Cover photo by Wade Spencer, (top) Steve Conard by by Wade Spencer; (middle) Stained glass by Wade Spencer; (bottom) Russel Ingham courtesy of Gary Weir
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Behold a STAR
Behold a Star
Wellsboro’s Steve Conard Is a Herald of the Heavens
Wellsboro’s Steve Conard Is a Herald of the Heavens
By Lilace Mellin Guignard
By Lilace Mellin Guignard
Steve Conard, an avid astronomer who spent his forty-year career at Johns Hopkins—half at the Applied Physics Lab building instruments for space research—is definitely a wise man. So, it’s no surprise that he and his wife, Cindy, ended up in Wellsboro in May 2022 because they followed the stars.
“If it wasn’t for Cherry Springs I wouldn’t be here,” Steve says, “I guarantee you that.” He first came to the area in 2007 when his Maryland astronomy club took a trip to Cherry Springs State Park. “Then I heard about the rail trail and ‘conned’ Cindy to come up.” They vacationed here, cycling, hiking, kayaking, and watching wildlife. It seemed like an obvious choice for retirement.
The Pennsylvania Wilds no doubt has just as many stars and other celestial objects as before he relocated. But there are probably more people looking up, with and without telescopes, now that he’s written columns for the Wellsboro Gazette and given presentations on light pollution, the New Horizons mission to Pluto, and measuring asteroids. Along with Gary Citro, also of Wellsboro, he helped start the Pennsylvania Wilds Astronomy Club. No doubt, Steve’s invited many first-time viewers to look through one of his telescopes, asking, “Do you see what I see?”
Got Milky Way?: Astronomers at Cherry Springs State Park in
enjoy the phenomenal phenomena.
Curt Weinhold
Coudersport
Steve grew up in New York’s Catskills, where, he says, “the closest village a mile away was like Ansonia [Pennsylvania],” with not much more than a general store. But it had a very dark sky and lots of space to backpack, hunt, and fish. When he was twelve, his older brother handed down his telescope to Steve along with an old astronomy field guide. Trying to follow the field guide, Steve recalls seeing “a star with rings around it.” It was, of course, Saturn—nothing new, but new to him. This first taste of discovery hooked him.
Now he needed a bigger telescope, but the only way he could afford one was to build it. Long before YouTube tutorials, he looked up instructions and spent hundreds of hours in the basement with two glass disks sandwiching a gritty slurry, which he pushed back and forth. Over time, the movement of his hands on the top disk made it concave, eventually to the degree he needed for the telescope mirror’s focal length and focal ratio.
Out of this world research: Steve and Cindy beside LORRI images of small bodies of the solar system, signed by colleagues with “Thanks, Steve, for making these possible!” at the bottom; Steve monitoring data during the flight on the Astro-2 mission at the Payload Operation Control Center at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama; Steve (left, with the telescope) and his observing team on the second trip to Argentina in July 2017, the most southern station, where it was winter and very windy and cold.
Ultimately Steve found it was even more fun building telescopes than using them. In tenth grade, he told his social studies teacher that his career goal was to move to Australia and work on big telescopes. There weren’t many people Down Under, which meant fewer lights to dim the night sky. It also appealed to Steve since he’s an introvert. He didn’t know anyone growing up who had an interest in astronomy. Everything he learned was from books, so “I still mispronounce names of stars,” he laughs.
A Stellar Career
Steve attended the local community college, SUNY-Ulster, for two years before getting a BS from the University of Arizona in engineering physics, a program Steve describes as training engineers to work with scientists. Afterwards, he moved to Baltimore and started working in the Johns Hopkins physics department at the Homewood campus, simultaneously pursuing his master’s in applied physics. “Getting to work on astronomy instruments in space was something I didn’t even know enough to dream about as a tenth grader,” Steve says. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do, just not in Australia.
Courtesy Steve Conard
Good thing, too, because he wouldn’t have met Cindy there. In 1984, right after she moved to Baltimore, they met during a blind date. Cindy, a computer programmer then and up until her retirement, was not especially interested in astronomy. But she was interested in Steve. As she learned more about what he did, she was able to help him in public settings. “I’m a people person and will talk to anyone about anything,” she says, “so I’d be the B team.” She knew enough about asteroids—which Steve was helping measure—that she could talk to people until the questions got too hard and Steve could take over. They’ve been married thirty-seven years.
For twenty years, Steve worked on Astro and FUSE missions, looking at everything from Mars’ atmosphere to quasars (a rare and extreme class of supermassive black holes, according to NASA). Telescopes he worked on went into space aboard NASA’s Astro-1 (Columbia) and 2 (Endeavor) space shuttles. “Everything
looks different when the atmosphere is not in your way,” Steve explains. “We had to get above the atmosphere to ‘see’ far-ultraviolet light. Everything was new. They’re still writing papers on what they found.” He trained astronauts to use the telescopes, and one of the highlights for him was going into the payload bay of the space shuttle Columbia to check the equipment the day before the Astro-1 launch.
Steve was loaned to the Applied Physics Lab to help build an instrument for taking pictures of comets while flying by them. The CONTOUR mission was launched successfully into orbit, but on August 15, 2002, it lost contact after using its third stage to head towards its first comet encounter. Though the mission wasn’t a success, it resulted in Steve working at APL full time as an optical systems engineer.
At this time there was a lot of interest in Pluto, and the APL was competing with the Jet Propulsion Lab in California to get the mission. APL won, and, starting in 2003, Steve became lead engineer of the team that built and tested the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager instrument aboard the New Horizons spacecraft, which launched in 2006. LORRI is just eight inches in diameter and two feet long, and all it does is take pictures—really clear pictures of things really far away. The main target was Pluto. In order to get there, New Horizons flew by Jupiter in 2007 to get a gravitational assist. (It’s like how gravity helps a bicycle go faster downhill. Except different.) This assist saved money, fuel, and got the spacecraft near Pluto two-and-a-half years quicker. Plus, they were able to test the instrument by taking pictures of Jupiter. Scientists got tons of scientifically worthy images during the eight-year trip to Pluto. “And we got there,” Steve smiles. It was 2015 when it made the historic first flyby of the Pluto system. The largest receiving antenna was in Australia, and Steve remembers getting up at 3 a.m. in Maryland to see the new images coming in. “Knowing you’re one of the first persons to see these things was an amazing feeling,” he says.
