About Democrat and Chronicle columnist David Andreatta

I’VE GOT THIS By David Andreatta

Text copyright © 2016 Democrat and Chronicle All Rights Reserved

Table of Contents FOREWORD PARENTING Surviving the School Drop-off Line A Father, a Son and a Baseball Mitt Stressed-out Parents Are Not Alone Sportsmanship and the $250 Handshake Stop Selling Your Kid’s Girl Scout Cookies Parents Can Cure Unruly Lilac Festival Teens POLITICS Keep Walking, Assemblyman Gantt, I Mowed Your Lawn This Election, Beware the Costume Party Housing Authority Mess is a Comedy of Errors Maggie Brooks’s Long Quaff at the Public Trough My Brush with Trump University COMIDA Blew Off I-Square Probe READERS CHOICE: Hey, Errigo, You Can Go Home Again LAUGH LINES Mastering the Medley Centre Soccer Flop This Hunting Season, Help a Newsman in Headlights Being a Mascot Isn’t All Fun and Games When Common Sense Checks Out at the Supermarket It’s an Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad World Talking Turkey with a Stranger on Thanksgiving COMMUNITY Cops and Manners on Short Street ‘Squirrel Slam’ Reveals Upstate-Downstate Divide They Were Heluva Good! People Holding the Bag at Constantino’s The Pipes are Calling the Cops Crickets and Consequences at Eastridge High A Giving Tree Falls in Ontario CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Villages Judges Shouldn’t Be Village Idiots Her Macaroni Salad is Worth Stealing Death by Neglect on East Avenue Tan’s Father’s Killer is on the Loose Wiesner’s Crime Could Cost Us $39 Million Judge Astacio Isn’t Going Anywhere PEOPLE Mercy’s Wambach Honor was Bigger than a Soccer Field Amy Pierson has a Life Great-grandma’s Comfy Chair Defies Town Code The Late, Great Art of Meat Cutting Santa Opens his Heart, Wallet at Wegmans Golisano’s Big Beef with his Big Boat About Democrat and Chronicle columnist David Andreatta

FOREWORD There are plenty of traits that a world-class newspaper columnist would love to have, but not too many are strictly necessary. Writing that’s sharp and engaging? Nice, but not a requirement. A personality that’s appealing and relatable? These days, half the country is going to hate you no matter what. A gorgeous head of hair? I wouldn’t know. The only thing you really need is a finely tuned sense of what people are talking about. And in that regard, Dave Andreatta is a natural. That became obvious not long after he took over for me, writing a column every Sunday in the Democrat and Chronicle. Early on, Dave managed to fashion a perfect newspaper column out of something he’s actually good at: Pushing a lawnmower while wearing the hell out of a cheap dress shirt. Not only had he made devoted readers out of God-knows-how-many lonely hearts from Henrietta to Gates and beyond, he’d exposed the heinous hypocrisy of a state lawmaker who’d let his property go to seed. What really sets Dave apart isn’t weird Canadian sex appeal: It’s his effortless sense of what people will find interesting. Whether he’s haranguing hapless public officials or awkwardly chatting up a possiblyhuman Thanksgiving helpline operator about how to cook a turkey, Dave is able to seize on the city’s conversation and make it smarter, subtler or funnier. He’s got a built-in barometer for what’s interesting. He was onto the Trump University scam years before it made headlines. He tallied up Bob Weisner’s would-be, should-be bill just as Maggie Brooks’s husband jumped on a generous plea deal. He found empathy for Amy Pierson when all anybody wanted to do was judge a young widow’s choices. Those columns and so many others in this collection were entertaining and informative, sure. But they also captured the conversation in and around Rochester in a way that’s more difficult than it may seem. And despite being firmly in the middle of Generation X, Dave somehow maintains an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture references from the 1950s. (Is Canadian TV three decades behind or something?) We’re not in the same newsroom anymore, which means I don’t get to hear Dave switch from a shouting match with a public official to baby talk with one of his sons. But whenever I want to take the pulse of Rochester – to know what people are talking about in a region I still love – I look at what Dave is writing about. And I take a moment to admire that head of hair. Nestor Ramos Boston Globe (Formerly of the Democrat and Chronicle) November 2016

PARENTING

Surviving the School Drop-off Line For countless parents of young children, the end of the holidays meant a return to the dreaded school drop-off line. Entering one is like walking the wheel in Midnight Express. One wrong move and you’re a “bad machine.” Except in this version, there aren’t grimy prisoners pawing at you to “go the other way.” There are fed-up fathers honking their horns, makeup-free moms giving you the stink eye and clueless grandparents throwing up their liver-spotted hands. It’s much worse than any Turkish prison. A recent British study found that parents’ cortisol levels spiked on average 30 percent as they anticipated the school-run routine. Cortisol is the stress hormone our bodies release in fightor-flight situations. In other words, humans respond to taking a kid to school the same way we did when we were staring down woolly mammoths with spears whittled out of birch trees. What’s worse is saliva swabs taken from those parents throughout the day showed their stress hangover lingered until about 2:30 p.m., just in time to return to the school for pick-up. Call it the circle of life. It wasn’t always this way. Kids either walked to school uphill both ways or they took a bus and moms waved goodbye from the window in their pajamas then danced around the house singing “I’m So Excited” by The Pointer Sisters. Now, with greater school choice and parents’ refusal to go along with some truly horrific bus schedules that demand their kids get up before the guy who makes the doughnuts, the dropoff line appears here to stay. Surviving the line requires understanding that it’s a living, breathing thing that’ll chew you up, spit you out and leave you for dead if you obstruct its lifeblood: Perpetual forward motion. To get out alive, you must prepare as a general does for battle. Ever see those old war movies of paratroopers filing out of a moving plane? That’s the intensity with which your son or daughter should exit your automobile. Go! Go! Go! Go! Help ensure success by submitting your child to seat belt disengagement training before leaving the driveway. If she lacks the dexterity to unbuckle herself, then you are not battle-ready and you must retreat to the parking lot and shoehorn your Ford Expedition into a spot lined for a Mini Cooper or risk the wrath of others in the line. The same applies if she’s hauling enough stuff to be mistaken for a Sherpa. This includes backpacks that double as airline luggage, homework assignments made of poster board or anything else that could inhibit an orderly disembarking. If you face resistance once in the drop zone, threaten to press the “eject” button on your CD player. Children of a certain age will fall for this decoy.

You can set a good example by channeling your inner driving-school instructor. Monitor your mirrors, gauges and windows with the vigilance of one of those guys with brush cuts, hornrimmed glasses and short-sleeved dress shirts at NASA Mission Control. When it’s your turn to inch forward, move. Don’t finish your text. Don’t play another round of Candy Crush, Farmville 2 or whatever stupid smartphone game you’re addicted to this month. In fact, turn your phone off and concentrate on the mission as though your life depended on it, because it does. Lastly, whatever you do, never get out of the car. It’s the ultimate “bad machine” move. I don’t care if you were Time magazine’s Person of the Year or president of the PTA, nothing about you or the thing you think will take two seconds to do outside your car is more important than the flow of the line. Chances are most of the people behind you think they’re more important than you and their kids are more important than yours. Their kids are cuter than yours, too. So there’s a reality check. To curb the impulse to leave your automobile, have contingency plans for every conceivable setback. Your kid forgot his boots? There’s always the lost-and-found. Forgot his lunch? Make it a mystery meat day. Forgot to wipe that throbbing snot bubble in his nose? That’s what sleeves are for. The good news is that the same study that measured parents’ cortisol output also found that parents felt an exhilarating sense of achievement in conquering the line. Now that you know what it takes to make it out alive, blare the car stereo and get down to The Pointer Sisters like your mom used to do. “Surviving the School Drop-off Line” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on January 11, 2015.

A Father, a Son and a Baseball Mitt Frontier Field had been locked for hours by the time my son realized he’d left his baseball mitt in Seat 3 of Row G of Section 222. Don’t ask how a 6-year-old forgets the glove he had on one hand for nearly nine innings but remembers the seat and row and section where he’d been eating corn dogs with the other. We’d watched the Rochester Red Wings clobber the Norfolk Tides on a gorgeous afternoon in May. Now, as the barbecue sizzled in the backyard, Lucas wanted to play catch. I was livid about his glove. Not because it was anything special – just a $20 job off the rack – but because I’d warned him about leaving it behind. The rational side of me figured this happens all the time and that there would be a stadium lost-and-found I could check the next day. If he knew that, though, the boy would never learn his lesson. He’d think the world was one big lost-and-found. I couldn’t have that. So I stormed about, spatula in hand, ranting about every possible, and improbable, scenario that could have befallen his glove. I told him it was probably in a dumpster by now, covered in beer and peanut shells. I told him a maintenance man might have taken it, and that now he was tossing fly balls to his son in their backyard. I even told him that maybe what the Red Wings did with all the left-behind mitts that kids didn’t care about was fasten them to the famous glove horse statue at the stadium entrance. “How else do you think all those gloves get on that horse?” I asked him. Lucas was already crying, but that made him cry harder. My wife shot me a look that said I’d gone too far. But except for the horse statue thing, which I immediately regretted, I didn’t care. I was on a roll and the boy needed to know the harsh realities the world had in store for the unprepared and irresponsible. So I did what any unhinged father would do: I told Lucas to get in the car, that it was too bad he was hungry, and that we were driving back to the closed ballpark to get his glove or die trying, reminding him that our chances of success were slim. He cried the whole way there. When we arrived, the stadium was desolate. The gates were padlocked. The shades were drawn in the ticket booths. The concessions were closed. We walked the exterior of the whole park hoping to glimpse someone who could help. There was no one. All cried out by then, Lucas said how sorry he was and how we should just give up, that the glove was gone and that he’d go back to using the too-small blue one from last year that I knew made him feel like a baby. He’d been broken. So had I. I pointed to cups and popcorn boxes on the stadium floor and told him that meant the place hadn’t been cleaned yet and that chances were good his glove was right where he’d left it.

“Seat 3, Row G, Section 222,” he said. “You’re a good boy for remembering,” I told him. We returned to the parking lot, where there sat a few cars that I imagined belonged to people somewhere in the building. I told Lucas we could sit on a curb and wait a while. By then, the setting sun had given the sky that reddish hue that cinematographers call “the magic hour,” when the light is indirect and soft. As we sat, I recalled the time I lost a collection of hockey cards I’d brought on a field trip to the Niagara Escarpment. That night, my father lectured me about responsibility, my mother hugged me, and I cried myself to sleep. The next day, my father came home from work with a box full of unopened packages of cards sold at the convenience store for 25 cents apiece. I knew I’d do the same thing for Lucas. Suddenly, a car door slammed. I grabbed Lucas’s hand and ran over to the car. A man rolled down the window. “Do you work here?” I asked. “Not really,” he replied. “What do you need?” I explained, and he said nothing. His eyes were obscured by tinted sunglasses, but his silence suggested he was sizing up the tear streaks on Lucas’s cheeks, the ice cream stains on his T-shirt, and the sweat stains on mine. We were a pitiful pair. Then the man got out of his car. “Come with me,” he said. He wasn’t a tall man, but he was broad in the shoulders and narrow in the hip, and when he pulled from his pocket a set of keys to a side door of the ballpark, I could see his wrists were thick. “So, you do work here,” I said. “I work for the Twins,” he said, opening the door. “I’m the Red Wings hitting coach.” His name was Tim Doherty, and he spoke with a bit of a drawl. He’d been with the Red Wings, the AAA affiliate of the Minnesota Twins, for a couple of years. Before that, he had stints with the Red Sox and the Indians. After escorting us through a warren of offices, Tim opened a steel door to the concourse. “You remember where you left your glove?” he asked. “Seat 3, Row G, Section 222,” Lucas said. We bolted. Sure enough, the glove was under the seat surrounded by peanut shells I’d dropped a few hours earlier. Lucas slipped it on and pounded it like a big leaguer. “He looks happy,” Tim said. “He is,” I said. “He needed this, too. I gave him a good tongue lashing.” “That’s part of being a dad,” Tim assured me. “But part of being a kid is getting to do things like this.”

Then he said, “Don’t go yet,” as though we weren’t entirely dependent on him to get out of the stadium. “I’ve got something else for you.” Tim led us onto the field and into the dugout, still littered with plastic cups and gum wrappers. “Look,” I told Lucas, “the pros like Double Bubble, just like you.” “Yeah!” Then he pointed under the bench. “A baseball!” “That’s for you,” Tim said and disappeared into the locker room. Lucas scrambled for it, crushing the plastic cups underfoot. “It’s a hardball,” he said, seemingly surprised that the pros don’t use the sponge core balls he uses in Little League. I took it and smelled the leather. I was disappointed to learn it was made in China. Tim emerged a few moments later with a splintered bat. “That’s for you, too,” he said. Lucas struggled under the weight of it. The butt was marked “Diaz” for Argenis Diaz, the Red Wings’ journeyman shortstop from Venezuela who once played 22 games for the Pittsburgh Pirates. But Lucas cradled that bat like it belonged to Derek Jeter. “Be careful of the splinters,” Tim said. We promised we would. Then Tim made us promise to visit him in the dugout the next time we went to a Red Wings game. There’s nothing I could write about baseball or the bonding effect the game has on fathers and sons that hasn’t already been written or photographed or filmed. Our baseball memories are colored by snippets of fiction and soundtracks that have seeped into the collective consciousness. When I think about playing catch with my dad as a kid, it’s always the magic hour. The street lights never come on. His arm never gets tired, and the only sound is the pop of the glove. Back then, I just wanted another fly ball. Now, toss in an Iowa cornfield and James Earl Jones and I get weepy just thinking about it. But there’s something magical about being a father and recognizing the moments when those memories are being made, cognizant of the bond crystallizing before your eyes. Lucas probably won’t remember our adventure that way. I will, though. “A Father, A Son and A Baseball Mitt” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on June 21, 2015.

Stressed-out Parents Are Not Alone I’ve been thinking for a while that something’s got to give. I don’t know what, but something. A person has only so much bandwidth. It was almost this column that gave. I’d written three in four days and by Thursday afternoon I didn’t think I had the gas for another, even though it’s this column – the one that runs online on Fridays and in print on Sundays – that butters my bread. My stress was amplified by my wife working late. I was to pick up our boys from school, whip up dinner, and get one kid to a hockey practice at 5:15 p.m. and the other to a practice at 6:30 p.m. – practices that I was to coach. I had too many balls in the air. Then inspiration hit me in the form of a new work-life survey that found working parents feel stressed, tired, rushed and short on quality time with their children, friends, partners and hobbies. The survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center, told me I wasn’t alone in feeling like a jack-of-all-trades and master of none, like my touch in whatever endeavor was more brass than golden, and like my grip on life was as fragile as a newborn chick. The data showed that public policy and workplace expectations have not adjusted to a permanently changed family structure in which both parents work full-time. To be fair, my editor offered to cut me some slack. He said we could replace this column with a “reader note,” which is usually reserved for columnists on vacation and reads something like: “David Andreatta is on vacation. His column will appear again next Sunday.” I have no idea what this reader note would have said, but probably something like: “David Andreatta couldn’t get it together this week. His column will appear again next Sunday, we hope.” I couldn’t bear the thought of it, which is why at this moment, it's 9:57 p.m. and my boys are running around the house unwashed in their hockey underwear like children out of a Dickens novel. Dinner was a deep-fried pizza log at the rink. Any minute, one of them is going to try to sell me a book of matches for two pence. Actually, they’re making pocketknives and slingshots out of hockey tape and Popsicle sticks for something they call real-life Minecraft, whatever that is. And they keep asking all these questions that I can’t answer because I either don’t know the answer or because I’m too focused on banging out this column. “Why do apples have stickers on them?” “How can I sharpen this?” “What’s the easiest way to shoplift?” I swear, they’re really good boys. In 46 percent of all two-parent households, both parents work full-time, according to Pew, up from 31 percent in 1970. The share of households with a mother who stays home has fallen to 26 percent from 46 percent over the same period. The result of these shifts for many working parents is that their lives feel haphazard. They’re just half paying attention to their children. They’re just half focused on their work. They’re just half taking care of the household.

