as the wind
Living Sherlock Holmes
Richard Walter of Montrose, Pa. is the world’s best detective on the world’s worst murders, and stars in an ABC Special based on The Murder Room, a new book by our publisher.
By Michael Capuzzo
By Kay Barrett
By Joyce M. Tice
The Murder Room
By Michael Capuzzo
Richard Walter of Montrose, Pa. is the world’s best detective on the world’s worst murders, and stars in an ABC Special based on The Murder Room, a new book by our publisher.
By Angela Cannon-Crothers
By Fred Metarko
The Lunker
By John & Lynne Diamond-Nigh
By Dawn Bilder
Two guys and one karaoke system make a lot of happy faces.
Top: The living Sherlock Holmes, Richard Walter. Middle: Ed Bellinger singing George Jones at the Green Home. Bottom: Barber chair at Spencer’s Barber Shop that has seen many a haircut. Cover art by Tucker Worthington.
By Matt Connor
The Endless Mountain Music Festival and other local events bring the sound of music back to the region.
P ublisher
Michael Capuzzo
e ditor - in - C hief
By Cornelius O’Donnell
A little Greene in the kitchen never hurts.
By Jennifer Cline
K.C. Larson makes a bright future for renewable energy.
By Dave Milano
Sleeping in is oh so sweet on a vacation day.
Teresa Banik Capuzzo
A sso C i A te P ublisher
George Bochetto, Esq.
M A n A ging e ditor
Kay Barrett
C o P y e ditors
Mary Nance, Kathleen Torpy
s t A ff W riter
Dawn Bilder
C over A rtist
Tucker Worthington
P r odu C tio n M A n A ger / g r AP hi C d esigner
Amanda Doan-Butler
C ontri buting W riters
Kay Barrett, Dawn Bilder, Sarah Bull, Angela Cannon-Crothers, Jennifer Cline, Matt Connor, Barbara Coyle, John & Lynne Diamond-Nigh, Patricia Brown Davis, Steve Hainsworth, Martha Horton, Holly Howell, David Ira Kagan, Roberta McCulloch-Dews, Cindy Davis Meixel, Suzanne Meredith, Fred Metarko, Karen Meyers, Dave Milano, Tom Murphy, Mary Myers, Jim Obleski, Cornelius O’Donnell, Audrey Patterson, Gary Ranck, Kathleen Thompson, Joyce M. Tice, Linda Williams
P hotogr AP hy
James Fitzpatrick, Ann Kamzelski
s A les r e P resent A tives
Christopher Banik, Michele Duffy
b e A gle Cosmo
Mountain Home is published monthly by Beagle Media LLC, 39 Water st., Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, 16901. Copyright 2010 Beagle Media LLC. All rights reserved.
to advertise, subscribe or provide story ideas phone 570-724-3838 or e-mail info@mountainhomemag.com. Each month copies of Mountain Home are available for free at hundreds of locations in tioga, Potter, Bradford, Lycoming, union, Clinton, Wyoming, and sullivan counties in Pennsylvania; steuben, Chemung, schuyler, Yates, seneca, tioga, and Ontario counties in New York. Visit us at www.mountainhomemag.com.
Get Mountain Home at home. For a one-year subscription to Mountain Home (12 issues), send $24.95, payable to Beagle Media LLC, to 39 Water st., Wellsboro, PA 16901.
LOOK FOr Home & Real Estate magazine wherever Mountain Home magazine is found.
the Last Great Place
A Book Born in Wellsboro
Michael Capuzzo
Wellsboro (pop. 3,242) has a diner, sandwich, and coffee shops right out of a Norman Rockwell painting, and I am grateful for that. Just off Main Street, the Native Bagel became my second home, a place to sit over coffee and write my latest book, The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases (Gotham Books/ Penguin Books, in stores nationwide August 10). Sue Cummings’s sandwiches kept me alive,
and her sandwich place also sheltered the 20,000 monthly copies of Mountain Home —back with the bags of coffee and stirrers—so we could deliver them from the Finger Lakes to the Susquehanna River valley.
A 426-page book that takes five years to finish—the story of three famous detectives and their partners and a dozen real-life murder cases over twenty years—accumulates a lot of thank yous. The most important page is the first one, blank but for two words: For Teresa. My wife Teresa Banik Capuzzo somehow edited Mountain Home with one hand and The Murder Room with another. Dawn Bilder, Mountain Home ’s gifted staff writer, interviewed Richard Walter at his home in Montrose, Pa. for this month’s cover story. Like Dawn, Amanda Doan-Butler, the magazine’s production manager, and artist Tucker Worthington were forces of life-giving nature for us and the magazine.
Sue’s coffee can’t
be held responsible for bad reviews. It’s early, but so far the reviews are good. Kirkus Reviews said—is “Terrifying, engrossing, inspirational and surprisingly funny.” Michael Connelly, the bestselling thriller writer who penned Blood Work (made into the Clint Eastwood movie), called it “a gripping page-turner, masterfully drawn and full of truth, dedication, and darkness.” John Walsh, host of America’s Most Wanted , found “some of the most exciting detective work I’ve ever read in The Murder Room .”
My last book—the New York Times bestseller Close to Shore —was an historical thriller about the true 1916 shark attack that inspired Jaws . This time I went looking for, and found, deadlier predators.
The Murder Room is the true story of the Vidocq Society, a private club of great detectives from around the world who meet monthly in Philadelphia in an old Victorian dining room to examine cold murders over a hot gourmet lunch – before crossing the country as secretive agents, pro bono, to catch the diabolical killers ordinary cops can’t handle. Named for 19th Century Paris sleuth Eugene Francois Vidocq, it’s the world’s most exclusive club, open only to great detectives—from Scotland Yard, Interpol, NYPD, the FBI, private eyes, pathologists, the finest forensic specialists on the planet, men and women who
I’m eager to hear your story. I’m looking for new tale to chase down for the next few years.
would rather volunteer to hunt cold killers than chase a golf ball. The Vidocq Society is CSI to the tenth power, and it’s real.
The book revolves around the society’s three founding detectives: gaunt, Kools-addicted forensic psychologist Richard Walter; forensic artist Frank Bender of Philadelphia, an earthly psychic who with Walter forms perhaps the greatest detective duo alive—when they can stand each other. The twosome tracked down one of the 20th Century’s worst mass murderers, John List, in less than two weeks after the feds couldn’t catch the No. 1 Most Wanted fugitive for seventeen years. Then there’s the Vidocq Society’s leader William Fleisher, a tough, emotional, idealistic FBI agentturned-Philadelphia private eye who inspires the Vidocq Society to fight to redeem murder victims and families, and draws on forensic connections around the world to solve crimes—all while keeping his two eccentric-genius partners from destroying one another.
I was on NBC’s Today Show the day Close to Shore came out, but the early media response was nothing like this. ABC News is filming a special one-hour edition of 20/20 about The Murder Room —featuring me and the Vidocq founders as they work murder cases in Texas, Oregon, and elsewhere— with hopes of making it a series. The ABC special tentatively airs at 10 p.m. Friday, August 13. I’ll also be interviewed on NPR on “Fresh Air with Terry Gross” and on Weekend Edition . You can read an excerpt from The Murder Room , “Who Killed My Son?” in the August Reader’s Digest at stores now. USA Today named it one of the summer’s “Thirty Hottest Books.”
I’ll be on a book tour with stops including New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Houston, and Phoenix. When I get back, we’re having a reading and a party at the Penn Wells Hotel in Wellsboro, with the “living Sherlock Holmes” in attendance. I’d love to see you there. Or stop by the Mountain Home offices, 39 Water Street, Wellsboro, to chat. I can’t sell books but I can sign a copy, and I’m eager to hear your story. I’m looking for a new tale to chase down.
Dawn Bilder, staff writer, Mountain Home .
MO u N t AIN Ch A
Race Fever at the Gallery
Watkins Glen and racing are synonymous, so it is no surprise that the Franklin Street Gallery and Gift Shop will be displaying The Art of Racing from August 1 to September 30 in celebration of the area’s biggest tourist attraction.
The exhibit will feature paintings by Sid Mann and photographs by Robert Gillespie that are centered on racing in Watkins Glen. An opening reception for the display will take place on August 13 and will give the public a chance to chat and interact with the artists.
The Art of Racing reception will also include the guitar stylings of Todd Stratton and wine and cheese tasting by Lakewood Vineyards and Sunset View Creamery. The reception is free and open to the public from 5:00 to 6:30 p.m.
The Franklin Street Gallery is operated by The Arc of Schuyler and is open Friday through Monday, 11:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. and Tuesday through Thursday by appointment. The gallery displays local artist’s work and art created by artists with developmental disabilities, and also provides classes and workshops for the community. The Arc of Schuyler is a non-profit organization based in Schuyler County, New York. The organization helps provide support and services for individuals with developmental disabilities. For more information about the Franklin Street Gallery and Gift Shop call 607-535-2571. The gallery is located at 203 Twelfth Street in Watkins Glen. See “Back of the Mountain” on page 55 for a sneak peek at Sid Mann’s work. ~ Kay Barrett
Oops & Etc.
