In Pursuit Of A Tidbit Of History

It must be noted that both Arthur and I spent some time as newspaper reporters in the 1970s when our dream to carry on my family's legacy in the local newspaper world burned bright. Newspaper reporting in a small town meant you were first and foremost charged with providing accurate information. After all, you were the eyes and ears of the community.

All these years later, in our pursuits that involve writing and music and the intersection of the two, we still hearken back to those lessons learned when we were young and hopeful. And it was our interest in truthful and careful reporting that took me to the Potter County Historical Society last month. I was in search of documentation of a snippet of information Arthur had remembered from a long-ago newspaper piece about New Century Club.

New Century Club was a women's club that began some time early in the twentieth century - and celebrated a milestone anniversary during our time at The Potter Enterprise. It was that celebration and the retrospective of the club printed in the paper that needed to be found.

The volunteers at the Historical Society are always anxious to help solve mysteries involving the community and its people and these women went to work to help me on my quest to find a truly obscure piece of information. Diane Caudell checked sources online and provided the year of the club's establishment, a framework that send Linda Goodnoe Russell upstairs to pore over old newspapers.  

Julia Kolat recalled that there were records of New Century Club stored on the third floor of that fine old brick building. And she took me up the sweeping staircase to the second floor and then up the narrow steps into the attic space. Stacked on the floor, carefully boxed and labeled, records of the Club that served the community for more than 100 years are stored.

And thus began my introduction to Belle Haskell Lewis.

These are her words, taken from a multi-paged document tucked in the front of an over-stuffed scrapbook of clippings. Typed on a typewriter, double spaced with wide margins at the top and bottom, it is a history written in 1935 - a 30th anniversary retrospective.

I was asked to write a history of the New Century Club but many of the records I find missing and most of those available are mere outlines of programs, lacking all the life and color that characterized our activities...

To look back over the road we have travelled is interesting and enlightening. We see a procession of years steadily moving forward. In some of these years things apparently were static. Old customs and traditions held fast and were meticulously observed.

Then as the years passed a more extensive outlook was gained and closer contacts were made with the world's great movements. There were years that were exciting, exhilarating, heartbreaking.

Our country was emerging from its seclusion, and with high purpose had entered a war, to maintain a principle which we thought had been established to be a beacon light to the world. 

The years that followed the World War brought a larger, fuller life for women, a freedom that in 1905 was talked of with bated breath, lest we be thought unwomanly.

Thereafter followed years of reaction, with changes so radical that they seemed to threaten, to undermine, what to us had seemed to be the fundamentals of society. Years of doubt, of confusion in the fog of which we are still wandering.

While we have been moving forward, keeping pace as best we can with the changing world, accepting innovations, following the trend of modern thought. Ever advancing, we have been carried into realms scarcely dreamed of before.

Yet when we looked backward we find that we have left behind us many things that were infinitely precious. We have lost old friends, old ideals wherein we found safety and comfort and security.

Dreams that we once entertained have been dissipated; illusions that we once hugged to our hearts as being things of utmost importance have vanished, lost in the clear light of science.

Old friends: How the essence, the flavor of their kindly spirits permeates all the years since they left us. Many of them we will see no more. We recall how they looked, what they said, even what they wore!

Recollections of them, and of others, come to us over and over, like some haunting phrase of music, a bit of melody wrought out of our association with them in the New Century Club.

... What of the New Century Club of the future? We find ourselves in the midst of a giant upheaval. What the world will be like, how many of our institutions will survive, no one knows.

There must be no limit to our horizon, it must extend beyond tihs world even into eternity. We cannot escape the past, it determines the future. We can never say, "It is finished."

I was enthralled by the discovery of this woman's writing and by the history of New Century Club but lest I forget – that obscure piece of information that was the purpose of my visit to PCHS was found by Linda in the newspaper from 1980. And Arthur's memory was accurate and what he's concocting from that piece of Potter County History - and others - is his story to tell.

And as for me, I'm now on a quest to learn more about Belle Haskell Lewis (1864-1955) and share in this New(ish) Century, her observations about the last New Century.

For now, her poem, published in her 1955 obituary in The Potter Enterprise.