Turns out that Pluto, long dismissed as the pinky toe of our solar system, is much more geologically complex than we knew. Glaciers of frozen nitrogen and methane move downhill with water ice much harder than Earth’s—like bedrock. “We saw things that looked an awful lot like volcanoes,” he says, “even though it’s so cold out there.”
Christmas on Main Street
Wellsboro, Pennsylvania Tuesday-Sunday December 10-15, 2024 The Town that Saved Christmas
Stroll along our gaslit Main Street and enjoy a unique Shopping ex P erience you won’t soon forget!
It’s a festive weekend filled with shopping, activities, and history that will warm your heart and fill you with Christmas Spirit! WellsboroChristmasOnMainStreet.com for event schedule updates
Wellsboro’s ninTH a nnual Vintage Ornament Displays will be on exhibit December 10 through 15!
HIGHLIGHTED ACTIVITIES:
Extended Shopping Hours • Santa Brunch Live Theatre • Dollar Christmas Movie • Live Reindeer Christmas Concerts & Caroling • Live Nativity Holiday-Themed Game Night • Historic Tours Historic Ornament Display • Swing Dancing Horse-Drawn Wagon Rides • Santa Parade
One of Steve’s hobbies is measuring asteroids, and for over fifteen years he’s been a member of the International Occultation Timing Association, a volunteer organization that predicts, gathers, analyzes, and publishes observations. In an asteroid occultation, a star is covered by an asteroid, and the length of the time the star blinks out is recorded. Recordings of the same event taken by people in different locations can be used to measure the asteroid. Steve participated in two NASA-sponsored citizen science trips to Argentina to collect data on an asteroid, Arrokoth, that was discovered in 2014. At that time, they didn’t know it was two objects conjoined. This data was used to plan the New Horizon flyby in 2019 of the double asteroid which, according to NASA, “is one of the thousands of known small icy worlds in the Kuiper Belt, the vast ‘third zone’ of the solar system beyond the inner terrestrial planets and the outer gas giant planets,” and it “may harbor answers that contribute to our understanding of the origin of life on Earth.” This advertisement brought to you by:
Plutopography: This high-resolution image of Pluto captured by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft combines blue, red, and infrared images taken by the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC). The bright expanse is the western lobe of the “heart,” informally called Sputnik Planum, which has been found to be rich in nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane ices.
Star continued from page 9
Now, New Horizons is twice as far as when it went by Pluto, taking photos of objects at the edge of the Kuiper Belt so we can characterize their surfaces. With the high-powered telephoto-like capabilities of LORRI, New Horizons is studying objects from great distances away. So, while the spacecraft is not yet at the edge of the solar system, it can see it from there.
All Is Calm, All Is Bright
Ensconced in Pennsylvania now, Steve enjoys trivia Tuesdays at the Duncan Tavern in Antrim, local craft beer at the Wellsboro House, and volunteering with the Wellsboro Glass Association. Until his official retirement this past April, he was still lead engineer on the New Horizons mission, working part-time from his home on a hilltop just outside of town, and was part of the engineering team for the LORRI Lucy mission launched in October 2021, the first to explore the Jupiter Trojan asteroids. He owns six telescopes (“three gener-
al purpose and three ‘one trick ponies’”), including his fourteen-inch Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain in his Bobcat Observatory in the backyard. He named it after seeing a wildlife cam photo of a bobcat outside the observatory one night, probably wondering what new nocturnal critter was in its territory. Small enough that more than two people make it a tight squeeze, the top half of the domed structure spins to align the opening with whatever part of the sky he’s interested in. When it’s cold, he can sit at the large desk at the dining room window looking out at the Bobcat’s dome, maneuver the telescope, and look at its images using the computer.
When he and Cindy were looking for property, having a good space for dark sky observations was paramount. The real estate agent for a house they toured heard that and said, “You’re like that other guy I sold a house to.” He was speaking of Gary Citro, a retired music teacher.
“I first met [them] at a Wellsboro First Friday, where we both brought our solar telescopes,” Gary says. “When I learned
that Steve worked (and continues to work) on the New Horizons mission that went past Pluto, I was in awe, because I’ve always thought that mission is one of the most incredible things that humankind has achieved.”
Gary was willing to help Steve start an astronomy club. When they found out that Cherry Springs didn’t have its own, they decided to broaden their scope from Wellsboro to the thirteen counties of the Pennsylvania Wilds (pawildsastro.org). Gary says, “We certainly need to do a lot more recruiting in a number of those counties who probably don’t even know about us. Ideally, we’d like to have people in each county doing outreach at the level we’ve been doing it here.”
The club usually does several winter events where they bring telescopes out for the public to view.
“We’ve had some great nights where people have really gotten great views through a telescope for the first time,” Gary says.
The club is also participating in the library telescope program, started in 2008 in New Hampshire. Steve and Cindy gifted a telescope to the Green Free Library in Wellsboro, and it is available for patrons to check out. Now the astronomy club has ordered kits for five more, which they’ll assemble (Steve is making some parts with his 3-D printer) and bestow in January 2025.
Another side project Steve is involved with is measuring the light pollution and making recommendations about how to mitigate it. “Our dark skies bring in a lot of tourists to Wellsboro, too,” Steve says, so managing this natural resource makes sense. He gave a short presentation to the Tioga County Planning Commission in the spring of 2023, using Potter County’s lighting ordinance for new construction as a model. Tioga County’s ordinance is in the last stages of approval.
There’s a lot that people with outdoor lights can do to make them more dark sky friendly. It’s not just important to stargazers. Maybe your neighbor’s flood light shines in your windows. Tim Morey, Natural Resource Program Specialist at Hills Creek State Park, says that while we don’t have the issues cities have, “As our backyards get brighter and brighter, it’s effecting wildlife.” Nighttime artificial light negatively impacts the ability of amphibians to reproduce, and migrating birds using moonlight to navigate can get disoriented. “I’d like to see people think about how we can use light in more effective and wiser ways,” says Tim. After all, we love hearing the spring peepers and watching the fireflies blink at potential mates.
