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Tuesday, July 28, 2015
* 13 Months Ago: School Board
By Don’s Early Light:
Army of One Protests
Coach’s Departure
Retired Hartford school teacher Paul Keane sits along Route 14 on June, 20, 2014 in White River Junction, Vt., with a sign urging football coach Mike Stone not to leave. Keane is a member of the Hartford School Board. Valley News - Jennifer Hauck
Hartford High football coach Mike Stone addresses his team during a break in an Aug. 24 scrimmage at Hanover. Valley News - Tris Wykes
White River Junction — Paul Keane is fed up, and he’s not going to take it any more.
The former Hartford High English teacher and current member of the School Board was so upset over the news of football coach Mike Stone’s resignation earlier this week that he took to the streets Friday to publicly show his displeasure.
First Friday morning and then again later in the afternoon, Keane manned his post on the corner of Hartford Avenue and Maple Street in White River Junction to show his support for Stone, the longtime Hartford football coach who announced earlier this week that he was leaving his post after 28 years.
“I don’t care if I’m allowed to do this or not,” said Keane, alternately waving to people honking their horns in support or waving a sign saying, ‘Coach Stone Please Stay.’
“I feel we were remiss in that we didn’t listen to rumors of Stone’s dissatisfaction.
“I should have asked the board to find out what we needed to do to keep him. I feel it was my inexperience that actually made him feel hung out to dry.”
Keane sounded the alarm in an email earlier this week when news of Stone’s resignation came public.
“I hope the chaos surrounding the rec bond did not push him into this,” wrote Keane.
It was a sentiment shared by many in the Hartford community. And the reason for Keane’s public stand.
The team’s weight room is now disassembled, forcing players to seek other avenues for their workouts — locations that charge for what once was free.
Then there was the problem with the bond that raised $3.25 million for constructing a new track, all-weather turf football field and field house. (A portion of those funds went to completing renovations at the middle school.)
In actuality, the recreation projects, all of which haven’t been completed — or even started — are now projected to cost closer to $4.55 million — the field house $1.55 million, the track and turf field roughly $3 million — a figure the voters couldn’t justify, signified by residents rejecting a $3 million supplemental bond at Town Meeting in March to make up the shortfall in funds needed to complete the projects.
Thus the road forward has been uncertain regarding what projects would be completed, leaving Stone and his football program out in the cold. The School Board, to this day, hasn’t decided how to expend the remaining funds from the original bond, which total $1.5 million.
“Mike would never say anything because he is such a gentleman, but we have heard about this for months ... that the problems with the field funding pushed him out.
“Maybe we can’t come up with the additional money,” Keane said. “But at least we can come up with a way to keep Stone. It’s just irritating to me that we would allow him to go without anyone trying to keep him. After all the thousands of kids he has affected, the way he has handled himself and represented the school ... now we’re going to throw all that away?”
Jessica Rushton felt the same way.
A 1988 Hartford graduate, Rushton was driving up Hartford Hill on Friday morning, when a vision caught her eye. It was Keane, sitting on a hard-backed chair next to his classic 1984 T-top Camaro Z-28. He was a sight that could stop traffic, with a broad-brimmed sun hat shielding his face, holding his large plastic sign.
Rushton had just been talking about Stone when she saw the sign. She immediately turned around and stopped to visit with Keane.
“I think it’s awesome what you are doing,” she told Keane. “He was my teacher,” she said of Stone. “He’s just the best.”
Rushton related a story of how she had left the area following Hartford graduation, returning three years ago. “I ran into Coach Stone at the store, and he remembered me by name — after all that time,” she said.
“My son is going into high school next year, and I’m just so upset he won’t have Mr. Stone as his teacher.”
A lot of people in town are feeling that exact sentiment.
And by the number of horns serenading him as the cars drove by — including Kevin Christie, chairman of the School Board, and Alex DiFelice, co-chairman of the Select Board — people in Hartford are feeling Keane’s pain, too. He hopes the support can start a local groundswell that might change Stone’s mind — or at least bring the matter out into the public eye.