Please note for clarification that in last month’s Read & Feed, Cornelius O’Donnell was referring to James Beard’s American Cookery as arguably the chef’s best book. The title had been accidently left out.
A Highlands
Hello
Be ready to wear that tartan proudly and play those bagpipes loudly at the Dundee Scottish Festival on September 18. A new event to the area, the Dundee Scottish Festival celebrates all the merriments of Scotland in a packed day of drinking, dancing, and caber tossing.
Held at Black Rock Speedway in Dundee, the festival will feature wine and beer tasting, British and antique car show, Highland games, sheep herding demonstrations, and more. Vendors are needed and welcome. To become a vendor please visit dundeescottishfestival.com or call 607-729-8784.
Keep your eyes open for more information on this event, which benefits Yates County Christmas for the Needy Fund, in the September issue of Mountain Home
Gillespie’s depiction of Frank Griswald’s race at the Glen in 1948.
The Living
Sherlock holmeS
Great detective Richard Walter and his Vidocq Society partners solve cold murders over lunch in an acclaimed new book by our publisher – and on a one-hour ABC 20/20 special
By Michael Capuzzo
You drive east from Wellsboro on Route 6, through the lovely hills and long green views of northern Pennsylvania. Ten miles past Towanda 409 North snakes into quarry-pocked woods, narrow and dark, emerging into the lonely village of Montrose (pop. 1,827, eighty-seven less than a hundred years ago) at the “Top of the Endless Mountains”
I found the mansion of the “living Sherlock Holmes” before noon. It was the Biddle House, a grand white Victorian with seven bedrooms, rumored also to hide chambers of the Underground Railroad and the ghost of a 19th Century woman who pushed her daughter to death down the grand staircase. Richard Walter, a gaunt thin man with the face of Poe and a suit that stank of menthol Kools, greeted me at the door himself. He lived in the Biddle House alone.
My host offered me a “spot of tea” in his formal English accent. I was sitting in a Queen Anne chair in the parlor where baffled coldcase detectives and federal agents from New York and Philadelphia come to glimpse the heart of darkness. Walter set his cigarette in an overflowing ashtray and handed me a book, thick as a city phone book, documenting in color photographs the la cuisine au beurre of a London cannibal killer. Scotland Yard had rushed the book by diplomatic pouch to northern Pennsylvania, to the semi-retired forensic psychologist said to be the world’s sharpest mind on the darkest murders. Richard Walter is known from Scotland Yard to the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office to the Hong Kong Police as “the living Sherlock Holmes.”
He gave me a tour of Biddle House. On a shelf in the parlor was I Have Lived Inside the Monster, the book by legendary FBI agent Robert Ressler, whose work inspired Silence of the Lambs. It was inscribed, “To Richard, my friend and fellow monster slayer.” There was also a flattering inscription in Signature Killers
by Dr. Robert Keppel, the Ph.D. criminologist and Seattle investigator known for developing computer programs to chase down Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer. Keppel consulted with Walter on the Green River Killer Case; Keppel and Walter are renowned for describing the personality subtypes of murderers in a scientific fashion a generation more advanced than the FBI.
Nearby was the grand piano the thin man plays, classical pieces of his own creation— only when he is alone, only when he can create unique pieces no one else will hear and he will never play again—to stimulate the subconscious mind.
Walter is offended by the Holmes comparisons, which he terms “absurd.” “When I hear that I turn away as if someone in the room has just farted.”
We sat down in the parlor in facing Queen Ann chairs. Walter lit another cigarette and I sipped my tea. He invited me to turn the pages of the cannibal’s photo album. “It’s a wonderful case,” he said, eyes gleaming.
“The troublesome lad had served ten years
for murder, then the do-gooders decided he had reformed and let him out,” he continued, his aquiline nose wrinkled in distaste. “Within weeks, he’d found a girlfriend, discovered a rival for the girlfriend, and was soon driving around with the rival’s head in his trunk .
“And now this,” he added, sneering at the book of photographs. “The Yard, of course, wants to know why this happened, and they regard me as one of the few people in the world who can answer that question.” He laughed. “They know me as the guru of perversity.”
I began to turn through the killer’s album. The photographs showed the cannibal’s modest flat, his kitchen, his small white stove. An iron skillet sat on the stove, a brick of butter next to the skillet. Many close-ups showed the chopped brain and fillet of scalp with bits of dark hair with a pad of butter in the skillet. My host lectured me on the criminological and psychosocial roots of cannibalism and how it can morph into murder. He told me of a German man who advertised in the newspaper
See Holmes on page 16
The Murder Room
An exclusive Mo untain Home excerpt from Michael Capuzzo’s new book, The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases (Gotham Books, New York).
“Terrifying, engrossing, inspirational and surprisingly funny.”
~Kirkus Reviews
“Once again Michael Capuzzo shows he is one of our most brilliant storytellers. The Murder Room is a gripping page turner, masterfully drawn and full of truth, dedication and darkness.”
--Michael Connelly, New York Times bestselling author of Nine Dragons
“Brilliant forensic artist Frank Bender, a frequent star on America’s Most Wanted, joined forces with his fellow ace sleuths at the Vidocq Society to perform some of the most exciting detective work I’ve ever read in The Murder Room.”
--John Walsh, host of America’s Most Wanted
“The Murder Room is flat-out fantastic. Even better than Close to Shore, which is one of my all-time favorites. Capuzzo’s new book treats murder and the investigation of it as not just a science but an art--strange, full of wonder, terrifying and exhilarating. It is also an odyssey of true crime that lends true grace to the genre.”
--Jeff Leen, Washington Post Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Kings of Cocaine and The Queen of the Ring
PROLOGUE
The Profiler and the Priest
Hudson, Wisconsin, December 2004
The profiler would not shake hands with the priest. It was unacceptable, intolerable if he was to go in for the kill. And the profiler always went in for the kill. That was the thing that excited him most. It never ceased to enthrall him, even in retirement.
The priest had swept in, cassock whirling, smiling and pumping familiar hands, trailing an assistant “to puff himself up with more power,” the profiler noted. The Father was a large man, commanding in his black garb; bearded, youthful face cracked in a welcoming Midwestern smile. Next to him the profiler seemed shrunken, emaciated, pale as a ghost. He coughed up a lung with each cigarette, at least three times an hour. He also was an atheist, sneering and quite cynical about the whole question. But that was not the point.
The point was moral standards must be upheld as a matter of honor, a point of manhood. The more immediate point was control, and the thin man would not let the psychopath acquire it, not for a moment. Each moment in life, he believed, was a choice: a step toward good or evil, dominance or submission, authenticity or falsehood. He did not tolerate the lesser choices. He did not tolerate those who crossed the line invading common decency. This made him a lot of enemies. He was proud to have enemies. “One should never apologize for being right,” he said.
Now the big, fleshy hand near to God was outstretched toward the thin man in fellowship. The others, the police chief and two detectives, were watching.
The profiler wrinkled his aquiline nose in disgust, “as if I was being offered a piece of dog shit.” Swiftly he withdrew his hand and turned away. He was pleased to see a stricken look fleetingly cross the priest’s face. Then, “composure returned like a sheen coating the hollow man.”
It was always all about control. The profiler had instructed the chief how to introduce him. No name, no city or rank, only “this is a man from out of town who is an expert on murder.” Once the detective introduced the profiler as instructed, the thin man shook hands with the priest with Victorian courtesy, like the old-school gentleman he was. Then he sat in the corner, legs folded, lip turned in a sneer, quietly watching as the police asked the priest about the murders.
The police were no closer to an arrest than that afternoon in broad daylight when the town was shocked from a century of innocence in such matters, unimagined and unimaginable, with the execution-style murder of two prominent citizens. The police had once had eleven suspects, and now, two years later, had moved no further. The profiler studied the case file and chatted with the police for three hours before narrowing the eleven suspects to one. “It’s the priest,” he told the police. “Of course, I know you don’t want it to be the priest. Nonetheless, it’s the priest.” The thin man had appeared on the front page of the small-town newspaper declaring he was “quite confident” the mysterious murders would soon be solved. “If I were the killer,” he quipped, “I wouldn’t buy any green bananas.”
The police hadn’t known what to expect when they presented the cold case in the nineteenthcentury men’s club in Philadelphia to the world’s greatest detectives. The French flags, the walnut paneling, the chandeliers made them nervous. There was an immense, portly, bearded man with a huge head, a man of a thousand jokes they called the Grand Inquisitor; a slim, short, muscular artist, bald with a white goatee and dressed all in black, who saw dead people; and the gaunt profiler with the face of Poe. There were a hundred others, famous sleuths, the FBI agent whose movie double nails Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs, investigators of the RFK and Martin Luther King assassinations, too many to remember.