My Tapestry

The tapestry of my life I know

Has been wrought without design;

Seemingly colorless, somber and grey,

Faulty of texture and line.

The world will carelessly toss it aside

When the fabric is complete;

For this is the fate that commonplace lives

In the end must always meet.

I wove each day the threads that came

To my patiently waiting hands,

And I tried to mingle the beauty of the earth

With the dull monotonous strands;

A bit of blue of the heavens above

And the gold of the setting sun.

You will find them there with a thread of love

When the tapestry is done.

Dear Medicare enrollee

The letter came in the mail on Friday. A letter from the United States Government. A letter signed in that familiar yet unrecognizable sharpie signature at the bottom.

I was immediately struck by the number of capital letters in this letter filled with the overwrought and overused rhetoric of DJT. The AI-assisted marketing team affixed capital letters on phrases that have no business being capitalized while in the greeting, it's Medicare enrollee.

I'm wondering why the incessant use of capital letters in a way that would make Mrs. Olin frown and put her head down on her desk.

It's all part of the relentless assault these days on the conventions of how we express ourselves through language. One observer wrote "He uses language to prevent us from holding him accountable for his words and actions in what scholars call 'language intensity'."

She continues "Trump is the outrage president. He doesn't seek to be presidential."

And so we can assume the capitalization of words not needing to be capitalized signals the importance he attaches to those words.  And these particular words tell me that he's sending me a One-Time Payment, putting healthcare dollars back where they belong - in the hands of the American People.

I could more easily excuse the body of the letter if it weren't for the last paragraph.

May God bless you .... 

This from a thrice-wed male who has bragged of his penchant for assaulting women, a man whose association with Pedophile Jeffrey Epstein is well documented. This from a man convicted of sexual abuse. This from a man who has never once even hinted that he has repented for anything. This despicable human who has brilliantly manipulated God-fearing individuals to do his bidding.

Signing off in all capitals - shouting at us once again that he is president of the united states of america.

Afghan

It was a work for Art – this afghan that hung across the back of the avocado green couch in Thelma's living room. You know the kind with the zig zags in sometimes - mostly - garish colors, this one in brown and orange and yellow in those too-synthetic hues. Crocheted in scratchy synthetic yarn that become more scratchy with time.

Ugly, just plain ugly.

"But Jane, my grandmother made it."

"It's still hideous," I said. 

But still it was kept, even plucked from the dumpster after our daughter discarded it along with the worn out pillows and threadbare sheets and old newspapers and even older magazines and the broken chairs that would be perfectly good if just repaired with a little glue and a clamp.

But he rescued the afghan and stuffed it behind the seats in his truck where I wouldn't see it – that's not until the day I was cleaning out the truck. The afghan purportedly so preciously had absorbed half a can of motor oil, miscellaneous discarded foodstuffs and perhaps even some deer blood.

I pulled it out and hung it on the clothesline. It disappeared again sometime later that day and he swears it's been eliminated but I fully expect to find it in the of a cupboard in the workshop.

I put together the words you read above on February 27, 2026 during a ten-minute writing practice session with the prompt "Afghan."

We're buried in such stuff here on the farm - not just our stuff, thought there's plenty of that! But we're living in a place where five generations of family - thrifty farmers for the most part - have lived. And if you know thrifty anybodies, you'll know that throwing 'perfectly good' things away is a challenge. You might need it some day.

Add those 'perfectly good' things that might need just a little tweak to restore them to the 'perfectly good' status, and you've described much of what has been squirreled away. And then, of course, the sentimental things - worn out baby shoes, old high school and college yearbooks from parents, grandparents and offspring, funeral calling books from family members who have been in the cemetery since early in the last century.

But we're determined at the end of yet another summer to made a substantial dent in the purging process.

But guess what showed up again draped across the futon on the upstairs back porch to surprise me?

But this time, in the interest of truly making the substantial dent, here's the rest of the story.

Maybe that's the end of that afghan story - but here's the last part of my "Afghan" writing practice from February.

My grandmother made me an afghan when we were married. It too is rather garish but soft with cotton yarn. Black borders with colorful knitted blocks. It's hidden away upstairs in a trunk in the attic and he doesn't know it's there.