“I just want to raise the issue and see what we can do,” said Keane. “If I can’t (lead the protest), let them fire me. I don’t give a damn. But friendship is more important than politics."
Don Mahler can be reached at dmahler@vnews.com or 603-727-3225.
Monday, July 27, 2015
* Cuba's Jurassic Parking Lot
Cuba, diplomatically unfrozen after 50 years, is more than an economic treasure for investors now that the Cuban flag flies over an embassy in Washington. It is an automobile time capsule. And it should be preserved as such, like the San Francisco cable cars, with vintage cars cruising alongside the modern vehicles that will flow into Cuba.
It’s an automotive Jurassic Park, with dinosaur cars long extinct in the rest of the world still roaming in a time warp created by the embargo that prevented Cubans from importing new American cars for 50 years. Ah, politics! Creator of such a strange beauty, at least beauty to my mind. Cubans had no choice but to make do with the cars they had in 1960, the year the embargo was imposed by the United States. The Ford Edsel, produced only from 1958-1960, squeaked in under the wire
Every time I watch a news snippet showing Cuban streets, I see the cars I grew up with. I can identify by sight instantly every car from 1949-1960 — practically the entire automotive inventory of Cuba’s traffic in 2015.
Cars were my life when I was a kid. Every September I would ride my bike a mile on Whitney Avenue and stand in front of Ekblade Oldsmobile’s showroom in Centerville, Conn., hoping to see the new model for the next year. Sometimes it took days of wasted bike trips before the new car appeared. But once it did, you had a preview of four other GM cars that were variations on the theme: Chevy, Pontiac, Buick, Cadillac. The same went for DeSoto: Once you saw that new model, the rest of the Chrysler models were simply variations: Plymouth, Dodge, Chrysler, Imperial.
I’ve heard that Hollywood studios each year purchase and save samples of every model of car, and have been doing it going back to the 1920s. But film industry automobile preservation doesn’t help average citizens much, even if they could go to a Hollywood museum and look at all those models, which as far as I know, they can’t.
Sixty years ago, my brother and I, constantly chauffeured to one place or another in my parents’ second-hand 1954 Nash (which happily I still see today on Superman reruns) would play the game of “Name the make and year of that car” as traffic drove by: ’49 Chevy stick shift; ’53 Buick, with dynaflow automatic transmission that almost growled (we called it super-slush, it was so slow); ’55 two-tone Ford with the long chrome checkmark dividing the colors (white and turquoise was sweet).
Or a ’56 Oldsmobile, hydramatic transmission (much faster than dynaflow); ’57 Plymouth, with the fantastic swept wings on the back looking like shark fins, and pushbutton automatic transmission; and, most fantastic of all — the ’59 Cadillac with gigantic swept wings and a wrap-around windshield back and front. If you owned that model it meant you were “rich,” driving what was sort of an American royal carriage. It also had two chrome “Mae West” front bumpers that really bumped. Today they would be politically incorrect.
The 1958 Oldsmobile was the most chromed-up car of all time: It seemed it had a musical score sheet minus a G-cleff sign in chrome on its fender and doors.
Does anyone know what I’m talking about? Go to Cuba and you will see.
That’s why I suggest that we baby boomers well into our nostalgia years create a new living, moving, chugging, sputtering, clunking museum called the Cuban Automotive Preservation Society (CAPS). It would be a kind of Car Disneyworld of Cuba, complete with dents and smog. As at Disneyworld, you would have to pay an entry fee, and then, a la Uber, you could order by cellphone a driver with the car of your choice: a ’49 Packard stick shift with a flat 8 engine, a ’56 DeSoto, with pushbutton drive, or a ’59 Cadillac convertible with its machete-like fins. Of course, Ralph Nader’s seatbelts would have to be added for safety.
Take a vacation to Cuba and ride real dinosaurs from my childhood. Walt Disney: Where are you when we need you?
Paul Keane lives in Hartford. He drives a 1984 vintage Z-28 Camaro T-Top.
