Tom Terrific Today
40 years ago this month, Mansfield High School’s Tom McMillen shot his way onto the cover of Sports Illustrated... And that was just the beginning
Important reasons why you should consider Guthrie for your health care needs.
– One of the Top 50 Health Systems in the Nation, Modern Healthcare, 2009.
– Niagara Health Quality Coalition Honor Roll for Excellence in Patient Care (myhealthfinder.com), 6th year.
– VHA Leadership Award for Clinical Excellence, Outstanding Nursing Care, 2008.
– Recognized by the national American Nurses Credentialing Center, as a Magnet™ Hospital for Excellence in Nursing, 2008. Fewer than 5% of hospitals in the nation have earned Magnet Recognition®.
– 100 Top Hospitals in the Nation, 3rd consecutive year.
– 100 Top Cardiovascular Hospitals in the Nation, 6th year.
– Hospitals & Health Networks “Most Wired” Hospital, 3rd year.
We Are Guthrie... & Fitness Center
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Mountain Chatter
By Laura Reindl & Nicole Hagan
Gas boom times two.
Back
By Joyce M. Tice
Mansfield’s Remember the Twain campaign aims to bring “moving pictures” to town.
Smooth Sailing
By Jennifer Cline
For over forty years, Crystal Lake Ski Center in Hughesville, Pennsylvania, has provided one of the most extensive networks of groomed cross-country ski trails in the state.
Reading Nature
By Tom Murphy
Bill McKibben’s anthology, American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, spotlights the power of the environmental writer.
By John and Lynne Diamond-Nigh
Our columnists discuss the importance—nay, necessity—of the story.
Yogamama Says
By Kathleen Thompson
Why Yoga? Yogamama explains.
The Circus Comes to Town
By Laura Reindl
Flying high and singing out, Cirque Dreams Illumination brings high style to the big top in Elmira.
Top of His Game
By Matt Connor
From the cover of Sports Illustrated to the floor of the U.S. House, Tom McMillen has always been a lead scorer in life.
Lucky in Love
By Sarah Bull
Baseball and high school are long since gone, but, more than sixty-eight years later, Don and Betty Kerrick’s love still flies high.
Half of Half
By Kay Barrett
Avid shopper Etta Kay Rupert Dewey leads the charge as hordes of customers descend on Dunham’s Department Store for a shopper’s paradise.
Top: Tom McMillen with former President Richard Nixon. Middle: Don and Betty Kerrick. Bottom: Etta Kay Rupert Dewey outside Dunham’s Department Store.
Cover art by Tucker Worthington. Photography by Regis Vogt.
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Spot of Tea in Naples
By Angela Cannon-Crothers
“Come, let us have some tea and continue to talk about happy things.”
~Chaim Potok
& Dine
By Rob Lane
Around the Finger Lakes, chocolate is hot this Valentine’s Day.
Someplace Like Home
By Dave Milano
Dave falls hard for winter. 38 Mill Street Market
By Roberta McCulloch-Dews
Old is the new “new” at Mill Street Market in Horseheads, New York. 42
Back of the Mountain
Sunday Afternoon in the Park
P ublisher
Michael Capuzzo
e ditor - in - C hief
Teresa Banik Capuzzo
A sso C A te P ublisher
George Bochetto, Esq.
G ener A l M A n AG er
James Fitzpatrick
M A n AG in G e ditor
Laura Reindl
C o P y e ditors
Mary Nance, Kathleen Torpy
s t A ff W riter
Dawn Bilder
i ntern
Nicole Hagan
C over A rtist
Tucker Worthington
P r odu C tio n M A n AG er /G r AP hi C d esi G ner
Amanda Doan-Butler
G r AP hi C d esi G n A ssist A nt
Kay Barrett
C ontri butin G W riters
Kay Barrett, Dawn Bilder, Sarah Bull, Angela Cannon-Crothers, Jennifer Cline, Matt Connor, Barbara Coyle, John & Lynne Diamond-Nigh, Patricia Brown Davis, Jeffrey Allen Federowicz, Martha Horton, Holly Howell, Rob Lane, Roberta McCulloch-Dews, Cindy Davis Meixel, Fred Metarko, Karen Meyers, Dave Milano, Tom Murphy, Mary Myers, Jim Obleski, Cornelius O’Donnell, Gary Ranck, Myles C. Rhodes, Kathleen Thompson, Joyce M. Tice, Linda Williams
P hoto G r AP hy
James Fitzpatrick, Ann Kamzelski
A dvertisin G d ire C tor
Michele Monks
s A les r e P resent A tives
Christopher Banik, Michele Duffy, Laura Rose, John White
A CC ountin G Zachery Redell
b e AG le Cosmo
Mountain Home is published monthly by Beagle Media LLC, 39 Water St., Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, 16901. Copyright 2009 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, and Schuyler counties in New York. Visit us at www.mountainhomemag.com.
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LOOK FOR Mountain Home Real Estate Guide wherever Mountain Home magazine is found.
MOUNTAIN Ch ATTER
Classes on Gases
Pencils, notebooks, calculators…and hardhats? Through the collaboration of the Pennsylvania College of Technology (Penn Tech) and the Marcellus Shale Educations and Training Center (MSETC), the stereotypical classroom is changing.
Anyone from our region has most likely heard of the Marcellus Shale—a geological formation stretching from New York to West Virginia that is being drilled for natural gas. Originally, natural gas from the area was thought to unobtainable, locked within the “pores” of organic shale. The current hullabaloo comes from techniques such as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing that have now made getting natural gas from the region a possibility—and beyond that, a source of job opportunities for people in the Northeast.
Due to the growing demand for trained professionals in the industry, Penn Tech and Penn State Cooperative Extensions began
collaborating with MSETC in 2008 to drill up some short-term college training programs specific to the development and production of Marcellus Shale.
This past January, Penn College’s North Campus near Wellsboro held its first training course—American Petroleum Institute (API) 1104 – Down-Hand Welding.
“We are looking forward to being involved in many aspects of preparing our local work force for emerging and existing jobs in the natural gas industry,” says Brenda G. Abplanalp, director of North Campus outreach services in an article from PCToday .
Starting in February, the North Campus will add Commercial Drive (CDL) Training Specifics for the Oil and Gas Industry to their course offerings. For a complete list of future courses and more information about MSETC, visit www.pct.edu/msetc.
~Nicole Hagan
A Bridge Too Far
In the January 2010 article “Safe and Sound in Bill Town,” we included a picture of the Market Street bridge (above right). Unfortunately, it was a photograph of the Market Street bridge in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, as opposed to the Williamsport bridge by the same name. Concerned citizens let us know about our error immediately. That’s the Williamsport bridge above at the left.
The Great Gas Boom
Over the years our quiet mountain home has been overlooked by big business and industrial revolution. But something is in the air—or ground, rather—that is about to change all of that. With new drilling techniques underway, we are experiencing a gas boom which may yet reach the proportions of the California and Texas oil booms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Our humble hills are already gaining national notoriety. PBS aired a radio report on the Pennsylvania gas rush titled “In the Hills” in January 2009 as part of their Blueprint America segment. On January 5, 2010, Lycoming County was featured on Fox News’s On the Job Hunt series. Articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Enquirer, and other major newspapers around the country in the last two years.
Farmers who once barely scraped by have found themselves millionaires overnight, their financial woes thrown out the door in a whirlwind of drills and trucks. As we struggle to keep up with the high-speed whirlwind of big-city industry, only one thing is certain: change is coming, and coming fast.
~Laura
Reindl
WHAT: “your Business and Marcellus Shale,” a free series of lectures on the impact drilling will have on our region’s businesses.
WHEN: February 3, 10, and 17; 8–9:30 a.m.
WHERE: Pennsylvania College of Techology North Campus, 12880 Route 6, Wellsboro.
