CapeCodToday Blog Chowder

Top Golf Essays To Win Free Golf Clinics At Ocean Edge!

Want to swing like Tiger Woods and putt like Vijay Singh? Probably not possible. But you can learn how to play the game and be good at it. If you live in Brewster, the best and most cost-effective way to learn is to enter the Ocean Edge Resort and Conference Center essay contest, open to all age groups, extolling the joys of golf and why you want to play. Authors of the top 12 essays will be treated to three free clinics at the championship Ocean Edge course in September. ?Our goal is to introduce more people to the game,? said club professional Dale Morrison, a golf instructor for 21 years and a pro at Ocean Edge for 17 years. Morrison and writer/editor Greg O?Brien of Codfish Press will judge the essays. The top winners will be invited as guests on Mr. O?Brien?s Capewide cable television show, Country Journal. ?Anyone can learn to play,? said Ocean Edge Assistant Pro Brian Chapman. ?You just have to have the desire.? So sit at your keyboard with your head down and arms locked in place, and belt out an essay on the beauty of golf and why you want to learn how to play. Essays can be e-mailed to Morrison at dmorrison@oceanedge.com or mailed to Ocean Edge Golf Course, attn: Dale Morrison, 832 Villages Drive, Brewster, Ma. 02631. The contest is open to Brewster residents only. Essays should be no longer than 250-to-500 words. Deadline is Sept. 22.

Westfield gets developed, we get open space

An Editorial in The Providence Journal this morning has the right slant on Otis;

"No one can accuse the Base Closure and Realignment Commission of being a rubber stamp for the Pentagon. In New England, at least, the BRAC rejected some of the Defense Department's proposed base closings, and so saved a major military presence in this part of the country.

Dollars and cents aside, this is probably a good thing. The Pentagon's proposed closings would have so concentrated defense work in "red states" -- states that had voted for George W. Bush -- that the Northeast's commitment to the national military mission might have been sorely undermined, and disruptive political bitterness aroused. This might not have been intentional, but the effect could have been divisive.

The largest New England facilities saved by the BRAC were the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, in Maine, and the Naval Submarine Base New London, in Connecticut -- each with thousands of jobs. Then, on its last day of deliberations, the BRAC unexpectedly reversed the Defense Department's proposed expansion of Hanscom Air Force Base, outside Boston, and voted to close Otis Air National Guard Base, on Cape Cod, with plans to send its fighter jets to Barnes Air National Guard Base, in Greater Springfield.

The last move left political leaders astonished. Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy called himself and others "baffled." "[I]t defies logic, it defies intuition, it defies understanding."

Militarily speaking, that may be so. Certainly, the closing of Otis must defy understanding by the more than 500 workers whose jobs will be moved to the Springfield area.

But from the commonwealth's strictly selfish view, the move might serve the long-term best interests of both Greater Springfield and Cape Cod. For whereas the Springfield area lags behind eastern Massachusetts in economic development, overdeveloped Cape Cod's greatest lack is open land.

Otis will apparently continue to serve the Coast Guard, which is part of the new Department of Homeland Security. But if the major Otis operations close, there is, with proper planning, a tremendous opportunity to set aside the huge tract formerly known as the Shawme State Forest for thoughtful environmental, residential and business uses.

Our political leaders need to recover from their bafflement and get to work planning for Otis's long-term future."

And Jack Coleman said it here first 

The above is one more example of this great newspaper's habit of getting ahead of the curve every time. It should be recalled, however, that cctoday's Jack Coleman had it right over a month before the rest of the world. See his April 15 story "Otis on notice" here.
 