Star continued from page 10
Not as cold as outer space: Steve sets up his equipment for daytime space viewing at the 2023 Hills Creek State Park Winterfest. The Pennsylvania Wilds Astronomy Club can be found at many Step Outdoors events.
Steve is a member of the Pennsylvania Outdoor Lighting Council, and of DarkSky International and the organization’s state chapter, which advocate for reducing light pollution that “disrupts wildlife, impacts human health, wastes money and energy, contributes to climate change, and blocks our view of the universe.”
He also joined the Illuminating Engineering Society, an industry-backed group of professionals who research and promote standards. “I have been in groups that measure light,” Steve says, “so I joined the group that produces recommendations about light.”
He has been developing a device to use locally to measure light pollution. His initial goal was to provide data so short-term rentals could be advertised as astronomy-friendly, but now he’s hoping to establish a baseline of light pollution in Tioga County so it can be monitored annually to see if it’s getting better or worse. He used an old astronomy camera and 3-D printed some parts to adapt it, added a cloud sensor, hooked it up to a cheap laptop he’s protected from the elements, and it all runs off a battery. Emporium is interested in using it to help them establish a space on a hill as an observation site—for elk during the day and stars at night.
It Came Upon a Midnight Unclear
Steve admits he did not know until he and Cindy had relocated how cloudy the winter skies are here. “Tioga is the driest Pennsylvania county but has the most cloud cover,” Steve exclaims.
Courtesy Steve Coinard
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Planet of the Grapes
Sherrying the Holiday Spirit
By Terence Lane
Another holiday season is upon us, and I’ve been dreaming about the food and drinks since the leaves began turning to gold in September. It’s time to think about gifts and about which wines will be adorning the yuletide table cloth. Here are a few ideas to get you started.
The Seneca Lake Wine Trail offers a first-class selection of Finger Lakes wines in their 12 Days of Wine pack, an annual holiday special available at all Wine Trail-affiliated wineries (senecalakewine.com). This limited edition case includes a magical array of dry, sweet, and sparkling wines for $199. A variety of styles is important to have in your holiday tool box in order to accommodate a range of tastes and cuisine. Pop the bubbly for toasting and canapes, uncork those brisk whites for cheese and veggies, and break out the reds for heavy-hitting stews, roasts, and game. If you’re unlike me
and love caroling, pajama parties, and girls’ night, this one-size-fits-all party pack promises to keep the yule times rolling long into the wee hours of 8:30 in the evening.
You can’t do Christmas without sweets, and the rule with dessert pairing is that the wine must always be sweeter than the dessert, otherwise the wine’s nuance is lost. Dessert is the time to experiment with all of those stout and skinny bottles of fortified wine. I’m talking about port. I’m talking about cream sherry.
Available in gift-sized 500 ml bottles, Barnstormer Winery’s Nosedive dessert wine ($28) makes for the perfect end-ofday indulgence. This Blaufränkisch/merlot blend undergoes nine months of maturation in ex-cognac barrels, the seasoned oak lending gravitas and a touch of spice. Blueberry, fig, and Bing cherry notes contribute to a broad, mouth-filling palate.
The heat of the alcohol comes through on the back-end, italicizing the fruit without overpowering, and concludes with a long, toasty finish. Pair the Nosedive with strong cheeses (Cambozola, anyone?) and extravagantly wrapped boxes of Whitman’s chocolate truffles.
New from Barnstormer is their off-dry vermouth ($45), made from fortified Finger Lakes riesling and infused with select botanicals. Winemaker Taylor Stember’s preference is to serve over ice with a slice of orange, as the fruity, herbaceous profile of this vermouth makes for a perfect cocktail all on its own.
It can also moderate boozier drinks while taking center stage in a low-alcohol spritz. Hints of mint add a freshness that would nicely support a gin cocktail, such as a white Negroni. Vermouth is a staple ingredient in any mixologist’s wheelhouse
and makes for a truly practical gift for the home bartender of any experience level.
That brings me to Hazlitt 1852 Vineyard’s solera sherry, a wine garnering serious attention after winning the Best of Show in the 2022 Governor’s Cup and the gold medal at the 2024 Atlantic Seaboard Wine Competition. Solera sherry is a non-vintage cream sherry. The “cream” moniker is rooted in the wine’s sweet and velvety profile and not from any dairy. While Spanish sherry’s oxidative, austere flavors have long struggled to win over the American palate, Hazlitt’s sweet solera sherry has won acclaim for its rich and accessible profile.
When Hazlitt acquired Widmer Wine Cellars in 2011, the Naples facility came equipped with a solera sherry system already in place. The new owners readily kept the tradition alive, making and bottling sherry under their own label.
Solera sherry is raised in a nursery of ex-whiskey barrels called a criadera. The casks are stacked in tiers with the solera, or “floor layer,” at the bottom. The solera contains the oldest, most mature sherry, just half of which is drawn out annually for bottling— something in the range of 175 cases. The younger wines from the criadera above are used to top up the solera below. This downward cycling of the wine is how the sherry develops its character and richness. Since the solera is never fully emptied, a small portion of the first wine from the Widmer era still exists in the barrels. That means that every new batch of sherry will always contain a whisper of the original recipe dating back to 1988.
An uncommon wine for the region, Hazlitt’s solera sherry clocks in at $29.50, and makes its mark as a genuine stand out in category, quality, and rarity. It abounds with nutty, butterscotch, and golden raisin flavors. Sea-salted chocolate caramels and pecan pie are dessert pairings that come to mind, but cured Iberico ham and hard aged cheeses make fabulous candidates for a savory experience.
I snagged a bottle of this sherry for myself and plan to lay it down for a few years to see what happens. In the meantime, I’ll check in on other sleeping beauties, relishing any chance I can get to visit the cool and quiet gallery of my cellar. Remember, if time’s running out to find a great gift, you can always choose a cellared wine from your collection. Which dusty bottle should you select? Fortified wines and brawnier reds hold up well when properly aged, but fruit-forward riesling from the Finger Lakes can reward cellaring, too. In fact, one of the best wines I’ve ever tasted from the region was an off-dry riesling from 2009. It’s been my experience that gifting an older bottle never fails to create a memory not soon forgotten.