Thursday, July 23, 2015
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
* Jurassic Park on Wheels in Cuba
Cars were my life when I was a kid. Every September I would ride my bike a mile on Whitney Avenue Pontiac Plymouth
I understand that Hollywood
producers each year purchase and save ten samples of every car and every model
of car going back to the 1920’s. Scenes
in the 1974 Robert Redford film The Great
Gatsby for instance used those cars on the actual Riverside
Drive New
York ’s Mayor’s office closed for a day or two for Hollywood filming.
Sixty years ago my brother and I, constantly chauffeured to one place or another in my parents’
second-hand, 1954 Nash (which happily I
still see today on Superman re-reruns)
would play the game of “Name the make
and year of that car” as the traffic drove by: ’49 Chevy stick shift; ‘53
Buick, with dynaflow automatic transmission that almost growled (we called it
super-slush it was so slow) ; ’55
two-tone Ford with the long chrome check-mark, on fenders and door dividing the colors
(white and turquoise was sweet);
If you owned that Cadillac it meant you were “rich”, driving what was sort of an American royal carriage back in 1959. It also had two chrome “Mae West” front bumpers that really bumped. Today they would be politically incorrect.
That’s why I suggest that we baby boomers well into our
nostalgia-years create a new living, moving, chugging, sputtering,
clunking museum called the Cuban Automotive Preservation Society (CAPS). It would be a kind of Car Disneyworld of Cuba, complete with dents
and smog. Like Disneyworld, you would
have to pay an entry fee, and then, like Uber, you could order by cell phone a driver with
the car of your choice: a ’49 Nash
stick-shift, or a ’56 Desoto, with pushbutton drive; or a ’59 Cadillac
convertible with its machete–like fins. Of course Ralph Naders seat belts would
have to be added for safety. even if
they are an anachronism.
Take a vacation to Cuba
Sunday, July 19, 2015
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
Monday, July 13, 2015
* Fallen Fathers: Atticus and Heathcliff
by
Paul Keane
Lee has turned her fictional white paragon of fatherhood and
racial fairnesss, 52-year-old lawyer Atticus Finch (remember Gregory Peck?) ,
into a 72-year-old rheumatic Atticus , who has attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting,
complains about NAACP lawyers and bad mouths integration. Or so the New
York Times reviewer with early access to Ms. Lee’s long awaited novel, Go Set a Watchman, tells us.
The same week that the
Times reviewed the novel Watchman, Bill Cosby, the actor, who created America’s most beloved
black father, Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable, on The
Bill Cosby Show, destroyed his own
creation by admitting under oath that he purchased qualudes decades ago to give
to women from whom he sought sexual favors, as a way of making them less
resistant. Over forty women have claimed
they were victims of Cosby’s ruse.
Some say this admission makes him a serial rapist, a far
worse offense than the transformation of
white Atticus Finch from a noble defense attorney for a falsely accused
black rapist in the 1930’s in To Kill a Mockingbird,
into a unpleasant segregationist twenty years later in Watchman of 1957. Atticus of 1957 merely troubles the heart of his
now 26 year old daughter Scout. Cosby has troubled our nation and manhood
itself.
After all, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black was a member of
the Ku Klux Klan as was longtime Senate majority leader, Robert Byrd. The Mockingbird
Atticus may have been a pure hearted lawyer, but that was in 1937 ten years before a president would have
the courage to integrate the armed forces. All that time the soul of the
Atticus of 1957 Watchman was being
corrupted by racist ideation. Or so we
are left to conclude from the New York
Times’ preview of Lee’s novel.
And add the race ingredient of Hemmings being African
American, and a slave ---not an employee—and you have a situation similar to
Cosby’s. Instead of qualudes overcoming
sexual resistance you have the
intoxication of power doing so. Some old
fashioned romantics would call that
love.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there were pure hearts without racism
in the past : William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Ralph Waldo
Emerson, for example. But they lived in
the 1830’s before we institutionalized racism as a national policy and then
rehearsed it for 100 years with separate but equal scenarios in the armed forces, restaurants, schools, buses and
bathrooms, pretending all the while that treating others as if they were
contaminated was a just and right thing to do.