From The Outer Beach Looking West To An American Hiroshima

By Greg O?Brien Codfish Press The closest Cape Codders have ever come to witnessing war firsthand?or the direct affects of war?was in 1918 when Orleans residents were stunned to see a German U-Boat surface just offshore and fire on an unarmed tugboat and four barges it was pulling. The moment was surreal; as if it were an eerie out-take from a 1960s classic, like The Russians Are Coming! ?Torpedoes set the tug ablaze and injured its crew, while constant shelling sank the barges,? notes the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities history of the event. ?Thanks to the skill and courage of Coast Guardsmen, everyone was rescued. Some of the shells fired from the sub landed on the beach, making this the first time the U.S. mainland had been attacked since the War of 1812, and the only time the country was attacked during World War I. Massachusetts had been producing arms, vehicles, and supplies for the war effort and sending soldiers abroad, but no one expected what occurred that Sunday in Orleans.? Cape Codders since have regularly stood on the eastern shore and pondered wars, conflicts and weapons worlds away, sensing the tragedies of its victims. But lost in the recent newspaper headlines of the 60th anniversary of the dropping of nuclear bombs over two Japanese cities that brought World War II literally to a screeching halt are the ?downwinders? of this country?the forgotten victims of our atomic testing program in the 1950s and 60s, the road kill of this American Hiroshima, the scores who have died from radiation exposure and their families who were left to cope with this numbing loss. The government had told the downwinders it needed to test these fireballs to stay ahead of the Soviets, who had detonated their first atomic device on Aug. 29, 1949; in the years to follow, the Soviets ignited 266 surface and air nuclear bombs in the Kazakhstan region of Semi Palatinsk. And so no one in the remote downwind corridor of southern Utah and northwest Arizona blinked when over the course of two decades more than 100 nuclear weapons were exploded above and below the ground at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Residents?many of them patriotic Mormons who seldom questioned the government?s authority?were not dissuaded in the early days from viewing the explosions at a distance. The warnings at first were casual. Families were told there would be a test, and hours later the ash would fall?at first light, then heavy?as pink clouds of fallout, carried by downwind air currents, drifted over Arizona and Utah. The ash tingled the skin, almost stung. Children brushed it off. The debris covered playgrounds, homes and fields where milk cows ate the grass coated with radioactive ash. It wasn?t long before children and their parents began getting sick. Many died, and soon the downwiders began to feel that they had been deemed ?expendable? by their government in its quest for nuclear superiority. Government officials privately specified that ?if it turns out that we have killed children, as we were clearly doing in the 1950s, lie about it,? Stewart Udall, Interior Secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, and a lawyer for some of the downwinders, said several years ago in an interview for a documentary, ?Downwind of Morality,? produced by Bill Turpie. I served as associate field producer on the project and co-wrote the script. The government lies would hide a multitude of sins: at the Nevada Test Site and the Los Alamos (New Mexico) Lab where the bombs were designed; at Hanford reservation in southwest Washington where the government processed plutonium during World War II and the Cold War, and secretly released radioactive iodine up the stack of a plutonium processor in 1949; and at government laboratories throughout the country, like Oak Ridge Laboratory in Tennessee where a number of terminal patients were injected without consent many years ago with plutonium (the critical isotope needed in a nuclear chain reaction) to determine how much exposure humans could endure. Not only is radiation that is injected or burns the skin deadly, but equally lethal is the absorption into the body of plants and animals that have been contaminated. ?We have killed off or maimed millions of people without any war at all,? Rudi Nussbaum, an expert on the nuclear issue who then taught at Portland State University in Oregon, noted in Downwind of Morality. ?In our fear, we sacrificed whole parts of this country by the creation of these weapons,? William Lanouette, biographer of Leo Szilard, the Hungarian scientist who first contemplated a nuclear chain reaction, said in the documentary. ?We sacrificed a generation of people?through the radiation affects of producing these weapons.? The litany of suffering and death in the wake of atomic test explosions in the Nevada desert is stunning. It defies any coincidence suggested by defenders of the testing program, or statements by nuclear energy officials, that evidence of radiation poisoning is anecdotal. One woman interviewed for the documentary said she had a brother whose entire class, with the exception of one, ultimately died from cancer. A retired Air Force worker said that after Nevada test blasts Geiger counters were often placed on cars in the area, and ?they buzzed like rattlesnakes!? And in nearby Utah, a hardware store owner lost 14 members of his family to cancer. ?The government lied to us,? said a downwinder in Northern Arizona. ?That?s the greatest travesty. They told us we were safe, and they knew that we were not.? More than 50 years later, the tragedies continue. Entire family trees have been seared, and the toll, passed down through heredity, sadly keeps rising.

Goose-stepping with the Commission

The Cape Cod Times has a new editor.  You can tell from today's editorial. Instead of marching in synchronized goose-step with the Cape Cod Commission, as was their usual want under Cliff Schectman, they have instead taken to applying reason to a critical Cape  issue; housing.