If you don’t have any aged wines at your command, check in at your favorite Finger Lakes winery and ask about library wines. Sometimes the tasting room staff will let a back-vintage bottle go to a loyal customer. Choose a quiet time to ask, be friendly and polite, and delightfully delicious things can happen. It is, after all, the most wonderful time of the year.
Terence Lane is a Certified Sommelier. His short fiction and wine writing has appeared in a number of magazines including Wine Enthusiast. A native of Cooperstown, New York, he now lives in the Finger Lakes and is the beverage manager at J.R. Dill Wine Bar in Watkins Glen.
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Tess’s Table
A Polish Christmas Vigil
By Teresa Banik Capuzzo
When I was a child, and until I left for college, every new year had the same happy rhythm: Plow through winter, look forward to summer vacation, look even more forward to the first day of school (a milestone event: the excitement of new books coupled with getting off the farm and away from all those— five!—brothers). But the best day, bar none, was Christmas Eve. The whole 365 days of the year indeed seemed on some sort of a slightly tilted plane, and the apex was that evening and the Polish Catholic feast called Wigilia, the vigil, the wait from sundown for the birthday of Christ.
We had a bunch of aunts and uncles, all local, and a passel of cousins, and enough of those families made it to our house religiously on that magical night, so much so that Dad built a family room onto the back of the house that would seat dozens. My brothers dragged up from the basement (or the barn?) chairs and folding tables Dad had made. My sister and I rolled out the yards of red tablecloths Mom had sewn from bolts of fabric and set those long festive tables with candles and dinnerware. And no matter what the head count, in keeping with the Polish tradition, we laid an extra place setting for a stranger, Christ himself perhaps in the guise of the needy.
That place at our Wigilia table was often filled by a widow or widower, or someone my parents knew had nowhere to go on this sacred night. There was always room for a stray in our stable.
The meal—like all of those Fridays in Lent per the Catholic tradition of abstinence—was a meatless one. And even though our people immigrated from the hills of Poland, on the other side of the country from the Baltic Sea, we did have some baked cod or haddock on the table. My mom and grandmothers would work a virtual pierogi assembly line in advance of the feast, stuffing them with farmer’s cheese (my personal favorite), or potato sharpened with cheddar. Swimming in butter and sauteed onions, they were the centerpiece of a meal that included our Bushi’s chałka (the celebrated braided egg bread, golden from an eggy wash and lightly scented with orange rind that would make such fabulous toast on Christmas morning, such a beautiful sandwich bread for the leftover Christmas ham), Aunt Carrie’s rutabagas in cheese sauce, Aunt Ann’s kapusta (braised cabbage with sauteed onions and copious amounts of butter), Mom’s famous buttery mashed potatoes to carry the kapusta, wild mushrooms Dad would pick in the woods, also sauteed with onions and butter. (Are
you sensing a theme here?) It was, overall, a pretty blonde meal (except for Granny’s poppyseed roll and cousin Janey’s “secret” molasses cookies), and my ex dubbed it the Great Banik Starchfest.
But it was, in its own butter-gilded way, magnificent.
Decades and hundreds of miles later, the first food story I ever wrote was published in the Philadelphia Inquirer on this very topic. Krystyna Eljasz, who had brought her Wigilia traditions and recipes from her native Poland to Northeast Philly, shared her stories and recipes. As a child in Poland, she and her brothers and sisters would wait outside on Christmas Eve, scanning the skies for the first star to appear. They had fasted all day while the grownups readied the banquet. Sighting the star was the signal that the wait was over, and the feasting could begin.
Krystyna’s Wigilia meal was different from ours: It had color! Beet recipes aren’t as plentiful in my Polish cookbook as are cabbage ones—cabbage beats them (sorry) by just a whisker. They are, after all, a sturdy root vegetable, so they are a natural on a Polish table. I’m not a big beet lover. But I do love this ruby-colored soup, the acidic sweetness of the beets brightened with lemon and redolent of mushrooms.
Alice Wadowski-Bak
Before any Wigilia meal begins, the head of the household offers to the company a plateful of oplatki (a Christmas wafer, whose translation is angel bread) which have been blessed by the priest, and the crowd mingles, sharing oplatki along with three wishes for the new year. The illustration (left) is a painting of a Wigilia celebration by the late Polish-American artist Alice T. Wadowski-Bak. On the Niagara River downstream from Niagara Falls (where Alice was born and died) sits the Christmas Wafer Capital of the World, the little town of Lewiston, New York. This illustration came from a packet of oplatki from the Christmas Wafers Bakery in Lewiston. It has graced countless envelopes of oplatki across the country.
•
This is Krystyna’s wonderful soup:
Wigilia Barszcz
9 dried mushrooms, medium size
Water for soaking mushrooms
1½ quarts salted water
2 carrots, cubed
2 ribs celery, cubed
5 bouillon cubes
Bouquet garni
1 bay leaf
1 medium onion, chopped
4 Tbsp. (½ stick) butter
4 small red beets, quartered
1 clove garlic
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Sugar to taste
Lemon juice
Uszka dumplings
Soak thoroughly washed mushrooms in water, cover overnight, and cook in soaking liquid, covered, until tender, about 30 minutes or longer. Reserve soaking liquid; set mushrooms aside to use in uszka.
In the 1½ quarts salted water, cook cubed carrots and celery with the bouillon cubes, bouquet garni, and bay leaf until tender. Strain, reserving vegetable broth. In a separate skillet, fry chopped onions in the butter until transparent. Set aside.
In a separate pot, cook quartered red beets in skins in enough salted water to cover until soft. Drain beets, reserving liquid. Peel beets and grate on a coarse grater. Add the grated beets to the strained vegetable broth and bring to a boil. When the broth becomes deep red, strain out beets.
Mash garlic with salt and add to broth. Add soaking liquid from the mushrooms (approximately ½ cup), sauteed onion, and sugar and lemon juice to taste. Bring to a quick boil. Strain out onions if you want an absolutely clear broth; add some of the reserved beet liquid to taste, if necessary, to increase flavor. Add cooked uszka. Makes approximately eight servings.