INFORMATION: For reservations or more information, call the Wellsboro Chamber of Commerce at 570-724-1926.
The teammates together again last month at George Washington University
Photo by Regis Vogt
“I was the second high school athlete to be on the cover,” says Tom McMillen, the former Mansfield, Pennsylvania, High School player who graced the cover of the February 16, 1970, edition of the magazine forty years ago. “There have been a handful since then, but it’s somewhat considered to be a curse as well. I’m not sure the others had much of a career.”
In the case of McMillen, the SI cover was just the start of a remarkable life that would include a Rhodes Scholarship, the Olympics, the NBA, Congress, a presidential appointment, and staggering success in business.
No “SI Curse” for him.
“The way I look at my life is like a series of circles, like the circles in the Olympics seal,” McMillen says.
Musicians dream of getting on the cover of Rolling Stone Businessmen fantasize about landing on the cover of Forbes . For actors, the ultimate validation is the cover of Vanity Fair . But it’s the cover of Sports Illustrated that most athletes pine for, and, for most, that rare, fleeting burst of recognition just never comes.
Imagine being a seventeen-year-old high school basketball star whom Sports Illustrated crowns “The Best High School Player in America.” Would it be a blessing or a curse? Would it be a designation too heavy to live up to? Would it be a case of peaking too early? Could anything to come in the life of this youngster match or surpass such a stellar designation?
“If you took those circles and you kind of intersect them, tell me, how many players in the world have played in the NBA and been an Olympian and been a congressman and been a Rhodes Scholar and then a successful businessman? There may be only two people on the planet: myself and Bill Bradley. If you look at the totality of life, that’s the way that I would evaluate it.”
McMillen was raised in Mansfield by his dentist father and former school teacher mother, both of whom emphasized sports and study.
“It was a professional family, and my brother Jay was a pretty successful basketball player in his own right,” he says. “He was an inspiration to me to become a good basketball player. And it helped that I was tall.
“To grow up in a town like Mansfield, where the state college was, enabled me to play against college players who were older than I was. Plus, educationally, the high school had a good reservoir of teachers.
“Our parents were very education conscious,” he adds. “We had a big library in our house. My two sisters went on to the University of Pennsylvania, Jay is a doctor, and my other brother is a foundation executive, so I think it was a good upbringing.”
College recruiters who showed up in Mansfield to watch big brother Jay play were soon nudging each other and pointing to Tom, who clearly had great potential and stood at a towering six feet eleven inches. This was a kid who bore some watching.
“My brother’s success focused a lot of attention on
me, so I was invited to basketball camps from sixth or seventh grade on, so I was always competing against great players outside of Mansfield,” McMillen says. “That’s very important. It’s very hard, if you’re limited in terms of competition, to succeed. Because of my brother’s success I had a chance to go to the University of North Carolina camp and camps all over the United States, where all I did was play basketball.”
As this star rose on the high school basketball courts, the recruiters started showing up en masse. The media soon followed.
“I was being recruited in a crazy, crazy fashion, but I still kept very focused on the two things that I tried to do well, which was to be a good student and be a good basketball player,” he says. “Those are the things that I focused on. I tried to put a lot of the other stuff out of the way.
“But the Sports Illustrated cover then fomented a lot of even more crazy recruiting,” he continues. “It really created even more of meltdown. I’d hate to see what it would be like today with Fox News, CNN and all that. It would be insane. It was pretty insane at the time, but it would be even more insane now.”
For two weeks, McMillen recalls, an SI photographer and writer tailed him from the basketball court to the classroom to his home, interviewing family and friends and, of course, McMillen himself all along the way.
“It wasn’t just Sports Illustrated,” says McMillen. “There was sort of a meltdown, if you will, a media meltdown. CBS News and all the major networks came to Mansfield, came to our high school. We had the college coaches all the time at the high school. But Sports Illustrated was the ultimate. They sent a photographer, Neil Leifer, a world-renowned photographer, who spent weeks
photographing me.”
To achieve the iconic cover shot, with the young McMillen, mouth agape, leaping up and extending his seemingly endless arms, Stretch Armstrong-like, above the basketball net, photographer Leifer actually climbed the backboard and stood there like a catbird through the entire game, shooting constantly.
“I remember Neil Liefer was the photographer, crawling up on that backboard,” says McMillen’s lifelong friend Tom Cole, who played on the Mansfield team with McMillen and also appears on the SI cover. “He actually took the cover shot while standing on the backboard during the game. He was up there while the game was going on. We thought that was a little strange, but there he was. He was up there taking pictures down onto the court as we were playing the game.”
Cole jokingly calls the SI cover “the highlight of my life! It’s been downhill ever since!”
Well, hardly. Cole later attended the U.S. Naval Academy, served as commander of a nuclear submarine, and is now a successful businessman. So much for that supposed “SI Curse.”
“I still have that cover framed at home, and periodically I find someone who has some interest in that, and I pull it out and we laugh about how short the basketball shorts were back then and that sort of thing,” Cole says. “It’s still a pretty exciting thing. I’m still a small town guy.”
Looking back on that heady experience forty years ago, Cole is filled with a mixture of awe and lighthearted humor. There was a quote attributed to him in the original article, for example, that he’s been trying to live down ever since.
“At that age you say things and you think you’re See McMillen on page 16
The 1969 Pennsylvania Basketball Champions. Kneeling, from left: S. Heinrich, R. Hill, Coach Rich Miller, T. Stickler, T. Cole. Standing, from left: R. Schanbacher, G. Barber, G. Slater, T. McMillen, L. Kingsley, H. Cole, J. Hill.
It’s Still Miller Time in Mansfield
“I always listen to what he says; anything he says—that’s it. He’s the top dog.” Unusual words to hear a father speak about his son, but for Rich Miller Sr., that’s reality. The tables have turned on this former Mansfield High School basketball coach now that his son, Rich Jr., is the head coach of the Mansfield University men’s basketball team, calling the shots—officially, at least—and leaving his father, who helps out as a volunteer assistant coach, in the background.
But he’s okay with that. In fact, both father and son seem happy with the arrangement. “I come up here around October when the practices start,” says Rich Sr., who lives with his wife near Harrisburg during the off-season. “I stay with Rich and his wife; they have a basement apartment for me. My wife is still teaching—she’s a first grade teacher—and she doesn’t mind me coming up. I go home probably once every week or two and complete my ‘honeydo’ list, and then I come back up.”
“It works out pretty well,” agrees Rich Jr. “We have different philosophies, and I like to do things my way. I’m certainly in charge—there’s no doubt about that. But Dad helps out a lot, he does a great job, and, of course, he is certainly not afraid to
By Laura Reindl
go around town, you see those people, the people that were around then, and they still look at that team in 1970 and ’71. That was a glorious time.”
While Tom McMillen, the 6’11” star and the top college prospect in the nation in his senior year, is the number one hero of the team, people remember Rich Miller’s name, too. “A lot of people are remembered for different things, and Dad’s remembered for something very positive. That’s something pretty special. He made his mark on so many people and made them really happy. There’s a lot to be said for that.”
Rich Sr. is not the first Miller to gain notoriety in Mansfield, though. His father, Warren L. Miller, was a standout athlete at Mansfield State College in his day, as well as a “founding father,” Rich Sr. says, of the education system in Mansfield, serving as superintendent for a number of years. The local elementary school is named in his honor.
Like any successful coach, it is clear that Rich Sr. was tough on the kids he coached, telling about a practice he held the morning after a snowstorm had dumped two feet of snow on the town. “A lot of these kids were from the country. Their parents
brought them in, but they didn’t have rides home, so I told them to walk. And they did—some of them for five or six miles.”
Rich Jr. laughs. “If you’re a high school coach, you’re kind of looked at as a god-like figure, or a dictator. As a college coach, it’s not like that. They’re more mature, and they understand life a little more. They’re not going to run through a brick wall for you. We’d bus our kids down the hill to the dorms, because that’s the nice thing to do.”