In my house at this moment, dishes are piled up in the sink from breakfast, the recycling is waiting to be put out, and the second-floor toilet won’t flush. Outside, the “check engine” light has been on in the van for a month and the lawn is a blanket of leaves. Fifty-six percent of working parents surveyed found the balancing act difficult, and those who did were more likely to declare parenting tiring and stressful and less likely to find it “always enjoyable and rewarding.” More than half of mothers and fathers said they didn’t have enough leisure time, and 39 percent of mothers and 50 percent of fathers said they spend too little time with their children. Reading those figures, it dawned on me: Was parenting ever “always enjoyable and rewarding?” Is it supposed to be? Is work supposed to be? I don’t think so. And when have parents ever had leisure time? Those “Calgon, take me away!” ads date to the 1970s. Life may have been slower generations ago, but its stresses were relative to the times. I don’t think parents of today are so much different, except perhaps, in thinking we are and thinking we somehow can or should have it all. No one has it all. No one can do it all. That’s OK. I think previous generations accepted that more than we do now. My boys won’t get their bedtime story, but they’re laughing uncontrollably in the basement, my wife is on her way home, and I know I’m not alone. “Stressed-out Parents Are Not Alone” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on November 8, 2015.

Sportsmanship and the $250 Handshake If you want to kill sportsmanship in youth athletics, take a page out of the Western New York Amateur Hockey League’s rulebook. Not long ago, the coach of a Perinton Youth Hockey team of 9-year-olds that includes my son was informed by a concerned parent that his actions following a losing game had put him at risk of being suspended and his squad being fined $250. Had the coach manhandled the kids? No. Had he cursed at the referees? No. Had he spiked the water bottles? No. His infraction? He had his boys and girls shake hands with the players of the opposing team after their game. The opposing coach presumably got a talking-to as well because by having his players congratulate the Perinton kids on a game well-played with a clasp of hands, he also violated Rule J, Section 2 (a) of the Western New York Amateur Hockey League, which states: “Prior to game commencement both teams will shake hands. Any teams that are found to shake hands AFTER a league game will be subject to a $250 fine and the offending head coaches will be suspended for their next league game.” (Emphasis included.) The post-game handshake is routine in most youth sports, and even in many high school and collegiate athletics. But the ritual is perhaps nowhere more sacred than in hockey. No one knows for sure when the tradition began, but at least one historian traced its origins to a 1908 charity game between the defending Stanley Cup champion Montreal Wanderers and a team of select players from eastern Canada. To this day, professional hockey teams shake hands after playoff series. Western New York Amateur Hockey League officials didn’t respond to an email asking when and why it adopted its handshake rule. The league’s executive director did respond to the email to ask my “spin” on the rule and whether I was “in favor or opposed.” I told her this: The rule defies the basic tenets of sportsmanship and follows a societal trend of expecting less of our children. The rules governing youth hockey in the United States don’t cover handshakes. Boards of individual youth hockey leagues that care to address the subject make their own rules, and most of those that do defer to custom. Joe Baudo, president of the New York State Amateur Hockey Association, which oversees the Western New York league, recalled the league’s handshake rule dating back maybe 10 years. If that’s the case, then it’s high time we talk about it. The whole point of the post-game handshake in any sport is to emphasize the virtues of displaying grace in winning and dignity in defeat. The handshake is an opportunity for athletes who’ve tested each other’s mettle to acknowledge that their battle has ended and the dust is settling. Tennis players shake hands after a match. So do boxers.

Nothing encapsulates the intimacy of the custom like a 1952 photograph of Boston Bruins goalie “Sugar” Jim Henry and Montreal Canadiens legend Maurice “Rocket” Richard shaking hands. Henry’s eyes are blackened from a broken nose and blood trickles from a bandage over Richard’s left eyebrow. An account at the time read that Henry, who’s pitched forward, “almost appeared to be bowing to the Rocket as he struggled to hang onto his goalie gear.” That dynamic is lost in a pre-game handshake. Nothing is learned. It’s easy to look an opponent in the eye and take his hand before a contest. It’s much harder to do so afterward. Sometimes it’s so difficult that confrontations arise. Such disgraceful behavior – and its potential for liability – no doubt prompted the Western New York Amateur Hockey League’s rule. Too frequently all it takes to flush tradition down the toilet is a saber-rattling letter from one litigious parent and a shameless lawyer. But that’s a misguided reaction because it’s the potential for conflict that makes the postgame handshake a teachable moment. It takes character to pay homage to an opponent whom you’ve bested or to whom you’ve fallen and show no arrogance or animosity. That’s the standard of sportsmanship we should be setting for children. Now if only the grown-ups could muster the character to do it. “Sportsmanship and the $250 Handshake” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on December 20, 2015.

Stop Selling Your Kid’s Girl Scout Cookies Girl Scout cookies are in season, and despite a resolution to cut back on sweets I’ll probably buy some. I always do. Who can resist those Thin Mints, Rah-Rah Raisins and Lemonades? Yeah, I’ll buy some. But not from you, parents. Don’t even ask. Don’t bother putting me on your email list gently reminding me that your daughter is selling cookies. Don’t expect me to acknowledge your Facebook post about how many boxes your daughter wants to sell. Don’t bank on me filling out the order form you left in the lunchroom at work. This year, I intend to do something extraordinary by buying my Girl Scout cookies from an actual Girl Scout. The problem is I can’t find one who’ll ask me if I’d like to buy a box. That’s not to suggest there aren’t earnest Girl Scouts peddling Peanut Butter Patties doorto-door right now. I just haven’t seen any. I haven’t seen any in some time. All I see are parents with cookie order forms in their back pockets. In fairness to Girl Scouts, with the exception of a Boy Scout who sells me popcorn once a year, I can’t recall the last time a kid sold me anything. At some point, the fundraising torch once held by youngsters in activities of all kinds fell and it was hoisted by parents who took off running like Forrest Gump. At no other time of year, though, is the parent-as-fundraiser more evident than Girl Scout cookie season. “We know it happens, and that’s not what we want to happen,” Laura Fakharzadeh, the product program manager for the Girl Scouts of Western New York, said of cookie-pushing parents. The Girl Scouts encourage adults to assist girls in cookie sales. The organization has safety guidelines that request girls be supervised by an adult or use the buddy system when selling cookies door-to-door. Adults must also be present during cookie booth sales. “Parents should assist, but not do the sale,” Fakharzadeh said. “The girls really do need to make the ask.” The Girls Scouts website declares: “Every time you buy a box, you help girls learn five essential skills – goal setting, decision making, money management, people skills, and business ethics – all while helping them better themselves and their communities” and add inches to your waistline. OK, I made up the last part. But I didn’t make up the part about “goal setting” and “people skills” and “business ethics,” all life skills which are derived from the asking part of the cookie sale. Fakharzadeh noted that there are other ways to sell cookies than going door-to-door, which many parents are reluctant to have their children do. Girls can call and send emails to potential customers, or set up a booth. They can visit their parents’ workplace. Selling Girl Scout cookies for $4 a box is not that tough. Let’s face it, pair a pack of Caramel deLites with a kid in a Girl Scout uniform and you’ve just created the ultimate guilt trip.

Try selling coffee mugs for $5 a pop in 1986 for a peewee hockey team called the Peach Buds. That’s tough. Rejection will be part of the deal, too. A kid might be the tenth Girl Scout in a week to hit up the same customer, in which case she’ll get a “No thanks” for that package of Thanks-a-lots. That’s when her parents should say, “Honey, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.” “Stop Selling Your Kid’s Girl Scout Cookies” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on January 14, 2016.

Parents Can Cure Unruly Lilac Festival Teens After the Lilac Festival was marred by the arrest of seven teenagers and one magnificent puke caught on camera, some officials are talking about enforcing a parental escort policy for anyone under 18 years old. That would keep teenagers in line at the festival because everybody knows teenagers listen to their parents. Recall how James Dean smartened right up after that talking to by his mom and dad in Rebel Without a Cause. Seriously, though, requiring teenagers to be accompanied by a parent at the Lilac Festival would indeed end all teenage disruptions at the festival because it would ensure that no teenager ever attend the festival again. Parents are to teenagers what Raid is to every other household pest. If all the parents of all the teenagers in Monroe County gathered at the Kettle Corn stand, there wouldn’t be a teenager within a five-mile radius. Rochester would be ringed by a cloud of AXE body spray and Vera Wang Princess visible from outer space. That’s because there are only two things more embarrassing to a teenager than a parent, and they are, in order, being made to hang around said parent and being made to hang around said parent in public If the juvenile justice system allowed for sentences of walking around the mall with one’s mother, youthful offenders in the United States would go the way of polio. Hard time would demand mom declare as loudly and lovingly as possible in the middle of the food court over a court-mandated Orange Julius, “You need a new pair of pajamas, honey. Let me buy you some pajamas.” When I was a teenager, I failed my driving test on an advance green two days before a spring prom to which I promised my date I’d drive. My father and I picked her up in his Chrysler minivan, one of those models that had Lee Iacocca crowing, “The pride is back.” She lived two miles from the school but it might as well have been 2,000 the way my father went on complimenting her dress and asking her what she was doing with the likes of me, all while minding the speed limit. It was mortifying. Had he started singing “Mack the Knife” like he was wont to do on a whim, I’d have flung myself out the back hatch right onto Main Street along with the other kids who’d risked life and limb and tearing a rented tuxedo to escape their chauffeurs. Like their predecessors, parents of today have almost no leverage when it comes to keeping their teenagers in line. But they do have the power to pull up to a gaggle of their teenager’s peers while belting out Adele’s “Someone Like You.” Parents don’t even need a minivan to humiliate their adolescent offspring with song. Any automobile will do. They could pull up in a Ferrari and they’d still be dorks if they were singing. Adele herself could pull up in a Ferrari singing “Someone Like You,” and if her teenager were there he’d be horrified.

Yes, making teenagers attend the Lilac Festival with their parents could solve a lot of problems. One problem it could solve is food vendors running out of product. Teenage boys, in particular, are food vacuums. The only reason feed bags aren’t part of their wardrobe is because the bags would interrupt the incessant bragging about their athleticism and stealing of kisses. Speaking of which, the only thing teenage boys drop more money on at festivals than food are those carnival games that require spending $35 for a chance to win a 35-cent stuffed animal. Only over-confident, testosterone-laced adolescents hoping to impress a girl and middleaged fathers of young children desperate to recapture their confidence and testosterone are stupid enough to make that investment. If teenagers had to hang out with their parents at the Lilac Festival, carnival barkers wouldn’t have to worry about half their target audience. That would be a load off for them. Then again, if a teenager were willing to risk social exile by attending the festival with his parent, he might learn from the older, wiser adult that tossing money at silly games and food and merry-making is no way to win true friends. After all, everybody knows teenagers listen to their parents. “Parents Can Cure Unruly Lilac Festival Teens” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on May 10, 2016.

POLITICS

Keep Walking, Assemblyman Gantt, I Mowed Your Lawn As a homeowner, there are days I want to throw in the towel just like David Gantt, the longtime Democratic state assemblyman from Rochester. One of them was last week, when I returned from a vacation to a smattering of knee-high dandelions on an overgrown lawn and a village of Fairport tax bill in the mail. I wanted to tell Mother Nature and the taxman to stuff it, like Gantt did at a house of his in his legislative district. Instead, I fired up the lawn mower, filed the tax bill where I wouldn’t forget it and daydreamed of walking away from it all. By the looks of it, Gantt walked away from 489 Central Park sometime around his ninth term in office. Seven elections later, to call the house an eyesore would be an insult to the broken light fixtures over my garage that my wife tells me are eyesores. The house is a full-blown blight, with graffiti, busted windows, boarded-up doors and a lawn like a cornfield. No one has lived there for years, but a Keystone drinker appears to frequent the porch. It’s a disgrace to a neighborhood that has more than its fair share of blight and whose residents have helped keep Gantt employed in Albany for 31 years. How did it get so bad? To hear Gantt and the homeowner next door tell it, he couldn’t stay ahead of the vandals. “Every time I’d do work on the home, they’d break in,” Gantt told me, estimating he sank upward of $20,000 into the house. “You want to keep losing money?” That new furnace? Gone. New plumbing? They tore the copper pipes right out of the walls. They even took the water meter. The driveway he resealed was a catwalk to ruin. Selling the place wasn’t an option, he said, because he couldn’t even give it away. “I said to the city, ‘Take the house. I’ll give it to you,’” Gantt recalled. “They didn’t want it.” Eventually, Gantt did what deadbeat landlords who want to get rid of their bad investments do. He stopped paying the property taxes. Two weeks ago, the city that didn’t want the house took it through a tax foreclosure. “It’s sad because I know he worked hard at it,” said Maxsene Hanks, the homeowner next door. “You don’t give up on your kids, but this is a property that’s sucking you dry. What are you going to do?” I don’t know. But I have to believe the answer lies somewhere between throwing good money after bad and throwing your hands up and walking away. Taking care of what belongs to you, and to your neighbor when need be, is how communities keep from falling apart. Enough people walk away like Gantt and there goes the neighborhood. Maybe it’s easy for me to say stay and fight because the worst vandal on my street is a Westie whose owner follows her around with a baggie.

After snowstorms, one of my neighbors snow blows her driveway then chugs her way to the next. When a guy hired to fell an old locust tree out front of the house across the street walked away from the job, neighbors showed up with chainsaws and wheelbarrows. They do these things because they recognize that not only is their property their problem, but so too is the health of their neighbor’s property. Now that Gantt dumped his carcass of a house on the city, his mess is our problem. I say “our problem” because a healthy city is vital to all of us. Overburdened city taxpayers will pay for whatever the city does with the house – refurbish it, sell it or, more likely, demolish it. In the meantime, since our problem is my problem, I figured I’d do my part and relieve Gantt’s constituents on Central Park of some of the blight he left behind. So, on Thursday, I fired up my lawn mower for the second time last week and cut his cornfield of a lawn. And all the while, I daydreamed of walking away from it all. “Keep Walking, Assemblyman Gantt, I Mowed Your Lawn” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on June 8, 2014.