 

Genesee Cheeseboxes

A trip to the Potter County Fair always brings a visit to the Oswayo Valley Historical Society building at the edge of the fairgrounds in Millport. This year as I made my way through the exhibits, my attention was captured by this:

While I imagine my grandfather (W.D. 'Golly' Fish) might question the syntax of the label affixed to this particular cheese box, I expect he'd wonder if it made at the cheese box factory in nearby Genesee Forks - known today as Genesee

His words from a long-ago "Golly" column.

When I was a young fellow, before I absorbed a lot of printers' ink in my system I learned to make cheese boxes. There was a cheese box factory at Genesee. Ambrose Veley owned the plant. It employed a dozen or so men at a mill a bit south from the present school building.

The plant made the heads for the boxes from bolts purchased locally. The bolts were sawed on a machine known as a "slasher," a vicious machine that every now and then clipped off a finger or two for the operator.

The heading was taken to an outdoor yard and piled loosely so it would dry quickly. After two or three weeks it was returned to the plant, pieces assembled wide enough to make a head, the pieces matched together and rounded on a small concave saw.

The sides for the boxes were of elm cut by a veneer machine but purchased from Oakes & Burger at Cattaraugus, N.Y. They were called "hoops."

The box maker was called a "nailer" and he was the elite of the plant and for the reason he earned more money than others, his work was "piece work." He received 80 cents for making 100 boxes and 100 covers. The best nailers, when all went smoothly, could complete 200 boxes in ten hours of top speed effort.

A dollar and sixty cents was real money when the common laborers were getting but one dollar or less. just the same the elite earned their pay as they drove nails and tacks at top speed for ten straight hours.

Board at Vern Teater's Hotel (not a trace now marks the site) cost $3.00 a week. Sweet Caporal cigarettes, ten in a package were five cents a pack.

This was around 1895 and before a brick plant was erected to manufacture sand-lime bricks and long before a long cement walk was built to the busy railroad station, a junction of the Buffalo & Susquehanna and the New York & Pennsylvania Railroads. It was long before the building of the huge milk plant with a high stack said to have cost $25,000.

It was even before Dick Coyle, hell-raiser and Irish wit, was a telegraph operator, and before genial Jim Sullivan was the village tonsorial artist.

This scribe knew a lot of people, fine people, years ago at the "Forks," but now only a few.

Even the "Old Folks Reunion," for years a big annual event with a brass band, a male quartet, silver tongued orators and a bountiful dinner has fallen by the wayside, with J.H. Tilburg as its moving spirit. Coming as it did in late summer politicians never missed the event with glad hands extended filled with campaign cards. 

A.J. Borden is no longer blacksmithing, and Henry Clark long ago stopped shoeing horses and hung his leather apron on a peg following his last lay at the anvil. Victor  Allen and the Genesee Times – gone!

How times change!

Where A Wendell Berry Poem Took Me

Though a busy late-summer schedule has taken me away from my online groups for the past several weeks, Thursday morning I set aside an hour to join others from all over our earth who make time to write together in a Zoom room.

Lucy, who leads this gathering from Spokane, Washington, chose this poem by Wendell Berry  – "Before Dark" – as the morning's first prompt and I was off - the thoughts evoked coming faster than I could move my hand across the page.

Written by Jane, September 3, 2026:
My mother's father was 94 when he left behind this place on our earth. When I remember him - remember him from my memory and not from the way I've been coming to know him through his writing - it's at camp. There he is – seated in the faded green canvas chair on the little porch that faced the pond where my little brother nearly drowned one August afternoon.

Wendell Berry, also a man who counted his years with a 90, wrote of kingfishers, and this morning we heard those words, and this writer felt that tug to remember, to put down the memories of a little girl and the kingfishers at the pond, at the camp.

He called it a miniature lake in his writing, my grandfather. But sometimes he called it a big mud puddle - that pond with a little island in the middle with its cattails in the fall and a riot of late blooming old-fashioned daffodils on its banks in May. And the water lilies that the big boys always had to be watching out for.