They said they’d consider taking the case, possibly organize a team.
Then one man, the thin man, got off the plane alone.
And now he watched as the priest sat before him and fielded questions from the police with dignity and poise. The priest sat erect with his elbows on the table, his hands tented as if in prayer. The detectives asked him about the young boys. The priest sat back with umbrage; the mere suggestion was an insult. The detectives pushed harder, with names and dates, until the priest had to admit to sex with the young teenagers. But the priest told the police they badly misunderstood. He was not assaulting the boys. He was teaching them sex education.
There was quiet. A detective looked to the corner and asked if the profiler had any questions.
The thin man leaned forward and removed his glasses to stare at the priest. “To begin with, if I were in charge of this investigation, you would not be wearing that costume.” He spat out the word “costume” as if it were something foul.
“I’m a priest twenty-four hours a day!” the priest objected.
The profiler gave the priest a merciless glare, and scowled in deepening disgust. “Here, you are not representing the Roman Catholic Church. Here, in fact, what you’re doing is representing a failed man.”
The priest blanched and fell silent. The police resumed their questioning about the boys. The priest repeated his educational theory, his justifications. Of course, he got them drunk first; they were too ashamed of their bodies otherwise. Then he got them excited. But he didn’t bring them to climax. He was teaching them responsible sexuality. It’s not wrong to get a hard-on, it’s wrong to use it.
The thin man’s voice rose shrilly from the corner. “Ridiculous! You’re a pervert!”
The police asked the priest to remove his
cassock. It had been the profiler’s idea. “With this sort of psychopath, we must do everything to rattle him.” Indeed the priest seemed a smaller man after he pulled off the cassock and removed the undershirt beneath. The police compared the tattoo on his shoulder with one a witness described. It was a match.
As the priest pulled his undergarment back on, and then his cassock, the profiler stood and approached him, coming very close, and gave him a death-stare. He kept staring, implacable, his eyes as cold and unrelenting as a night wind, until the priest looked down and away. Suddenly, the profiler’s heart leaped in joy, though he kept his face expressionless as a smoothed stone.
The priest was crying!
“A tear of hatred slowly trilled down his cheek,” the thin man noted. “It was quite lovely.”
They were standing two feet apart, the man of law and the man of God. As the tear dissolved into the thick beard, the big man wiped it away, then looked up into the thin man’s eyes with loathing and slowly hissed:
“God . . . damn . . . it!”
The thin man couldn’t contain himself. He was grinning openly.
“Was it a thrill to hear this man of the cloth taking the name of the Lord in vain?” Indeed it was.
“I knew then the bitch was mine.”
THE VOICE OF THE BLOOD
In the beginning of the world all hope was lost. But there were three men:
The chieftain, the warrior, the shaman.
The king, the knight, the wizard.
We tell these stories to survive. The story swirls in smoke, fabric, and music; spins in the winds of the gods and the vortex of DNA. Harvard University biologist E. O. Wilson calls such stories “The Voice of the Species”—the essential stories formed by the “epigenetic rules of human nature . . . the inborn rules of mental development.”
This tale, the most enduring in the west outside the Holy Bible, was first written down more than eight hundred years ago. Between the years 1129 and 1151 A.D. a Benedictine monk who taught at Oxford translated into Latin, at his bishop’s request, a series of ancient Celtic prophecies, Prophetiae Merlini (Prophecies of Merlin). The monk then wrote Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain), pieces of which were handed down to him from the oldest written Welsh sources, the Red Book of Hergest and the White Book of Rhydderch. In these texts can be found fragments of the first historical record of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
Who Killed My Son?
The Murder Room goes on sale at bookstores nationally on August 10th; Amazon.com and other internet sites are taking preorders. Meanwhile, if you want to read more, the August Reader’s Digest has an excerpt adapted from the book, “Who Killed My Son?” Read about the efforts of famous northern Pennsylvania consulting detective Richard Walter and the Vidocq Society as they track down a young woman psychopathic killer in Texas who got away with murder for years, and bring justice to a grieving father.
The story, as told numberless times across the centuries, begins with the world in ruins. Crops wither, even the trees are dead, “tortured bones of a perished race, of monsters no mortal knows,” the poet cries. The wounded king ails in his castle, powerless. The king cannot act without help; he needs two other men to embark on a journey, men of great and unique talents to complement his own.
Why we ceaselessly tell this story is a mystery. Scientists cannot explain why Homo sapiens must take in oxygen and release certain stories to live.
Philosophers say the ultimate source of the story is the eternal human need to find, in the words of Joseph Campbell, “the promise enshrined in the Mysteries since the beginning of the world.” The prophets say it is our pathway through trials to the grace of God. A man of action might say the relevant point of more than a million years of human trial, error, and wisdom embedded in the story is entirely practical:
When the world breaks and needs fixing, the thing to do is find the right three men.
for a man he could kill, cook, and eat—and actually found a willing volunteer. They shared a meal together before the cannibal made a meal of his guest. As a reporter I had covered murders and plane crashes and crime scenes; I was surprised when my stomach began to churn.
“Young man,” my host said, looking up as I closed the book, “would like some cookies with your tea? Chocolate chip. I bake them myself, an old recipe with some modifications, real butter, proper chemistry. They’re quite good.”
It was a lovely spring day. Over tea and cookies and photos of fried brain my host related the story of how he had moved to Pennsylvania coal country. After retiring from twenty years as a prison psychologist and consulting detective in Michigan, he traveled to Montrose in 1997 as an expert witness in the sensational murder trial of Montrose doctor Stephen Scher, convicted then (and reconvicted in 2008 on appeal) of killing his close friend, the lawyer Martin Dillon, and making off with Dillon’s wife and children. Walter prepared for the trial with his close friend and protégé Pennsylvania State Trooper Stephen Stoud, one of the principal investigators on the Sher case, who lived near Montrose with his wife and children.
After the trial ended, Walter decided to “semi-retire” in Montrose, moved from the Midwest, and bought the Biddle House. “I do not much enjoy the general run of humanity,” he said, and the small village suited him well. Most importantly, Montrose was also only 160 miles from Philadelphia, where Walter and his partners—legendary forensic artist Frank Bender and FBI agent-turned-private eye
William Fleisher—had founded the Vidocq Society, the private club of the world’s greatest detectives.
The Vidocq Society is named for 19th Century Paris detective Eugene Francois Vidocq, the “Father of Forensic Science” and the visionary forerunner of the FBI, private detective agencies, and the detective novel. It boasts members from more than nineteen American states and eleven foreign countries. You have to be one of the world’s great detectives or forensic specialists to be invited to join. Full membership is limited to 82 members, one for each year of Vidocq’s life (1775-1857).
The gathering of the Vidocq Society on the third Thursday of each month is said to represent the finest detective talent ever assembled one room. Vidocq Society Members (VSM) are Interpol agents from Lyon, France, FBI from Washington, DC, NYPD, mafiabusters, private eyes, Al Qaeda hunters, former investigators of the JFK and RFK and Martin Luther King assassinations, renowned authorities on blood spatter, forensic pathology, anthropology, etymology, pathology, arson, tax fraud, terrorism, and Satanism. Called “The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes” by The New York Times and profiled on CBS’s 48 Hours, they resemble a CSI team but real, and with far more firepower.
I spent seven years reporting their story for the nonfiction book, The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases. I watched them as arm-chair detectives, and I watched them go into the field tracking down unrepentant killers, the most diabolical and brilliant who had fooled the police, as forensic avengers, men and women who would rather die than live in a world with no possibility for justice. The story revolves around the three founders who together embody the great American detective—deductive genius Walter, the psychic artist Bender, and the Vidocq Society’s leader and Commissioner William Fleisher, a tough, emotional private eye and former FBI agent.
Fleisher, a suburban New Jersey husband, father, and grandfather who once ran U.S. Customs law enforcement in three states, is the only conventional man of the three founders, yet hardly so. He named the Vidocq Society. He
Top: Private eye and Vidocq Society Commissioner William Fleisher. Middle: Forensic artist Frank Bender sculpting the bust that caught mass murderer John List. Top: The Vidocq Society, world’s great detectives meeting in Philadelphia See Holmes on page 46
Looking Back Goodbye Allen
Joyce M. t ice
What goes up must come down. The forces of time and gravity will have their way in spite of us. So it is that on the Mansfield University campus another old landmark has reached the end of its days.
Back in 1920, the idea of a junior high school was an innovation. For the education and experience of future secondary level teachers, Mansfield’s ninth graders were removed from the high school and installed on the first floor of Alumni Hall at the Mansfield State Normal School, now Mansfield University. The following year, the seventh and eighth graders from the campus’s Model School—the campus elementary school also for teacher training— were brought in to join them.