This Election, Beware the Costume Party If you’re fed up voting for Democrats and Republicans, you’re in luck. They’ve invented new political parties just for you. Candidates of both parties will masquerade on the ballot this fall under party lines their campaigns dreamed up so you can pull the lever for them without the shame of supporting a party you gave up on ages ago. It's a costume party, and lots of big names will be there. Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo will make a showing under the Women’s Equality Party. His Republican challenger, Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino, will appear under the Stop Common Core Party banner with Rich Funke, a local Republican candidate for state Senate. State Sen. Ted O'Brien, a Democrat from Irondequoit, will arrive on the appealingly named Upstate Tax Relief Party line. He’s taking a lot of heat for that one from the Republican and Conservative parties, but that’s because they’re just jealous he came up with it first. Never mind that these parties have few or no members and aren’t certified political parties, but rather what the state Board of Elections calls “independent bodies.” In that sense, they’re more like pity parties. They’re designed to rally disillusioned voters around a single issue – women’s equality, the Common Core curriculum, tax relief – and get candidates’ names on the ballot one more time. It’s a shrewd strategy that takes advantage of a New York law allowing anyone who gathers enough signatures of support to get on the ballot. The law is intended to promote democracy by giving candidates without the backing of a major party a chance to run. That’s what happened in 2010, when Jimmy McMillan ran for governor on The Rent is Too Damn High Party line. By distorting the law in this fashion, though, these politicians are perverting democracy. They’re hoping the electorate is in the slumber party and will buy into it. Wake up, and don’t. To paraphrase the late comedian and Straight Talking American Government (S.T.A.G.) Party founder Pat Paulsen – up your standards, and up theirs. There are legitimate but fledgling political parties trying to make a go of it in New York that deserve more recognition than one-offs like the Tax Revolt Party and the Tax Relief Now Party created solely to bolster the name recognition of major party candidates. There’s the Libertarian Party, for instance, and something called the Sapient Party, which I would highly advise choose another name. Parties keep their place on the ballot for the next election if they receive 50,000 votes in the gubernatorial race. Six parties have earned that status for this election cycle – Conservative, Democratic, Green, Independence, Republican and Working Families.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of parties. Pizza parties, dance parties, surprise parties are a great time. Bachelorette parties look like a real hoot, what with all the white tulle and adult-themed straws. Political parties, though, ought to be something people can get behind, like a greatgrandfather who needs help blowing out the candles at his birthday party. They should be broad in scope and appeal to the masses who are so tired of politics and want the madness to stop. Maybe that’s the answer: The So Tired of Politics (S.T.O.P.) Party. Has a nice ring to it, don’t you think? “This Election, Beware the Costume Party” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on August 24, 2014.

Housing Authority Mess is a Comedy of Errors We tend to picture kangaroo courts holding session in faraway countries, where Steven Seagal is box-office gold and borscht is served cold. But what label better applies to the buffoonery of late at the Rochester Housing Authority? The comedy of errors that housing commissioners have made of replacing the agency’s executive director, Alex Castro, with City Councilman Adam McFadden is so bush league that analyzing all their missteps in the confines of this column is impossible. Making the whole mess more galling is what most of us see as the feigned ignorance of Mayor Lovely Warren, who appointed the commissioners who hired McFadden, a close Democratic political ally of hers. Everyone involved seems to lack the requisite hardwiring to serve any quasi-governmental agency in Monroe County: The ability to make a political patronage hire appear legitimate. When the Republicans pull this stuff off at places like the Water Authority, they spend years quietly executing their plan. A seemingly innocuous resignation on a village board somewhere sets off a domino effect that ends two years later with an aging party loyalist being named director of water ablution compliance. Housing commissioners are missing that microchip and have thus come off like a middle school production of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. What else could explain why commissioners thought it a good idea to trot out McFadden’s attorney cousin, Langston McFadden, to defend his hiring at a news conference that answered no questions? What else would possess Commissioner Jacqueline Levine, the wife of McFadden’s legislative aide, to vote in favor of hiring her husband’s boss instead of recusing herself just to be safe? Commissioners voted to hire McFadden without interviewing him and within six minutes of firing Castro. Apparently, they weren’t aware that he had been passed over for the job in favor of Castro four years earlier because he had no experience in public housing. The process unfolded so quickly that, according to the meeting minutes and McFadden’s timeline of events, McFadden didn’t know he was a candidate until two hours after he was hired. Luckily, McFadden explained, he was “very interested.” In their haste, commissioners put their agency at risk for the $1 million that Castro had left on his contract, overlooked that hiring a sitting city councilman may violate federal conflict of interest rules, and enflamed tensions between blacks and Latinos. Now they pay McFadden $12,000 a month and can’t articulate why they fired Castro without the supposed reasons just sounding like cover-ups. Speaking of cover, Warren appeared to be running for some with a letter she sent commissioners demanding to know why Castro was fired. If answers weren’t forthcoming, she warned, commissioners would be replaced.

For fun, let’s give Warren the benefit of the doubt that she had no idea what was going down at the Housing Authority. She was the one who exercised her mayoral muscle in an unprecedented manner earlier this year by appointing all new commissioners. No mayor has ever done that, presumably because it’s a bad idea. What good could come from a board with no institutional knowledge? The mayor has referred to a letter commissioners wrote her a few months back in which they questioned the stewardship of the Housing Authority. Those questions were so elementary, anyone who had spent time studying the agency’s operations could have answered them. I know because it was my work as an investigative reporter in 2010 that got the last executive director fired. That director was drawing pay from a company he started with a nointerest loan that commissioners had approved while asleep at the switch. In that case, red-faced commissioners redeemed themselves by enacting more stringent fiscal and ethics policies and conducting comprehensive searches and interviews over many months for suitable interim and permanent executive directors. But these new commissioners wouldn’t know anything about that. How could they? There’s no one left on the board to tell the story. “Housing Authority Mess is a Comedy of Errors” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on October 26, 2014.

Maggie Brooks’s Long Quaff at the Public Trough As the Regional Transit Service’s newest vice president, outgoing Monroe County Executive Maggie Brooks will be “occasionally required to stand; walk; reach with hands and arms; and stoop; kneel, crouch or crawl,” according to the job description. She will also have to slink and skulk if she ever plans to leave the orbit of the Stepford Republicans who control the public bus company, because the real world sees her new position for what it is – political patronage. There’s nothing inherently wrong with patronage, as long as those hired are qualified, and most people would say that Brooks is qualified. She ought to be since the position, vice president of strategic initiatives, appears to have been created just for her. The job is a new one and was posted online just a few weeks ago. An RTS spokesman said at the time that the ideal candidate would be able to represent the agency before region-wide groups, like the Finger Lakes Economic Development Council. Brooks could easily do that. No, there’s nothing wrong with patronage. It’s the abuse of patronage that the real world rightly finds so odious, and Brooks’s hiring reeks of it in a county that’s rife with it. What else explains the string of Monroe County Legislature presidents who, after leaving office, filled tailor-made job openings at that fountain of Republican cronyism, the Monroe County Water Authority? Recall that the Water Authority also hired Brooks’ husband, Robert Wiesner, to oversee security, and tapped former Pittsford Supervisor William Carpenter to fill a deputy director role that was so integral it had been vacant for seven years. That William Carpenter shouldn’t be confused with the William Carpenter who runs RTS. Before joining the transit agency, the latter Carpenter was Monroe County’s budget director under – you guessed it – Brooks. Brooks will find other familiar faces at RTS in its chief financial officer, Scott Adair, who was her finance director; in its general counsel, Daniel DeLaus Jr., who was her deputy county executive, and in its purchasing manager, Justin Feasel, who was her spokesman until this week. Caligula couldn’t have orchestrated a more incestuous political orgy. The slate is only cleaner on the Democratic side of the ledger because there are fewer Democrats with any real power at the local level. Those with power have cranked the patronage mill, too. Who could forget Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren’s lead-footed uncle, Reggie Hill, who resigned as her head of security amid public outcry? Or how Assemblyman Joseph Morelle, who as head of the Monroe County Democratic Committee appointed his son, Joseph Morelle Jr., to fill a vacant seat in the Monroe County Legislature?

Sound judgment and good conscience should have prevented Uncle Reggie and Junior from assuming those posts, just as they should have kept RTS from appointing Brooks to a highpaying, made-up job. But politicians don’t live by the same moral code as those of us in the real world. As the great satirist H. L. Mencken once said of the politician: “Anything is moral that furthers the main concern of his soul, which is to keep a place at the public trough.” Doing that sometimes requires reaching, stooping, kneeling, crouching and crawling. “Maggie Brooks’s Long Quaff at the Public Trough” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on December 27, 2015.

My Brush with Trump University A photographer once captured the precise moment that Donald Trump tried to sell me a load of bunk. It was 11 years ago – May 23, 2005, to be exact – about a week after his casino company emerged from bankruptcy protection. The press corps had been invited to Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan that day for what Trump promised in a news release would be a “major education announcement.” As the New York Post’s education reporter, I drew the short straw to attend. This was during an age of unprecedented private investment in the city’s public schools, and speculation was that Trump was making a charitable gift. But that theory died when no one from the city’s Education Department took the stage with Trump. We should have known. Trump doesn’t give. He takes. That’s how he got his reputation as the most miserly billionaire in the world. And that day he wanted to take some more. Trump’s “major education announcement” was the introduction of his ever-so-humbly named Trump University, a panoply of online courses, CD-ROMs, consulting services and hotel seminars in marketing, real estate and entrepreneurship at $300 a pop. For that price, students – or “customers,” as Trump referred to them that day – could get as much Trump know-how as could be squeezed into an eight-hour course, but no degree. Trump University didn’t offer degrees, grades or a graduation. That’s because Trump University wasn’t a university. It wasn’t a real school. It was a forprofit enterprise intended to cash in on the star power Trump had harnessed as the host of NBC’s reality show, The Apprentice. The profit was for Trump. “When I make speeches, a lot of people show up, a lot of people,” Trump said at the news conference. “There’s something out there, and I thought this would be a good time to take advantage of it.” After deflecting some questions that attempted to pin down what this “university” was with answers like, “It’s going to be a tremendous venture,” and “There’s no bigger fan than me of education and universities,” Trump exited the stage. That’s when I cornered him to press him on whether his “university” had been accredited by the state Board of Regents. He said he loved the Post, with whose gossip page he often traded wet kisses, and said I was “sharp” for asking such a “good question.” Trump explained that Trump University would help people be successful like him by imparting practical business knowledge. That’s when a Post photographer snapped a photo of us When I asked Trump again how he could get away with billing his venture a “university,” he extended a hand and said, “Let’s take a picture.” Knowing he’d never answer, I laughed, shook his hand and looked at the camera. Back in the newsroom, my editor mercifully agreed that Trump University didn’t fall to my beat. None of the education reporters in town wrote about it that day. In time, writing about Trump University would fall to criminal justice reporters.

Customers complained about the program to attorneys general in at least five states. New York and Maryland forced Trump to drop the word “university,” saying it violated state education laws. Trump University reportedly earned a D- rating from the Better Business Bureau, the second-lowest grade, between 2009 and 2011, when it ceased operation. Marco Rubio seized on Trump University’s checkered past to attack Trump at the Republican presidential debate last week. Trump defended the venture saying, “They actually did a very good job, and I’ve won most of the lawsuits.” In fact, the biggest lawsuits are still pending, including two class-actions in California and one brought by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman that accuses Trump University of running an unlicensed educational institution. Schneiderman is seeking restitution of at least $40 million on behalf of 7,000 “students” who bought Trump’s pitch. (A state Appellate Division of state Supreme Court in Manhattan ruled Tuesday that Schneiderman’s suit can proceed.) It turned out that $300 course fee was just a starting point. Customers were eventually sold advanced levels of Trump tutelage called Elite mentorships for additional costs of up to $35,000. Trump’s people have said Trump University received a 98 percent approval rating in customer satisfaction surveys, and have released some complimentary surveys at the website 98percentapproval.com. If you think it’s tough sympathizing with people who were foolish enough to pay for Trump’s insights, you’ll have no trouble after reading some of the surveys. Asked what was best about a Trump University “Profit Lab” event held in Miami, Florida, in 2010, one satisfied customer wrote about a female presenter named Page Sadlier: “Page, she looks good.” Another satisfied customer in Norfolk, Virginia, in 2008 wrote, “include snacks and meals” when asked what topics he’d like to see covered in future Trump University seminars. “There are a lot of people that borrowed $36,000 to go to Trump University, and they’re suing him now,” Rubio said. “And you know what they got? They got to take a picture with a cardboard cutout of Donald Trump.” At least I got the real thing at Trump Tower. Since that day in 2005, lots of cameras have caught Trump selling loads more bunk. PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning news site devoted to vetting statements made by political candidates, rated 78 percent of 96 assertions made by Trump on the campaign trail “mostly false,” “false” or “pants-on-fire false,” by far the highest proportion of all presidential candidates. Unbelievably, the polls suggest the people are still buying. “My Brush with Trump University” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on March 2, 2016.

COMIDA Blew Off I-Square Probe A reader sent me an email the other day that asked earnestly: “Do you have any idea when the various authorities will release their findings concerning the I-Square reviews?” To which I replied: “LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, ho ho ho ho ho . . .” The idea that “various authorities” were seriously looking into the I-Square matter was just too funny. The earnest reader was referring in part to the board of the County of Monroe Industrial Development Agency, whose ethics committee chairman, Gene Caccamise, said would “look into it” and issue a statement “in a couple of days.” That was at COMIDA’s last board meeting on April 19. So unless Caccamise lives on Venus, which takes 243 Earth days to rotate on its axis, those “couple of days” have come and gone. No one believed him anyway. What happened was Caccamise had a really bad seat at the meeting that left him vulnerable to reporters in the gallery, some of whom appeared to be salivating at the prospect of talking to a real, live COMIDA board member. See, board members don’t talk in public other than to approve a tax break. There’s a distinct possibility that some of them can’t talk. For all any of us know, each has rubber stamps for hands and a string in his or her back that says “aye” when pulled. After a bunch of “ayes” and one “meeting adjourned,” reporters pounced on the only board member who couldn’t scramble out of his seat fast enough. Caccamise got cornered by Cujo and threw him a bone. Reached by phone on Monday, which was about three hours later on Venus, Caccamise acknowledged that COMIDA never looked into anything. He said the board chairwoman, Theresa Mazzullo, told him to drop it and let District Attorney Sandra Doorley worry about it. “Theresa said, ‘Stay out of it. We don’t have the means to do this. We’re volunteers, we’re not paid to do this,’” Caccamise recalled. “So with that, we had many discussions but we said, ‘Let’s leave it up to the district attorney.’” Doorley had said in late March that she had opened “an informal inquiry” into whether anything criminal went down, which was a long shot. I-Square was always about squishy ethics and politics commingling in county government, not crime. Recall that Monroe County Republican Chairman Bill Reilich set off the whole affair in March when he bad-mouthed the popular I-Square development in Irondequoit in a botched political attack on Democratic County Clerk Adam Bello. Reilich revealed potentially damaging information about I-Square’s tax incentive plan with COMIDA, to which few people had access. Within days, County Executive Cheryl Dinolfo fired a top aide, Justin Roj, leading to speculation that Roj fed Reilich the information.

“I’m as clueless as you are other than the fact that you can put two and two together and see that this kid just stepped out of line,” Caccamise said of Roj. “Politics got in the way of the community. That’s basically what happened.” That, earnest reader, is as close as anyone at COMIDA or in the Dinolfo administration has come to date to formally acknowledging how Reilich got the information and publicly condemning the episode. When Mazzullo heard what Caccamise said, she broke the COPMIDA code of silence and called me to report that she sincerely believed the district attorney was the proper authority to investigate. “I think the district attorney is going to get the air cleared much better than me asking a question or Gene Caccamise calling around and asking a question,” Mazzullo said. Then what was all that from Caccamise about “looking into it” and issuing a statement? “I think Gene was nervous,” Mazzullo said. “I think you guys (reporters) made him nervous.” Mazzullo added that she understood the district attorney was doing “a thorough job” and that she expected a report to be issued. Here’s that report: “We did conduct an informal investigation and we did interview parties and we found no basis for criminal prosecution.” That was from Tim Prosperi, second district attorney, who said Monday that his office’s inquiry was over and that there were no plans to issue a written report. COMIDA is scheduled to meet again Tuesday, earnest reader, but don’t count on anything revelatory about I-Square being said. So, to your question of when our various authorities will release their findings concerning the I-Square reviews, the answer is: never. “COMIDA Blew Off I-Square Probe” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on May 17, 2016.