The Commission staff is recommending that they tax commercial real estate developers for creating low-wage jobs. Aside from the obsurdity of that notion, their (il)logical extension of that thought suggests to them that they use the tax to subsidize housing (as opposed to subsidizing wages).

After exercising a host of alternatives to taxing commercial developers, The Cape Cod Times comes up with the most obvious solution to the housing issue;  tax those hoarding the housing.

We have plenty of housing.  We don't have to build more houses. They're  just not available to full-time residents, because the Cape's part-time residents have bought them and keep them off the market.

[One correction to the Times editorial: the locals are not competing with high incomes when it comes to second home-owners, we are competing with high amounts of equity. And that's no contest. ]

But after the Time's dissertation, the Editor suggests correctly, that we should be taxing second home owners that are not renting their homes, for taking up the supply, driving up the prices, and forcing out the locals.

Congratulation to the Editor. You're off to a great start.  In the immortal words of Oliver Twist, "...more please!".  Reasoned logic returns to the Times.

Post-script:  Or maybe it's just self-interest.  The Times advertisers are commercial businesses.  Maybe  the new editor took a look at the rest of the paper and noticed that neither homeowners nor the Cape Cod Commission take out full page ads. 

Either way, we'll take it.  SM

Shock Value: Sending A Powerful Message from Cape Cod and Beyond

By Greg O?Brien, Codfish Press In this day of shock value shooting from the lip, many on Cape Cod and beyond are sending a powerful message. We hear it every day in the Cape Cod Times, The Boston Globe, on radio, television and the electronic pages of Cape Cod Today. Some messages are good; others are best left alone. Whatever the sound byte, we?re all ears. Across the bridge, Boston Juvenile Court Judge Paul D. Lewis sent a long overdue powerful message days ago in setting a $250,000 bail for a 12-year-old accused of carrying a gun in the South End. One round of the loaded Smith & Wesson .38-caliber-handgun had been fired, police said. ?These kids don?t take responsibility for anything,? Lewis told The Boston Globe. ?They?re fearless. It?s out of control.? Added Mayor Tom Menino, supporting the hefty bail, ?You have to send messages that we?re not going to tolerate guns on the street.? A Texas jury a week ago sent a deafening and fitting missive to the drug-maker Merck & Co., awarding a stinging $253 million settlement to the widow of a 59-year-old triathlete who had been taking the company?s trendy painkiller Vioxx before it was pulled from the shelf after a study reported that it doubled the risks of strokes and heart attacks after 18 months of use. The widow?s attorney argued that Merck had hid the risks. ?Respect us, that?s the message,? Derrick Chizer, a juror, told The New York Times. The U.S. Senate, looking down the barrel of the trigger-happy gun lobby, showed little respect late last month for young children and law enforcement officers harmed by firearms. The Senate, by a 65-31 margin, approved a National Rifle Association-sponsored bill to block most civil lawsuits against gun makers and dealers whose weapons are used in crimes. The bill, supported by 14 Democrats apparently gun-shy to take on the NRA, would dismiss pending lawsuits. Advocates?wink, wink?had argued the bill was a national security issue, ?saying lawsuits brought by municipalities and individuals threatened to bankrupt the firearms industry at a time when the nation is fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,? according to a Los Angeles Times report. Greased through the Senate chamber with little public notice on the eve of a month-long recess, the vote points to a disturbing political reality: don?t take on the NRA if you want to remain in office. Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya punk? Finally on Wednesday, ending a recent volley of in-your-face communiqu?s, a federal judge in Pittsburgh ordered a school district to readmit a 14-year-old student who had been expelled for writing violent, profane and threatening rap lyrics. The judge ruled the lyrics did not amount to ?true threats? against the school and were protected by the First Amendment, according to an Associated Press report. States one of the songs, ?And the word of mouth is that I?m carrying guns/ Now that I?m comin? for you?what the (expletive) you gonna do. I come double with the pump tons of slugs that will punish you.? In defending the student, the leftist American Civil Liberties Union proffered, ?If you could punish on words alone without looking at context, you could wipe out the entertainment industry, and certainly rap music.? Not a bad thought at that! Can you hear me now?