While lacking a bit of his father’s tough attitude toward his players, Rich Jr. has experienced success as well, both as a player and a coach. He was the second-leading scorer in the history of his high school’s basketball team (the Lower Dauphin Falcons) and was recruited by a number of division two and three schools. “Basketball was my first love. I played football at Bucknell, but the most interest I had was in playing basketball, and the most knowledge of the game I had was in basketball.”
He moved to Mansfield for the first time as a graduate student at the university, playing a year of basketball and eventually earning a position as a fulltime assistant coach. “Spending six years on Coach Vince Alexander’s staff at Mansfield taught me a lot
Rich Miller Sr. (left) and Rich Miller Jr.
Looking Back Resurrecting the Twain Joyce M. Tice
Mansfield has a history of firsts when it comes to the movies. This may come as a surprise to generations who grew up in the last thirty years in a Mansfield with no theaters.
Lyman H. Howe was an enterprising young man from Wilkes-Barre who booked traveling entertainment at the local opera houses as early as 1880. His company was responsible for getting the early moving picture reels into the rural communities such as Mansfield. Lyman H. Howe’s Moving Pictures were advertised in the local papers beginning in 1905. In Mansfield the movie reels were shown in the upper part of the Opera House, a portion of which remains on East Wellsboro Street as the Borough Hall.
In 1907 Edward Saks, a Mansfield jeweler, and his partner, Charles Miller, opened the first movie theater in Tioga County. The Saks and Miller Theatorium was built behind the jewelry store which was on the corner of East Wellsboro and Hoard Streets. The theater faced Hoard Street, about where the back doors of the First Citizens Bank are now located. K. F. VanNorman purchased the theater in 1911 and ran it until it burned down in 1916.
W. A. McCausland and Elmer Cornwell built the Star Theater in the 1916, which stood next to the old Mansfield Hotel, demolished in 1957 and replaced by the Mansfield Inn, and the restaurant that was demolished this year. VanNorman managed the Star until 1933, by which time he had purchased it. This theater showed the first “talkie” in 1929. In 1936 the Star was leased to Jack Myers who named it The Rialto. He sold it in 1940 to Harry Taylor and Harry Swain, who combined their names to call it the Twain Theater. This is the name by which most of us remember it. Taylor bought out Swain’s interest in 1940, and when he died in 1950, his wife, Louise, and son, Walter, continued to run it.
In 1959 the Taylors sold the Twain to Effie and John Antonio who had previously operated
the Lyric Theater in Elkland. The Twain had 420 seats at that time. A major renovation in 1972 included taking out the center aisle and increasing seating capacity to 470. It was the first theater in the county to be air-conditioned and the first to replace the old projectors with an automated system. Daughter Linda ran the concession stand when she was old enough. John showed free movies at Mansfield University’s Straughn Hall from midnight to dawn. He also put on Saturday children’s shows as Uncle Johnny.
The Antonio family enjoyed their time running the Twain Theater in Mansfield as a family. Effie died in 1981 after a long illness, and John could no longer run it alone. The last movie shown was The Rose in May 1980. The building was demolished in 1984, ending the nearly eightyyear history of movies in Mansfield.
Hope springs eternal and closed doors can open again. The first project of the recently formed Mansfield Downtown Development Corporation (MDDC) is to bring a theater back to Mansfield. The Remember the Twain campaign is underway to raise money for a four-screen theater in the downtown area of the borough. MDCC includes people from local businesses and public officials as well as representatives from the university. Brochures explaining the project are available around town and they have a page on Facebook with more information. Contributions to support the project can be sent to:
Remember the Twain
501 North Hall
Mansfield University
Mansfield PA 16933
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.
being clever, then you read them in print and think, ‘I wish I hadn’t said that,’” Cole says with a laugh. “I think the quote that got his mother excited was when I said, ‘I think [McMillen] is so straight he’s never kissed a girl.’ The next time I saw his mom, she gave me the eyeball and essentially what she said was, ‘You couldn’t think of something better to say about my son to Sports Illustrated?’”
“It’s not every little boy who gets to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated,” he adds. “It certainly is an amazing little footnote to my life. I was just lucky enough to have even been in the photo that was used. There were other guys on the team who might have been in that photo had they used a slightly different photo. So it’s been fun to have that. It’s been a fun thing.”
Still close to McMillen, Cole marvels over the “amazing things” his former high school classmate has done with his life: “It’s rare that when I meet someone, and I think it’s appropriate, that I tell them I was Tom McMillen’s best friend in high school and they don’t know him as a basketball player, the chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, a U.S. Congressman, a businessman, or entrepreneur. He’s done a lot of things, and he’s one of the good ones.”
After high school, McMillen played ball for the University of Maryland, where he majored in Chemistry and became a Rhodes Scholar.
“It would be very hard for me today, because Chemistry was a tough curriculum,” he said of his double emphasis on basketball and a challenging academic life. “I showed up late for practice a lot. It would be very hard to have that curriculum today and play college sports.”
In 1972 he made the U.S. Olympic basketball team and during the games in Munich played in one of the most controversial hoops competitions in history.
“The Olympics in Munich, Germany, was where the terrorist attacks occurred,” McMillen says, referring to the kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes that year, a horrifying incident that was certainly the darkest episode in Olympic history and was later the basis of a Steven Spielberg movie. “And our basketball game against the Russians was probably the most memorable basketball game ever in the Olympics.
“We came from behind to win the game—it was a very controversial game, you can Google it and you’ll get plenty to read—and then the Internation Basketball Federation (FIBA) officials came out of
See McMillen on page 36
McMillen continued from page 12
OU T d O O RS
OGliding the Great Ski Basin
“If you can walk, you can ski,” says Anna Alford, whose Crystal Lake Ski Center proves it with miles of welcoming cross-country trails
By Jennifer Cline
utside the community of Tivoli, Pennsylvania, lies a sanctuary for lovers of the outdoors—a “bowl” in the heights of the Endless Mountains that creates an idyllic spot for coldweather recreation.
Blessed by unique topography—sitting at an elevation that brings snow and nestled within a pocket that holds it longer than the surrounding area—Crystal Lake Ski Center hosts more than thirty kilometers of cross-country trails that surround both Crystal and Wild Rice lakes, winding through a scenic backdrop of woodlands and streams in Lycoming County.
Opened in the 1970s as the popularity of
cross-country skiing began taking off in the United States, the ski center was conceived by Dottie Alford, an avid skier whose daughter Anna continues to manage the center.
“She’s from Maine,” Anna Alford says. “When she was a girl, she would go out with her skis, climb the mountain, and ski down.”
The original network of trails was developed from existing logging trails and was then expanded to make Crystal Lake Ski Center one of the most comprehensive cross-country skiing facilities in the state in terms of the quantity of groomed trails and the availability of equipment rentals and instructors.
“John Manifold, who designed our trails,
went up in an airplane at the end of the ski season and looked at where the snow still was,” Alford says. “That’s part of how he designed the trails.”
Alford grew up skiing, like her mother, and played a part in the ski center.
“I love this place,” the manager says. “I really enjoy the people who come skiing here.”
Clients return season after season, some visiting the center several times each week, and others traveling great distances to ski Crystal Lake once or twice each winter.
Alford rightfully takes pride in the center.
She is a lifelong lover of the sport, but working at the ski center means she does not get as many opportunities to ski herself. She sees it as a worthy sacrifice, though.
“I’ve skied other places, and I kind of feel like this is the best,” she says boastfully. “I don’t feel deprived working here all winter and not getting to ski other places. I feel really fortunate to be doing this.” And it is Crystal Lake’s customers who fuel her energy. “The customers have become friends, and you want to keep it going for them,” she says.