READERS CHOICE: Hey, Errigo, You Can Go Home Again Unless you’ve been living in a bubble with Joe Errigo, you’ve heard that the former state assemblyman thinks his childhood neighborhood is so unsafe he wouldn’t visit it riding in an armored car. “I grew up in Rochester and where I lived I wouldn’t go down there (now) in an armored car because that’s how dangerous it is,” Errigo, who’s running for the Assembly again on the Republican and Conservative lines, told WXXI Connections host Evan Dawson. That remark, and others he made on the program Thursday, drew swift condemnation on social media for being wildly out of touch with reality and pandering to baseless fears about city life held by some residents of his mostly rural and suburban district. Errigo, 78, lives in Conesus in Livingston County. But he grew up on Carter Street just north of Norton Street with his brother and parents, Salvatore and Mary, in a modest singlefamily cape built in 1929. “It was a beautiful area when I was growing up,” he said. “However, like I said, I wouldn’t go down there in a bulletproof car.” That’s a shame because armored cars are hard to come by and Errigo would find that his childhood home exudes all the love and warmth that he so fondly recalls. He might be pleasantly surprised to learn he’s welcome there, too. “If he wants to come over he can,” said Eduardo Alonso, the current owner. Alonso, 48, has lived there with his wife of 23 years, Maisdelin, and their children, Eduardo, a junior in high school, and Angelica, an eighth-grader, since 2004. They have a Chihuahua named Chiki who barks at knocks on the door. Alonso is a Cuban immigrant who speaks little English and might have every reason to be suspicious of a strange man showing up on his doorstep at dinnertime droning on about what some politician he’s never heard of said on the radio. But Alonso invited me to sit on his couch and had his children translate. They’re fine young people, and their photographs hanging on the living room wall suggest they’re growing up splendidly. “Does he think we live in Afghanistan or something?” Alonso asked of Errigo. He and his children shared a good laugh at that one. They’re happy kids. Maisdelin wasn’t home from work yet. She’s a baker at a Wegmans. Alonso is a factory worker who makes car and airplane parts. They make ends meet. City and county records show they've never been in arrears on their taxes. Angelica was in her pajamas. She said her parents sometimes talk about moving, but she wants to stay put because she can’t imagine a better place to grow up. “It’s been like the greatest place,” she said. “My parents will say, ‘I want to move,’ and I’ll say, ‘No, I want to stay,’ because I grew up here and have so many memories and I never had any bad ones.” Besides, her father has worked so hard on making the house a home.

“If this man came to the house he would think it’s a whole different house,” Alonso said, already having forgotten Errigo’s name. Through his son, Alonso explained how he tore up the carpet in the living room to expose and polish the original hardwood floors, remodeled a bathroom and built a second one, and put another kitchen in the basement for his wife to do her baking. She loves to bake. Outside, the once-enclosed porch has been opened and the tall hedges in front of the house have been replaced by small garden plants, making the place look a lot bigger than its roughly 1,100 square feet. A horseshoe hangs over the front door for good luck. The tidy house next door has a white picket fence, a rose garden and an American flag out front. There were no armored vehicles in any of the neighboring driveways. Eduardo, who every day catches a public bus near the corner of Norton Street to get downtown and then another bus to get to School Without Walls, said he feels safe in his neighborhood. He said he regularly goes to the corner store for pizza. “The people here are amazing,” Eduardo said. “An armored car? I feel like that’s a very big over-exaggeration.” Eduardo did recall, though, once getting his cellphone swiped by a passing bicyclist. But there’s nothing new about someone in the neighborhood doing something foolish. Errigo and his father got caught trespassing while hunting in 1957. The state Conservation Department fined them $15 apiece and the newspaper published their names and addresses along with all the other area hunters with field violations. That’s not to downplay what crime occurs in the neighborhood these days. Bad things do happen. Just last month, Alonso reported a petit larceny to police after finding a few tools missing from his shed. In June, police responded to an armed robbery a block away. Living on Carter Street can be little dodgy, but not as dangerous as living in a bubble. “Hey, Errigo, You Can Go Home Again” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on October 30, 2016. In a survey of readers, this column was chosen as a favorite to include in this book.

LAUGH LINES

Mastering the Medley Centre Soccer Flop This is an open letter to U.S. Soccer Coach Jurgen Klinsmann: Dear Coach Klinsmann, Word around the World Cup is your players need a lesson in flopping, that is, falling to the turf like a pepper-sprayed rag doll in a shameless attempt to earn a free kick. Please consider this recommendation for Scott Congel as your flop coach. While his greatest strengths lie in crushing the hopes of communities and squeezing the life out of malls, Congel has feigned injury over his Medley Centre with such flair lately that you ought to book him on the first flight to São Paulo. What is Medley Centre? Imagine a gutted Estádio do Maracanã anchored by the world’s loneliest Sears in the heart of Monroe County, New York, and you’ll get the picture. By the time Congel’s through with your players, they’ll writhe so persuasively you’ll think the only humane thing to do would be to drive the hearse right out onto the field, throw up the shields and load the bolt gun like they do at the horse races. Then you’ll get a free kick. The Internet tells me there are five steps to flopping. Judging by his behavior, Congel has mastered every one. 1) Identify an easy target. This typically involves a striker luring in a cement-footed defender prone to clutching and grabbing at faster players. That's nothing. Congel sucked in entire government bodies prone to grasping at anything resembling economic investment, even fantasies like his $260 million plan to turn Medley Centre into a tourist destination of housing, hotels and too-good-to-be-true excitement in exchange for millions of dollars in local tax breaks. 2) When the target impedes your progress, fall down. World-class floppers collapse like da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, then recoil into a fetal position. Big deal. When the county’s corporate welfare team, COMIDA, last month told Congel that he had defaulted on $3.9 million in payments, Congel twisted the whole scenario into something out of Cirque du Soleil and threatened to sue. 3) Make it look realistic. This crucial step demands the flopper embellish his playacting. For many soccer players, that means holding random body parts and mumbling something about the Blessed Virgin Mary or wanting their mother. Congel went much further. He actually sued. He sued everything – a town board, a school board, even the corporate welfare team that propped up his imaginary tourist attraction long after taxpayers realized it was a mirage.

4) Wait and hope for sympathy. The best floppers attempt to elicit sympathy by slowly raising their arms in disbelief and wrinkling their chin as though they are about to cry, like my 7-year-old did last week after he put a hole in the rec room wall. That's child’s play compared to Congel’s response when cops caught some teenagers setting off fire extinguishers inside Medley Centre two weeks ago. In a statement thanking the police of the town he’s suing, Congel gratuitously revealed a variety of other disturbances at his echo chamber of a mall, including finding “used condoms in the play area.” I, for one, felt sorry for that couple. 5) Keep faking your injury. If you’re going to flop, stay committed. There’s nothing less convincing than a flopper who springs off the pitch too quickly. Last week, when the school district that hasn’t seen its share of the payment Congel never made announced it would sue for the money, Congel’s company said it was prepared to go to court and suggested the district would waste tax dollars. Don’t get me wrong, Coach Klinsmann, no one around here actually believes Congel is the injured party. But then, no one actually believed that Brazilian guy Fred was injured when he flopped against Croatia, and his flop helped Brazil win that game. Sometimes flopping works, you see, even if it is dishonest. That’s why you could use Congel. If not for you, hire Congel for us here in Monroe County, where property taxes to home values are the highest in the country. Maybe he’ll find a second career and stop not developing malls at taxpayer expense and forget about his flop. Because if you don’t hire Congel, and his flop works, he’ll just get another free kick at us. “Mastering the Medley Centre Soccer Flop” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on June 24, 2014.

This Hunting Season, Help a Newsman in Headlights Hunting season for me is sort of an Advent calendar of emasculation, when each day reveals a fresh reminder of what a cupcake I really am. The signs are everywhere. That pickup with a buck in the bed and a brass scrotum dangling from the bumper. Those red-knuckled men in camouflage at the diner recounting their weekend in the woods. The friend who repays a favor with a cut of venison he field-dressed himself. Even at Thanksgiving, I stared at that bird on the table and marveled at how the pilgrims did it. Then I wondered whether they still make those guns that look like bassoons. These episodes tap a deep-seated anxiety that should the job of rebuilding civilization after an apocalypse ever fall to me, the human race would be wiped out in six weeks. It’s a terrible burden to bear. That’s why I want in. I’m serious. Next hunting season, I plan to stare down a skittish creature with eyes like Marty Feldman through a scope attached to (insert make and model of something that shoots bullets here, perhaps a bassoon) and pull the trigger. I’m not bloodthirsty. I’m just tired of being a hypocrite and feeling deficient. I love meat, and I get that for me to eat it, someone has to kill it. That someone just hasn’t been me yet. It’s not my fault. I wasn’t raised that way. Hunting is a culture that’s passed down from generation to generation. My father taught me many things, but being handy and an outdoorsman weren’t among them. His toolbox consisted of a hammer, a screwdriver and a rusty pair of pliers. There wasn’t a power tool to be found. He could’ve been mistaken for Amish had it not been for the invectives he’d hurl whenever he tried to fix anything around the house. The same feeling of inadequacy overcomes me whenever I visit my sister, who’s married to a man who’s everything I’m not. One time, as my brother-in-law described the finer points of his new air compressor, I made the mistake of asking when he’ll ever need an air compressor. To which he replied, “When don’t you need an air compressor?” I didn’t know the answer to that, either. Like everyone else with a tool belt, my brother-in-law hunts. He’d let me tag along, but he lives halfway up the Arctic Circle past armed border guards with strict rules about crossing with things like meat, Chinese mitten crab and some citrus fruits. Basically, getting there can be a pain in the neck. Every year I ask friends of mine who hunt if I could join them. I’m upfront about my shortcomings: No gun, never fired a gun, no hunting license or experience tracking game. When my boys asked me what animal left the pile of “black jellybeans” in our backyard, the only way I could answer was to Google a photograph of it. Turns out it was a deer. No wonder my friends get shifty-eyed and hem and haw about not having enough room in their cabin. When I tell them I’ll sleep in the car, they tell me, “You need a permit for that.”

I checked. You don’t. What humiliation! I never wanted to be that guy. I don’t want to be Jeremiah Johnson, either, but I’d like to be able to impart some survival skills to my sons should it start raining frogs tomorrow. A lot is lost in the way carnivores like me consume meat. There’s no respect for how the meal got to the table. That’s because it’s impossible to learn humility from an animal you’ve only known wrapped in Styrofoam and cellophane. I want to be more grateful for the food I enjoy. That doesn’t mean I intend to stop buying meat at the grocery store. But it does mean that at least once, I want to know what it means to take a life that will help sustain mine. The state Department of Environmental Conservation tells me I’ll have to wait until next year to take the safety course required for my hunting license. In the meantime, I can observe a hunt. So consider this a plea to you hunters out there: Take me with you. Please. I’ll even bring cupcakes. “This Hunting Season, Help a Newsman in Headlights” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on November 30, 2014.

Being a Mascot Isn’t All Fun and Games If there’s a godfather of Rochester mascots, it’s Nick Hadad. He’s only 29, but he once juggled seven different mascot gigs simultaneously and has been in the game for 14 years. “Sometimes it feels like 50,” said Hadad, who, when he’s not the feathery, fixed-smiling R. Thunder of the National Lacrosse League’s Rochester Knighthawks, works at a bakery. Four years ago, he said, the doctors told him he had arthritis from all his mascotting, a line of work that never makes any most dangerous jobs list but deserves an honorable mention for its triad of perils – dehydration, sadistic fans and indignity. I know because on Monday I stepped, quite literally, into the 34 EEE shoes of Finley, the moon-eyed grinning shark of Rochester’s pro basketball RazorSharks. It was the team’s Kid’s Day, and Hadad was a leader for eight mascots tasked with entertaining a crowd of about 4,000 at Blue Cross Arena. Notables included Spikes of the Rochester Red Wings and an oversized Dunkin’ Donuts coffee named Cuppy. “Stay hydrated,” Hadad warned me before we hit the court. He was hard to take seriously in yellow leggings, but the perspiration trickling down my spine told me to pay attention. Everyone said it would be hot in the costume. But none of the counsel prepared me for what – by the end of the first quarter – felt like a Turkish bath in the Florida Everglades. One of the drawbacks to being a mascot is having no way to show duress. Your smile forever projects a freewheeling, fuzzy ball of fun, when in reality you’re a dying man in a shark suit. Had I collapsed into a heat-induced seizure, the crowd would have gone wild. Mercifully, I ran into the Bishop Kearney Lion when I did. He was positioned near a large vent in Section 121 that was blasting cool air. In furry mittens, I lacked the dexterity to unscrew the grate and crawl inside, so I settled for gently swaying my backside against the cold. I didn’t care how creepy it looked. Apparently no one else did, either, because hordes of people took advantage of Finley swaying in place to converge on me for photos and autographs. The way Hadad explained it, there are two types of people who approach mascots: The vast majority who love them and the minority who want to hurt them. Some mascot lovers inadvertently hurt them, specifically waist-high children who run directly at them full speed and head-butt the man inside in the groin. Spotting these children in time to intercept them is impossible with a peephole at a fixed 45-degree downward angle obscured by shark teeth. But they are innocents. Then there are the malevolent, like the three boys who descended on me from a 200 level staircase. They couldn’t have been more than 12, but I’d been warned about their kind. “Take a look at the people you might be running into next,” Hadad said. “Sometimes they just have this look in their eye, and it’s hard to describe, but you’ll know it when you see it. They want to mess with you. “Approach with caution if you have to, but if you can avoid it, avoid it.”

The trio looked friendly enough with their fists outstretched for a Finley bump, but their manic giggling suggested trouble. Then, Bam! A shot to the snout. Ugh! A poke in the gut. The last one yanked my dorsal fin. Then they ran toward the snack bar. The only time I got scared, though, was when a woman asked me to hold her baby for a photo. I was on a step and could barely hold myself together, let alone hold a baby. This wasn’t a toddler with a couple of teeth whose chub would’ve broken her fall, either. This was a helpless newborn with the natural protective film still on her eyes. Overshadowing all these perils of the mascot trade, however, is the wholesome fun of bringing joy to so many people in so short a time. It’s what keeps Hadad and those like him fighting through the aches and pains for $50 a pop. People lighting up for you is infectious. The biggest letdown of the day was exiting the dressing room in my street clothes after the game and realizing that none of the children and parents milling about the lobby were smiling at me anymore. As Finley, I must have high-fived and hugged and posed for pictures with hundreds of smiling RazorShark fans. What those fans won’t see in their photos is that I was smiling right along with them. “Being a Mascot Isn’t All Fun and Games” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on February 18, 2015.

When Common Sense Checks Out at the Supermarket Wegmans was recently ranked the best supermarket in the country again by customers, based in part on employee courtesy. But the folks at Consumer Reports who conducted the survey must have missed the World War II veteran in front of me in the checkout line in the East Rochester store not long ago. I knew he was a WWII veteran because he wore one of those V.F.W. hats that remind my generation how we’ve fallen short in every way, shape and form. He wanted to buy beer but didn’t have ID. The conversation went something like this: “I’m sorry, sir, I’ll still need to see your ID,” the cashier said. “Why?” he asked. “It’s the law,” she replied, completely convinced. The cashier couldn’t have been more than 18, about the same age the veteran was when he was shelling Nazis on the Rhine. At that age, it’s tough to distinguish between law and company policy. There was no law that said the veteran had to fire mortars into enemy territory or sleep in a mud hole; there was just that foul-mouthed sergeant telling him to do it or else, and that was enough. “So we don’t sell to minors,” the cashier continued. “I need to punch your birth date into the computer.” The veteran said something about 1925. His hair was white and he was stooped in the shoulders, but he didn’t look a day over 78. “You can’t just tell me, I need your ID,” she said. “Otherwise anyone could say anything they want.” I couldn’t take it anymore. “Excuse me, sir,” I said to the veteran, “I’d like to buy you your beer.” It was the least I could do. After all, he had saved the world. “Sorry, you can’t, sir,” the cashier piped up. “Why not? I have ID,” I said. “’Cause if you’re buying it for someone, I need to see their ID.” “Why?” “Because you might be buying it for a minor.” “I’m buying it for him,” I said. “I know.” This was crazy. “Then I’m buying it for myself,” I lied.