In the fall of 1927, the same year that the Normal School became Mansfield State Teachers College, the junior high building was erected on a terraced hillside at the then eastern edge of the campus. It had a student population of 150 in 1928. New programs included vocational education in addition to the existing academic curriculum. Athletics and extra-curricular activities were also among the new ideas put into practice. It was considered unique in its dual function of educating both the youngsters of the town as well as young teachers. Eventually, seventh and eighth graders from Mainesburg and Roseville were brought in by bus.
Dr. Myron Webster was the first principal. Senior teachers in the campus junior high were called supervisors for their dual roles. They
taught the young students and also supervised the practice teaching of the college students. Miss Jessie Grigsby succeeded Dr. Webster. Dr. Richard Wilson served in that role, and Dr. Mildred Menge was the last principal when the school graduated its 33nd and final class in 1959.
In the fall of 1959, the junior high classes were relocated to the combined junior-senior high in the expanded facility still in operation on Wellsboro Street. The 1927 building was converted for college classes. The gym became a theater, and the building was named East Hall. Later the name Allen Hall was applied to it in honor of Professor Fordyce Allen, an early normal school principal and developer of teacher training in the nineteenth century.
I was in a college class in that converted building when, on that sad and sunny November day, all the church bells in town tolled for John F. Kennedy.
In its 83rd year, the old “Hillside Penitentiary,” so named by two generations of Mansfield’s children, is to be replaced by a new, modern, and larger facility under construction beside it. The new Allen Hall will serve the same function as before: theater, TV studio and film editing, art and classrooms.
It is a sad farewell for many in Mansfield, but time claims its due.
Joyce M. Tice is the creator of the Tri-Counties Genealogy and History Web site (www.joycetice. com/jmtindex.htm). She can be reached at lookingback@mountainhomemag.com.
Mansfield University soon to be demolished Allen Hall was once the Mansfiel Junior High School.
O u td O Ors Friendly Waters
Friends of the Chemung Watershed do their best to preserve a community-loved river Story
and
Photos by Angela Cannon-Crothers
Seven years ago, Jim Pfiffer was canoeing along the Chemung River in Elmira, New York when he was fortunate enough to catch an array of colors on the flowing water’s surface at sunset. He took a picture. When he developed the image, however, he was disturbed to find garbage distorting one entire corner of his shot. Pfiffer decided to put together some volunteers to clean the river banks. The group managed to haul a lot of garbage from the river (over ten tons to date) in a water system that supplies 68 percent of the local municipality’s drinking water. Pfiffer knew the garbage would just keep coming if things didn’t change.
As if by fate, Cornell Cooperative Extension announced a grant to do a study on the perception of the Chemung River around that same time. Pfiffer got involved. “People who’d lived here all their lives didn’t seem to know much about the river,” said Pfiffer. “Past floods, like the one that hit in 1972, had distorted people’s view,” he added. Quite literally, tall cement barriers lining the river edge made it difficult for anyone in the city to get to the water, or even see over the wall’s edge. As well, a water control dam has made portaging nearly impossible. In 2007, CCE obtained a follow-up grant to create a Master Plan on the use, protection, and future development of the Chemung River thus creating the Chemung River Council.
“The Master Plan was full of great ideas to help get people
connected to the river – with trails, a whitewater sluice at the dam for kayakers, picnic areas, boating derbies, concerts and ecoeducation,” said Pfiffer. “Unfortunately, there weren’t any funds to make it happen.” But Pfiffer was too hooked on the river to let the plan stall. He found financial support from Chemung County and the municipalities of Elmira, Big Flats, Southport, Chemung, Casella Waste Systems and private donations to help fund a non-profit organization to implement the Master Plan through 2013. Pfiffer quit his journalism career of 27 years and took on the director role of The Friends of the Chemung River Watershed in December 2008. Since then, the goals of the Master Plan the original Chemung River Council set up, have been roiling ahead like a river after ice break-up.
“We’re more than just the Chemung River,” Pfiffer tells me. “Because the Chemung River eventually feeds the Susquehanna and then the Chesapeake Bay, tributaries like the Cohocton, the Canisteo, Cowanesque, and Tioga, as well as the surrounding hills and valleys, are all part of the watershed.” The river’s system now includes boat and fishing access areas with kiosks explaining the unique history and qualities of each site. River and tributary hosts help maintain and check each area.
“It’s all about partnerships,” Pfiffer says as he takes me on a driving tour of all the local Chemung Friends sites along the River in Elmira. “I tell people – I want your help to improve
the environment, economy, and quality of life right in your own backyard!” That, he says, is an easy sell. We stop at Katy Leery Park Community Garden - an old dilapidated tennis court on the upper banks has been turned into a Community Garden of raised beds loaded with beans, squash, and greens with plans for berries and fruit trees to come. Teachers can utilize the garden and riverside for hands-on education. “No matter what the subject is,” says Pfiffer, “you can connect it to the river.”
At another site we visit a solar-powered weather station and barbecue pavilion with picnic tables, at yet another area we tour mountain bike and hiking trails with Tom and Carol Trifoso, who started the Finger Lakes Mountain Bike Club and help maintain and promote a section of trail. We visit future bike trails in the making, the historic Chemung River Pump House, a music concert area and an island overlook full of nesting ring-billed gulls. I’m gazing out over the river just south of the dam when I see three men out wading in the wide shallows below the dam; the rhythmic sound of heavy clinking against slate rock echoes through the air.
“What are they doing?” I ask Pfiffer. “They’re fishermen,” he tells me. “They’re banging the rocks to stun minnows so they can use them for bait.” I nod.
What: Model Huck Finn Raft Contest
When: Saturday, September 25
Additional Information: “Make a model” raft contest and derby.
Cost: $5 Entry Fee
Prizes: First place winners receive $100. Second place finishers earn $50. A $50 “Spirit of Huck Finn” award goes to the youth who builds a raft that best symbolizes Huck’s raft.
Sponsored by: the Friends of the Chemung River Watershed, Cornell Cooperative Extension’s “Farm-City Days” and the Chemung Valley History Museum.
Info: For more information and race rules, contact Lee at (607) 562-3988 or visit www.chemungriverfriends.org and click on “events” for the Huck Finn Model Raft Race details.
“There are a lot of families who depend on the fish in this river for food too,” adds Pfiffer.
I can see what Pfiffer means when he says the Chemung River connects to everything; I can feel that river running through and rolling on, from its wild areas for paddling, to its history, its trails for biking and hiking, its plentiful fishing, community activities, and opportunities for time spent in the soothing presence of flowing water. Pfiffer is right - “a river runs through us.”
Angela Cannon-Crothers is a freelance writer and outdoor educator living in the Finger Lakes region of New York.
Above: Jim Pfiffer holding a model Huck Finn raft for the rafting race. Background: Our author and her daughter, Maeya, took a canoeing trip down the Chemung River near Elmira.
Time’s Running Out
Tickets are going fast and are limited, so see a Chamber member listed below and get in on the action!
Were you feeling lucky that day?
“Not particularly,” Greg Bee says. “I was just doing the family thing. My first baby, Ella, was about five months old, and I was home feeding her, giving her a bath, and trying to get her to sleep. When the phone rang, I just thought, ‘Who is that calling me?’ Then the person on the phone said that I had won the raffle.”
Thirty-four year old Bee, a general manager for three family-owned Napa Auto Parts stores, had bought one raffle ticket for the Galeton Chamber of Commerce’s first raffle fundraiser from a deliveryman who came to his store. Winners of the raffle could choose between a new a Yamaha Grizzly 450 ATV, a Harley-Davidson Iron 883 motorcycle, or $5,000 in cash.
“At first, when they called me and told me I won, I was shocked, and I thought, ‘Okay. Wow. Seriously?’ I never win anything. They needed me to pick which prize I wanted right away, so I thought for a few minutes. I had to go with the Harley-Davidson Iron 883.”
This year the winner of the raffle will be able to choose between a 2010 Polaris Sportman 500 HO ATV, a 2010 Harley-Davidson Iron 883, or $5,000 in cash.
Canyon Motorsports, located at 1572 Route 6 in Gaines, Pennsylvania, (814-435-2878, www. canyonmotorsports.com), is providing the ATV.
The Harley-Davidson is being provided by Larry’s Sport Center, 1913 US Rte. 6 W. in Galeton (814-435-6548, www.
larryssportcenter.com).
Raffle tickets cost $5 per raffle or 5 for $20. This year’s raffle winner will be chosen during the Gale Fest on September 4.
The Gale Fest is a free multi-day festival of arts which includes music, painting, crafts, and activities for the whole family. Go to www.visitgaleton. com for more information on the raffle and the Gale Fest.