First Person: Reflections From Paines Creek? Mentors and Role Models That Make A Life

By Greg O’Brien, Codfish Press

Listen and you touch on light twisting through the shallows; you sense a speech within a time eluding it, ripples on stone. It has no answer. Music follows, music falls, with its magicians. With birds, we hear what we could be, never what we say we are.”—John Hay, “Bird Song”

John Hay of Brewster has spent a lifetime touching on light, always hearing what he could be, never what the world said he was. The author of 18 books on nature, a Harvard poet laureate, and recipient of the celebrated John Burroughs Medal for nature writing, Hay—a mentor and neighbor in the Stony Brook Valley where Paines Creek makes its way up the stone ladders of Brewster’s Herring run into Lower Mill Pond—has been compared in many ways to the venerable Henry David Thoreau. “He (Hay) is probably a better naturalist than the son of Concord,” the New York Herald Tribune once wrote.

 The son of noted archaeologist Clarence Hay and the grandson of John Hay, secretary of state under Theodore Roosevelt and a private secretary to Abraham Lincoln, the reclusive and pensive Hay published his first collection of poetry in 1947, the year he moved to the Cape. Surrounded by an awe-inspiring setting, he turned to nature writing with a perspective wider than an aerial view. In his first nature book, The Run, published in 1959, Hay wrote eloquently about the annual migration of the alewives at Stony Brook Run in Brewster, just down the road from where he lives. “The fish kept moving,” he wrote. “I watched them swinging back and forth with the current, great-eyed, sinewy, probing, weaving, their dorsal fins cutting the surface, their ventral fins fanning, their tails flipping and sculling. In the thick, interbalanced crowd there would suddenly be a scattered dashing, coming as quickly as cat’s paws flickering the summer seas.”

            Other acclaimed books soon followed, among them Nature’s Year, The Season of Cape Cod, The Great Beach, Sandy Shore, In the Company Of Light; and A Beginner’s Faith In Things Unseen. The New York Times Book Review has called Hay “gifted and perceptive.” The Christian Science Monitor has said he “dramatizes our isolation from the rest of life.” And Publisher’s Weekly once described Hay as “a man with an almost religious sense of nature.”

            In a call to arms several years ago, Hay warned, “There has been a pronounced detachment, and pulling away from, our land, primarily thought of as an area of what may falsely be called ‘improvement.’ We do not see our nature or natural history as a necessity or food for our well-being. We need to involve people in the process of seeing—innate, natural sight—not substitutes for sight…We need help from people, young and old, who will participate in its vision. We are nothing about the life we are given to share.”

            Hay has shared passionately, and I will always treasure the talks in his living room up the street and in his snug writing studio about observing nature and crafting the language. He taught me and others to think and how to feel. His spirit will echo long after his voice has been silenced.

            A principle lost on many, life is void without mentors and role models—individuals who fill in the blanks, flick on the lights of our dim observations. Hay, in this sense, is a master electrician, and so is writer Robert Finch, who once lived on the lip of a kettle hole, at the bottom of the hill, just below Hay, his teacher. Square foot for square foot, this section of Brewster was once one of the most literary places in all of America. More critically acclaimed nature writing has been written here than any other place on the continent. Finch—a role model of mine and a contributor when I edited The Cape Codder, Cape Cod Life and The Naturalist, a journal of the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History—is the author/editor of more than a dozen highly praised nature books. Author of Common Ground, A Naturalist’s Cape Cod, The Primal Place (essays about the marvels of our Stony Brook Road neighborhood), Outlands, Journeys to the Outer Edges of Cape Cod, and The Cape Itself, Death of a Hornet, and a Place Apart: A Cape Cod Reader, to mention a few, Finch, who now lives in Wellfleet, has been praised for his writing in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. His simple eloquence, poetic verse at times and dedication to his craft, capture the essence of good writing and are an inspiration to follow.

            “(Finch’s writing) temperament is introspective, his prose fleshy, sometimes sentimental, and occasionally rhapsodic,” writer Alex Wilkinson, who spent childhood summers in Wellfleet and wrote the local best-seller Midnights, the story of a year working the midnight-to-eight shift on the Wellfleet Police Department, said of Finch in the New York Times Book Review.