Uszka
For the filling: 1 small onion, chopped
1 Tbsp. butter
4 to 8 mushrooms, chopped
2 Tbsp. breadcrumbs
Cooked mushrooms from barszcz, finely diced
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
For the dough:
¾ c. flour
1 egg
1/8 c. water (approximately)
Salt
½ Tbsp. oil
To make the filling, fry onions in butter until light gold in color. Add chopped fresh mushrooms and sauté until the mushroom liquid partially evaporates. Add breadcrumbs, the diced mushrooms reserved from the barszcz broth, salt, and pepper.
Mix all the ingredients for the dough and knead on lightly floured board until smooth and uniform. Roll dough thin, less than 1/16-inch thick. Cut in 1- to 1¼-inch squares. Place about 1 teaspoon of the filling in the middle of each and fold each square diagonally, forming triangles. Crimp edges to seal. Overlap two corners of the longest edge, crimping them to form the shape of an ear (an uszka).
Drop into boiling salted water. After uszka rise to the surface, let simmer three minutes. Remove and drain. They can be frozen at this point and thawed later at room temperature for half an hour, or by steaming in a strainer over boiling water for a few minutes. Makes approximately three dozen.
•
Kutia is a symbol of prosperity, a traditional dish native to eastern Poland and the Ukraine. Cooked wheat is mixed with raisins, hazelnuts, walnuts, poppy seeds, and honey. In earlier times, the sticky grains would be tossed against the ceiling: The more that stuck, the better the harvest to come. I plan to experiment this year with farro, an ancient Mediterranean wheat grain with a beautiful nutty flavor. Krystyna cautioned that “This is a dish that can’t be prepared more than a day in advance, because the honey and the wheat will start to ferment.”
Here is Krystyna’s recipe:
Kutia
1 c. wheat grain
2 c. salted water
1 can (8 oz.) prepared poppy seeds
½ c. coarsely chopped hazelnuts
1/3 c. coarsely chopped walnuts
½ c. golden raisins
¼ c. honey
1 tsp. almond or vanilla extract
Rinse the grain and simmer, covered in salted water, stirring occasionally until tender, about two hours, adding a little water if necessary to keep it from sticking to the bottom. When cool, mix it with the remaining ingredients. Keep refrigerated. Makes approximately 10 servings.
A Fistful of Light
Corning Stained Glass Artist Makes the World a More Colorful Place
By Karey Solomon
The sun casts blue light through celestial images on a rectangular stained-glass work projecting out above the Stained Glass Works and Antiques of Corning storefront at 85 East Market Street where master craftsman and artist Joe Barlett has a shop and studio. Here he creates, repairs, restores, teaches, and sells stained glass. Instead of retiring after nearly four decades of work as a school counselor in Hughesville, Pennsylvania, he followed his love of stained glass art.
It loves him back.
In his early twenties, as a recent college graduate, he spent a summer in Reading apprenticed to Leonids Linauts, who needed help with the handling and restoration of heavy church windows. A renowned artist who came here from Latvia in the late 1940s, Linauts inspired Joe to begin his own glass studio—he used space in his grandmother’s former corner grocery store in Hughesville. That same grandmother had predicted, as she watched then-toddler Joe draw, that he’d grow up to be an artist.
For thirty years, during the time he worked as a counselor in school, he also taught night classes in stained glass at Bloomsburg University and the Pennsylvania College of Technology. In 2010, when
he retired from counseling, he opened his shop in Corning, and taught classes there. A few years later he also began teaching at the Studio at the Corning Museum of Glass.
For level one students, “we start with straight pieces to teach technique, then teach them to cut circles,” he explains. Students get their own set of tools, an understanding of techniques, and several pieces they’ve made with their favorite colors, ready to hang in a window. Participants in level two classes learn how to create a window using curved as well as straight shapes.
“I get so much satisfaction out of teaching,” Joe says. “I get them turned on to stained glass and they run with it. They learn the correct way.” He changes the statement with a small laugh. “They learn Joe’s way. I’ve been doing it for fifty years, so I think I know what I’m doing.”
For students who want to learn and don’t want to invest in a huge variety of glass and a solo studio, he runs nine group sessions, meeting at the shop several days a week. One Thursday group regularly begins with pizza.
As a session begins, glassmakers carry in their tools, retrieve their labeled tray containing their work in progress, and get down to business at a spot along the well-lit
workbench. The more advanced glassmakers might work with their own design, one from Joe’s extensive library of stained glass design books, or from something found online. Paper patterns are traced, placed atop the colored glass, and cut with a glass cutter. Special breaking pliers help trim the piece close to size. Students use a grinder to fine tune and smooth the piece, allowing them to wrap copper foil around its edges without injury. When the foiled pieces fit together, they’re soldered on both sides.
“Solder is your friend,” one of the students calls out, quoting Joe. Solder can help define what the eye sees while subtly filling in tiny spaces so the finished piece won’t have gaps.
The people who work together on glass have become more than friends in the years they’ve been meeting weekly. Joe calls them, with good reason, his “stained glass family.” He might help adapt a design, locate the exact right color needed from the thousands stored on edge along the store’s long, many-cubbied storage wall, and offer gentle encouragement. Connie Wemple, Joe’s girlfriend, fell in love with Joe—and then the art of stained glass—about a dozen years ago. She’s there, working on projects
Often foiling, never foiled: Joe Barlett looks on as Jen Harvey applies patina to darken the solder on her highland cow stained glass project.
VISIT & VOTE
during every class. While Joe often circulates during a work session to make sure everyone’s project is proceeding smoothly, Connie is another person class members can turn to for advice. A recent group ended with a surprise repast of quiche, fruit, and cake to celebrate Connie’s birthday and her recovery from an illness.
“You learn something every day in here,” Joe says, adding he learns from students too. “It’s an ongoing experience between all of us. The main goal is to come up with a finished piece that’s well designed with good color choices. I suppose it’s like therapy when you get a piece accomplished.”
“We support each other. It helps us look at each other in a different way,” contributes another student. “You find your tribe.”
Four former students sell their stained-glass work at the shop. Some, like Jen Johnson, whose interest in stained glass was kindled in the early 1970s and who began working in the studio about a dozen years ago, do commissions for other people.
“The biggest thing is not to be a perfectionist. Would you notice an imperfection if you were driving past it at twenty-five miles per hour?” she asks, quoting Joe.