“But you already said you’re buying it for him.” She had me there. Plus, a sign at the register read that she could ID anyone in a group that was buying alcohol. The veteran and I exchanged glances. Mine said that I knew I’d let him down just like my entire generation had; his said forget it, he’d come to expect it. Then he walked out. We’ve gotten used to the overreaching “We ID Everyone” policy of our supermarkets, which Wegmans introduced in 2004 and others soon followed. They did it to reduce liability and take the pressure off young cashiers, who don’t have second jobs as carnival age-guessers. Presumably the policy is accomplishing both. But it’s also trumping common sense. The policy was intended to curb alcohol sales to minors, but as written it curbs sales to anyone without an ID, and that’s not the same thing. Wegmans spokeswoman Jo Natale said a store manager or front-end manager could make an exception when they’re “very confident” a buyer without proof of age is over 21, and that the cashier in this case should have asked one to make a call on the veteran. Sometimes, though, even managers have common sense on backorder. I’d learned that at Tops in Perinton when I’d summoned a manager after running afoul of that chain’s excessive proofing policy a year earlier. At the time, I was pushing 40, had two rangy kids in tow, and the cashier had scanned all $209 worth of my groceries except a six-pack of Samuel Adams. When he asked for my ID, I realized that I’d given it to my wife that day for a health insurance matter. I explained the situation to him, then to his manager, to no avail. Did they really think I was born during the Clinton administration? Were they born yesterday? What minor is so thirsty for a wannabe craft beer that he’d hire two misbehaving boys and ring up a $209 bill to complete his ruse? If I were half the man of that veteran at Wegmans, I would have walked out. But I relented because kids have to eat, I guess. “Go ahead and swipe your card,” the cashier told me. “It’s a credit card,” I said. “Do you need my ID?” “Not to pay.” That made perfect sense. “When Common Sense Checks Out at the Supermarket” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on April 12, 2015.

It’s an Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad World Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren has asked City Council to think different* and approve a bill to sell ads on municipal property to raise revenue. She wants council to just do it, but lawmakers for the moment aren’t budging because they fear the legislation could lead to the city being overrun by ads. Their imagination at work has a banner on City Hall asking, “What’s in your wallet?” Court precedent bars ads on city halls and other public property whose primary function is the people’s work, but city lawmakers are concerned that once you pop, you can’t stop and that the mayor’s proposal could be a slippery slope. It’s the betcha can’t eat just one principle. They’re also wondering, where’s the beef? Warren’s measure contained no details on how much revenue the so-called City Asset Advertising Program might generate. “What we got is pretty loosey-goosey,” said Council Member Carolee Conklin, whose Finance Committee hosted a public hearing on the bill on Tuesday. “It raises more questions than it answers.” Among them: Will neighborhood associations have a say in what ads go up? Does selling signage imply city endorsement of a product? Are you in good hands? Under the legislation, a five-person committee would oversee the program. Four would be City Hall officials and the City Council president would reach out and touch someone to be the fifth by appointment. In a letter to council, Warren made clear the ads won’t be everywhere you want to be; just some places. She wrote that ads would target special events, parking garages and something called “non-permanent fixtures at city-owned facilities.” That’s hardly a list that keeps going and going and going. But imagine how quickly those already ubiquitous ads that ask, “Hurt in a car?” or urge, “Don't wait, call 8,” could multiply under the parking garage provision. How do you spell relief? James Smith, the city’s communications director, said ad revenue generated by the program would relieve overburdened taxpayers who, like anyone, want to save money, live better. He likened the program to the type of marketing initiatives in place at the Greater Rochester International Airport, where ads on the terminal and garage net the Monroe County Airport Authority upward of $574,000 a year. That’s not huge, Rochester, huge – and no one at City Hall is suggesting its proposal would rake in as much – but it’s something for the city to consider at a time when taxpayers don’t want to pay any more taxes.

Municipal marketing programs have been around for years, yet they’re invariably met with skepticism when introduced to a new locale. The Flower City-Flour City is no exception, and for good reason. Many people, like those of the group Monroe County People for Parks, wonder where the line will be drawn. Who wants to walk in Durand Eastman Park and be reminded that your lawn is hungry and you have to feed it? When Chicago draped its iconic Wabash Avenue Bridge with Bank of America ads in 2011, the move was derided as “a visual crime,” “commercial graffiti,” and “a grotesque cheapening of the public realm.” But that program took a licking and kept on ticking, just like those of so many other cities from Los Angeles to New York because, as the Chicago Sun-Times put it, the ads, while unappealing, “beat going bust.” Rochester will probably follow suit. Before it does, though, City Council should stand like a rock until the program’s potential and limits are better defined, lest it open the door to shrink-wrapping the entire city like a Regional Transit Service bus. After its Bank of America disaster, Chicago drafted what reads like a clear and sensible mission statement that addresses things like protecting that city’s visual integrity, oversaturation of outdoor advertising, and less being more. Sometimes you need a little finesse. Sometimes you need a lot. Smith said City Hall wants to emulate the tasteful municipal marketing on display in world-class cities and is open to more discussion. That’s good because City Council has been inundated with emails about the bill and none of them said, “I’m lovin’ it.” Their sentiment was more, “Can you hear me now?” *In this column, David Andreatta gives a nod to the well-known slogans of 24 companies and enterprises. Can you find them all? “It’s an Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad World” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on October 18, 2015.

Talking Turkey with a Stranger on Thanksgiving Thanksgiving is a time to reconnect with relatives and discover they’re virtual strangers with whom you share nothing but a third cousin in jail. But it’s also a time of tradition, and there’s no tradition like stranger-relatives barking unsolicited advice on how to prepare the feast you got stuck preparing after drawing the short straw last Thanksgiving. Fortunately, you can brace for the holiday with the help of Karen at FSIS. That’s FSIS, with an “F” not an “I.” The federal Food Safety Inspection Service isn’t threatening anything this Thanksgiving except salmonella poisoning in turkeys that aren’t cooked to an internal temperature of 165-degrees Fahrenheit. Karen is the service’s “virtual representative,” a virtual stranger like your relatives except with sound food preparation advice. If you want to kill yourself and your relatives at Thanksgiving, which you very well may, listen to them. If not, listen to Karen. I was skeptical of chatting online with Karen at AskKaren.gov while at work. After all, FSIS also runs the unsavory-sounding Meat & Poultry Hotline and talks a lot on its website about the “innermost part of the thigh” and “the thickest part of the breast.” But Karen turned out to be a delightful woman, although she might have been a man, or maybe even a robot. She was conscientious and far more fun to talk to than the usual Thanksgiving virtual strangers. Here are some excerpts of our conversation: Karen: Thank you for contacting Karen. How may I help you today? Me: Am I speaking to a real person? Karen: You are indeed. Would you like to ask a food safety question? Me: Are you in the United States? No offense to international phone banks, but I prefer to get my advice on Thanksgiving from an American. Karen: Right here in the U.S.A. Me: Great. Can you answer questions about maintaining sanity during the holiday? Karen: We have something regarding “Panic Buttons” around the holidays. Me: Do “Panic Buttons” address crazy aunts and unwanted uncles? Karen: Not specific to uncles or aunts. ;-) Me: Any advice on how to complete all the dishes at the same time? At my Thanksgivings, there’s always one that’s dry, one that’s gone cold. It’s very un-American. Karen: Well, there is one type of “perfection” and that is ... ready? Me: Yes. Karen: “Perfectly safe!” Me: You don’t miss a beat, do you, Karen?

Karen: Sometimes I do miss one maybe, or two. But we try to guide you properly when it comes to food safety. Me: Is there a proper way to carve a turkey? Karen: Is that a safety question, David? Me: Well, carving does involve a sharp instrument. Karen: For quality, let the turkey stand for 20 minutes before carving to allow juices to set. Me: Thank you. I’ve been squirted in the eye with turkey juice. It’s no fun. Karen: I appreciate the sense of humor, David! We need that. Me: Thank you. I try to live life to the fullest, especially on Thanksgiving, when I have to let out my pants. Here’s another question: Fact or fiction: Stuffing in the bird – deadly or not? Karen: Cooking a home-stuffed turkey is riskier than cooking one not stuffed. Bacteria can survive in stuffing that has not reached 165 degrees F. Me: My grandmother always stuffed the bird, and I’m still here. How do you explain that? Then again, my grandmother is no longer here and I can’t be sure her passing had nothing to do with her stuffing. (Karen spits out a series of turkey-related cooking links) Karen: Fast typing, right? Me: Were you a stenographer in a prior life? Karen: He, he. I don’t know. I forgot. Me: I bet you’d make a great Thanksgiving conversationalist. Would you like to come to my house for the holiday? Karen: Actually, my family prefers less comments from me about food safety. But one cannot help it at times! Me: Yeah, I can imagine you’re the ultimate Thanksgiving backseat driver. Karen: Thanks for your great humour! Me: Humour? Humour with a “u”? Are you Canadian? Karen: No, not Canadian. Just need a typing class refresher. I’m American. I work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. (See? Karen is human!) Me: I’m glad. Canadians had their Thanksgiving like seven weeks ago. All their advice would be stale by now. Do you get calls on your Meat & Poultry Hotline from Canadians? Karen: Sure. We get calls from across the pond as well on occasion. Me: I guess those callers don’t have mothers and grandmothers barking advice at them. Karen: We can all bake a turkey. Either gender! Me: Some people order Chinese food for Thanksgiving. Is that safe? Karen: Sure, why not? Restaurants, remember, are inspected by health departments.

Me: You haven’t seen my Chinese food restaurant. Karen: Should you see anything wrong there . . . check with the health departments in your area. Me: I live in New York. Government here is useless, unlike the one you work for in Washington, D.C. Karen: Is there anything else I can help you with today? Me: No thanks, Karen. You’ve been great. I can’t believe your job is live chatting with obnoxious strangers. It’s like Thanksgiving every day. Karen: It’s great. Most importantly, we help prevent foodborne illness! Me: And I’m thankful for that. Happy holidays! Karen: You too, enjoy! Bye. (Karen has disconnected.) Don’t tell me you’ll have a more entertaining conversation than that on Thanksgiving. “Talking Turkey with a Stranger on Thanksgiving” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on November 26, 2015.

COMMUNITY

Cops and Manners on Short Street There was nothing welcoming about the stoop on Short Street. It was carpeted with green artificial turf and had a thick metal chain wrapped around the wooden railing. The three young black men on the landing were scrawny, but imposing in their own way. One had no shirt and didn’t seem bothered by the evening child that had the approaching cops and clergymen bundled up. “What you want?” one in a hoodie demanded of them. The clergymen didn’t answer. They just walked through the chain-link gate and up onto the porch like everything was awesome. It wasn’t. Local media on Monday played up the Clergy on Patrol initiative as the dawning of a new age between the Rochester Police Department and “the community.” None defined “the community” as poor black people, but that’s what we’re talking about. The two sides have been living in a powder keg since the shooting death of Officer Daryl Pierson and the emergence of a video showing an officer beating a cowering man on Genesee Street. In both altercations, the cops were white and the suspects were black. Realizing that Rochester police have zero street cred across a wide swatch of the city, City Hall asked church leaders to help bridge the gap. It’s a concept that’s been tried before and has some merit because church leaders have a lot of sway in some neighborhoods. So, for an hour last week, small groups of cops and clergy walked an impoverished section of town selling community relations and handing out pamphlets highlighting city recreation and job training programs. Reporters were invited to observe, and I joined an inconspicuous group away from the television cameras following high-profile clusters led by Mayor Lovely Warren and Police Chief Michael Ciminelli. You might have seen news footage of officers shooting the breeze with grandmothers and business owners, and Warren and Ciminelli declaring the effort a success. Warren said cops and clergy would walk together again in the spring. Maybe they made inroads. I sincerely hope they did. But on that Short Street stoop was a failure worth noting. The two white officers in the group didn’t follow the clergymen past the chain-link gate to greet those young black me. They didn’t extend their hand to them or introduce themselves. The young men didn’t exactly roll out the welcome mat, either. But it was their house, and a bunch of strange men, two of them in uniforms the young men distrust, had just popped by. The cops stood there on the sidewalk the way cops do when they mean business – arms cross and eyeballing those young men. The officers knew they weren’t wanted, and they looked as though they didn’t want to be there.

After a few uncomfortable minutes of the clergymen giving their best sales pitch with no backup from the police, they young men asked them to leave, and they did. I walked away wondering what those young men thought about what just happened. Two days later, I returned to Short Street to ask them. “What you want?” a man barked through the door. I apologized for intruding, then spent five minutes explaining myself to a woman through a crack in the door before two of the men I had seen on the stoop came out onto the green turf. They appeared much more fragile in the morning light than they did at dusk, and I realized they were just kids. Their names were David Brock, 19, and Joshua Albarran, 18. They’re sort of related in that Albarran’s brother has a child with Brock’s sister. They’re high school dropouts and unemployed and have criminal histories. Court records show they were convicted in the robbery of a woman in 2013. And they don’t like cops because, as Brock put it, “They think they just high and mighty and everybody else is just rag dolls.” They told me cops have stopped and frisked them for no good reason, pushed them around and stolen money from them. I’m not sure I believed everything they told me about the police. It doesn’t matter whether I believe their stories, though. They believe them, and there are tens of thousands of poor black people in Rochester who believe them. That’s why the cops have no street cred. If Clergy on Patrol is going to succeed, police officers need to make an effort to connect with people who distrust them, like Brock and Albarran, rather than chat up grandmothers and business owners who are already on their side. That takes time, way more time than a seasonal one-hour walking tour. Those officers on Short Street stood there with what Brock and Albarran called “mean muggers,” dour faces that said my boss made me be here. I asked Brock and Albarran how the interaction could have been improved. Brock shook my hand and demonstrated: “If they just come, ‘Hi, my name is Officer Such-and-such and we’re here on behalf of Lovely Warren, this and that, it’d have been more, you know, ‘Oh, OK.’ You feel me?” I felt him. “It’s all about how you greet people, basically,” Brock added. We spoke for a half-hour on that stoop. As I left, I asked if I could visit again if I were ever in the neighborhood. They said I was welcome. “Cops and Manners on Short Street” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on September 28, 2014.