            There was never more a sentimental writer than the late Henry Beetle Hough, who for more than a half century toiled on the Vineyard as editor and publisher of the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette. It has been said that Hough influenced more young journalists, present company included, to carry on the noble and now virtually defunct cause of country newspapering than any other writer in America. Hough possessed a rare gift as both a writer and editor to affect the character of the community he called home. “Instead of being qualified in a profession, it seems to me that I have taken root in a place,” he wrote in Country Editor, a best-selling memoir of island life and one of several books he produced. “Yet why not? To each there must be some particular spot on the surface of the globe and I rejoice that this is mine.”

            In a 1996 introduction to a reissue of Country Editor, Hough’s friend and colleague Walter Cronkite quoted from the Reverend John Golding’s eulogy at Hough’s funeral: “Thoreau once said that one is not born into the word to do everything, but to do something. Henry Hough did something for 65 years—with a small newspaper, in a small town, on a small island. And he did it with such a deliberate and concentrated attention that the world off-island soon took notice. What he wrote and what he stood for was so specific to this place that it was universal.”

            Clearly, the days of writing from the heart in journalism—not the pocketbook, a focus group, or in the middle of a dizzying pack of scribblers—are waning. The late Malcolm Hobbs, editor, publisher and owner of The Cape Codder for 40 years and a surrogate father to me in many ways, was among the last of a rare breed. Trained as a congressional and White House reporter for major news outlets in Washington, D.C., Malcolm knew a story when he saw it. His newspaper philosophy was to the point: “Our intent is to keep The Cape Codder well above the level of newspaper mediocrity. Perfection is beyond us, but striving for it isn’t.” His striving led to one of the nation’s finest country newspapers.

            Hobbs was as direct in running his newspaper; the word “curmudgeon” was often used to describe him. His credo, distributed to all reporters (still have one in my office), directed them to make the news more readable, pertinent, and fair. He wanted The Cape Codder written in style. “Anyone can dip a brush in globs of colored paint and dab the result on canvas,” he wrote to his reporters. “How the colors are arranged distinguishes the painter from the dauber.”

            Malcolm’s alter ego was the late Cape Codder executive editor John A. Ullman, nickednamed “Mouldy” by Malcolm because of his advancing age, blunt but always entertaining personality and the fact that he wrote swiftly, gracefully and with little effort. We were in jealous awe of his talent, and always looking for ways to marginalize him. As much as Malcolm, John knew the colors, all the shades and hues, of the palette.

            I shared a farewell scotch with John shortly before his death about a year ago. It was Tuesday with Mouldy, and we sat at his kitchen table overlooking Great Pond in Eastham, a place where he learned to fish, taught his children to swim and sail, and marveled at the beauty all around him. He had hardly been out of bed in two days and hadn’t eaten much, not surprising for a man closing in on the century mark. But he wanted to talk—about his life, his many blessings, the newspaper business he so loved and had so changed, and about his late wife of 61 years, Eleanor, who died in 2002.

            For a brief moment, John was young again: his eyes brighter, his mind engaged and the razor wit that once trimmed cub reporters to their suitable size returned in full force. For the next two hours, John, a friend and mentor for more than three decades, reminisced about his life—a mix of pride, satisfaction, humor and humility for a remarkable career that also included several newspaper stints after attending Dartmouth College, New York University and the University of Georgia. He worked for the Atlanta Constitution, the Worcester Telegram, the Boston American, and contributed to numerous publications like defunct New York Mirror, True Detective Magazine, and curiously enough Airwoman Magazine where he once served as its managing editor. He also was a runner on Wall Street as a young man, working the floor the day the stock market crashed; was a labor organizer with the United Auto Workers (UAW) and with the New England Newspaper Guild, negotiating union contracts for reporters; and wrote the local bestseller, Fried Fog.

“When I think of all the people who helped me get to where I am—which is now retired and disconnected—I owe a lot of people an awful lot of good love and thanks in the world,” he said with a smile. “I’ve been carried on people’s shoulders. I’ve been carefully nurtured, and it has been an incalculable benefit to me. I’ve tried to be a decent guy.”