Balsam Real Estate Settlement Co. 19 Crafton St., Wellsboro, PA 16901 570-723-7200 www.balsamsettlement.com
Brick House Deli 4 West Main Street Galeton, PA 16922 814-435-2444
Canyon Motorsports route 6, Gaines, PA 16921 814-435-2878 www.canyonmotorsports.com
Ed-U-Caterers 14 1st Street Galeton, PA 16922 814-435-2603
Galeton Drug 20 West Street Galeton, PA 16922 814-435-6588
Heart’s Desire 27 W. Main St., Galeton, PA 16922 814-435-2280 www.visitheartsdesire.com
John’s Sporting Goods 27 Whispering Pines Lane Galeton, PA 16922 814-435-3544
Lydia’s 14 East Main Street Galeton, PA 16922 814-435-2411
Nob Hill Motel
289 Route 6 East Galeton, PA 16922 814-435-6738 www.nobhillmotel.com
Top: Cheryl Main, co-owner of Larry’s Sport Center, with raffle motorcycle. Bottom: John and Cindy McCarthy, owners of Canyon Motorsports with raffle ATV.
Sthe Lunker
Gettin’ In Deep
Fred Metarko
o… your buddy wants you to become a bass fisherman and enter tournaments. Let me give you an idea on what to expect.
First you need a resident Pennsylvania fishing license. With New York State and the Finger Lakes nearby, a nonresident license is next.
A few rod and reel outfits will get you started. These need to be filled with braided, fluorocarbon or monofilament line. Add a supply of hooks and sinkers in different sizes and weights. An assortment of plastic lures, crankbaits, spinnerbaits, and jigs is next on the list. There are millions to choose from.
go. You load all the required gear, life jackets, a throwable device, anchor, fire extinguisher, and fishing gear.
Finally on your way, a stop at the gas station is required. The boat and truck’s multi-gallon gas tanks are filled, Sta-bil added and oil checked.
To transport the accessories a tackle box or two is required. Now you are ready for dock fishing.
But, you want to fish from a boat and enter tournaments. So you join a club and pay the dues. After a tournament fee is paid the draw puts you on a boat as a rider. You take along a newly-purchased life jacket, rain gear, sunglasses and lunch, and don’t forget money to help pay your share of the day’s expenses.
After a few tournaments you feel the guy in the front of the boat is getting to all the fish first. To eliminate this you decide the best way to improve your luck is to purchase a boat. To transport the boat a tow vehicle is needed. By now your wife is questioning, “Is all of this necessary to catch a few fish that you just put back?”
The registrations and insurance papers are complete on the new truck and boat in the driveway hitched up and ready to
At 4:00 a.m. you stop at the scheduled meeting place to pick up your rider and join the caravan. After a few close calls with wildlife you arrive at the lake and head for a restroom to get rid of the coffee that kept you alert for the ride.
A launch fee is paid, everyone is in the water and the tournament begins…so does the rain. After seven hours of a heavy downpour with strong winds, and not even a nibble, the tournament ends.
Back at home you tell your wife, “I did poorly because I didn’t have the right length and color lures. I need to make a Bass Pro order.” For justification you blame the buddy that convinced you to start bass fishing
I always grin and tell my wife Linda, “It’s Curt Sweely’s fault. He convinced me to start bass fishing and join the club.”
The Lunker is a member of the Tioga County Bass Anglers (www.tiogacountybassanglers.com). Contact him at lunker@mountainhomemag.com.
Every lunker needs a boat.
And the Whole World Sings
Ken Bartlett and Ed Bellinger prove that a song can lift the spirits and bring people together
By dawn Bilder
Ken Bartlett and Ed Bellinger love to sing karaoke for residents at local nursing homes, though they hesitate to be interviewed because, in their words, “Are you sure you want to interview us? We don’t do much.”
But they do a lot. With their time and talents, they light up faces and bring people together in song.
Both Wellsboro residents, fifty-six year old Bartlett and sixty-nine year old Bellinger worked at Osram Sylvania factory and sometimes went fishing together. Bellinger says, “I taught Ken everything he knows about fishing.” Bartlett laughs. “Which wasn’t much. It only took him ten minutes.”
In January of 1993, Bartlett was trimming
a two-hundred-year-old oak tree, forty feet above the frozen winter ground. He fell with his chainsaw in his hand. Life-flighted to Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pennsylvania, he lay in the intensive care unit, in and out of a coma for two and a half months. When he awoke, he spent three months paralyzed in a wheelchair. Gradually he recovered, and now it’s impossible to see any physical sign of his fall.
He wanted to give back some of the goodness that he felt God had given to him in his recovery, and in November of 2006 he started going to the Green Home, a nursing home in Wellsboro. At first he just visited and talked with every resident in every room once a week. But Ken wanted a better way to communicate to the residents, so he began to sing acapella to them. “Some of them got tears in their eyes. I think because it was taking them back to a better place and time.” His visits grew so anticipated that he bought karaoke equipment in January of 2008 and began singing to the residents as a group.
Enter Bellinger, who was retired and loved to sing in his car. His karaoke career had an inauspicious beginning when he and his wife went to a tavern that was having a karaoke night. He told his wife that he was going to sing, at which point she grew horrified and said, “I’m crawling under the table if you go up there.” But he surprised her, and now she occasionally joins him, out in the open, when
he sings.
A mutual friend of Bellinger and Bartlett told Bellinger about Bartlett’s karaoke activities. After that, Bellinger and Bartlett teamed together. “I’m in charge of finances,” Bellinger jokes. There’s no money involved. Then he adds, “No, I sound better than him, so my job is to try to drown him out.”
Bellinger has a deep baritone voice, and it blends wonderfully with Bartlett’s high tenor voice. They perform at least two times a week at the Green Home, the Carleton, Country Terrace, Broad Acres, or the VA hospital in Bath, New York.
They always sing the first and last songs together, which are hymns, and in between they take turns. Bellinger is known to start off some of his songs with “Hey, Darlin’,” and the ladies love it. “They also love songs like ‘Country Bumpkin’ and ‘There’s a Tear in My Beer,’” says Bellinger. He sings a lot of Johnny Cash and Conway Twitty as well. Bartlett sings easy rock like “Unchained Melody” and doo-wop by artists like Little Anthony and the Imperials.
“If we can go there and lift people up through singing, what is better than that?” Bartlett asks.
When they’re told that, if they ever lose their voices, they could be stand-up comedians, they look at each other and laugh. “We probably couldn’t stand for that long,” says Bellinger.
Left: Ed Bellinger joined Ken Bartlett singing karaoke after being introduced by a mutual friend. Background: Bartlett and Bellinger belt out some old favorites at Wellsboro’s Green Home.
Tthe Better World Non John & Lynne diamond-Nigh
here’s nothing quite like travel to remind you of just how different people can be, from surly and pompous to almost angelic in their generous inclination to help you find a street, guide you to the nearest metro stop, thank America, or hail a cab for you.
Thanks to an inconvenient volcano, we arrived a week late this year in Paris. Appointments we had made for the first week, of course, had to be made all over again. So, with lapsed reservation in hand, we made our way to a large art museum. We explained what had happened. Act of God; not our fault. Could we please make a new reservation?
Non.
that’s what we did, arrived with our class, presented our reservation, and the lady shook her head. Non, it is not possible. Your reservation is not regulaire. Not valid.
For heaven’s sake, look for yourself, there’s hardly a soul in the place. Exactly the wrong thing to say under the circumstances; Lynne gives me the abrupt hush sign. We are both so bushed. Profoundly bushed. Please, I think, just let us in.
Emerald fingernails point: go and ask him. I look at my watch. An hour has been wasted. Meanwhile, our students stand patiently; what a great bunch of kids.
At long last we are granted passage into the museum. Our lecture, by now much abbreviated, is just picking up steam when
It’s a bit like fishing in a big lake with only one fish in it.
Non? Not possible? But it is quite essential that our students visit the museum sometime in the next few weeks. We show our professor credentials.
Zat mean nothing in France, pointing to our American teacher’s cards. And non. The schedule is already full. I suspect otherwise. I had just been inside the museum myself (to see what art was hanging where) and it was almost empty.
We can come almost any time. Is there nothing you can do?
Non. Scarlet fingernails point, but go and talk to him.
From pillar to post we go. It’s a bit like fishing in a big lake with only one fish in it. But at last we net a provisional consent to come on Thursday evening. Bring your class and we will see what we can do. So
museum guards come rushing toward us. Sorry, sorry, you must leave at once; go, you must get out of the museum at once. Suspicious package, of course, means a slight chance it’s a bomb.
Down the long escalator we go and out into the freezing rain. Our coats are still inside. A blinking sign reads 20 STUDENTS GET PNEUMONIA. Around us rush heavily armored police with dogs on short leashes. Another sign, like a derisive Greek chorus, blinks NON, NON, NON.