The sense of community is one of several attributes that draws skiers to Crystal Lake. “Everyone is really friendly,” Alford says, noting that veterans freely offer help and advice to first-time skiers. “I really think people go out of their way to make others feel comfortable here.”
But what skiers love most is the snow that blankets the ski center, even when the remainder of northcentral Pennsylvania is without. Even regulars continue to be surprised at times, arriving at Crystal Lake in wonderment, saying, “I didn’t think you
would have snow.”
“Those last couple of miles, as they drive in, all of a sudden—there’s snow,” Alford says.
Skiers also appreciate the variety of trails available at Crystal Lake Ski Center, which include fast, downhill runs as well as rolling hills suitable for beginners. The mix is also made up of trails groomed for classic skiing and trails groomed for skate skiing, plus a handful of ungroomed trails, ideal for snowshoeing.
While cross-country skiing is a tried-andtrue form of full-body exercise, the activity is not reserved for only the athletic and agile.
“If you can walk, you can ski,” Alford said. She notes that people often see Olympic cross-country skiers and become intimidated, but she reminds reluctant would-be skiers: “You can ski at whatever pace you want to. It’s just like the difference between going out for a stroll and going for a run.”
Crystal Lake Ski Center does count among its frequent clients Olympic crosscountry skier Prawat Nagvajara, a Thai native and Drexel University professor who was Thailand’s sole representative in the 2002 and 2006 winter games. He trains at
the center, where his young sons are now also learning to ski. Alford enjoys watching families learn to ski, passing the tradition to the next generation.
In addition to equipment rentals, lessons, and a wealth of beginner-, intermediate, and advanced-level trails, Crystal Lake hosts a dining lodge, and when conditions are favorable, Alford opens the lake to iceskating.
On her website (www.crystallakeskicenter. com), Alford posts skiing conditions and a daily photo to show skiers whether there is sufficient snow on the trails before they brave the country roads. Skiers may also call 570584-4209 for more information.
Trails are open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. Half-day, one-day, two-day, six-day, and season passes are available. Cabin lodging is available at the facility during the fall, winter, and spring through Crystal Lake Camps, a separate business that offers children’s camps at the locale during the summer (www. crystallakecamps.org/lodging).
Old Lycoming Township resident Jennifer Cline is an occasional contributor to Mountain Home
Crystal Lake
REAdING
NATURE
The Mighty Pen
Tom Murphy
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy winter, even February when the bones of ice ridges protrude from under the windblown snow. It is a raw time, and spring seems still so far away. But it’s not all bad. For one thing, the bitter cold heightens the contrast between inside and outside: coming inside, cold and damp, and feeling the comfort and warmth of the house, perhaps standing close to the fire for a few minutes, then making a hot drink and sitting down with a book.
And I have just the book: American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, an anthology assembled by Bill McKibben and full of classic essays and excerpts from important books. McKibben explains in his introduction that the writing in the collection—environmental writing—“takes as its subject the collision between people and the rest of the world, and asks searching questions about that collision.” Oh, you might think, just what I need, more bad news about how we are destroying the world. But the material McKibben has chosen charts how impassioned and well reasoned writing has helped shape our world. He notes how some of the writing in the book was instrumental in creating the National Park system, halting the excesses of the plumage trade, protecting birds (and people) from harmful pesticides, and reducing smog in cities.
In the case of these pieces, writing about environmental problems is a step in dealing with them. The writings in this book are not about politics; they “drove the political side of the [environmental] movement more than the other way around.” American author and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams wrote about a demonstration she participated in to try to stop nuclear testing in the Nevada desert. She was not some radical agitator. The testing affected her directly since she lived down-wind of it in Utah. She was also a fifth-generation Mormon, and when the testing started after World War II, many in the Mormon community and in her
family died of cancer, a rare occurrence before that time. She and the other protesters were arrested. Williams described what happened:
As one officer cinched the handcuffs around my wrists, another frisked my body. She found a pen and a pad of paper tucked inside my left boot.
“And these?” she asked sternly.
“Weapons,” I replied Our eyes met. I smiled. She pulled the leg of my trousers back over my boot.
So in a way these pieces are about how people have done something, begun conversations about saving the world.
The essays are in chronological order with no thematic subdivisions. Reading the essays in order shows how issues were first raised and illustrates how the groundwork was laid for current solutions and issues. The two sections of pictures enhance the awareness that real people and real places are involved. I was surprised to see, for example, that in a 1909 photograph of John Muir leading a Sierra Club outing in a rugged California landscape, fourteen of the twentytwo people were women. There are Ansel Adams landscapes and a huge pile of buffalo skulls.
The book samples a broad range of writing and if you find a writer or book that speaks to your needs, you can move outside the anthology. Especially in this region of New York and Pennsylvania, sitting on top of the Marcellus shale as we are, we will not have the luxury of being nature-lovers without being environmentalists, regardless of how the term has been exaggerated and ridiculed. To be able to enjoy nature—hiking, fishing, hunting—will mean becoming environmentally involved. We will need to be vigilant and outspoken, and this book can inspire us.
Tom Murphy teaches nature writing at Mansfield University. You can contact him at readingnature@ mountainhomemag.com.
Review of American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau. Edited by Bill McKibben. New York: Library of America, 2008
B O d Y & S OUL Seasons of Love
Don and Betty Kerrick’s
Romance Has Gone Into Extra Innings—Threescore and Counting
By Sarah Bull
Phototgraphy By James Fitzpatrick
Spitting into his palms, a boy on the cusp of becoming a man steps up to the plate, his sweat-soaked green and white Wellsboro Hornets uniform clinging to his back. With a wink over his left shoulder aimed at a pretty girl on the top bleacher, he pulls back his wooden bat and waits for the pitch. The girl watches the batter intently, softly whispering, “Good luck, honey.”
Crack! He loves to swing on the first pitch. The ball pounds against the dirt and bounces twice before being scooped up by the shortstop. The shortstop fires the ball to first base, but he’s too late—the hitter is already on the bag. Catching his breath, he glances over at the bleachers once more, catching his sweetheart’s eye. Matching grins spread across their faces.
In 1938 Don Kerrick loved playing baseball. In fact, he loved all sports. “Everything else in high school was just sissy stuff,” he says. But even sports were more enjoyable when he glanced out of the corner of his eye and caught a glimpse of the young sophomore, Betty, flashing her sweet smile as she cheered him on.
Few wonders in life can be compared to the often-fleeting phenomenon of young love, and Don and Betty were one of the few couples able to keep that shooting star burning brightly. Whether they were sitting together in chapel or “scraping together thirty-five cents” to see a movie at the Arcadia, they were always together.
Had they been an ordinary high school couple, their passion would have soon faded, and time would have pulled them apart until the star had disappeared altogether.
But theirs was different—streaking all the way to 2010 where the Kerricks sit side-byside in their matching chairs at the Laurels Assisted Living Residence in Wellsboro.
The Kerricks married in the spring of 1941, just one year after Betty graduated from Wellsboro Area High School. They had two sons, ten years apart—the younger of whom is now fifty-seven years old. They raised their family in Wellsboro, the town they’ve called home for most of their lives.
Don, a Navy man with a degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, was the administrator of the local Carson Investment Company loan offices. And Betty attended the Rochester Dental Dispensary, later becoming a dental hygienist in Wellsboro.
“We never had a lot of arguments about money and children,” Don says, explaining one of the reasons their marriage has lasted so long. “And we were never a couple where one partner started to say something and the other one would cut in and try to correct.”
The Kerricks were active members of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Wellsboro. After joining in 1950, they jumped in with both feet. Betty launched the church’s annual antique show, Don served as treasurer for twenty-five years, and together they taught a Sunday school class for several years. “Anything that wasn’t musical, we had a hand in,” Don says.
Kim Runey working on Geri Kennedy. Inset:
The Better World Telling Tales
John & Lynne diamond-Nigh
“I came here as a stranger, / A stranger I go out. / The month of May did favor me / With flowers strewn about. / The girl she spoke of loving me, / Her mother, of a wedding day; / But now the world is full of gloom, / And snow covers up the way.”
“Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”
“Worn by Pershing’s men on the 1916 Punitive Expedition, it was eleven grueling months of chasing Pancho Villa across the Mexican Sonora. One week they were racing across the desert in an open-topped touring car. The next it was up into the mountains on horseback.”
How do stories make us better people?
A large literacy banner down the street goes like this: “Read to me, my own story is just beginning.”
Yet, as Larry McMurtry observes in his latest book, Books, not only may books be on their way out, reading itself may become an obsolete skill, practiced only by a few sentimentalists the way calligraphy and archery are now.
The first story is a stanza from Franz Schubert’s Winterreise. As with many silly love songs, it’s a tale about love going plum awry. Aristotle thought that really grim tragedy was a moral or emotional detergent; it cleaned away our woes by sizing them up against a king who marries his mother and cuts his own eyes out. I can’t say it usually works that way for me, but what this stanza, and stories in general, do so well is to prime my curiosity. What went wrong? Did her meddlesome papa drive him off with a shotgun? Did the beloved die?
I recently read this ad: “Curiosity Wanted.” I never saw it kill a cat (and we have six), but I have seen curiosity make good people even better. I’d even go so far as to say it’s the unique and lustrous genius of our particular civilization. Among its several tonics, it keeps us youthful and immune to bigotry. If, like an anthropologist, I’m curious
about you, your way of life, and why you keep your pockets full of jasmine-flavored jellybeans, I’m less apt to hate you.
The second hymn is a root story shared across ages and civilizations. From these few roots, all of our other stories grow. This may be the deepest good that storytelling does for us—it gives us collective patterns to live by, a few universal poles every compass needle swings to in grief, in joy, in quandary or hardship. These roots are being lost. Kids in their digital niches can find a clip of Weezer but can’t fill in Zeus or Buddha or Christ in a crossword puzzle. If, as this gospel hymn portrays, a man died to enhance the lot of humanity, the least I can do is stop my car and help that elderly lady across the street.
The third story reminds me of what the great English writer Somerset Maugham called himself: a romancer—the buccaneer, the stowaway in all of us. It is taken from a clothing catalogue and is meant to induce you to buy a shirt by making you—if you do buy the shirt—part of the heroic, swashbuckling gallantry of the past. I’m a sucker for it, I admit. I did buy their aviator’s scarf years ago, and I’m flying with Amelia Earhart every time I put it on. We don’t crash. We land on a tiny dot of palm trees in the Pacific and live out our fruit-plucking lives in primitive bliss, quite as naked as the natives.
Stories show us that under the skin of literalness there are other, even richer ways of truth that are symbolic, allusive, fallible, or ironic. Stories also show us that the days of our lives aren’t an accidental mix, but are chapters twined in the fulfillment of a luminous personal destiny. Perhaps obstetricians should ink onto every newborn baby: Read to me, my own story is just beginning
Lynne is an etiquette and protocol consultant and a humanities professor at Elmira College. John is an artist and designer. Please send questions and comments to thebetterworld@mountainhomemag.com.
Yogamama Says My Life, The Movie
Kathleen Thompson
Tonight I told my Beginner Yoga session the real reason I do yoga: it makes me high.
Seriously. Why else would I do this crazy stuff? Breathing like a stallion, making weird sounds in the back of my throat, closing off one nostril while breathing out the other, holding my breath until I almost pass out?
And that’s just the pranayama. Add in the postures and the holding of those postures until every muscle in my body screams for release and then holding for five more excruciating breaths, and you have the recipe for wackadoo-ism in the extreme—unless there is something more.
Who does this stuff unless there is something more, some serious payoff at the end? Not me, that’s for sure.
But there is a payoff at the end. Big time. And the payoff is that this stuff allows me to transcend my ordinary experience.
That’s right. I leave my ordinary take-out-the-trash, shave-my-armpits, walk-the-dog, do-the-dishes, check-my-e-mail, pay-my-bills life behind.
My practice takes me on a magic carpet ride, up, up, high in the air, high as a kite, to a vantage point where I can look down and see myself driving around in my little Mickey Mouse car, on my way to my little Mickey Mouse business thing that I am so very, very earnest about and think is ever so important. “Hah! Silly woman,” I think, from my high post-yoga vantage point.
For quite a while after a really good yoga practice, I walk around in an altered state, wondering why everyone is taking this movie that we’re all in for real. Like the little girl in the Arcadia theater bathroom who watched me bawling after a sad movie said: “Lady, it’s only a movie.”
But we always get suckered into this movie, don’t we? We always think that our life is really real, just like we think our dream is really real until we wake up and go, “Wow, that was one strange dream.” Someday we’re all going to “wake up” from this dream we are currently taking to be our “life.” This show we are taking so seriously is totally going to close.
What a yoga practice does is allow us to see that even though it is a show, and we are stuck in it, we can act in it, write it, produce it, and direct it. We are totally in charge of our own movie. We have total control in how we behave, what choices we make, with whom we choose to co-star, and what plot lines we want to play out.
A yoga practice affords us that perspective, and from that “high” vantage point, we can see, and be reminded of, what’s really going on.
That’s why I practice. That’s the only reason I practice.
Kathleen Thompson is the owner of Main Street Yoga in Mansfield, PA. Contact her at 570-660-5873, online at www.yogamansfield.com, or e-mail yogamama@mountainhomemag.com.
A RTS & L EISURE
½ of ½ Draws Full House
Ladies (and Gents), Start Shopping! Dunham’s Twice-Annual Sales Extravaganza Has Arrived
By Kay Barrett
Phototgraphy By James Fitzpatrick
It’s 6:30 a.m., and a crowd is gathering at the front and rear entrances of one of the last family-owned-and-operated smalltown department stores in America. Pacing feet and anxious giggles greet the morning, while eyes peer through the store windows looking for the best lanes of travel and the most valuable items. There is only one event in Wellsboro that would put the female shopping population in such a tizzy—the Dunham’s ½ of ½ sale.
“It started as a leap year sale,” says Ann
that sent us advertising ideas, and a leap year sale was one of them. It was supposed to be a sale that would only happen once every four years, and it would be one of those too-good-to-be-true sales. We called it our ½ of ½ sale and it was so successful we have continued it twice every year, in February and August.”
One woman, first in line at the rear of the store, stands out as an obvious veteran of the sale, offering her advice to some of the freshmen shoppers. “Just grab it! You don’t even look at the
go. Just grab them!” reiterates Dewey. “I’m a little selfish. I buy for myself first and then the rest of the family. Today I have to get a pair of Clarks,” Dewey says.
After finishing in the shoe department, Dewey explains how she needs to move on to the women’s section to buy clothes for her daughter who is in law enforcement in San Diego. After the women’s department, Dewey plans on trekking to the top floor, where she hopes to load up on baby clothes for her niece who just had triplets.
Shoppers wait in line at the August 2009 Dunham’s ½ of ½ sale.
Kay is our best ½ of ½ shopper. She is this sweet enthusiastic woman who never misses a ½ of ½ sale,” says Nancy.
Still standing by the locked doors at 8:28 a.m., Dewey gets anxious. Peering through the store windows, paranoia sets in. “How did that person get in? Oh, I think he works here,” Dewey says with a nervous laugh. But the sight of a worker inside the store sends the crowd chattering.
As the store clerk walks toward the door, the crowd moves closer, and as the lock turns and the doors open, the stampede begins. “I’ll talk to you after the sale,” says Dewey as she sprints toward the shoes.
Women with four and five boxes of shoes in their arms swarm the checkout counters as latecomers scramble to find any ½ of ½ shoes in their sizes. Dewey has already moved on from shoes to women’s clothing, where shoppers pick through the balloon-marked rack of name-brand misses and junior clothing.