 If Malcolm Hobbs, who owned and edited The Cape Codder for close to 40 years, was the soul of this community paper, then John was its pulse. Through his insightful and prosaic reporting and writing, and through his brilliant and often lyrical editorials, most pounded out with two fingers on his manual Underwood or his Hermes Ambassador typewriter, John captured the essence of the Outer Cape—its people, its issues and the need to preserve its haunting charm.

            “I have no regrets,” he said. “Working with Malcolm at The Cape Codder, that’s where I was happy. That’s where life was free and wide open.”

            John—JAU as many knew him—was a man of absolutes, like Malcolm.  Mouldy followed to the letter the framed quotation from H.L. Mencken that hung in the office he shared years ago with Malcolm. “Editors are unmemorable without reporters,” Mencken wrote. “Reporters will have nothing to remember if they don’t insist on having fun. As I look back over a misspent youth, I find myself more and more convinced that I had more fun doing news reporting than in any other enterprise. It is really the life of kings.”

            Indeed John lived like a king. Not so much in the rambling farmhouse on Kinsbury Beach Road that had no central heat, but in his big heart and in his large mind that suppressed his gruffness. At his 93rd birthday party when he officially retired from The Cape Codder, John held court with fellow scribes on the purpose of a newspaper, comments that would raise many bottom line eyebrows in today’s corporate newspaper boardrooms. “A newspaper,” he said, “is not a money-making operation, it is not a commercial enterprise. It has to make money. It has to stay in the black, but the purpose of any profit is only to permit it to publish another day.”

            Malcolm and Mencken must still be smiling.

            When I left The Cape Codder in 1976 after a stint as a cub reporter—to return seven years later to pursue my dream of running the paper—Malcolm and John exhorted me on my way out the door to my new assignment as a political and court reporter for The Arizona Republic in Phoenix. “Keep searching for mentors,” they stressed. I found one in a tough-talking but caring Superior Court judge in the Valley of the Sun.

            The woman with the gentle smile and penetrating stare had an engaging way about her, unless you were an unprepared or swaggering lawyer in her Maricopa Country Superior Courtroom in Phoenix. In that case, she would verbally skin you like a rattlesnake for all the courtroom to see. This mother of three, a cowgirl in a loose black robe, was tough on lawyers.

            As a young reporter for The Republic, as green as South Boston, I entered her courtroom in 1977 with great trepidations, fumbling to record everything she said, just in case she ever called me on it. For a kid out of college who was used to reading little more than baseball box scores, understanding the complexities of legal issues was as daunting as the mysteries of the universe. I felt sucked into a black hole of ignorance. 

            On this particular steamy afternoon after the judge abruptly ended a court session, redressing the stunned attorneys at the bench, I slithered into her office to check on the status of the case. I was confused about the proceeding, and had a deadline to meet. 

            “Excuse me, can I ask a quick question,” I said, clearing my throat and fully expecting to be shown the door.

            “Sure,” the woman said, indicating she had seen me in her courtroom taking notes. “Sit down.”

            Her office manner changed abruptly from her courtroom demeanor, like a soothing desert rain after a scorching day. “What’s on your mind?”

            After I explained my dilemma and paucity of court reporting experience, she closed the law books on her cluttered desk, leaned forward in her chair and began tutoring me on the fine points of covering a Superior Court case.

“I’m glad you came by,” she said, patiently answering all my questions point-by-point and inviting me back the following day if there were more.

            I took her up on the offer, and we soon became casual courtroom friends. I would regularly stop by her office to discuss cases I was covering in her court and to ask legal questions about cases in other courts. She always had time, and there was no such thing as an ignorant question so long as you wanted to learn.

            A few years later when she was appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals, I followed her out to the state capital, covering the high courts, Governor’s Office and legislature. I always felt comfortable stopping by to discuss appeals court cases or the political issues of the day. The door was always open.

            I was elated in 1981when my tutor, Sandra Day O’Connor, was appointed by President Reagan as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. Before she left, she took me aside and advised to keep asking questions. “Keep at it until you get all the answers,” she said.

“Sounds like my mom,” O’Connor’s son, Scott, a Phoenix real estate developer, told me in a phone interview. 

 The first time Scott, 47, realized his mother was a rising star was when she received national publicity as the first women in the country to be majority leader of a state legislature.  “But she always wanted to be a judge,” he said.