While finished work may be admired at the Stained Glass Works and Antiques of Corning Facebook page, there’s nothing like seeing it in person. On a recent Friday morning, customers entered, talked to Joe and Connie, and looked and looked. The storefront windows are layered with large and small work. Shelves hold lamps with stained glass shades, ornamental and antique glass lines shelves, and even humble pieces one might recognize from grandma’s kitchen, like a glass citrus juicer or a colored-glass butter dish, seem elevated by their proximity to Tiffany-style stained glass creations.
Over the door is a tribute to Molly, Joe’s studio dog, a beloved dachshund who died a few years ago. The original, much smaller piece was designed by one of Joe’s students; with her permission, he made a larger version for display.
Carole Robinson, a visiting stained glass artist from Scotland, has her own studio, mostly creating church windows, and is here to do research at the Corning Museum of Glass.
“It’s like heaven here, so organized!” she enthuses. After an animated conversation, she invites Joe and Connie to visit her in Scotland, and they discuss plans to do so, despite Joe’s admission to being a workaholic.
At the back of the shop is his workspace, where he’s currently crafting a four-season set of panels for a customer, with different birds and different foliage for each. With repairs and commissions and teaching, “the only problem is, I don’t have time to do my own work.”
Yet, “I like to travel,” Joe says. “Last March, Connie and I went to Ireland.” They toured in company with fifteen people from the Thursday night group. “It was a lot of fun. So yes, I’ll close the store for a few weeks and go to Scotland.”
And he’ll come back with new ideas.
Karey Solomon is the author of a poetry chapbook, Voices Like the Sound of Water, a book on frugal living (now out of print), and more than thirty-six needlework books. Her work has also appeared in several fiction and nonfiction anthologies.
shop LOCAL GIFT GUIDE
Field Notes
Claus Consulting
By David Nowacoski
Ijust saw a headline about the hourly minimum wage in New York State—it’s sixteen dollars in most places these days. That has a lot of implications for small businesses, even if you live just south of the state border.
It’s already hard enough being a business owner. You start a business because you are good at this one thing, but running a business requires all sorts of skill sets. As soon as you hire your first employee, you are expected to be an expert in all the human resource laws. The government demands you follow all of the 6,871 pages of the IRS tax code. There are safety regulations, environmental considerations, supply chain dynamics, and don’t even get me started on navigating the logistics of moving products.
It can be overwhelming. So, if they can afford it, a lot of small business owners will hire some experts to help them figure out how to accomplish everything. There are accountants, and lawyers, and such, but many actually turn to a business consultant to help guide the business end of things.
If I had the money to do so, I’d hire Santa as my business consultant. I mean, this guy, he has it all figured out. Am I right? Look, if we count just those under the age of fifteen, he has over two billion customers worldwide. And he only sells one day a year. The man is a marketing genius.
But he is more than that. His business acumen is off the charts. First, he sets up in the North Pole…a spot not governed by any nation or government. Brilliant. No taxation. No political instability. He creates his own little village out in the middle of nowhere so he doesn’t have to deal with neighbors complaining that Rudolph’s nose is too bright and is keeping them up at night.
I’ve never been there, but I’d say he is probably the largest employer in the North Pole. Every picture I see tells you he hired the indigenous population of elves to garner the support of the locals. He gets it—give us stable jobs so we can support our families and everyone is happy.
Then there are the logistics of moving that much product within such a short de-
livery window. I think I am pretty good at figuring out routes, but this guy is next level. He creates this media-ready story about sleighs and all that, but I’m thinking it is just to cover up an insane contract with FedEx. I bet he built them their own terminal in the North Pole to shorten their international routes, but, in return, he gets their whole fleet for the month of December.
I wonder what Santa charges for business consulting? I could see us implementing some of his strategies. Hmmm. I wonder how the whole “naughty and nice” thing would go over with our customers?
David Nowacoski grew up on a farm in East Smithfield and lives just down the road a bit from it still, where he runs WindStone Landing Farms and Delivered Fresh (deliveredfresh. store) with his wife (and high school sweetheart), Marla. He made his kids pick rocks from the garden and believes that sometimes a simple life is a more wise way to go.
Wade Spencer
We were uncles once…and young: The author’s three-year-old father, Charles Weir, poses with Uncle Russel Ingham (right) and another National Guardsman (unidentified) in Gaines, September 1941. Inset: the Christmas postcard Gary found, sent from his Great-Uncle in Luxembourg in 1944.
A Postcard from the Edge of History
Gaines Soldier Remembered at Battle of the Bulge Anniversary
By Gary Weir
This summer, I was sorting “memories” my mother saved. There was a basket of postcards—pictures of places other people visited, backed with short notes that read like prehistoric social media posts. Among these I found one that was very uncommon.
The card was in good shape. Plain white but you could tell it had been frequently handled. The cursive writing in pencil had faded. It said:
Dear Charlie and Teen, I recv’d the package you sent thanks a lot it was very glad to get will try to write you a letter when I get time
Uncle Russel
Charlie was my father, just three years old at the start of WWII, and Teen was his sister, older by six years. They lived in Galeton, and Uncle Russel, known as Rut to family, had been the oldest son at home in Gaines. Not yet twenty, with dark clouds growing over Europe and Britain, he volunteered for the National Guard sometime in 1940. From the card’s appearance, I knew it had been important to the little boy who would become my father.
Dad respected Uncle Rut—that was obvious to me even as child. My parents’ first house was around the corner from Uncle
Rut, his wife, Dorothy (Aunt Dot, a lifelong nurse), and their kids. We visited often—my brother and I would play on the floor with matchbox cars while the grownups talked. Rut’s father, Herbert Ingham, a coal miner immigrant from Britain, had died when he was just eighteen. My grandfather, John Weir, died when Dad was a senior in high school. A favorite uncle often replaces a father lost when you’re young.
As I turned the card over, I hoped I would find something that would connect it to a specific time or place. When had Dad and Teen sent the package? When and where did Rut write this thank you? The first thing I noticed was a Christmas tree, small, simple, with candles on the boughs. There was a poem, speaking of remembrance at Christmas time and wishes for a “Bright New Year.” “Grand Duchy of Luxembourg” was printed where the stamp would normally be.
