottish Rite Cathedral in Corning is probably our most prominent Masonic feature.
So prevalent was Masonry that its terminology became common speech – hoodwink, on the level, on the square, and third degree all started out in the lodge.
There have been at least 14 Masonic presidents, from Washington to Ford. Order of the Eastern Star is the auxiliary, with DeMolay for boys and Order of the Rainbow for girls. Their most common symbol is the square and compass, and you will often find Eastern Star carvings or medallions in cemeteries.
Many of the fraternal orders still exist, but numbers have suffered severely as Americans have lost their enthusiasm for “joining,” along with their yen for costumes and secret rituals. In many ways the “service clubs” – Lions, Rotary, Jaycees, Kiwanis, Zonta, Quota, and more – have taken their place.

Keuka Lake Legends

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As the story goes…

A Seneca man watched helpless and horrified as a freak storm sprang up on Keuka Lake, capsizing a canoe and killing his enture family. Filled with anger he cursed the lake, saying that though it might take people’s lives, it would never take their bodies. And from that day to this, those who are lost always rise before long to the surface of Keuka.

So the old tale goes, anyway. All communities have myths and legends that have grown up over the years… some amusing, some inspiring, some a little frightening. On Keuka Lake, legends abound.

One is the story that Red Jacket, the Seneca leader and orator, was born on Keuka Lake. There was certainly a Keuka connection – Red Jacket’s mother lived in the Branchport area, at least in her later years, and he used to visit her there. Red Jacket Park in Penn Yan honors his memory.

I checked four sources, and found three birthplaces. We understand that Red Jacket said he’d been born on Keuka — but at other times, he said he’d been born in other places. He was a supreme politician, of course; perhaps at times he tailored his tale to fit his audience.

This leads to a similar legend that Henry Flagler was born, or at least lived, in Hammondsport. Flagler was the driving force behind the development of Florida – notably the Florida East Coast Railroad, Miami, and Miami Beach. Flagler’s father was a Presbyterian minister, and Hammondsport Presbyterian Church had a Flagler as minister in the mid-1800s. But it was a different Flagler, not Henry’s father.

Then there’s the tale of Viking fortifications. A line of large stones stretches along one section of Keuka Bluff. An old local story is that they’re ruins of a fort, built by exploring Vikings.

This always seemed a little unlikely to me. But just for fun, I asked regional historian J. Sheldon Fisher (then in his nineties, but still as busy as I was, half a century younger) for his opinion. Shel was never shy about interpretations that other people considered a stretch, but his take on the Viking ruins was swift and sure: “It looked to me like somebody rolled the big rocks down the slope to get rid of them.”

Jerusalem’s pioneer prophetess Jemima Wilkinson supposedly once told her flock that she would demonstrate miraculous powers by walking on the water of Keuka Lake. At the appointed time and place she asked the gathered enthusiasts if they had faith that she could do as she proposed. When they shouted that they did, she said that since they had faith, they didn’t need proof, and went on home dry-shod.

So the story goes, anyhow. But other versions place the event on half a dozen other bodies of water, including Waneta Lake and Seneca Lake. So it’s probably a fairy tale told by unbelievers to poke fun at Jemima and her followers.

Another legend concerns the old Hammondsport Academy building, currently apartments. On the lower level along the Main Street side a set of built-in bleacher-like seats leads down toward a high-sided rectangular “well.” The legend is that this space was a swimming pool. The reality is that it was an awkwardly-placed gym and basketball court.

A set of linked stories claims that young Glenn Curtiss, overexcited on creating his first motorcycle, ran out of gas far from town and had to push the machine back (having forgotten fuel consumption), or that he had to stop by driving it into the lake (alternatively, a tree), having forgotten brakes.
These stories are told affectionately, but they royally annoyed Curtiss, who firmly, if not forcefully, denied them. Curtiss even as a child was famed for meticulous planning — they said he’d think for half an hour before doing fifteen minutes of work — so it seems pretty unlikely that he would be so spectacularly dense. But those stories are now on their second century of making their rounds, and they’ll probably continue to be told. It’s Keuka Lake, after all. Legends abound.