            Sandra Day O’Connor, Scott said, will terribly miss her job on the highest court. “She will have horrible withdrawal pains, but at some point you have to move aside,” he noted.

“We’ll be glad to have her back,” said Scott. “To most everyone else, she is the most powerful woman in the country. To us, she’s just Mom.”

And so Mom it is! When it comes to mentors and roles models, it’s not the star power that counts; it is the passion in someone’s heart for what they do and for what they do well that counts.

As Malcolm Hobbs might say, it’s the dabs of color applied by others in great wisdom and love over the years that connects the dots in one’s life.

 

Cape Cod Tomatoes

From time to time I peruse the other blogs tethered to Cape Cod Today. Boy, lots of angst and interest about small town doin's. Color me ignorant, but I've got enough angst and subtle ruin in my own life to keep me distracted. That and the new batch of "Facts of Life" reruns showing on cable.

It's the "little" things that keep me busy. Kind of like "Seinfeld". Remember how it was billed as a show about nothing? Well, really, it was about something. Or better yet, a bunch of little somethings.

Which brings me to tomatoes. Ah, tomatoes. I don't much fancy summer and it's associates, heat and sun. But I love its tomatoes. Local tomatoes. Cape Cod tomatoes. Tomatoes are a seemingly simple matter.

But it hasn't been an easy road the past few years. One year a co-worker's homegrown tomatoes developed a black fungusy (yes, not a word) ailment. Kind of like the big bad in the final season of Buffy--the evil that "devours from below".

Others fall victim to various and sundry bugs and rodents. And deer. Do deer eat tomatoes? I'm sure there is some know-it-all out there who will let me know.

We tried one year (sounds like having a baby). Bought the pots, the soil and a variety of plants. The big and beefies--all the ones with weird names. The S/O was very sporting about the whole thing considering she hates tomatoes. Not the flavor she tells me, the consistency. Endless tirades about how slimy they are do not deter. Me loves me tomatoes.

So she's out there watering them, tending to them, fashioning poles for them to grow on. Once, I think I even heard her talking to them. I like to think she was saying something sweet--it was probably more along the lines of "grow you little f&*#ers!"

That year's crop was no bumper. I think it yielded one or two sorry looking specimens. Which I, of course, seasoned and devoured with great thanks to the S/O and just in case, whatever higher being may have been listening in.

The following year, we tried the in the ground method. Disastrous. Not a one. But that's okay. Because of the male Chihuahua. Male Chihuahuas aren't exactly leg lifters. They kind of just stand there, aim down and do their business.

But one day my boy caught on to the heavenly, testosterone induced feeling of the leg lift. And now he can barely keep it down. His favorite target(s)? Plants. Flowers. Tomato plants. And the basil we were growing. Suffice it to say our "Green Acres" days are over.

I now rely on the kindness of others. Namely a coworker (cellmate, whatever) who bestowed upon me some of the best tomatoes I've had in a long time. Cape Cod grown and tasty as all hell.

Ocean Edge Sept. 17 Wine & Food Festival To Benefit Hole In The Wall Camps

Looking for some great wine, excellent fare and a worthy cause?

Take in the first annual Ocean Edge Wine & Food Festival on Route 6A in Brewster on Saturday, Sept. 17 to benefit Paul Newman’s Hole in the Wall Camps for children with serious illnesses. The festival will be held from 4 pm until 9 pm on Ocean Edge’s newly renovated property overlooking Cape Cod Bay, and will feature five celebrity guest chefs from Ireland, Boston and New York, as well as reserved wines from around the world.

Newspaper columnist and Hyannisport summer resident Mike Barnicle, host of a radio program on WTKK-FM in Boston and a regular commentator to NBC, MSNBC and Channel 5’s Chronicle, is honorary chairman of the event.

The evening will include a silent auction, a live auction and overnight packages at Ocean Edge.

Tickets are $175 and all of the proceeds will go to the Association of Hole in the Wall Camps. To purchase tickets, visit the camp website at www.holeinthewallcamps.org or call Ocean Edge at 508-896-4880, Ext. 1479.