Suddenly a camel . . .
(to be continued)
John writes about art and design at serialboxx. blogspot.com. Lynne’s website, aciviltongue. com, is dedicated to civility studies.
Arts & L EI sur E
In Perfect Harmony
Three different musical events in Tioga County make for some beautiful mountain music
By Matt Connor
“Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life” wrote the noted nineteenth century poet and author Berthold Auerbach. If that’s true, Tioga County residents and visitors are likely to come away from the month of August with just about the cleanest souls on record.
Upcoming weeks will bring an amazingly diverse selection of musical options to the area, from elegant classical to down-home country and rollicking zydeco.
“My goal is just to bring great music — Blue Grass and acoustic — to Wellsboro and Tioga County,” said Sue Cunningham, executive director of Hickory Fest, held August 20-22 at the Stony Fork Creek campground. “And I want to bring in major national acts and expose this music to the people of the area.”
“My hope is that Wellsboro will, in a sense, become the Lennox, Massachusetts of the area,” said Endless Mountain Music Festival conductor Stephen Gunzenhauser, referring to the decades-old Tanglewood Music Festival, which lures some of the greatest classical musicians to New England every summer.
“Our focus is really on country music and local acts,” said Tioga County Fair secretary Jennie York. “That is our audience, and we plan to offer them quality entertainment that is familyoriented.”
The fair, held August 9-14, regularly attracts up to 20,000 attendees, who will pay from $10 to $14 for three shows featuring Daryle Singletary (who hit the Billboard Top Ten Country Music charts in 1996 with “I Let Her Lie” and “Too Much Fun”) and Marty Haggard, whose two concerts will be tributes to his musical
icon father, Merle Haggard. In addition, said York, there is a wide variety of free musical offerings at the fair.
If country isn’t your cup of tea, however, there are myriad other musical options available for sampling during these dog days of summer. Rapidly becoming one of the most highly-regarded classical music events in the U.S. by both performers and audiences is the Endless Mountain Music Festival, held July 31- August 15 at various locations throughout Tioga County.
“To make a long story short, I am now turning performers down who call me from all over the world who want to be part of this festival,” Gunzenhauser said of Endless Mountain’s rapidly growing reputation as an ideal venue for classical musicians of all stripes. “Obviously the performers are not coming for the money. They’re coming for the opportunity to make music with other world class
musicians. They’re coming to enjoy Wellsboro, to have a stress-free musical experience and be appreciated by the community.
“There’s also an opportunity to do repertoire that they would never be able to do in a traditional orchestra setting.”
Gunzenhauser said he spends a great deal of time “researching and looking for music that can be appealing to audiences and inspiring and challenging to musicians. I want to give them an opportunity to take chances with music, which they perhaps can’t do during the year.”
Among this year’s highlights is “Tango Time & Elvis in Wellsboro!” featuring Marcelo Nisinman, “King of the Tango” and godson of virtuoso bandoneonist Astor Piazolla, who virtually created the term “tango nuevo” with his revolutionary approach to traditional tango.
And then there is Santiago Rodriguez, whose piano concerto during the third week of Endless Mountain will give audiences, “a wonderful opportunity to get up close and personal with one of the world’s great artists,” said Gunzenhauser.
Rodriguez, whom the New York Times described as “a phenomenal pianist” and the Baltimore Sun called “among the finest pianists in the world,” will perform selections from Chopin and Rachmaninoff at Liberty High School.
Gunzenhauser is clearly ecstatic to have an artist of Rodriguez’s stature performing at Endless Mountain: “People pay big bucks to see him in New York City,” he said.
“Musicians are so enthusiastic to perform here,” he added. “They’re treated like rock stars and are really appreciated in the community.”
Launched six years ago, the Endless Mountain festival began as a kind of whim when Gunzenhauser and his wife came up with the idea while strolling past the Wynken, Blynken, and Nod fountain on the town green in Wellsboro.
“We absolutely fell in love with the town,” Gunzenhauser said. “And we were walking downtown past the statue when my wife said, ‘This would be a perfect place for a music festival.”
Fired up by this sudden brainstorm, Gunzenhauser — who has been musical director of the Lancaster Symphony Orchestra for over 30 years — said he would approach the local chamber of commerce with the music festival concept.
“Don’t you dare!” his wife said.
“Of course, I DID dare,” Gunzenhauser said with a laugh. “She threw down the gauntlet and I had to pick it up.”
Soon a board of directors was formed and an executive director hired. The first festival featured six concerts in seven days. A year later Endless Mountain’s budget quadrupled and the offerings expanded to 15 concerts in 17 days.
“We took the orchestra from 20 players up to 62 players,” Gunzenhauser said. “I never thought it would be so successful that I would not have to beat the bushes to find musicians, but I’m turning people away now.
Top: Performers at last year’s Hickory Fest brought the folk and bluegrass back to Tioga County. 2nd from top: Marvin Gruenbaum has some fiddle fun with the Endless Mountain Music Festival orchestra. 3rd from top left: Merle Haggard’s son, Marty, will be paying tribute to his father at this year’s Tioga County Fair. 3rd from top left: Daryle Singletary has had two top ten Billboard hits and will be performing at the Tioga County Fair. Bottom: Gita Ladd return to Wellsboro for her fifth year at the Endless Mountain Music Festival. Facing page: Down home music and family fun is what keeps people attending Hickory Fest. Page 28: No shoes, no shirt, no problem at the outside family friendly Hickory Fest.
“My hope is that the audience will come away from the experience saying, ‘This is remarkable. This little community is a vehicle in which music can grow.’ It is my hope that the community will transform itself into a real arts community, and that’s really already happening to a remarkable extent.”
Two years before the first Endless Mountain festival got off the ground, a group of passionate musicians of another genre decided to launch a major event of their own. Hickory Fest, which celebrates blue grass, zydeco, blues and other varieties of “roots” music, was born when the Canyon Country Blue Grass Festival moved from Tioga County to another location around 2001.
The following year, members of the Hickory Project band decided to bring blue grass music back to the Stony Fork Creek campground with a festival of their own.
“Every year we bring about six national acts to the festival,” executive director Cunningham said. “The one thing I want to emphasize is that we’re a family festival, with a children’s tent and arts and crafts displays and a lot of activities in addition to the music.”
Among this year’s highlights is a concert by the Steep Canyon Rangers, who Cunningham said are “one of the foremost upand-coming blue grass bands in the country.”
The Rangers occasionally perform with comedian and banjo enthusiast Steve Martin. Indeed, when Martin recently released a banjo CD, he asked the Rangers to perform on the recording with him.
“I’m hoping Steve Martin may show up just out of a whim,” Cunningham said with a chuckle. “You never know!”
She said she’s also “very excited” to offer a concert by Shannon Wentworth and her band. Wentworth, York said, “has a golden voice” and has been compared to music legends like Patsy Cline and Billie Holiday.
A pre-festival concert held Thursday, August 19 at 9 p.m. at the Wellsboro House restaurant will feature The Harris Brothers, “a great duo performing a lot of North Carolina blues stuff,” said Cunningham.
Whether your taste runs to blues, classical, blue grass or country, opportunities to experience great music abound this month.
So get out and embrace the melodies that are availing themselves in the area this month.
It’s bound to do that dusty old soul of yours a bit of good.
read & Feed
Going Greene in the Kitchen
Cornelius O’donnell
“Cuisine a la Greene” is the inscription on a small refrigerator door magnet that I treasure. It’s a reminder of the two cooking classes that the late Bert Greene presented in Corning back in 1983. Corning Hospital Chapter D (as in “delicious,” according to Greene), sponsored the nearly sold-out program that benefited the hospital. In the morning it was an “All American Brunch;” “Easy Over Supper” was the 7:30 p.m. presentation.
And it reminded me, to remind you, about this New York City born food writer and columnist who started out as art director for a large cosmetics firm, then I. Miller shoes and, ultimately, Esquire Magazine. (Note: Bert rarely wore a tie but, rather, a jaunty neckerchief became his trademark.)
Bert simply loved to cook, a knack he learned from his maternal grandmother. In 1966 Bert and several others opened what has been called the very first gourmet take-away shop in America, in Amagansett on Long Island. It catered to the swells with vacation palazzos in the Hamptons. Others dropped out, but Bert persevered and wrote The Store Cookbook published in 1974.
That book was my first brush with Bert, and his Ziti Salad became my goto recipe for many, many picnics and dinners. I still make it. Several cook books followed, including Honest American Fare, which garnered Bert a Tastemaker Award (think Oscar or Tony, but for cookbooks), Kitchen Bouquets, a terrific assemblage of his favorite ingredients—and how to use them—and then Greene on Greens (another Tastemaker winner) and the latter published posthumously. Every book will provide you great reading—Bert was among the best food writers ever—as well as inspiration for breakfast, lunch, or dinner dishes that are full of flavor, yet easy to pull off.