Presidential Rejects (5) Donald Trump

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Secret Service speeded up George W. Bush’s inaugural parade in 2001 because hostile crowds were throwing raw eggs at his limousine.

When Donald Trump was inaugurated in 2017, there were demonstrations against him on all seven continents, including Antarctica – where no one actually lives, but where tourists and scientists marched out onto the polar icecap to make their feelings known.

Trump and Bush, like three presidents before them, had suffered the indignity of moving into the White House after being rejected by the voters. It was legal, constitutional, ridiculous, and anti-democratic. It’s unsurprising that people were angry that they’d been cheated of their choice.

John Quincy Adams became president after weeks of maneuvering in the House of Representatives. Hayes’s election was stolen (partly by a special commission), and Bush’s was at least finagled (for which the Supreme Court perhaps shares some blame). Harrison and Trump got in more staidly, losing the election but getting in anyhow, because of the way the state-by-state totals drove the undemocratic electoral college. (Some states get more electors that their population warrants, and more than their voter turnout warrants.)

Rutherford B. Hayes made clear from the start that he would not run for a second term, showing a dignity unusual for his era. Benjamin Harrison, on the other hand, announced that obviously God had made him president, overruling the voters. (The voters beat God on their next matchup, four years later.)

Bush continued the God-made-me-president routine, but Trump went one better, crowing that he had actually WON the election – and by the biggest landslide in history! When even his followers proved unable to swallow this, he backtracked to say he had won the biggest ELECTORAL COLLEGE landslide in history, which of course also wasn’t even close to true.

Many of Trump’s religious followers point out that Trump was behind in the polls, and even lost the election, so clearly God intervened to make him president despite the voters. St. Augustine, almost 2000 years ago, pointed out that you can’t know God’s will from events on earth, but anyhow that would also suggest that God had intervened to put Hitler in power. He too had no experience, had been rejected by the voters, and had then been slipped into office constitutionally but undemocratically.

Like Harrison, Bush, and even Quincy Adams, Trump has spent a lot of time and energy trying to ram his rejected policies, programs, and appointments down the throats of resentful voters. He was the most unpopular candidate since we started polling (Hillary Clinton was second-most), and he hasn’t helped himself any since getting into the White House. Rather than trying to win others to his side, he’s instead dedicated himself to excoriating and antagonizing them.

This no doubt says more about his personality and emotional state than it does about any governing skills he might have, but it’s of a piece with (though far more extreme than) the behavior of his two predecessor Reject Presidents. Having gotten into the White House (constitutionally) after being rejected, all three have reacted with entitlement and arrogance. It would have been far more sensible to react with embarrassment, and far better yet to react with humility.

Rather than parading themselves as the elect of God, and expecting us to kneel down before them, they might have gone to the nation and spoken along these lines.

*The election is over, and under our constitutional system I will be your president for the next four years. This places me in an awkward position… for by your votes you have made clear that you don’t want me to be your president. You chose my opponent instead.

*Even so, under our constitution I will take office in January, and I intend to fulfill my constitutional duties. I also intend to stay true to my convictions.

*But in addition to that, I intend to do a lot of listening – honest listening, not just meetings for the show of it. You haven’t so much rejected me as rejected my programs. We need to work together. I need to work with you the voters, and I need to work with our elected representatives in Congress. Together we need to govern and legislate with compromise – compromise that surely won’t completely satisfy any of us, but compromise that we can agree on, live with, and work with, as Americans together, together wanting the best for our nation and our world.

*One more thing I promise you: on January 21, the first full day of my term, I will send a message to congress asking for a constitutional amendment to abolish our troublesome and undemocratic electoral college. When we vote four years from now, I want us to be voting directly for president for the first time in our history. Maybe I’ll be back in the Oval Office after that election. Maybe it will be someone else. But whoever it is will be there for the best of all possible reasons, and the only sensible reason: because the American people chose him – or her.

A reject president who approaches his people that way… instead of lording it over them like the kings of the gentiles… will garner great good will with which to govern. He or she will go down in history as a person who strive to unite a divided people. And he or she will be the very last reject president.