I never liked history class, or remembering dates. But a few have stuck with me, like December 16, 1944. The Battle of the Bulge began as Germans shelled the American front lines in Luxembourg. I knew GIs spent Christmas 1944 in foxholes dug in the Ardennes. I knew the story of the 101st Airborne and Bastogne in Belgium. The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is between Germany and Belgium. What I did not know was Uncle Rut, the strong but kind man I remembered
from my own youth, the man I saw my father go to for advice and approval, was there. I did not know about his unit, what he did, or where he most likely was when he wrote this note.
That’s how I learned of the 28th Division, its deep connection with Pennsylvania, the courageous devotion to others shown by men from Tioga County as they served in the Division’s Medical Battalion, and how my own father’s favorite uncle came to send a Christmas postcard from Luxembourg to a couple of little kids back home.
This year marks the eightieth anniversary of what has been called America’s bloodiest battle—the Battle of the Bulge. Stories of tenacity, determination, and heroism in the second half of December 1944 are easy to find. As the battle began, the Army’s 28th Infantry Division stopped seven German divisions from taking Bastogne and St. Vith on the first day as planned. For three days, east of Wiltz and Clairvaux in Luxembourg, the 28th’s strong resistance allowed the 101st Airborne to reach Bastogne and prevent its capture. In the middle of this fierce fighting was Uncle Rut’s unit, Company B of the 103rd Medical Battalion, attached to the 110th Infantry Regiment. Company B was a Collecting Company of about 100 men. Enlisted men were litter bearers, ambulance orderlies and drivers, and rifle company aid men. Three years of train-
ing, drills, and exercises made them the US Army Medical Corps’ first responders. Bandages, tourniquets, sulfa, and morphine were carried instead of grenades or land mines. Officers served as surgeons at a battalion aid station just behind the front lines. All of the men in Company B wore the Red Cross on their arms, and walked through battles without guns.
The Division was federalized and activated February 17, 1941. This began a year (subject to extension) of training for the nation’s defense, ten months before Pearl Harbor. Initially composed entirely of the members of the Pennsylvania National Guard, changes came quickly once they were activated. By the time they returned, less than ten percent were from Pennsylvania. Known officially as the Keystone Division, they wore a red keystone patch. Its resemblance to a bucket quickly earned them the nickname “The Bloody Bucket” from the Wehrmacht (Nazi Germany’s unified forces). They landed on a quiet(er) Omaha Beach, seven weeks after D-Day in July 1944. From this point, until they returned home to the US, they were what the Army refers to as “under canvas.”
Within forty-eight hours of reaching France, they were involved in action outside Saint-Lô. They received campaign ribbons for the Normandy Campaign and were prepared to enter Paris. Instead, they became short-lived movie stars as the 28th was selected to march in the Liberation of Paris parade. Newsreel footage shows Jeeps with Red Cross flags flying and large Dodge ambulances being driven down the Champs-Élyssées and under the Arc d’ Triomphe, past Charles de Gaulle, Omar Bradley, and Bernard Montgomery on the viewing stand. Soon enough, the Division found itself on the famed Siegfried Line, attacking the Fatherland itself. They began November 1944 in an area of rugged wooded hills known as the Hürtgen Forest, aka America’s Meat Grinder, the Green Hell, and Death Valley. Its geog raphy might have reminded Rut of his home in Gaines. The 28th Division suffered over 6,000 casualties here in the first two weeks. The Company B men were pulled out of the Hürtgen and sent south in mid-November. They would have a chance to rest, receive replace ments, and repair equipment. Division headquarters was set in Wiltz, about twelve miles east of the city of Bastogne. A rest center was set up in Clairvaux and movies were shown. Mail caught up with them. A GI dressed as St. Nick helped the resident children celebrate. There was a chance for a hot Thanksgiving meal and, hopefully, packages from nieces and nephews.
According to the Wellsboro Agitator, of the seventy-seven local National Guardsmen who began their service in February of 1941, all but one—who had died since coming home—returned to Wellsboro five years later.
They had set aside their own young lives during the preceding years in service of their fellow man. They captured no bridges, liberat ed no towns, and appear as if uncredited extras in the official histories. As it seems my own father did, I will hold and look at this small card from a kind man, and I will remember many men, and the example they have given—that to set aside your life, to give of your time, your care, and your concern for them, is the best way to show your love for your fellow man.
Blossburg American Legion Post 572 Private Club for Members and Guests
Breakfast with Santa! • December 15, 9:30am-11:30am Members only
Adult Christmas Party • December 21
Open to the public • Live band 8pm-11pm
Wednesday Night Wings, Thursday Night Tacos & Friday Night Fish Fry & Delmonicos on the Grill!
Open Mon-Sat: 2:00-10:00 pm and Sun: Noon-8:00 pm
S. Williamson Road • Blossburg, PA • (570) 638-2481
Join today - Stop in and pick up a membership application!
• Stop in and check out our selection of gifts for the holiday season!
May you have the gift of faith, the blessing of hope, and the peace of His love not only at Christmas, but throughout the New Year!
Gary Weir grew up in Horseheads, New York, where he failed eighth grade history. Luckily, he didn’t have to repeat it. If you know of any other Company B members, contact him at weirworkinghere@gmail.com. Merry
A Snowball’s Chance in...Grandma’s House
“This is a clear violation of the rules,” I said as sternly as my festive Christmas Eve mood would allow.
“I am aware of that,” Brent replied with eyes shining.
Brent was waiting for his new apartment to be ready, so he was bunking in with us. Having young people in the house again was a joy, especially for the holidays. But I am a militant Christmas traditionalist.
We do not open packages on Christmas Eve. Gifts are for the morning. But Brent was insistent, so I complied. When the last of the wrapping paper fell away, I gazed at a large tub of synthetic fiber balls. I looked up at Brent in confusion, which didn’t last long because he popped the top off the tub, grabbed a snowy white ball, and bounced it off my forehead.
“Snowball fight!” Someone yelled that,
By Maggie Barnes
but my memory of who was obliterated by the silliness that followed.
Our daughter, Angie, upended the tub and the balls spilled across the floor. A mad scramble ensued as we each grabbed as much ammunition as we could hold and scattered throughout the first floor. While Bing Crosby sang of peace on earth, we attempted to pummel each other with snowballs.