The Kingfisher, with its be-crowned head, perched on the wire that stretched to the springhouse tucked into the hillside. "Watch the Kingfisher. See the Kingfisher, Janie? He'll soon find his supper."

Then the swoop, the splash, the swift flight over the trees to the place where the creek – The Nine Mile – flowed to meet Commissioner Run on to Pine Creek. 

It's not just the Kingfishers I remember. It's the phoebes who made their nests on that porch, splattering mud on the gray shingles and white trim. As the young fledglings left the nest, white trails of bird droppings made their way down the picture window. Every spring the nests would reappear, moved only slightly from the prints left on that siding despite the scrubbing with a wooden handled scrub brush and a galvanized bucket of sudsy water.

One year someone – Uncle Bill perhaps – tacked up something I know now as hardware cloth into the corners of the porch. It looked even uglier than the muddy nests. The phoebes moved to the little stoop-like porch on the kitchen side.

... The rest of my camp memories I will save for a different day. But here are my grandfather's words from camp as he wrote in his Golly column in The Potter Enterprise:

Kingfishers (belted) often find a perch in a tree high above the little lake and evidently search the water for a meal. Their vision must be extremely keen to locate a fish in the water. Once located, a power dive is almost certain to reduce the fish population by one.

Our bird book tells us that the belted kingfisher is one of the few cases where the female is more colorful than the male.

Golly at times is provoked by their watchful waiting but when he thinks that it is the nature of the bird, he realizes that the kingfisher has to eat, and he is forgiving. Mother Nature takes care of all such things. Golly has shot at Kingfishers (never hit one) but he'll shoot no more. (1958)

And I'll finish on this Labor Day weekend in 2026 with this piece he wrote just before Labor Day weekend in 1961. Perhaps that weekend the Heimel kids were at camp too - though the peace and quiet would have been elusive.

The old-timer, who writes this column, is planning for a long holiday weekend at Golly's Folly.

An order has been filed at the weather factory for more sunshine and less rain.

That vine-covered porch invites Golly to loaf where he may watch the miniature lake.

Kingfishers perch at times in trees hoping for a fish dinner. A breeze sets the waves dancing. Autumn leaves fall and float on the surface. Occasionally a deer picks its way to the lick nearby and later drinks at the water's edge. When the light is just right the image of the graceful arrival is mirrored in water – a scene Golly loves to behold!

Birds come to the lawn to pick worms and insects from the grass, but at this season there are no lilting songs.

There is peace and quiet in the Black Forest.

100 Hundred Guns At Sunrise

Today is the 250th birthday of the United States Of America! And as is fitting for a nation's birthday observance,  Americans have been putting together celebrations for all these many years.

Memories from his childhood in Allegany County, N.Y. were particularly vivid for my grandfather as he often shared his charming recollections through the years of his newspaper career.

From 1943 –

We'll soon celebrate the National Birthday – 147 years of freedom. Maybe we'll recite the Preamble to the Constitution:

"We, the people of the United States – "

On second thought, maybe we'd better not – takes too much space – or maybe memory might let us down.

Memory is good, however, on how we used to save pennies and nickels for weeks and weeks, when a youngster, so we could buy firecrackers, punk, torpedoes, a bag of candy and maybe a banana, on the Fourth of July.

And when there was a celebration in the country village it opened with "100 Guns at Sunrise."

This was proclaimed by huge posters in bright red and blue ink, with a screaming eagle clasping in its talons, banner inscribed "E Pluribus Unum."

There was a stirring patriotic address by the noted Mr. Somebody, a fantastic parade, dancing all day, a greased pig to catch and a greased pole to climb, ball game, sack race and three-legged race and a pie-eating contest!

Picture a bunch of boys voraciously devouring blackberry pie with copious quantities of sticky juice running down over their chins.

Fireworks in the evening was the culminating event of the day. That was something else again.

But the day came to an end – as all good things must end. Dogged tired and with singed eyebrows, hands blistered here and there, we went wearily to bed, the day done but the memory to live on and on!

Do boys of today get as much pleasure from anticipation and the same joy of realization of the Fourth of July, and will the event remain green in memory's storehouse – we wonder – we hope so.