Dunham’s biggest sale of the year keeps customers busy shopping and employees busy checking out boxes of shoes and armloads of clothing. Some shoppers come alone, while others bring buddies to hold bags and boxes as their partners search for more steals.
Three hours later, Dewey leaves Dunham’s with tired feet, full arms, and her Dunham’s addiction satisfied—at least until the next ½ of ½. “Dunham’s is a small-town, family-run business that has made it. I’m a Dunham’s customer for life,” says Dewey.
STAY ROMANTIC
WHERE: dunham’s department Store, 45 Main Street, Wellsboro INFORMATION: www.dunhamswellsboro.com; 570-724-1905
Above: Shoppers rummage through racks of clothing at the Dunham’s ½ of ½ sale. Below: Etta Kay Rupert Dewey checks out.
A Little Bit of Everything
Cirque Dreams Illumination Lights up the Clemens Center With A One-Of-A-Kind Show
By Laura Reindl
Bright lights, flashy costumes, and energizing live music pull you to the edge of your seat and the verge of sensory overload, then push you back from the edge again, as you sigh in wonder and pure incredulity. It’s all part of the experience—and what an experience it is—of Cirque Dreams Illumination, a show that combines the European cirquestyle performance with traditional American circus arts and Broadway theatrics, scheduled to perform at Elmira’s Clemens Center on February 12 and 13.
Illumination, the thirteenth show created and performed by Cirque Productions since its establishment in 1993, brings the city streets to life in a blaze of color and incredible acrobatic feats. Arial acrobats spin and twist high in the air next to high-wire walkers (although “dancers” or “gymnasts” might be more apt terms), while the imaginary streets of the cityscape below are alive with jugglers, contortionists, musicians, dancers, and tumblers, adorned in road signs, caution tape, and construction gear. We aren’t just talking about your typical clowns juggling colorful balls or pins; these performers take their acts to a whole new level. An Argentinean duo performs the Risley act, a foot manipulation performance in which one performer lies on his back and juggles his partner with his feet, flipping him with the elegance of an otter spinning through the water.
Another performer brings back an old Russian circus act called the Perch act, as he travels the stage with a harness attached to his head, on top of which his wife gracefully spins twenty feet in the air above him. Everywhere you look, there is something to see and gasp at in awe.
A team of creative minds works together to create each show, under the direction of the company’s creator. “All of this is the brainchild of Neil Goldberg,” says Jennifer SierraGrobbelaar, Director of Media Relations. “He is the creator, director, and artistic director of all of our shows.” With an educational background in business and theater arts, Goldberg created, owned, and operated numerous entertainment companies in southern Florida before starting Cirque Productions. The first American-based company to produce the European cirque-style shows, Goldberg’s “brainchild” has seen great success. Their last production, Cirque Dreams Jungle Fantasy, made it to Broadway last year.
“Everything is created in our studio: the choreography, music, costumes, everything,” says Sierra-Grobbelaar. The 20,000-squarefoot Dream Studios in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, serves as the headquarters for the group, as well as the main rehearsal and training complex for the company’s more than 100 performers, who hail from all over the world, including the Mongolian School of Contortion, the Acrobatic Training Center of Beijing, China, the Sports Acrobatic Association of Poland, the Moscow Circus, and the Russian State College for Variety Arts.
One such performer is David Ponzanter, a California native who performs on the roue Cyr, a large metal hoop he stands in the center of and maneuvers around the stage with his body. Ponzanter plays the part of the train’s engineer in Illumination, also riding a unicycle and performing stunts on rollerblades throughout the show. And in the “little bit of everything” spirit of the show, he also sings some opera as he rolls around the stage in his various contraptions. “I love that I can do everything in this show. I’m a dancer and a singer, and I
also do acrobatics. Illumination allows me to do them all at once,” says Ponzanter.
“Circus performing is very physically demanding, so you’re kind of limited to what you can do at first, but after you’ve been touring for a while, you can expand as you get used to the physical burdens. That’s probably my favorite part about it all. My act is always changing.” It is clear that Ponzanter, who has been involved in theater since he was twelve but had not done any acrobatics until he was twenty-four, truly enjoys what he does. “I really love the whole number. There are some circus skills people learn to do because they look cool, but they’re hard or painful to do. I wanted to do the Cyr because it looked fun to do, and it is. I love doing it.”
And that is part of what makes Cirque Dreams Illumination so much fun for the audience. The performers are having a blast, as well. With twelve countries and a vast array of talents represented in the cast, there is a lot to enjoy about each other both on and off the stage. And the language barriers? Not a problem for Ponzanter, anyway, who speaks six languages and is in the process of learning Russian, the first language of over half of the cast. “Everyone helps each other out—I’m always learning new things from the other performers. It’s a really great group of people who are all really talented,” he says. “We have a lot of fun.”
WHAT: Cirque dreams Illumination
WHEN: February 12 and 13, 7 p.m.
WHERE: Clemens Center, 207 Clemens Center Pkwy, Elmira, Ny
INFORMATION: For ticket prices and reservations, call 800-724-0159 or 607-734-8191, or visit www.clemenscenter.com/broadway/cirque.
OO d & dRINK
Dallying at Dallywater’s
Janice Dallywater Harwood Brings a Taste of England to a Teahouse in Naples
Story and Photography By Angela Cannon-Crothers
“Iwas in love with the idea of opening a teahouse,” says Janice Dallywater Harwood, whose pleasant demeanor, delightful smile, and English accent transport one to a different world. “I grew up in England,” she says, “so my very essence was based on tea and the whole concept of sitting down with friends and family to take a moment to relax.”
Having left England behind in 1999, Harwood wanted to bring that experience to the people in her new home. Seven years after first seeing the quaint house at 120 Main Street in Naples and thinking it would be a perfect place for a teahouse, the Harwoods finally decided to take a look at the home for sale in the little town they thought so picturesque. On the way up the steps, the realtor remarked that the building had been a teahouse in the 1950s. It seemed like serendipity was at play. And after only one year of being in business, Dallywater’s Tea House and Gallery was listed as the #1 tearoom in New York State, beating out 138 competitors.
“I like to educate people about how to make tea,” says Harwood, as she sets down a simple white pot, a cup and saucer, and a silver tea-leaf strainer and dish. Guests are given the opportunity to smell and select their pot of tea from among seventeen choices on her specially designed tea wheel. The pots of tea are endless, the food superb, and the cares of the day are set adrift.
Plain, lovely tearooms and the Harwood Gallery artwork on the walls are the perfect frame for what Harwood does best: serve traditional English tea, homemade scones with clotted cream, and other delectable foods in a quiet and relaxing atmosphere. The gallery features the work of her husband, Kevin Harwood, whose style of “realism with a little surrealism” and distinguished skills in egg tempera, watercolor, and oils has added both charm and success to the couple’s endeavor.
Since the opening of Dallywater’s in March 2008, the menu has expanded to offer five different lunches every day. They also hired five staff members, and, blessedly, Harwood found “just the right fit” for a pastry chef. Melanie Mattison studied at the Pennsylvania Culinary Institute in Classical French
Pastry, and Harwood calls her “my rare find.” This spring Dallywater’s plans to offer more in the way of a patisserie in addition to taking orders for wedding cakes, birthday cakes, and traditional English Christmas cakes.
Afternoon tea is served with a choice of English tea sandwiches like ham and hollandaise with asparagus or coronation chicken, a fruited English scone served with strawberry preserves and Devonshire clotted cream, as well as a selection of miniature pastries. Other menu choices include Just Desserts or Classic British Lunches like homemade pesto soup and freshly baked soda bread, quiche, toasted Welsh rarebit, or warm Shrewsbury salad.