‘Squirrel Slam’ Reveals Upstate-Downstate Divide More evidence of New York’s upstate-downstate divide unfolded Thursday in an Orleans County courtroom. There, a Long Island environmental activist named Richard Brummel made a case to stop the Holley Fire Department’s annual squirrel hunting contest. Then the judge threw it out. The lawsuit never had a squirrel’s chance in Holley of ending the Hazzard County Squirrel Slam, which is in its ninth year, or 45th squirrel year, according to a fun online human years-to-animal years conversion table. Not only was its logic that the hunt violates state environmental law flawed, but it was questionable whether Brummel had the legal authority to represent the case’s lone petitioner, a Wayne County woman. Turns out he didn’t. Brummel, who’s not a lawyer but a cook, searched for a petitioner for a year, or about five squirrel years, and settled for someone who lives 53 miles from Holley because there were no other takers. He had even placed ads in the Genesee Valley Penny Saver inviting potential plaintiffs who “live near a hunting area” or could “demonstrate a connection to squirrels in the area” to call his 516-area code phone number. No one called except me, Brummel said, and I had only called to see if anybody else had called. Brummel dismissed the idea that the lack of response suggested nobody around here cares about his case. He said many people care but are afraid of what he called Holley’s “brassknuckle approach to controversy,” noting that the mayor’s house was bombed in 1994. We chatted a few blocks from the courthouse at the Village House Restaurant in Albion, where Brummel, 54, polished off a plate of chicken and biscuits. “I found a lot of people who were not only opposed to it but would have fought it if they weren’t worried about a bomb being planted in their front yard,” Brummel said. “People like squirrels.” People do like squirrels. My young sons, for instance, enjoy feeding them peanuts in our backyard. Other people enjoy eating them. To do that, they have to kill them, and under state law, anyone with a hunting license can kill six squirrels a day because the government figures the environmental impact of doing so is negligible to the squirrel population. Killing what one eats is a foreign concept to most Americans nowadays. This is especially true downstate, where the hunter’s culture and history of leading the modern wildlife conservation movement are less prominent than in rural upstate. In tossing out Brummel’s case, Judge James Punch cast opposition to the Squirrel Slam as “an objection to the whole concept of hunting.”

Opponents of the event portray hunting as sadistic and outdated in today’s world. It’s inconceivable to them that in rural areas, hunters are predators in a world where predation still has a place. Jeff Pask knows that place. The former state transportation worker said before he got his pacemaker a few years ago, he regularly hunted and ate what he bagged. I met Pask a week earlier at Sam’s Diner in Holley as he, too, polished off a plate of chicken and biscuits. He gave his age as “older than the hills,” but he’s actually 64, which would be 320 in squirrel years. “It’s not the people from here who care about this,” he said from behind a burly white beard and thick spectacles. “It’s all the activists from downstate raising hell. They don’t understand the squirrels get eaten.” The Holley Fire Department insists all the squirrels killed are eaten and their tails are used to make flies for fishing. During dinner, Brummel, who was once a newspaperman himself, argued that society has evolved and that what he called “the war on nature” should end. I pointed out that he had just eaten chicken that was probably raised unhappily in captivity, unlike the squirrels that’ll be killed for the Squirrel Slam on Feb. 28. “If I eat chicken,” Brummel said, “it’s with regret.” Pask, on the other hand, had no regrets about his meal. “‘Squirrel Slam’ Reveals Upstate-Downstate Divide” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on February 22, 2015.

They Were Heluva Good! People Two days before they closed up shop for the last time, the ladies of the Heluva Good! Cheese Country Store unlocked the front door and hung the red, white and blue “Open” flag outside. They’d run out a week earlier of the cheese that made the brown wooden house off Ridge Road in Sodus a Wayne County institution for 35 years, but it was 10 a.m. and the place was still in business and would be until Friday. That’s when Heluva Good!’s corporate parent, HP Hood LLC, of Lynnfield, Massachusetts, shuttered the country store and a nearby packaging plant and laid off 59 people in the name of staying competitive. Corporate headquarters had warned the ladies not to talk about the closing, though, or about how special the store was to them and the thousands of customers from all over the country who made a point of stopping there whenever they were in the area. Although they’d be out of work soon and had every reason to be spiteful, the ladies followed orders and studiously went about the workday in their Heluva Good! aprons, leaving one to marvel at their loyalty, strength and pride. The ladies cleaned the glass of the empty refrigerated display case. They dusted bare shelves. They arranged what little inventory was left, mostly seasonal bric-a-brac, just so on tables in a side room where the wood floor creaked. Every once in a while customers hankering for cheese entered, beheld what had become of the place, shook their heads and muttered something like, “Sad, sad, sad.” Then the ladies graciously reminded them that Heluva Good! cheese would still be available in their supermarkets. The deal between HP Hood and Wisconsin-based Schreiber Foods Inc. that was cutting their jobs only meant the cheese would be packaged elsewhere. “It’s not the same thing,” R.C. Thomas, a retired liquor store owner from Rochester, said after leaving upon learning there was no more of the 5-year-aged extra sharp cheddar that he’d come for. “If it’s not the 5-year-old block . . . I don’t know.” A map on the wall behind the cash register was loaded with pushpins representing customers from afar. The ladies might have put another pin in the map for Maureen and Cedric Boone, a couple from New Brunswick, Canada, who enjoy Heluva Good! cheese and pulled a U-turn to buy some. But the Boones also left empty-handed. “It’s a shame to see this place go,” Julie Schuldt told the ladies from the side room where the floor creaked. “I’m just sick about it.” Schuldt, a lifelong Sodus resident, was in her early 20s in 1980 when Heluva Good!’s then-owner, George F.T. Yancey, opened the country store to satisfy customers who kept showing up at the packaging plant wanting to buy cheese.

Her favorite was the XXX Cheddar so sharp it made her lips pucker, but since that was all gone she settled for a few Christmas knick-knacks at 90 percent off that she felt guilty about paying next to nothing for. “Anyone who’s a native here knows we’re losing something big,” Schuldt said. Heluva Good! had been a fixture in Sodus since its founding in 1925. Company lore has it that President Franklin D. Roosevelt loved the cheese, and that NASA presented Apollo 8 astronauts with a hunk as a “preview of the moon.” Over the years, the company cycled through a handful of owners who were drawn to its quality cheeses and dips and a fun name that children never got scolded for saying. “It’s almost as though they’re selling a member of the family,” said Elaine Johansson of Williamson. “That’s what it feels like.” Johansson arrived at the store a few minutes after the ladies had locked the front door, the one with the sticker on the window that declared, “Our Pride is Inside.” It was early to close, but the ladies were to attend a luncheon with the soon-to-be laid-off packaging plant workers, who also complied with the corporate edict to not talk about what their jobs meant to them. One had to wonder whether anybody at corporate headquarters 370 miles away had any idea what they were losing in these employees, who toed the company line and talked up the brand with their heads high to the bitter end. What they lost was a hell of a good bunch of people. “They Were Heluva Good! People” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on June 28, 2015.

Holding the Bag at Constantino’s A “food desert” doesn’t sound like the type of place that within a couple hundred yards one can order a Braised Barbacoa Soft Taco, a Kastori Kebab, a Quarter Pounder with Cheese and a Caramel Macchiato to wash it all down. That sounds more like a food swamp. But before Constantino’s Market opened on Mount Hope Avenue in Rochester in April 2015, “food desert” was how the U.S. Department of Agriculture described that stretch of College Town lined with a Chipotle Mexican Grill, an India House, a McDonald’s, a Starbucks and several other eateries. That label meant that a third of residents in the census tract lived at least a mile from the nearest supermarket or store where fresh meats and produce were sold. It also meant that federal subsidies were available to grocers who wanted to move into the neighborhood. So it was that Sen. Charles Schumer called federal Health and Human Services Director Jeannie Chaffin in September 2014 to explain why she needed to pay special attention to an application to send $748,436 in Healthy Food Financing Initiative funds to Rochester. The application was made by Action for A Better Community Inc., a local nonprofit group, which wanted the money so it could lend it to Constantino’s at a low interest rate and quench the food desert once and for all. “Schumer explained that these funds are crucial in covering the start-up costs for the grocery store, and that without this grant it is unclear whether the project can become a reality,” read a news release he issued touting his “push” for funding. The Healthy Food Financing Initiative is a $400 million fund that gives money to nonprofit groups like ABC to support sources of nutritious food in “food deserts.” In ABC’s case, according to the nonprofit, the money was to be repaid over 23 years on the condition that Constantino’s hire between 15 and 20 workers of low-income backgrounds – roughly a third of the market’s staff of about 45. The grant never really was about nutritious food so much as it was about jobs for poor people – an admirable goal, but not exactly what the public was sold. Seven months later, in April 2015, after having gotten the money, Schumer literally broke bread with Constantino’s executive Andrew Revy to celebrate the opening of the store and, as he put it, “shed this area’s ‘food desert’ label.” But on Monday, 10 months after it opened, Constantino’s announced it would close and, in doing so, returned Mount Hope Avenue to “food desert” status, put 15-20 poor people out of work and left taxpayers holding the bag. ABC President James Norman said Constantino’s was making payments on the loan and that he expected the company to pay back what was outstanding. He said he didn’t know whether ABC would have to return the money, but that it would contact HHS to find out.

Schumer spokesman Jason Kaplan defended the senator’s involvement, saying that the University of Rochester and community approached Schumer expressing a need for a supermarket and that the senator’s job is to try to aid such requests. He added that Schumer has asked the Department of Health and Human Services to investigate why Constantino’s failed and urged HHS to recoup any money that is not being used for its intended purpose. Messages left for spokespeople at HHS were not returned. The census tract that houses Constantino’s (Monroe County 38.05) occupies a large geographic area that includes Mount Hope Cemetery and Genesee Valley Park. Most of its inhabitants reside between Mount Hope and South avenues. There are no other grocery stores in the tract, but just outside its eastern border is a Tops at Brighton Plaza on South Clinton Avenue, which is 1.5 miles from Constantino’s and a mile from most residents in the tract. But according to census data, 88 percent of households in the tract have access to an automobile. Just 13 percent of tract households collect food stamps, an indicator of poverty, compared to 34 percent of all city households. The federal government defines a “food desert” by residents’ proximity to supermarkets, but doesn’t consider the ease with which most residents can reach one. If there’s a neighborhood bereft of healthy food options in south Rochester, it’s west of the river in the 19th Ward, not bordering Brighton. On Tuesday, prices of staple items at both supermarkets leaned heavily in favor of Tops. A gallon of 2 percent milk ($2.99 at Constantino’s/$2.39 at Tops); loaf of D'Italiano bread ($3.99 at Constantino’s/$2.99 at Tops); 18-ounce Tropicana orange juice ($6.29 at Constantino’s/$3.99 at Tops), 12-ounce box of Cheerios ($4.39 at Constantino’s/$3.49 at Tops). Maybe Constantino’s executives thought people living in a “food desert” would pay anything for food. Or maybe they thought their clientele would be the nearby affluent University of Rochester students who are already on a school meal plan. Or maybe that “food desert” didn’t need so much water. “Holding the Bag at Constantino’s” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on February 3, 2016.

The Pipes are Calling the Cops The bagpipes aren’t for everybody. For some, their mournful drone evokes romantic images of misty Scottish glens dotted with sheep and medieval castles. For others, they sound like those sheep are being strangled with a tassel cord by a hairy bloke in a tam o’ shanter. Whether it’s because they look like a tartan whoopee cushion caught in the middle of an oboe orgy or because they can only be played really, really loudly, the bagpipes have been known to grate on the nerves, which they did in Brighton recently. There, last Saturday around 6 p.m., a police lieutenant visited the Elmwood Avenue home of Matt Weasner, a 43-year-old mild-mannered information technology worker and fervent bagpiper. Weasner started pipergeek.com and keeps his Great Highland bagpipes in a carrying case adorned with a “Chicks Dig Bagpipers” sticker. (In Weasner’s world, they do! His wife, Toni, bought him his first practice chanter.) When the lieutenant arrived, Weasner was in full regalia – kilt, knee socks, the whole getup – and had just finished playing the pipes in his driveway for what he figured was 15 minutes in preparation for a memorial service at which he was to perform. The problem, the lieutenant explained, was that Weasner’s piping was driving a neighbor to run for the hills – any hills other than the Scottish highlands, obviously – and thus ran afoul of the town’s noise ordinance. “I was pretty amazed to see them,” Weasner said. “But I guess in some respects I wasn’t really surprised.” That’s because the neighbor had previously complained about the volume to Weasner, who said he used to practice in his backyard for 45 minutes a day but has since taken to piping in Webster Park near his workplace on his lunch hour. “Thinking to avoid people who don’t like the pipes is always in the back of your head because it’s not a subtle instrument,” said Weasner, who describes the skirl of bagpipes as a “deep, rich and harmonic hum that strikes right to my heart.” Weasner said he had been piping on his property for 15 years with no complaints. Who complained isn’t as important to Weasner or his story as the grounds on which the complaint was made and upheld by police. Section 102-3 of the Brighton Town Code reads in part: “No person shall operate, play or permit the operation or playing of any . . . musical instrument . . . which produces, reproduces or amplifies sound so as to produce unreasonable or unnecessary noise.” Under the code, violators are to be warned by police. But if the conduct continues after said warning, violators shall be punished by a maximum of $250 or 15 days in jail or both. If Weasner were to keep on piping after that, who knows what fate might await him.

Perhaps he’d be drawn and quartered like James Reid, a Scottish bagpiper captured by the British at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Reid was convicted of high treason after a judge determined his bagpipes were “an instrument of war,” no different than a gun or sword. The operative phrase in the town code is “unreasonable or unnecessary,” said Brighton Police Chief Mark Henderson. Unless Weasner were rallying the local militia for a predawn raid on Pittsford, certainly bellowing “Scotland the Brave” at 4 a.m. would be “unreasonable and unnecessary.” But there’s nothing unreasonable about playing a musical instrument during the daytime. Nor is it unnecessary, since Weasner needs to keep sharp for his wedding, funeral and parade gigs. In that sense, bagpiping in the backyard is no different than mowing the lawn after work. The din of the motor isn’t unreasonable and it’s necessary to maintain a standard. At the same time, how often should any homeowner have to hear “Amazing Grace” (because let’s face it, most bagpipe songs sound like “Amazing Grace”)? Nobody but Wally Cleaver and Beaver mow the lawn every day, and they use those quiet manual jobs. “This is a judgment call for the officer,” Henderson said. “If you’re complaining that you can’t enjoy your backyard because of noise and the ordinance says police are to do something about it, we have to do something about it.” Henderson encouraged Weasner to take the matter to the Brighton Town Board, which Weasner said he intended to do. As it stands, Henderson said, police are taking the “no harm, no foul” approach. Weasner may play the bagpipes in his backyard until someone complains. But if someone complains – and it appears someone will complain – the police will respond. And the bleat goes on. “The Pipes are Calling the Cops” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on June 5, 2016.

Crickets and Consequences at Eastridge High There’s a lot of chirping in Irondequoit about a senior prank that saw hundreds of crickets unleashed in bathrooms at Eastridge High School. But this column isn’t about crickets. It’s about consequences. Here’s how the two are related: A couple of weeks ago, three quarters of the senior class at Eastridge by some estimates ditched school for Senior Skip Day, that time-honored rite of passage symbolizing rebellion against authority. The next day, the principal, Timothy Heaphy, summoned roughly 250 seniors into the auditorium to lay down the law. He warned them against any more hijinks for the remainder of the school year, particularly a senior prank. Another stunt and there would be consequences, he told them. The culprits would be suspended and prohibited from “Project Graduation,” in which students spend the last Friday of classes overnight at the school, an exercise that sounds like hell to anyone over 19 but is a real treat for adolescents. He would also consider not allowing the guilty students to walk across the stage to receive their diplomas at their graduation. “The Eastridge climate really needed a forceful message that there are behaviors that are unacceptable and have consequences,” said Paul Stack, a longtime Eastridge social studies teacher and head of the district’s teachers’ union. “The teachers were very much in agreement with the principal.” Now, as any adult who works with adolescents will tell you, adolescents will test the boundaries of authority. That’s what they do, as if they were contractually bound to be royal pains in the neck. So it was that a week later, on a Wednesday morning, hundreds of live crickets were bouncing around a couple of Eastridge bathrooms, leaving custodians to hunt down the insects and Heaphy to hunt down the pains in the neck. As luck would have it, adolescents chirped like crickets and the school had security cameras in the hallways. Plus, it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to track the source of the crickets to a nearby Petco. (A similar prank was pulled previously.) “That’s one of the harmful effects of having a pet store across the street,” said David Yates, spokesman for the East Irondequoit School District. Before the end of the school day, eight students were found to have pulled off the Great Cricket Caper of 2016. Now, as any adult who works with adolescents will also tell you, adolescents who test the boundaries need to face the consequences, lest authority become meaningless and the world devolve into “Lord of the Flies.”