Our home is all angles and corners, perfect for domestic warfare, so each of us captured a defensible position and began to launch snowballs. Brent popped out of the kitchen and rocketed one at me. I ducked, and the sphere sheared an ornament off the tree. Dropping to the floor, I glanced at lei-wearing Santa, a souvenir from our Hawaii trip. He was unscathed.
“Sorry!” Brent’s voice came from the kitchen.
“No worries,” I answered as I army-crawled to the dining room. “He’s plastic!”
My beloved husband, the only member of our squad with law enforcement experience, wisely took shelter in the stairwell, where he could fire from a protected position. For half an hour, we waged war throughout the house, ambushing each other with rapid fire. Angie deflected one of my shots and it glided over the dining table, nicking a lit candle. The action paused while Ang inspected the snowball.
“Just singed,” she announced.
“Rub dirt on it and put him back in,” her father barked.
It wasn’t exactly the Christmas Truce of 1914, but the pause gave us a chance to grab more of the bleached missiles.
The cats had fled the room as soon as
Wade Spencer
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the battle broke out, but I did see a few whiskers peeking around the bedroom door like a radar antenna.
“Don’t hit the cats!” I yelled as I dove behind the recliner under a barrage from my husband.
The snowballs were amazingly resilient, no matter what they collided with. Despite the fact that all our best china and crystal were in use, nothing ended up broken, which I consider a Christmas miracle. My heart skipped a beat when a delicate cordial glass took a glancing blow and rocked back before righting itself. Dessert wine was still on the menu—hooray!
Above the noise of running, jumping, falling, yelling, and the occasional curse word, I heard an unexpected but familiar sound. The doorbell. I was in the stairwell, nearest to the door, and I belly-flopped into the hallway and crawled to it, incoming shots going wide. I got on my knees to reach the doorknob, a risky move that exposed me to a punishing volley of snowballs. I yanked on the knob and fell back into the hallway as the door swung open.
At the same time, my champagne-soaked brain was dredging up a conversation I would find pertinent at this exact moment.
Chatting with our friend Connie days before Christmas, I had said, “If you all have time on Christmas Eve, stop up and see our luminaries.”
And there they were—the entire family bedecked in their holiday finery—the ladies with perfect hair and makeup, the men dashing in suits. Christmas Eve service had just concluded at their church, and they, bless their hearts, had made a point to visit. I blinked the sweat out of my eyes, feeling deeply honored and horrifically embarrassed simultaneously. They looked like the cast of a Hallmark movie. We looked like deserters from the other side.
A whizzing snowball made Connie gasp with surprise and brought me back to the moment. “Cease fire! Cease fire!” I yelled. “Civilians on the field!”
It is a credit to our guests that they were unfazed by the sight of us sprawled all over the house, panting and disheveled, with ornaments, candles, and a couple of presents toppled—all like the medics hadn’t shown up yet. The combatants emerged and, amid shirt tucking and hair shake-outs, greeted our visitors with yuletide cheer. It was absurdly warm, and we were able to go out on the deck and have our wine, surrounded by the lights we had strung on the railings and the really good ones God put in a sparkling sky.
Christmas is a time of joy, wherever and however you can find it. Sometimes it’s an eternal carol sung in a candlelit church. Sometimes it’s in a tub of fake snowballs. We lost Connie to cancer not long after that holiday, and I treasure the memory of her total acceptance of our weirdness. While being the personification of grace and dignity, Connie knew how to find joy.
When our friends went on their way, the four of us collapsed in various chairs and declared the night the “best Christmas Eve ever.” The snowballs were stashed away. I’m the only one who knows where. Will they make another appearance? Didn’t I tell you? Angie has a son of her own now.
And Grandma has a plan.
Star continued from page 13
“That’s weird!” Last year the sky was clear only 15 percent of January nights. It’s a good thing the Christmas wise men were not in today’s Tioga County looking up and trying to see something.
Of course, as a story of faith, there doesn’t need to be any explanation. But Steve is more a man of science than faith, and is familiar with the different hypotheses concerning what the star of Bethlehem could have been. Magi, commonly translated as wise men, can also be translated as astronomer or astrologer. In either case, Steve explains that they would have been so familiar with the night sky that any change would have seemed significant. What was called a star might have been a supernova (when a dying star explodes) or a conjunction (when planets pass close to each other, appearing like one bright object).
Steve’s favorite theory is that it was a comet. He remembers the Hyakutake comet in 1996 and “waking up in the middle of the night and going out on the back deck of our house in Maryland—seeing this very long comet tail very high in the sky.” He watched one of the closest cometary approaches of the previous 200 years in awe with his unaided eye. Perhaps that explains one Christmas song’s description of a star “with a tail as big as a kite.” Comets can be seen for days and even weeks. Plenty of time to get to Bethlehem.
Steve and Cindy are happy to have found their way to Wellsboro. Others are, too. Keith Thorne recently moved back to town after working sixteen years at the LIGO facility in Louisiana where he managed the people and computers that control the huge instrument that detected gravitational waves from colliding black holes (our March 2016 cover story). One night he and his wife, Kathy, were eating at the Wellsboro House and, he says, “I heard these words floating around. Someone was speaking astronomy.” They subsequently joined the new astronomy club and met with other members at the local airport.
Gary Citro can hardly believe there are two engineers involved with astrophysics in his small rural town. “The idea that I sat at a table at the Grand Canyon Regional Airport with all of these people blows my mind, because nothing like that happened in New York City!”
Just a Wellsboro miracle.
BACK OF THE MOUNTAIN
We’re Open for You
By Linda Stager
It was just after 8 p.m. on a December Saturday night a few years ago, and it was snowing hard. The kind of snow I love to walk in. The kind of snow that goes down the back of your neck, that sticks to your nose. A snowstorm you probably should stay home for.
But I was in a walking mood. Seeing this shoveler on Wellsboro’s Main Street, suddenly I was a child again. My parents owned a local movie theater, hometown restaurant, and charter bus company in Mansfield. We worked hard to make those good places for families to gather, no matter the holiday, no matter the weather. Plenty of times we’d have rather been home on the couch, but that’s not the life of people who own small town businesses.
So that night in the snowstorm watching a business owner shoveling the sidewalk so that customers could come out for a relaxing night, I knew the dedication it took. The Open sign was hung. Inside staff were waiting for us to arrive. No matter the weather. No matter the holiday.