Bert’s name was also a familiar byline in many publications. These ranged from Food and Wine to Harper’s Bazaar Cook’s Magazine, and Circle. If you’re of a certain age you might remember his TV appearances on Good Morning America and Hour Magazine. If you search you might find his twopart video, “The Vegetable Lover’s Video Cookbook.”
fame does not last forever.
But it was his chatty, witty, and opinionated syndicated column that began our friendship. In one of the columns he extolled the advantages of cooking with glass. I was so pleased that I took up my pen and wrote him a fan letter. He responded; I responded; and after more writing and phone calls he invited me out to Amagansett (where he had a weekend home long before and after The Store
Greene continued from page 32
Bert made a couple of other visits to our area, and was one of the several food personalities to “star” in a series of regional American cooking classes sponsored by Corning in 1985. Many of us will never forget the two tall men, Bert and Phillip, crouched over the cooking fireplace in Corning’s Benjamin Patterson Inn, being coached by several experienced volunteers in the ways of open-hearth cooking.
I love all of Bert’s books and commend them to you: search them out on the web, in used bookstores, house sales, and library book sales. If you choose only one of his books, I’d advise getting Bert Greene’s Kitchen: A Book of Memories and Recipes. It’s a compilation, edited by Schulz, of the best of Bert’s columns. It was published in 1993 by Workman. As a mutual friend wrote shortly after Bert died in 1988: “Reading Bert’s books and articles is like being privy to wonderful glimpses into a special friend’s life. He had an uncommonly candid style, liberally laced with wit and humor.”
I leave you with a quote from one of Bert’s columns: “Cooking fame does not last forever. With luck, recipes do.” I hope you’ll remember Bert as well as his recipes!
A Greene on Green Recipe
Here’s a custard-y recipe that Bert sent to Corning’s Hospital Chapter D for inclusion in their 2nd Taste of Corning cookbook. It’s from Greene on Greens and ideal for this time of year:
Hot Corn Flan
1 tablespoon unsalted butter plus butter for the pan
2 tablespoons minced onion
3 tablespoons minced seeded green bell pepper
3 tablespoons minced canned mild green chilies, well drained
1 to 2 tablespoons seeded jalapeno peppers finely chopped
1 1/2 cups fresh corn kernels (from 3 ears of corn)
1 1/2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole milk
3 eggs
1 cup heavy or whipping cream
1 teaspoon salt
A pinch of freshly ground black pepper (or a bit more to taste)
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg (preferably freshly ground)
A pinch of ground allspice
2 cups grated Monterey Jack cheese (about 6 ounces)
You’ll need a buttered 1 1/2 quart shallow baking dish for this, plus a roasting pan that will hold the baker.
Heat the oven to 350° F. Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium-low heat. Add the onion and green pepper. Cook 5 minutes. Raise the heat to medium and add the green chilies, the jalapenos, and 1 cup of the corn kernels. Cook, uncovered, 10 minutes, stirring often. Remove from the heat.
Place the remaining 1/2 cup corn kernels into the container of a blender. Add the flour and milk and blend until smooth.
Beat the eggs in a large bowl until light and lemon colored. Add the contents of the blender, the cream, salt, black pepper, nutmeg, and allspice. Fold in the corn-pepperchilies mixture and the cheese. Mix well. Pour into the prepared baking dish and place the dish in a shallow roaster. Slowly pour very hot water in the roaster to come about halfway up the sides of the baker.
Bake for about an hour or until the flan is firm. Carefully remove the baking pan from the roaster and allow to stand for about 15 minutes. This may be served warm, at room temperature, or chilled. Serves 6 to 8.
Chef, teacher, and author Cornelius O’Donnell lives in Corning, New York.
KhOME & r EAL At E
The Sun King
K.C. Larson has proved that renewable energy is the here and now
By Jennifer Cline
eevin Larson, president of K.C. Larson Inc., waited patiently for the right conditions to begin the company’s foray into renewable energy.
When the master plumber opened the firm in 1984, he began providing plumbing, heating, ventilation and air conditioning construction for commercial and industrial clients and quickly added electrical to the menu.
Over the next two decades, Larson kept his eye on the market and on emerging technologies for renewable energy.
“I just waited and waited, because I knew energy prices would go up and weren’t going to come down real fast,” Larson said.
The waiting ended in 2007, when, continuing to watch trends, Larson announced to his employees that in 2008, the company would expand to offer renewable energy systems. And as if on cue, in 2008, fuel prices skyrocketed, bringing renewable energy back to the forefront of public consciousness.
Key to K.C. Larson Inc.’s expansion into renewable energy is Jamie Sherman, who, following her stint as administrative
worker in the front office, received training to become the company’s renewable energy estimator.
“It’s nice, because I’m helping the environment,” Sherman said. “My job is actually to help make things better. It’s fulfilling.”
The company can install solar panels— which include photovoltaic panels that convert sunlight to electricity and solarthermal panels that capture heat from sunlight that is then used for household heat and hot water—as well as wind turbines and micro-hydroelectric generators, though few clients have the topographical and weather conditions needed to make wind or microhydro generators a worthwhile investment.
Many properties, though, provide favorable conditions for solar energy in Pennsylvania, which may surprise some, but Sherman noted that northcentral Pennsylvania gets 80 percent of the sunlight that Florida receives.
In addition, solar voltaic panels work more efficiently in cooler temperatures, so if a panel in Pennsylvania and a panel in Arizona receive the same sunlight for four hours a day, the Pennsylvania panel will produce more electricity over the course of a year. Larson said this principle is evident
on satellites in space, which are powered by solar panels. Brought inside the Earth’s warm atmosphere, those panels do not provide enough energy to run the satellite.
The early implementers of renewable energy have been residential clients, who retrofit their existing systems. It marks the company’s first shift from commercial clients to residential.
The company works with clients from initial consultation—helping them find the best solution for their home—to estimating, installation and follow-up. In that process,
someplace Like home Vacation Day dave Milano
Honest labor never hurt anybody. Dishonest escape from labor, on the other hand, damages mind, soul, and probably body. Nevertheless, in the grand cycling of all things, it is good and even necessary to once in a period, among our many right labors, exhale, slow down, and rest.
In the American tradition, rest generally means a vacation, often comprised of travel to far-away places, monuments, spectacles, museums and restaurants, and all the sundry indulgences we add to the minimum requirements of rest and renewal. It’s all great. I enjoy travel and touristing as much as the next man, especially with family or friends long unseen, but there is for me a vacation as good or better than those found in the norm of cruising and sightseeing, a vacation that requires no planning or preparation, no reservations or rentals or fees or juggling of schedules, no peregrinations of any kind. This is it:
It is late spring, or perhaps early fall. The days are warm, the nights chilly, the windows are cracked open just an inch or two, the quilt is on the bed. It is daybreak. The sun is just catching the horizon, yellow rays bending across the landscape, slowly filling the house with soft light. The morning birds are beginning their choruses. The cat is rousing, padding across the foot of the bed. I stir gently from sleep, and in those first moments of half-wakefulness begin to piece together the upcoming day. My first impulse is to rise, to start the morning chores, to feed the cats and dog and scurry outside and tend to the cows and bottle the morning milking before grabbing my typical hurried shower and getting off to work. But on this day I realize suddenly that there will be no work. Today is a vacation day. There will be no special clothes, no commuting, no bleating deadlines or restless telephones or grumpy computers. The chores are there of course (they never go away) but today they are not anxious for me. This day is different.
I let that thought soak in for a few moments. I listen, really listen, to the bird songs outside the window. I inhale the fresh, dewy morning fragrances, feel the crisp bedroom air, and in it savor the warmth of the bed. Then I roll over, tuck the covers under my chin, and go back to sleep.
In a half hour or so I awaken again, refreshed and comfortable, eager to get down to the barn, looking forward to a hot breakfast and perhaps some gardening later, and a dawdling walk in the woods. Yum.
There in the morning, for me, is the pure and true vacation; quiet, unmeasured, unplanned, a delicious lengthening of the world’s tether. There, I live as happily as any man.
Dave Milano is a former suburbanite turned parttime Tioga County farmer. You can contact him at someplacelikehome@mountainhomemag.com.
Sherman has been surprised to find that homeowners become like friends, keeping in touch and sharing updates on their systems’ performance.
The commercial and industrial segments, slower to invest in such changes, are just beginning to join the trend in Pennsylvania, Larson said, with incentive from the government.
When K.C. Larson Inc. launched its renewable energy division just two years ago, it might have taken 20 years for a system to produce enough solar power to pay for the its installation. But the payback time has dropped precipitously to between five and six-and-a-half years, with the introduction of government tax incentives.