That’s why Heaphy kept his word. He suspended the students through the rest of the week and that Friday’s “Project Graduation.” He decided against barring them from walking the stage at graduation. The superintendent supported the decision, according to the district and the teachers’ union. Naturally, the guilty students considered this outrageously unfair. Who does Mr. Heaphy think he is keeping them from eating pizza and watching movies in the gym all night?! What the students might not have known is they had an unlikely ally in the president of the school board, Kimberly Lasher, who is a mother to a senior at the school and a lead organizer of “Project Graduation.” When she got wind that some peers of her child wouldn’t be able to enjoy the party, she and other board members leaned on the superintendent to overrule the principal, according to the school district and teachers. “There were certain members of the board who felt the punishment didn’t fit the crime,” Yates said. “It wasn’t an official board decision.” The result was the superintendent caved, the principal was undermined, and the offending students – nay, all Eastridge students – were reassured that defiance has no consequences and that someone would always be there to bail them out. It was a mockery of authority. It was Lord of the Crickets! What worse graduation gift could have been given to those young people on the cusp of adulthood than to enable them to not accept responsibility for their actions? None. And since when does a school board, whose job is to set policy and guide programming, get involved in the day-to-day disciplining of students? Never. That's why board member Jeffrey Petrie was compelled to declare publicly at a board meeting on Tuesday that he and other board members had no knowledge of the intervention after teachers had expressed their disappointment with it. Reached by phone, Petrie said only that the intervention was the work of one or more board members and directed inquiries to Lasher, the president. Multiple phone messages left for Lasher were met with . . . crickets. “Crickets and Consequences at Eastridge High” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on June 19, 2016.

A Giving Tree Falls in Ontario A mighty tree was felled Tuesday. Trees topple every day across this land and nobody cares. They succumb to wind and weight and time in forests and on plains and mountaintops with a deafening crash that no one hears. But few of the fallen were as impressive as the sugar maple brought down by men with chainsaws on the side of Ontario Center Road in Wayne County, where he stood for nearly four centuries and had been crowned the largest in the state. The last of him hit the earth under an early morning sun with a thud so heavy it momentarily drowned out the buzz of the saw and trembled in the bellies of every witness to the somber occasion, reminding them who was once king. While it seemed a sin to reduce a wonder of nature to a stump 10 feet tall, the truth is he was on life support and running out of time. His heart had hollowed out over the decades and his trunk could no longer bear the strain of his leads. As sugar maples age, their bark transforms from a smooth dark gray to a rough dark brown of vertical grooves and fissures. This grand tree had thick, rigid knots that buttressed the tension of its growth, like swollen biceps that never depressed. “For years it’s just been a branch falling here and a branch falling there,” said Bill Slocum, a volunteer at the Heritage Square Museum, an assemblage of historic buildings in Ontario where the tree was rooted. Those “branches” were the size of average sugar maple trunks. The first of them fell in the early 1990s. Specialists attempted to stabilize the tree with cables, but metal wire is no match for Mother Nature and Father Time. The second one dropped last summer, taking out a parked pickup and landing within inches of a restored log cabin. Last week, another lead collapsed under heavy rain after months of drought. That's when the Ontario Historical Landmark and Preservation Society, which operates the museum, decided to pull the plug. “It’s been cared for, but after a certain length of time you just can’t do anything anymore,” said Ann Welker, a museum volunteer. “Just like for all of us. Twenty years ago, the Department of Environmental Conservation declared him the largest sugar maple in the state, with a trunk circumference of nearly 18 feet, a height of 76 feet, and a canopy spanning 79 feet. He very likely could have been the oldest in the state, too, although there’s nothing on record indicating so. Experts dated him at 370 years old in 1996, and sugar maples can live for over 400 years. Since his coronation, he had been receiving the royal treatment. He was watered regularly, fed slow-release fertilizer in the fall to strengthen his roots, and got periodic “climbing inspections.”

Slocum, 79, who served as town highway superintendent, even went light on the salt on that section of Ontario Center Road in winter, lest it dry out the champion tree. “We did everything the horticultural people told us to do to keep it alive,” Slocum said. Ontario is, by American standards, a town of deep roots. Many residents trace their origins back five or more generations. Slocum is of Slocum Road, a thoroughfare that runs through western Wayne County. But no family is rooted as firmly in Ontario as that sugar maple. He took root when the Iroquois held claim to the area. He was 180 when the first white settlers, Freeman and Martha Patterson Hopkins, built a log cabin a few miles north in 1806. He was 210 when a stone schoolhouse was built nearby in 1836, and turned 242 when the replacement Brick Church School House, which still stands today, was erected in its shadow in 1868. The museum has a mid-19th century photograph of a pioneer standing stoically in front of that stone schoolhouse. In the background, the sugar maple dwarfs the others around him that were perhaps his offspring and died long ago. Generations of schoolchildren found joy in climbing his limbs. Countless teachers found respite in his shade. Birds and squirrels and bees found homes in him. Like the tree in Shel Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree,” the sugar maple never stopped giving. He gave even as he fell. Motorists stopped on the shoulder of the road to pose for photos with him. They traipsed over sawdust that felt like sponge underfoot to take pieces of him. The museum hopes to make drink coasters out of his smallest limbs. Paul Carr, 65, grabbed two oblong slabs of him about 2 feet wide by 2 inches thick that he envisioned as end tables. “This is history,” Carr said. “It’s sad, but everything comes to end, don’t it?” Yes. That majestic stump will one day rot to nothing, too. Someday, though, someone will set a book or a laptop or a drink down on one of those tables and ponder how mighty the tree that bore it must have been. “A Giving Tree Falls in Ontario” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on August 24, 2016.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Villages Judges Shouldn’t Be Village Idiots Waterloo Village Court Judge Roger Barto must have the hardest head in the judiciary. Not only did he live to tell how an attacker beaned him with a toilet tank lid outside his Seneca County courthouse last year, but he stopped cooperating with investigators who say he made the whole thing up for insurance money. Barto, whom the state Court of Appeals suspended, faces multiple felonies related to the alleged attack. And because his story isn’t bizarre enough, he’s also accused of stealing gasoline from the village cemetery while he was its caretaker. That a sitting judge could be caught up in something so outlandish would be shocking almost anywhere outside New York, where the conveyor belt of craziness that is the town and village courts system has no off switch. In the last year, judges of these courts have been censured or forced to resign by the state Commission on Judicial Conduct for failing to account for tens of thousands of dollars in traffic fines, showing favoritism to political colleagues and relatives, and steering legal business to friends. One memorable knuckle-headed case involved a judge from Avon, Livingston County, who lied about fixing a traffic ticket for the daughter of a town board member when the board refused to give him a raise. The commission found Judge Michael Torregiano never actually gave the girl a break, but censured him for suggesting he had and for telling the board that refusing to hike his pay was “shoving it up” his honor’s backside. All rise! Headlines about town and village judges exhibiting bad judgment are so common, they leave the unrobed masses of us wondering: Who are these people? Some of them are village idiots and town coffee shop sages steeped in local politics. Most of them, however, are salt-of-the-earth folks with long histories of public service. At the same time, even well-intentioned judges are often as unschooled in the letter of the law as the people whose fate they hold in their hands. Consequently, many of them wind up in the headlines. While some judges are very well educated, they aren’t required to be lawyers like city, county and state judges, and the vast majority of them are not. They are farmers, car salesmen and real estate agents. Yet they have the power to make preliminary rulings in serious criminal cases, set bail, impose jail sentences, sign warrants and issue orders of protection. Lawyers have an answer for everything; but they aren’t the answer to everything. The landscape is littered with two-bit lawyers with less common sense than those farmers, car salesmen and real estate agents moonlighting on the bench.

But to modernize town and village courts, the state could do worse than embrace the notion that the people these courts serve are entitled to judges schooled in jurisprudence. There are basic legal concepts that many people without law degrees are either unfamiliar with or have trouble grasping. Just because an attorney is pro bono, for instance, doesn’t mean she’s a U2 fan. To its credit, the state has introduced sweeping reforms to catapult town and village courts out of the Dark Ages in recent years. Courtroom proceedings are now recorded and transcribed instead of passed down through generations in the oral tradition. Supervision of judges and required legal training for nonlawyers has vastly improved. Despite these efforts, though, New Yorkers can expect more wacky headlines about judges with bad judgment as long as almost anyone is allowed to hold court. “Village Judges Shouldn’t Be Village Idiots” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on July 27, 2014.

Her Macaroni Salad is Worth Stealing Deby Hill’s macaroni salad is darn good. If I were one of the burglars who ransacked her Build-A-Burger restaurant in Mount Morris on Sunday and was already in for her surveillance cameras and cash register, I would have made off with the big steel bowl of macaroni salad in the fridge, too. And like the burglars, I probably would have eaten it during my getaway. Because if you’ve ever tasted Hill's macaroni salad, you know you don’t wait to eat it, even if you’re lugging a 35-pound cash register and cameras through the weeds of the Genesee Valley Greenway hiking trail in the middle of the night on the lam. It’s that darn good. Which is why it was surprising that, according to the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office, the three men arrested in connection with the burglary left “a steady trail of macaroni salad” on the Greenway that helped lead investigators to them. “It was later discovered that the suspects stole a large bowl of macaroni salad, which they took turns eating, along their escape route,” Sheriff Thomas J. Dougherty said. If you’ve ever tasted Hill’s macaroni salad, you know you don’t leave any behind. If you accidentally drop a noodle, as I did Monday, you pick it up with all the tenderness you would a day-old chick and grieve for what might have been. It’s that darn good. That’s why some customers ask to buy it by the pound instead of just a bowl for $2.89. But then, these criminals weren’t the brightest crayons in the box. For one thing, they took the whole cash register instead of opening it by just turning the key that Hill had left in the register’s keyhole the night before. For another, they tried to fix themselves milkshakes when the milkshake machine was on “standby” and the ice cream inside had melted. Judging by the mess she found, Hill figures the burglars were covered in the Build-A-Burger equivalent of a bank dye pack. Lastly, they left cash register and video camera parts strewn on the trail along with the macaroni salad, the dropping of which ought to be a crime in and of itself. It’s that darn good. “It was just like Hansel and Gretel,” Hill said. “(The police) followed the line of macaroni salad and all the stuff (the thieves) took out of here. . . . They were not smart criminals.” Hill “gets up with the birds” to make 12 pounds of macaroni salad fresh daily, and prepared the bowl the burglars took a few hours before they broke in Sunday morning. She said she knows what time they broke in because when they tore the surveillance camera wires off the wall, they knocked the kitchen clock to the tiled floor, where it stopped ticking at 2:50 a.m.

Hill discovered the burglary about four hours later and she and her husband, Harold Hill, and daughter, Jayme Young, who works the counter, spent Mother’s Day cleaning up and filling out police reports instead of serving customers. “We had people drive here all the way from Hornell and Bath and we had to turn them away,” Hill said. “It was a sad Mother’s Day.” In all, Hill figures the thieves made off with about $2,000 worth of goods, not including the macaroni salad and the lost business. Police arrested the suspects within a few hours, thanks in part to the trail and Hill’s suspicion as to the identity of one of the alleged burglars. Matthew P. Sapetko, 34, of Mount Morris; James P. Marullo, 35, of Mount Morris; and Timothy S. Walker Jr., 23, of Idaho, were charged with third-degree burglary, third-degree criminal mischief and fourth-degree grand larceny. As of Monday, Walker and Sapetko were being held in the Livingston County Jail on $7,500 cash bail and $15,000 bond, respectively. Marullo was in custody without bail due to prior felony convictions. “At least they went to jail with a full belly,” Hill said. What’s in her macaroni salad that made it good enough to steal, you’ll never know. There are green peppers and carrots and mayonnaise, but the recipe is a family secret. Hill learned how to make it from her grandmother, whom she called “a good old Italian type.” Maybe that’s why her macaroni salad is so darn good. “Her Macaroni Salad is Worth Stealing” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on May 12, 2015.

Death by Neglect on East Avenue On a Monday evening in April, a crime for which no one has been charged unfolded in a first-floor apartment of an East Avenue luxury high-rise. It began, according to witness accounts given to Rochester police, around 8:30 p.m. when a naked woman gasping for air stumbled into the kitchen and crashed into a stack of dishes. Roused from the living room couch by the ruckus, the man who resided in the onebedroom apartment found the woman slumped over his sink struggling to breathe. Her name was Melissa Autobee, a 34-year-old mother of two whose friends and family recall could light up a room when she wasn’t high on heroin. The man had hired her as a prostitute that afternoon and she had been in and out of the bathroom shooting up all day. So he placed her on the kitchen floor hoping that whatever ailed her would pass. It wouldn’t. Within hours a doctor would declare Autobee brain dead. Two days later, the rest of her would be dead, too. Prostitution, soliciting and drug possession are crimes, but none of those is the crime we’re talking about here. After the man put Autobee on the floor, he disposed of a syringe beside her body in the bathroom trash. About 20 minutes later, by the man’s estimation, he noticed Autobee wasn’t breathing at all. So he called an acquaintance with whom Autobee lived in Greece to tell him that Autobee wasn’t doing very well. After the call, the man flushed seven to eight thumbnailsized bags of heroin down the toilet. Tampering with evidence is also a crime, but that’s not the crime we’re talking about here, either. Eventually, the man called 911 and at the direction of the dispatcher began administering CPR to Autobee until police and paramedics arrived. The call was made at 9:45 p.m. on April 27, according to the 911 Center, which sent police, firefighters and an ambulance to the man’s apartment at 1600 East Ave. If the man’s recollection about when Autobee crashed into the dishes was accurate, she was unconscious on his kitchen floor for 1 hour, 15 minutes before he summoned medical help. That’s the crime. Police arrived in three minutes, according to the 911 Center, and found Autobee naked. “When I got (the police report) and read it, it was the worst day of my life,” said Autobee’s mother, Michele Schneider, who lives in Webster. “He didn’t even have the decency to cover her up.” Since obtaining a copy of the report from the Rochester Police Department through a Freedom of Information Law request in June, Schneider and her husband, Don, have been at a loss to understand how charges haven’t been brought in the death of their daughter.

Police redacted the name of the man Autobee was with in her final hours from the Schneiders’ copy of the report, and attempts by the Schneiders and the Democrat and Chronicle to identify him were unsuccessful. The apartment unit he occupied is currently vacant and for rent. Amplifying the couple’s frustration are recent news accounts in which allegations of neglect at the scene of fatal overdoses have resulted in arrests. The best known of those involved two SUNY Geneseo students who were charged with evidence tampering and conspiracy in the death of their fraternity brother, Alexander Davis. Police have said the students searched Davis’s body for drugs and cleared the room of drug paraphernalia before making a call to 911 that could have saved his life. “He took the time to call acquaintances to find out what he should be doing. He took the time to dispose of evidence,” Don Schneider said of his daughter’s case. “Basically, he took the time to cover his butt before calling for help.” Compounding his grief is that the state’s Good Samaritan law, which encourages people to report an overdose in exchange for immunity on most drug charges, would have likely shielded the man with Autobee had he acted sooner. A Rochester police spokeswoman said an investigation into Autobee’s death is being conducted with the Monroe County District Attorney’s Office. Kelly Wolford, the assistant district attorney on the case, asked for patience. “Have faith that we continue to investigate this case, and that when we’ve uncovered everything we need to make a determination as to what, if any, charges would be appropriate we can sit down with (her family) so they can understand how we came to our conclusion,” Wolford said. Autobee’s death certificate reads that she died of “combined effects of fentanyl, morphine, and cocaine.” It should also list indifference. The doctor who treated Autobee at Strong Memorial Hospital, where she was transported with a faint heartbeat that was only kick-started by multiple shots of the antioverdose drug naloxone, told police he figured “that Autobee was unconscious for over 45 minutes before police or ambulance was called to the scene.” If that’s not a crime, what is? “Death by Neglect on East Avenue” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on September 6, 2015.