“It’s a commendable cause,” said Greg O’Brien of Codfish Press, spokesperson for the event. “At the Ocean Edge festival, you can experience some of the greatest wine and food in the world, and the joy of making a difference in the lives of children who need our help. It’s worth every dollar.”

At the Sept. 17 festival, Ocean Edge’s five star Executive Chef Michael Gregory will headline a team of culinary experts, including Johnson & Wales’ Frank Terranova, five-star chef and host of Cooking with Class, aired on NBC in Providence. In addition, Joe Elliott, a four-star chef from The Westin Great Southern Hotel in Columbus, Ohio and Sea Island Resort in Sea Island, Ga. will join the culinary masters.

The event will offer a variety of estate wines including BV; Sterling; Geyser Peak; Chalone; Franciscan Estates; Landmark; Lolonis; Miner Family; Mt. Veeder; Niebaum Coppola; Quintessa; Rudd; Truchard, David Ramey; Tony Truchard; Old Bridge Cellars (d'Arenberg); Guy Saget; DuBoeuf; Billaud Simon; Schlumberger/Spaar; Chapoutier; Alegria; Winebow; Goldwater; Crossings; and "57 Main Street" Wine Co. In addition, guests will enjoy a Champagne Garden (LP Roeder; Moet; Sophia; Pommery; Westport River), a Microbrew Pavilion, and a Port Pavilion.

Presenting Sponsors include Ocean Edge Resort & Club, Corcoran Jennison, & United Liquors, Other Sponsors include: L Knife & Sons, The Smith & Wollensky Restaurant Group in New York, and several media sources, such as Boston Magazine, Community Newspaper Company, Cape Cod Life, Channel 5, Clear Channel Outdoor, Greater Media, www.localwineevents.com, and www.yankeemagazine.com.

Hole in the Wall Camps, in select sites around the world, are the largest family of camps for children with serious illness and life threatening conditions. Children with cancer, sickle cell anemia, HIV/AIDS, and many other conditions come to Camp to experience the simple joys of childhood, without compromising any of their medical needs thanks to our state-of-the-art medical care. To date, nearly 100,000 seriously ill children from throughout the United States and 31 countries have attended Hole in the Wall Camps free of charge. Hole in the Wall Camps is a not-for-profit organization totally supported by charitable contributions. The camps are the vision of actor Paul Newman, who started the first camp in 1988 and has been the driving force ever since. Each Hole in the Wall Camp is a separate entity with its own distinct personality. They all share a common theme: to build self-esteem and restore joy to children who suffer from serious illnesses.

Hope to see you there.

Anyone Eat Lobster?

The Kennedys Love Wind Power

 "Call Joe-4-Oil" becomes "Call Joe-4-Wind"

Wolfe Island is the largest of the world-renowned Thousand Islands. Located where Lake Ontario ends and the St. Lawrence River begins its flow to the Atlantic, its beautiful sunrises, breath-taking sunsets and spectacular night-time skies are a big part of its charm. It is one of Canada's most important bird watching areas, and it's where  Joe Kennedy wants to build a wind farm. Apparently the wind turbines on someone else's horizon doesn't annoy the Kennedy Clan in the least. Below is the story from the  local property owner's web site.

GAIA Power Meets Business & Tourism: GAIA Power’s Samit Sharma presented an update about their planned wind farm for Wolfe Island. He was accompanied by Benoit Fortin, Vice President Infrastructure for Skypower Corporation.

In his presentation Sharma noted that the project has been in the planning stages since 2002 with Hearthmakers Co-Op and the City of Kingston. Originally the idea was to have the Federation of Municipalities as well as Wolfe Island engaged to raise some part of the finances for the project.

Because wind power has come of age there is less interest by traditional Canadian Municipalities and Federal agencies to be engaged because wind power is now seen as a business initiative.

The Ontario Government as issued a request for proposals for 300 megawatts of renewable energy with significant financial and structural constraints for the RFP. Projects can be no larger than 100 megawatts ,require a $50,000 bond per megawatt and experienced teams of professionals to run the project.

According to Sharma it was important to find a strategic partner whose values were in line with GAIA’s. “In consultation with our partners Hearthmakers we entered into a joint venture agreement with Sky Power Corporation along with Citizen Energy, a US based company run by the Kennedy Family.”

Read the article here.