“They were emotional purchases in 2008,” Larson said. Now, a solar energy investment allows a consumer to feel good about both diverting fossil-fuel use and making a practical financial choice.
Although Larson said the U.S. has lagged behind Europe, Japan, and now China in renewable energy technology development, it has made great strides in the last few years, and Larson is exhilarated to see what is coming. One product in development, he said, is windows that are installed with photovoltaic technology to produce electricity.
“I see the ingenuity kicking in, and we’re going to get caught up,” he said. “Every day, I track the new technology, and the products are evolving all the time.”
Above 1-5, 1: First rack installed for solar panels. 2: Racks for solar panels are installed along the roof. 3: Panels are laid across the racks. 4: The panels are laid on both sides of the roof. 5: The complete installation shown from the ground. Page 36, Top: Solar panel installation by K.C. Larson can be performed on big and small properties. Bottom: President of K.C. Larson, Keevin Larson, and installer, Adam Moyer.
Old Lycoming Township resident Jennifer Cline is an occasional contributor to Mountain Home.
Shop Around the Corner
Just A Little Off The Top
Story By Sarah Bull
Photography By James Fitzpatrick
“Next gentleman!” Marvin Spencer calls out with a hearty laugh as he shakes his apron out in front of him like a matador waving his cape, pieces of hair fluttering to the floor. An older man with thick, gray hair hops up into Marvin’s nearly fifty-year-old barber chair and asks him for “the usual.”
With a small nod, Marvin begins snipping away, chatting along with the man as if they were close friends—bonded by years of monthly visits just like this one. Part of the experience of coming to Marvin’s shop— Spencer’s Barber—is the friendly banter not only with Marvin, but also with the other customers waiting for their turn in his beloved chair. “Hearing the gossip’s what we come in here for,” laughs James Morgan, a customer who’s been coming to this shop since before
Marvin even graduated from trade school.
In his forty-seventh year as a barber in the same charming shop on Canton Street in Troy, Pennsylvania, Marvin still exudes a deep love for his job—and his routine—as if it were the day he started out.
“I enjoy the people in this job; I really do,” he says, the deep dimple in his right cheek showing. “Every morning, I come in the back door and leave the front one unlocked while I go over and have my breakfast at six o’clock. By the time I come back someone usually has me all set-up with the lights on, waiting to get their haircut.”
Though Spencer’s Barber is on a walk-in basis only and inflation has raised his rates from the initial dollar and a quarter it cost for a haircut, Marvin never seems to be lacking for customers. In just the hour-and-a half period I spent with Marvin, he had seven customers come in, each jumping into the on-going conversation as they
joined us. For some of these people, Marvin has cut hair for five generations in their families. Because of this, he’s been the person entrusted with the honor of giving many first haircuts.
“I have a lot of little kids come in for first haircuts,” he said. “It’s my job to be their buddy and give them confidence.” One of the oldest, most valued pieces of furniture in the shop is a small barber’s chair raised on a pedestal just to the left of the door as you walk in. It is the first in the row of larger barber’s chairs, though this one is the only of its kind and over one- hundred years old. This chair was the setting for a haircut that became famous in 1997 when Marvin’s grandson Troy sat in it for a haircut. During this haircut, a picture was taken of Marvin and Troy that was eventually placed on the Walmart calendar that year.
“A GRIPPING PAGE-TURNER”
-- bestselling crime novelist Michael Connelly
The Murder Room (Gotham Books/Penguin Books) goes on sale in stores August 10. It can be ordered or pre-ordered on Amazon (www.Amazon.com) Barnes & Noble (www.bn.com), and Borders (www.borders. com). The Murder Room Audiobook on CD, read by Broadway actor Adam Grupper, is available from Simon & Schuster (www.simonandschuster.com).
Watching Marvin work his scissors with such speed and grace makes it difficult to believe Marvin had absolutely no intention of becoming a barber until he walked into this shop to get his hair cut one day after school. “I came in one evening like all the kids did and Tony—one of the two barbers in this very shop at the time—asked me what I wanted to do after I graduated. Jokingly, I said, ‘Oh, I think I’ll be a barber.’ And after that, he just kept pressuring me to do it,” Marvin laughed.
After nine months of schooling at the Philadelphia Institute of Barbering and fifteen months of apprenticeship at Tony’s shop, Marvin was a licensed barber, ready to begin his career. “I got out of school on a Friday. That Saturday I bought out Tony’s old partner who was retiring. We moved his stuff out and my stuff in, and then I began that Monday.”
During his forty-seven years as a barber, Marvin has displayed his craft in settings other than just in his shop. He’s done many house calls for people who are sick or unable to come into the shop. And for over twelve years, he went to the Bradford County jail in Towanda every Thursday to cut the inmates’ hair—a task many people would find intimidating. But not Marvin.
“We always had some mouthy ones,” he said, pausing to laugh before continuing, “But none of them ever gave me any trouble—I was the one with the straight razor in my hand!”
With plans to retire in the next year, many of his customers are sad to part ways with their barber and close friend. “I know one thing,” says his customer, James Morgan, “There’ll be a lot of beards around here when he’s gone!”
In his retirement, Marvin plans to camp at his cabin in the woods, refurbish old farm tractors, and spend time with his wife, children, and grandchildren.
Dusting off his customer’s neck with a puffy brush and talc powder, Marvin booms out cheerily, “You’re all set.” The front glass door swings open and another customer walks in. “Come in. Come in,” he greets them, flashing his warm smile and deep dimple, once again sending hair flying with his matador’s cape.
Sarah Bull is a former high school intern at Mountain Home. Now a senior at Mansfield University, she keeps herself busy with school, work, and occasional Mountain Home stories.
Marvin continued from page 42
Top: Barber amd jokester Marvin Spencer practices his trade on a morning customer. Above: Spencer cutting his grandson, Troy’s, hair for a 1997 Walmart calendar. Page 42: A customer sits in the 55-year-old barber chair in Spencer’s Barbershop and gets his usual.
has written a classic book on interrogation, but if you ask him about it he pulls a copy of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables out of his desk drawer, and tears come to his eyes. Hugo was Vidocq’s friend, he says, and based both the criminal Valjean and the detective Javert on Vidocq.
“My favorite scene in all literature is Bishop Myriel’s forgiveness of Valjean for stealing the bishop’s silver. He says, ‘I have bought your soul for goodness, for God.’ Vidocq’s greatest gift to us was redemption. He was a redeemed man who worked to redeem others. That’s what I want to do with the Vidocq Society. I want to buy souls.”
Each time he reads the scene in the 19th
Century novel, the former FBI agent weeps.
“This will change you,” Walter to me said that day in Montrose years ago when we first met over fried brains and chocolate chip cookies and tea. He was right. I came to realize that the hard-boiled detective, the noir archetype described by Raymond Chandler and Michael Connelly, is real. So is the eccentric rationative genius framed by Arthur Conan Doyle and Poe, as is Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell, where threeheaded Satan weeps blood-tears and the graffiti includes “Redrum” and “Ted was here.”
I felt like a journalistic Dante following Virgil, a journalist lucky enough to descend to the depths with a guide to the purest evil and emerge in the sunlight more grateful than ever. I believe in Good. I believe in Evil. Life is more
Book Event Highlights
August 10: The Murder Room in stores.
August 13: ABC-TV one-hour 20/20 special, 10 p.m.
August 22: Author book reading and signing at the Penn Wells Hotel, Wellsboro, PA, 4-6 p.m.; cocktails and dinner with detective Richard Walter 6-9 p.m. Call the Penn Wells for dinner reservations, 570-724-2111.
Sept. 3: First Friday event with the author, Otto’s Bookstore, Williamsport, PA, 5-8 p.m.
Sept. 13: Author and detective Richard Walter talk and book signing at Mansfield University Straughn Auditorium, 7-9 p.m., public invited.
precious than ever.
People ask, “How did you find these guys?” as if they are not quite real. “On the Internet,” I say. The Vidocq Society web site hooked me with the headline, “Cuisine and Crime.” After I investigated a turn-of-the-century serial killer—the murderous Great White Shark in 1916 New Jersey that inspired Jaws—for my last book, the historical thriller Close to Shore, where all the characters were long dead, I vowed to do a book where everyone was living.
Well, not quite.
Michael Capuzzo of Wellsboro, the publisher of Mountain Home with his wife Teresa Banik Capuzzo, is the author of the forthcoming THE MURDER ROOM and the New York Times-bestseller CLOSE TO SHORE (www.closetoshore.net). He was a reporter for The Miami Herald and The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he wrote crime and police stories among many other things. He was nominated by The Philadelphia Inquirer four times for the Pulitzer Prize, and has won numerous writing awards. The web site www.michaelcapuzzo. com is under-going reconstruction and will be available soon.
B
The Roadster
The Art of Racing, Franklin Street Gallery & Gift Shop, Watkins Glen, New York.