“Everything is made here, from scratch,” says Harwood, “with authentic ingredients like real butter—just like your grandmother would have made.” Dallywater’s menu favors seasonal choices and local produce whenever possible. She plans ahead, she says. “Like a traditional English woman I can my own plums and blood oranges, and dry fruits for our own homemade mincemeat pies in time for Christmas and winter celebrations.”
This past December the teahouse created a theatrical Edwardian Tea. Staff dressed in costume and served a lavish Edwardian-era lunch and tea complete with courses of mini Yorkshire pudding, shredded roast beef and water cress sandwiches, roast parsnip soup, egg kedgeree, and more to guests who also enjoyed a “spirited” Christmas ghost story. “It was so successful,” says Harwood. “We already have reservations for next year!”
Another well-loved item of the luncheon was their mincemeat pie. Forget any notions of fruitcakes or mincemeats you might have—to taste this morsel of warm, melt-in-your mouth crust and raisin filling with orange and spice overtones delicately layered over sweet cream is a mouthful of pure delight, and may be even better than Christmas itself.
As I lick the last crumbs off my plate and sip down the to bottom of my cup (don’t worry, I kept my pinky out the entire time—I know how to be ladylike), I ask Harwood why she thinks this place has been so successful.
She credits the thriving tourism in the area and mentions that it’s a place everyone will enjoy—she’s even had Harley bikers come in for lunch. “But mostly,” says Harwood, with a sparkle in her eye, “this is a genuine experience with real food. There’s lots of love and thoughtfulness in everything we do.” She reflects for a moment and adds, “I know a little girl who comes here often with her mother. She says that nobody could ever be unhappy here.”
I smile and nod. This—the tea, the pastry, and the easy conversation— makes Dallywater’s, beyond a doubt, a calming and happy place and, in true English fashion, a most lovely spot for tea.
Cannon-Crothers is a freelance writer and outdoor educator living in the Finger Lakes region of New York.
Angela
Janice Dallywater Harwood
Wine & dine
For the Love of Chocolate
Rob Lane
So we have survived the frantic holiday season, and we’ve made it through those cold January nights. I think we all deserve a treat for making it halfway through winter. Fortunately, February is the month for you and your special someone to celebrate love and the food, wine, and fun that goes with it. The Finger Lakes area has many events and special wine dinners designed especially for romance and fun to get us through the last of the winter cold and into spring’s warm arms.
The Cayuga Wine Trail is adding a special Valentine’s twist to their annual Mardi Gras event this year on February 13–14. All participants will receive a special Valentine’s string of beads and a string of Mardi Gras beads, a wine glass, exciting prizes, and a wine and food pairing at each of the wineries. (www.cayugawinetrail.com) The Seneca Lake Wine Trail offers a special gift plus wine and chocolate food pairings at over thirty wineries on Seneca Lake for their Chocolate and Wine Weekend, February 12–14. (www. senecalakewine.com)
If you are looking for decadent chocolate treats, check out Sweet Expressions in Canandaigua. (www.sweetexpressionsonline. com) Their handmade chocolates, fudge, truffles, and gift baskets will satisfy any chocolate craving. For a truly unique sweet treat, The Chocolate Pizza Company in Marcellus, north of Otisco Lake, creates pizza and wings made from chocolate. The chocolate pizza (www.chocolatepizza.com), which was featured on the Food Network’s is chocolate mixed with English toffee, topped with walnuts, pecans, almonds, and white chocolate drizzled on top, delivered in a pizza box. The wings are rippled potato chips topped with peanut butter and dipped in chocolate.
Sara Lee Pound Cake (thawed)
12 oz. semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 Tbsp. coffee
1 tsp. vanilla extract
8 oz. sour cream
Slice pound cake horizontally into as many layers as you can (at least six), stacking layers so you can re-assemble the cake as it was when you started. Melt the chocolate chips with the coffee in a double boiler or the microwave. If using the microwave, take the chips out before they are completely melted and stir them to finish melting to prevent burning. Add vanilla and sour cream and stir until well blended. With wax paper under the bottom layer, begin spreading the chocolate mixture over each layer and restack the layers as they were originally. After putting on the last layer, cover the outside of the cake with the chocolate mixture. Chill for several hours before serving. Slice very thin and serve with your favorite Port wine (I recommend Lakewood Vineyards Port).
If you want to make a delicious but easy chocolate treat on your own for your Valentine, here is a simple chocolate torte recipe from Chef William Cornelius, author of the book From My Kitchen To Yours.
Rob Lane writes a Finger Lakes wine blog, www.fingerlakesweekendwino. blogspot.com. Contact him at robl@ mountainhomemag.com.
Chocolate Torte
Someplace Like home
Dave’s Downfall
dave Milano
Two years ago about this time, the homestead was firmly encased in ice. Every building, tree, blade of grass—everything—was covered in an absurdly thick and shimmering shell, simultaneously strange, beautiful, and silently menacing. I hurried out into the sparkle on a midweek morning with a bucket of salt, eager to clear the porch steps before leaving for work. The ice caught me gawking instead of watching my footing and sent me suddenly, stupidly, falling, bouncing downward with plenty of Dagwood Bumstead swoosh, connecting intimately and specifically with each of our six concrete steps. In the seemingly slow-motion moments, my eyes somehow locked onto the sky as feet, hands, and hat alternately came into view and disappeared, then the bucket, spinning gracefully into the air, ejected its contents over me like wedding-day rice.
After a stiff fall one tends to lie still for a few moments, for damage inventory. Head, hands, elbows, knees, back—amazingly the checklist this time was clean, and with only a few regions of embarrassed soreness, I was able to crank myself up to guarded near-standing. The flying bucket, I noticed, had done a not half-bad job of spreading the salt, leaving unsprinkled only a homicide-detective outline at the bottom of the steps. I brushed off into the outline, grabbed the bucket, and climbed tentatively back into the house, keenly recalling a friend’s recent sidewalk skid which had resulted in two broken wrists. My harmless fall and her venomous one mixed together into the season, along with the heaving sidewalks and the car accidents and the power
outages, and of course the startling, screwball beauty of an ice-coated landscape.
Now two years later we are in another mini ice age, with all the elements again in place. Slick, translucent, and fearsomely enchanting facades coax me out of good sense, lure me into forgetfulness, beckon to me, like Homer’s sirens, to draw near. I seem incapable of getting through a good ice storm without making some sort of upclose inspection. Often these include a mild slip or two, or sometimes, if the ice has its way, a good whacking fall. I am especially vulnerable when ice is melting, backlit perhaps by a low, setting sun, scurrying droplets reflecting and refracting into countless glistening stars, and the world becomes abruptly slipperier than a Philadelphia lawyer.
It is, I suppose, one of the ways God balances the scales. Lying on icy ground with a blooming pain in the backside, one looks up to see an arresting, astonishingly extravagant crystalline mantle, and can’t help but note that this place is not malevolent at all, but immensely charitable—a characteristic that must have been until this moment concealed by … what? Nearsightedness?
So in the icy season I tend to rise from a fall feeling oddly rejuvenated, wounded maybe, but not down, with my perspective jolted as much as my body, suddenly and curiously grateful for a bald misfortune that smartly interrupted the endless daily routine of chasing more and better; grateful for a calamitous event that slowed me down, just long enough to refocus my vision.
Dave Milano is a former suburbanite turned parttime Tioga County farmer. You can contact him at someplacelikehome@mountainhomemag.com.
McMillen continued from page 16
the stands and kept re-setting the clock back. On the third time the Russians finally won and we refused to accept the silver medal, so our silver medals are still sitting in Switzerland.”
After graduating from Maryland in 1974, McMillen was drafted by the Buffalo Braves. During his National Basketball Association career, he would play for the Braves, New York Knicks, Atlanta Hawks, and Washington Bullets before retiring to pursue a political career.