He wrote this one in 1967, those long-ago childhood memories still vivid in his early 90s.

An old time Fourth of July celebration poster – 

Ever see one printed in red and blue ink on white stock? Probably not unless you are an antique biped or there may be one in the vast collection of ancient relics in the archives of the County Historical Society, and that is unlikely.

This scribe remembers such sheets. As a matter of fact, he had a part in printing some of them.

To this day he can picture them with a huge screaming spread eagle and in large type "One Hundred Guns At Sunrise!"

Some of the attractions and contests were: Fantastic parade, music by cornet band, martial band, bicycle races, foot races, sack races, three-leg races; catching a greased pig with the pig the prize; climbing greased pole, with five dollar bill at the top for the prize; square dancing.

There was pink lemonade and peanuts, and usually a tight rope walker. For a big celebration there was usually a balloon ascension. And remember "excursion rates on all railroads." After all of these attractions and probably others this old timer may have forgotten, there was a "spectacular pyrotechnical display."

Even then there was dancing until dawn with fiddles supplying the rhythm and caller crying "salute your partner, balance all and grand right and left."

Of course these were descriptions of celebrations when Golly was a boy, and that was a long time ago –

It was before the advent of the gas buggy, when railroads transported people or horses hauled them about or –

They walked.

Maybe the younger set of today may think life was dull 75 years ago but they are just as wrong as though they had burned their shirt tails. 

Fourth Of July Victory Celebration!

In the year 1946, Coudersport planned a huge celebration for the July 4 holiday. With the long World War II just ended, there were even more reasons to celebrate. The newspaper headline related: 

Plan For Crowd of 7,000 At Fourth Of July
Victory Celebration; Arrangements Complete

The newspaper story on June 27 went on to describe all the preparations: 

High school bands, American Legion units and firemen from ten nearby towns are expected to compete for $150 in cash prizes at the Fourth of July Victory Celebration here.

With arrangements nearly complete, the celebration committee devoted itself Monday to combing a list of eligibles for workers to staff stands and ticket booths. It is expected that 150 men and women will volunteer for four- and six-hour shifts.

Athletic events for children will be directed by Harold B. VonNieda, a local merchant and former high school coach. Cash prizes will be awarded winners.

Edward D. Fisher is general chairman of the event.

With more than 1,000 veterans back in civilian clothes in Potter County and ready for a long-deferred good time on native soil, sie of the crowd has at no time been a question mark. The big 'if' has been in the corraling of enought wieners, sugar, rolls and bead, soft drinks, ham, butter and other hard-to-get foodstuffs to meet the anticipated demand. Nearly one half ton of frankfurters has bee contracted for. hundreds of cases of soda pop are already warehoused here with more arriving almost daily. Receipts of candy, crackerjack and chewing gum for the celebration already exceed the limit set by the committee.

Prizes purchased for distribution at the affair total nearly $2,500. Given away at night will be an electric washer, electric mixer, toaster, butter, cartridges, nylon hosiery and two bicycles. According to present plans, more than 250 pairs of nylons will be distributed.

A troupe of performing monkeys is expected to be an outstanding attraction. 

Are you wondering how it went, that big celebration 80 summers ago in Mitchell Park? Here's how it was reported the next week:

A record throng, observing the first peacetime Independence Day  infive years last Thursday, attended the victory celebration at Coudersport.

Held under the auspices of the Coudersport Community Association Inc., the celebration marked not only the independence of the nation, but a big stride toward the civic group's declared goal  sufficient funds to erect a recreation hall and pavilion for the use of Potter Countians.*

Ideal weather helped attract the crowd which by early afternoon overflowed the park. Those who came later found queues at the refreshment stands and at the three rides. Food ran low as the day wore on. Cold cuts were served in hot dog buns after the supply of wieners was exhausted. But these troubles did not dampen the enthusiasum of the celebrants.

Winners of the various contests and prizes were detailed here:

* The Coudersport Community Association was successful in its fund raising goal though it took several more years to raise the $15,000 necessary to construct the Coudersport Community Building which opened in 1950. That building continues to serve the community as the Coudersport Public Library.