It is that 100 years which weighs on us, slowly corrupting even an
Atticus.
Yes racism can invade even the pure and noble heart of a
great white father, and the Atticus of Mockingbird, the Atticus portrayed by
Gregory Peck, was great, and white, and a father. That is what Harper Lee’s new---first
---novel Watchman may tell us: Even the great father can be corrupted.
But before our own era of Jim Crow segregation, the 100
years of plantation owners having their
way with women slaves, cannot exonerate or mitigate the behavior of Bill
Cosby. His fall from grace is not merely
on the printed pages of a long hidden text.
It is printed on the hearts of all of us who wanted to believe in a
great black father, one who came into our living rooms on a television screen
every week for years. We found instead
the dark heart of another twisted male huckster.
The answer is in the pronoun.
Maleness has come to represent something troubling in our
world from fraternities to the halls of Congress, to statehouses.
A corrupted Atticus Finch and a corrupted Bill Cosby are not
that far apart: Fathers fallen from the hearts of those who wanted to love
them, on the printed page and the flickering screen. Fallen because they live
not in Oprah’s ideal world of hope, but in the real world of broken males.
* Rebonni----------------Teacher: Rowan A. Greer
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| Rowan A. Greer III |
What would prompt a renowned scholar of Patristics to agree to write an introduction ( below) to a student authored journal of satirical essays at Yale Divinity School entitled Holy Smoke?
Perhaps Professor Christopher Beeley, who succeeded Mr. Greer at Yale, suggests the answer in his obituary tribute: A Generous Scholar-Priest.
"Many noted how willingly he attended to the least scholarly students as much as the brightest lights. He had a gift for drawing out the genius in even the most ignorant question, teaching
you so subtly and charitably as to almost hide the fact that you didn't already know it."
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| Mr. Greer and devoted companion. |
Professor Christopher Beeley
Yale Divinity School
July 10, 2015
Dear Mr. Beeley:
I read with great satisfaction your tribute to Rowan Greer which I discovered only today on the Internet.
I was particularly pleased that you did justice to him as meticulous scholar and believer. And as aloof from the academic fads of the moment.
As Letty Russell once averred with a mixture of impatience and (I suspect) respect : "Rowan Greer lives in the third century ".
True.
That made seeing him in tennis garb on the YDS courts all the more amazing ---- not quite a priest on skateboard , but close.
You rightly spoke of his devotion to the average student.
Almost my first class with him at YDS in 1976 as an M. Div candidate, I knocked on his office door and confessed my doubts that I was too secular and too untutored in the the Bible to succeed at YDS.
Had I made a mistake? Would I flunk out?
He calmed me down and reassured me : "There are three grades at YDS --- Pass, High Pass and Honors. High Pass is what everyone gets".
And then he added: "The hardest thing about the place is getting in."
If that didn't calm me down his unflappably mellifluous voice made it clear.
I relaxed.
And when later that year I began publishing a controversial essay sheet called "Holy Smoke: Opinionation from Holy Hill" Mr. Greer was one of the few faculty members who would allow himself to be seen reading it attentively at coffee hour.
Occasionally he would even praise my writing.
I don't know how it began but we exchanged Christmas cards for decades until two years ago when I wrote a follow up to see what was wrong.
He wrote back in his impeccable and tiny script, on the same plain folded sheet he used for decades, that he had been "hit by a truck" while walking the dog . (We had both shared our dog stories over the years.) I was flabbergasted.
He also mentioned that this accident had "set him back" from which comment I gathered he had been recuperating from something else prior to the accident. "Old age" was all he offered.
I knew better than to pry and sent my best wishes.
I did not hear from him this year until I scoured the Net today and found your wonderful tribute.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Paul D. Keane , '80
M.A, M.Div., M.Ed.
M.A, M.Div., M.Ed.
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