“One of the most interesting moments of my NBA career took place in the last year of my career,” McMillen says. “It was 1983, and I was playing for the Atlanta Hawks. I asked [cable mogul and team owner] Ted Turner to trade me to Washington, so I could get ready to run for Congress. I had bought a house in Maryland in the early eighties, and I was playing for the Hawks, but I was maintaining a residence in Maryland because I was eyeing a congressional seat.
“Turner actually traded me to Washington, so I was playing there for three years. I had played with Bill Bradley during his last year, in 1978, when he went on to the Senate. But he had left basketball and he didn’t run for a year and a half or so.
“When I ran, I announced for Congress before my last season was over. I asked Bill Bradley about it, and he said, ‘Why not?’
“I quit the NBA in May 1987, and I was elected in November, but I would often have to leave practice and go campaign. I was busy as a hoot, and during that time I actually had one of my best seasons. I was NBA Player of the Week for one week that year.
“I was playing very, very well for the Bullets at the time. So one of the highlights of my basketball career occurred in the middle of my campaign for Congress. It’s kind of unheard of today.”
Another NBA highpoint for McMillen occurred years earlier, when he was drafted and traded to the New York Knicks.
“Literally, I was traded and twenty-four hours later I’m in New York and having to play a game. I remember [power forward Bob] McAdoo was hurt and [head coach] Red Holzman said, ‘You’re gonna start.’ I didn’t even know the Knicks’ plays. So he sat down in a room with me and went through the plays on a note pad. I never practiced them or anything.
“Here I am on a basketball court with my high school idol, Bill Bradley, as a teammate. I remember that night I had nineteen points and eighteen rebounds in my first game at Madison Square Garden. It was pretty extraordinary. It was a pretty exciting moment for me.”
With the tacit approval of his friends Ted Turner
and Bill Bradley, McMillen made a successful run for the U.S. Congress in Maryland’s Fourth District in 1987, where he served for six years. Unfortunately, a federally mandated redistricting in 1992 torpedoed his chances for re-election, and he left Congress in 1993.
His career in public service was rescued, however, by President Bill Clinton, who appointed McMillen to the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, replacing another former athlete who later went on to a political career—a fellow named Arnold Schwarzenegger. McMillen served in that position for five years.
As his public service career wound down, his business career began ramping up. Always interested in security, he was deeply affected by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
“Having been in Munich in 1972 … Rudy Giuliani called those terrorist attacks the start of modernterrorism,”McMillensayscontemplatively. “Seeing terrorism come to America almost thirty years later, I realized, having been in government, that we had a massive task ahead of ourselves. It was going to require help from the private sector, and I was involved in a lot of different ventures that were related to security.”
Today, his company, Homeland Security Capital, has revenues of about $90 million annually, McMillen says.
“We do a lot of nuclear radiological cleanup. We’re broader than just pure homeland security. For instance, if a dirty bomb went off in London, we might be the company cleaning it up.”
Recently, Secure America Acquisition Corporation, a company for which McMillen serves as chairman and CEO, purchased Ultimate Escapes, a luxury destination company with revenues of about $50 million annually.
“It’s a very cool company,” McMillen says of the new acquisition. “We’ve got homes all over the world: Paris, fourteen places in New York. A lot of people don’t want to own a second home. They’d rather travel around and have a shared usage. It’s similar to a time share in a way, but a very high-end time share.”
McMillen gets back to Mansfield about once a year, to give a commencement speech or attend a funeral or a high school reunion. It’s a town that clearly still holds a very special place in his heart.
“We all make mistakes along the way, and I’ve made my share of mistakes, but it’s part of the growing up experience,” he says. “But I’ve done so many things—politics, business, sports—that I don’t really have any regrets.”
Editor, author, and frequent Mountain Home contributor Matt Connor lives in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania.
M ARKET P LACE
Shop Around the Corner To Market, To Market
By Roberta McCulloch-dews
Photography by James Fitzpatrick
Nestled among a row of homes on a lightly trafficked road off Main Street in Horseheads, New York, sits the Mill Street Market. The store’s location isn’t the most prominent, but that has yet to stop shoppers from uncovering this hidden gem since it opened two years ago.
Sandy Rossi, of Big Flats, is one of the store’s latest admirers. Because Rossi wasn’t sure how to get to the market, she had a friend give her stepby-step directions over the phone. Once inside, Rossi says she finally understood why her friend couldn’t stop talking about the store.
“My gosh, it’s amazing,” says Rossi, as her eyes scan the room. “I just went to a craft fair in Harrisburg, but this is—wow.”
The two-story market specializes primarily in country living décor, antiques, woodwork, collectibles, and vintage finds. The store is home to goods from seventeen vendors who sell their wares in distinct sections of the store, allowing shoppers to feel like they’re visiting several mini-shops at once. That’s why, in addition to the countrystyle items, patrons can also find things like 80s-inspired clip-on earrings, fur-trimmed wool coats, formal gowns, records, dolls, signs with empowering messages, and children’s toys (both modern and old favorites like Radio Flyer).
“It’s this variety that keeps people coming back,” says Sheila Graham, a co-owner of the store. “We try to get as many handmade things as we can. I think word-of-mouth has been our best advertising.” Graham has also worked at The Windmill Farm & Craft Market in Penn Yan.
Graham opened the store with Linda Gokey, Karen Kress, and Steve Thorn, deciding to pool their knowledge and experience in the hope of creating a successful—and unique—shopping experience. “We have
Shop: Mill Street Market
Owners: Sheila Graham, Linda Gokey, Karen Kress, Steve Thorn
Address: 117 East Mill Street, Horseheads, NY
Phone: 607-739-2531
Hours: Mon.–Sat. 10 a.m.–5 p.m., Sunday 12 p.m.–5 p.m.
people who come in every single week to see what’s new,” says Gokey. The market’s reasonable prices probably have something to do with the steady customer base. A set of small brass-trimmed mirrors spied in a recent visit cost $7, while classic books like James Beard’s American Cookery, were priced at $10. “We try not to price gouge. We have done really well for the two and a half years we’ve been here,” says Graham. Customers who want to take a break during their hunt for that perfect something can do so on a pink bench stationed near the front of store. It’s also a place where men who are waiting for their wives or girlfriends to finish shopping can hang for a while.
Interestingly enough, at one point in history there were probably more men in the building than women, as the market was once an actual mill. On the second floor, exposed beams in the ceiling still bear the scars of a past mill-related fire. “I like this part of the mill, but then again, I like old things,” says Graham, pointing to the ceiling.
Indeed, a love of things of the past is what draws many shoppers, such as Penny Roman of Elmira, to Mill Street Market. Roman, a regular customer, was prepared to search for a unique find. “You have to spend your time looking,” she says.
Horseheads resident Roberta McCulloch-Dews is a first-time contributor to Mountain Home
& Linda Gokey
Sheila Graham (left)
A Downtown Shopping Tradition Since 1946
Exquisite Gifts
Exceptional Greeting Cards
Green Mountain Coffee FedEx / UPS Worldwide Shipping
Monday thru Saturday: 8 a.m. - 6 p.m. Sunday: 9 a.m. - 3 p.m. 205 West Clinton Street Elmira, New York 14901 (607) 732-1152
B ACK OF T
Sunday Afternoon in the Park
Illustrator and fine artist Cheryl Chalmers lives in Trumansburg, New York, with her husband, Lawrence, and three children. A Graduate of Parsons The New School of Design in New York City, she has been painting watercolor for over fifteen years. Her work has been used by Cornell University, New York magazine, and the Wall Street Journal, among others. “Sunday Afternoon in the Park” shows her two sons, Brian and Maybeck, and dog, Skipper, facing uphill at the top of the sledding hill at Taughannock Falls State Park, which is adjacent to their backyard. “I wanted to capture the color and light of a beautiful, crisp winter day, indicative of the natural beauty of the Finger Lakes,” she says.
To see more of Chalmers’s work, visit her Web site at www.cherylchalmers.com
© ChERyl ChAlMERS