Tan’s Father’s Killer is on the Loose There’s a killer on the loose in our community. That’s a reasonable conclusion to draw from the dismissal Thursday of the charge against Charles Tan that he murdered his father. If Tan didn’t do it, as the dismissal implies, that means someone else shot Liang “Jim” Tan’s face off and let his corpse lay behind his desk in the Tan home long enough for the family dog to gnaw on it before the authorities were summoned. That person’s walking free right now. Tan’s lawyers would have us believe Tan’s mother pulled the trigger in a fit of rage after years of domestic abuse. She had the motive and the opportunity to kill her husband, the lawyers told the jury in closing at trial, and then pinned it on her son. There are a few problems with that theory, though. The first is that Tan’s lawyers didn't offer a shred of proof that Qing “Jean” Tan killed her husband. Of course, that wasn’t their job. Their job was to get their client off the hook, which they did in part by suggesting his mother was the killer Planting that seed in the minds of jurors in part led to the deliberations stalemate and the declaration of a mistrial. Another problem is that all the evidence presented at the trial suggested Tan was a loving and devoted son to his mother. Yet, Tan let his own lawyers belittle his mother in the same fashion that his father apparently did for years when they labeled her a manipulative liar and a potential murderer. But the biggest problem with the theory that Jean Tan killed Jim Tan is that it was already tried and tested by police who, after weighing the evidence, threw out the idea that she was the shooter. Now, Monroe County Sheriff's Office investigators, who handled the case, aren’t infallible. They’re human. Maybe they erred in dismissing Jean Tan as a suspect. That’s not the kind of mistake that’s easily corrected, though. Police had good reason to arrest Tan – the best being that Tan told them “I did it” when they arrived on the scene – and apparently no good reason to arrest his mother. The police can’t just dream up a reason to arrest her now, and if Tan’s lawyers were right, that still leaves a killer on the loose. Throughout the trial, the prosecution was never able to definitively trace how the 12gauge shotgun that blew Jim Tan's face off wound up in the Tan household, where police found it in the garage. In throwing out the case against Tan, County Court Judge James Piampiano said the gun was never shown at trial to be in Tan’s possession or that Tan fired the gun.

That’s true. But it was shown at trial that Tan’s longtime friend, Whitney Knickerbocker, bought the gun. Knickerbocker's a clean-cut farm boy who went to school with Tan at Pittsford Mendon High School and Cornell University. No one suggests Knickerbocker was the shooter. It’s awfully curious, though, how a gun Knickerbocker bought wound up blowing his friend’s father’s face off a short while later It’s also curious how Tan’s fingerprints got on the box of ammunition and at least one of the four spent shells that forensic evidence showed were used to blow his father’s face off. Knickerbocker might have been able to shed some light on those matters, but the prosecution never put him on the stand. It couldn’t because it knew that if Knickerbocker were to recount in open court that he bought a gun that wasn’t for him he’d be incriminating himself as an illegal “straw purchaser,” and that he probably would have ended up pleading the Fifth Amendment. Jean Tan might have been able to clear up the mystery, too, but she never took the stand, either. Prosecutor William Gargan has said she declined through her lawyer to talk with investigators about her husband’s death, and that putting a witness on the stand without knowing what that witness might say was too risky. Instead, the prosecution relied on Jean Tan’s call to 911, in which she told the operator that her son killed her husband because “he was trying to protect me.” But none of the evidence or unsettled curiosities was enough to convince Piampiano to give the prosecution a second bite at the apple and schedule another trial. So, Tan walked free. But someone still blew his father’s face off. “Tan’s Father’s Killer is on the Loose” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on November 6, 2015.

Wiesner’s Crime Could Cost Us $39 Million Let’s get something straight: Robert Wiesner is crooked. Don’t let his plea deal that let him off with $8,000 in fines and forfeitures and a threeyear-conditional discharge fool you into thinking his crime was innocuous. By his own admission in court on Tuesday, Wiesner helped rig a bid for a $212 million Monroe County public safety project while his wife, Maggie Brooks, was the county executive. Before the project was put out to bid, Wiesner assembled a team of businessmen to assist in drafting the county’s call for bids and respond to that call. He held meetings with them in his office at the Monroe County Water Authority, where he was the director of security. Later, when the bidding was over, he had one of the subcontractors on the project wire the Webster home he shares with Brooks with a discounted $3,000 alarm system. Weisner was bought cheap, but his actions may cost Monroe County taxpayers $39 million. That’s not cheap. That’s how much the state comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, figured county taxpayers will overpay for that public safety contract. DiNapoli broke it down in a 2012 audit of the deal. Auditors couldn’t account for $20.6 million of the contract, found that $12.7 million in vendor discounts weren’t passed on to the county, and that the county took on $5.5 million in debt that should have been assumed by a local development corporation created as part of the deal Wiesner cooked up. At the time, Brooks dismissed the findings as “baseless and deeply flawed.” Her administration insisted the deal would actually save taxpayers $10 million. Auditors retorted that the county “just made up” that number. In copping a plea, Wiesner stood before Judge Dennis Kehoe in a gray pinstripe suit and admitted he was guilty of “combination in restraint of trade and competition,” a Class E felony that could have cost him $100,000 in fines and up to four years in prison. Then Kehoe sentenced Wiesner under the terms of the plea deal and asked the prosecution whether it had any concerns. Assistant Attorney General Mary Gorman replied, “No judge. That satisfies the people,” leaving one to wonder what people to whom she was referring. Surely it wasn’t the people who could pay $39 million for Wiesner’s crime. At one point, the matter of Wiesner’s application for a certificate of relief came up. That’s a piece of paper that, if signed by a judge, “shall create a presumption of rehabilitation” for the convict. The idea is that Wiesner, 68, could present the certificate to a potential employer or anyone else who questions his criminal past as evidence that he’s reformed and say, “Yeah, I did a bad thing once, but I’m all better now. See, the judge even said so.” Kehoe declined to sign the certificate but promised to consider it once the criminal trial against two others, Daniel Lynch, the principal of Navitech Services Corp., and Nelson Rivera, the county’s former information technology director, begins next month.

State laws governing certificates of relief were enacted “to reduce the automatic rejection and community isolation that often accompany conviction of crimes.” Whether a piece of paper could manage that for Wiesner, who abused the public trust and might have cost his community $39 million, sounded like a stretch. When he walked out of the courtroom alone, with no friends or family or lawyer, ignoring reporters as he made for the stairwell, it looked like one, too. “Wiesner’s Crime Could Cost Us $39 Million” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on January 27, 2016.

Judge Astacio Isn’t Going Anywhere If you think Rochester City Court Judge Leticia Astacio is in jeopardy of losing her job over her drunken-driving charge, think again. Since its inception in 1975, the State Commission on Judicial Conduct has never disrobed a judge over a drunken-driving matter, and has successfully removed only two of 27 judges it disciplined for excessive use of alcohol, commission records show. You might argue, yes, but court papers allege that Astacio told a questioning officer, “He can just go and mind his own f------ business.” Big deal. When Waterloo Village Justice James Richardson was pulled over in 1977 and arrested on a drunken-driving charge for which he was later convicted, he called his arresting officer “a little piss pot” who “never should have been a cop to begin with.” The commission admonished him. When Monroe County Court Judge Culver Barr got arrested in 1979 for what became his second drunken-driving conviction while in office, he told officers, “F--- you!” and that he hoped to “have the opportunity to repay this back someday.” The commission censured him. When Thomas Newman Jr., a village justice in Rockland County, failed two sobriety tests after rear-ending a car on a New York State Thruway exit in 2011, he threatened to attack one officer and take another’s gun. The commission censured him, too. You might then argue, yes, but Astacio’s arrest report suggests she may have pulled rank for special consideration by noting that she was on her way to court to hear arraignments. That’s nothing. Before police took Kenneth Kremenick, a town justice in Dutchess County, into custody for driving drunk on the Taconic State Parkway in 1984, he repeatedly said, “I’m the judge,” “You can’t do this to me” and “I’ll have your job.” He was admonished. Before John Henderson Jr., a town justice in Orleans County, pleaded guilty to drunken driving in 1993, he told his arresting officer he was a judge and asked, “Isn’t there anything we can do?” He was also admonished. Before state Supreme Court Justice Gerard Maney was arrested in Albany in 2009, he repeatedly referenced his judicial status and asked for a “courtesy,” noting that he’d been putting people in jail on drug charges for 18 years and was running for another term. He was censured.

You might then argue, yes, but Astacio’s preliminary breath screen, which isn’t admissible in court, registered a blood-alcohol content of 0.19 percent, meaning that she could have taken the bench drunk. So what? Villenova Town Justice James Bradigan Sr. of Chautauqua County was twice found to have heard drunken-driving cases while he was intoxicated in 1991 and 1993. He was censured. Hague Town Justice Heather Knott of Warren County was found to have held court under the influence of alcohol on various occasions during the summers of 1994, 1995 and 1996. She was censured. Steuben County Court Judge Donald Purple Jr. presided over an afternoon case in 1996 after downing three beers at the Elks Club. He was censured, too. The commission, which consists of 11 voting members who are appointed by several public officials, has four disciplinary options: private letter of caution, admonition, censure and removal. It has, in some cases, lamented its inability to suspend judges without pay. In a few cases, judges resigned before the commission issued a decision. Robert Tembeckjian, the commission’s administrator and counsel, said members weigh each drunken-driving case on its individual merits and examine various factors in determining the appropriate punishment. Speaking generally and not about any individual case, he said the commission recognizes that alcoholism, which may be in play in DWIs, is a disease, that judges are susceptible to human foibles, and that judges should have a chance to rehabilitate themselves and their careers when appropriate. “On the other side, there is the indisputable harm caused to public confidence in the judiciary whenever a judge is guilty of DWI,” Tembeckjian said. “If the aggravating circumstances so warrant in a future case, I will recommend removal and the commission may well impose it.” So what warrants removal? If a judge is found drunk and asleep behind the wheel twice, drives drunk the wrong way on the interstate, urinates on a police car, threatens officers with reprisals, and attempts to bribe police, as state Supreme Court Justice William Quinn did in the late 1970s, the commission will vote to disrobe. That decision was later overturned by the state’s highest court. Astacio was elected to a 10-year term in 2014. History suggests she won’t be going anywhere. “Judge Astacio Isn’t Going Anywhere” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on March 13, 2016.

PEOPLE

Mercy’s Wambach Honor was Bigger than a Soccer Field Something extraordinary happened in Brighton last weekend: A Catholic school honored a married lesbian. Plenty of folks would have you believe nothing of the sort happened when Our Lady of Mercy School for Young Women dedicated its soccer field to Abby Wambach. The school recognized a distinguished alumna and one of the greatest soccer players in the world, they’d say, and leave it at that. They’d be wrong. We live in an age in which Catholic institutions fire workers for being in same-sex relationships and rescind awards bestowed upon people later revealed to be gay. Those aren’t very Jesus-like things to do, but these institutions do them anyway because being gay defies church teachings. Bucking the establishment would mean being a rogue, and the only rogue for them was a carpenter who took a sledgehammer to the establishment. That Wambach’s sexual orientation and marriage to Sarah Huffman never came up at the dedication ceremony is irrelevant. In honoring her, Our Lady of Mercy eschewed the groupthink that being gay is a litmus test. That in itself is extraordinary. Don’t just take my word for it. Catholics across the spectrum recognized that the school’s gesture was much bigger than a soccer field. New Ways Ministry, which advocates full acceptance of gay people in the church, heralded the honor as “a glimmer of hope” on its website last week. “In a context where being gay or lesbian has become a politicized issue in the church, the fact that the school has stood up and said that this is not going to be a barrier for us to honor this person is a very big step forward,” Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, said in an interview. On the other hand, dozens of posts on a website run by Cleansing Fire, which defends “truth and tradition in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rochester,” were apoplectic. “If Miss Wambach were a same-sex attracted person honestly trying to live chastely as the church teaches, then by all means honor away,” wrote one member. “But by this honor, Our Lady of Mercy can’t help but be perceived as celebrating and endorsing her objectively sinful life choices, and this risks putting other young women in peril.” Critics justify their fury by pointing to a United States Conference of Catholic Bishops statement that counsels Catholic institutions against honoring “those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles” lest the recognition “suggest support for their actions.” That proclamation was written about political figures, but is commonly interpreted to apply to any public figure.

Given that kind of pressure, what Our Lady of Mercy did was courageous. Going against the grain always is. That’s why I was disappointed when the school’s president and principal didn’t return my calls and emails. I wanted to know the thinking that went into the decision to honor Wambach and how the school was handling any pushback. I was equally disenchanted with the “no comment” from the Sisters of Mercy, the religious order that sponsors the school. Wambach, too, declined to speak about the topic, but I was more forgiving of her. The field wasn’t hers to name, and she’s never been vocal about her sexual orientation. Our Lady of Mercy and the Sisters of Mercy probably figured why wade into all that gay stuff when Wambach’s bona fides on the pitch speak for themselves. They had a soccer field; Wambach’s a soccer star. It was a no-brainer, they could say. On the contrary, though, lots of brains thought long and hard about this one. They concluded that if the conversation turned from soccer to all that gay stuff, their actions would speak for themselves. “Mercy’s Wambach Honor was Bigger than a Soccer Field” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on August 17, 2014.

Amy Pierson has a Life It wasn’t yet three o’clock on a weekday afternoon when the know-it-all in a too-tight golf shirt ordered another gin-and-tonic and turned the conversation to Amy Pierson. Word was out that the widow of slain Rochester Police Officer Daryl Pierson was pregnant with another man’s child, and the know-it-alls at the bar were aghast. “She’s been putting on an act, you know that,” too-tight said. “Oh yeah, big time,” replied a know-it-all with beer in a plastic cup. “A lot of people are upset about giving her money.” “I don’t blame ‘em,” too-tight said. “All these things got put together to help her without anyone knowing who she really was.” A lot of people think they know, or thought they knew, Amy Pierson, who was thrust into the public eye when her husband was killed in the line of duty nearly 11 months ago. After all, she was on the front page of their newspaper and in their living rooms on the evening news. They cried for her and marveled at her poise. They gave her money. But most don’t know her any more than the know-it-alls in that watering hole a few miles from her East Rochester home knew two journalists were in their midst. Media personalities began talking about her after a blogger reported that Pierson announced her pregnancy on Facebook with a photo of her and a man holding a string of ultrasound pictures two days after her husband’s killer was sentenced to life in prison. Taking their cues from the blog, they talked about how Pierson allegedly hid an extramarital affair with the father and played the Rochester community for a fool. They talked about how the blue tank top she wore in the Facebook photo was the same she wore in a picture of her grieving at her husband’s grave that appeared on the front page of the news- paper a day earlier. But none had talked to her. Had they bothered to talk to her, they might have learned that they needn’t judge Pierson because she has that covered. “I’m ashamed of the position I’m in because it’s not what I’ve stood for publicly and what I believe is in my heart,” Pierson said. At the dining room table of her parents’ East Rochester home, Pierson, 34, was a woman conflicted, torn between living up to her public image of grieving widow and to her potential for leading a contented and full life. In the same conversation, she called her pregnancy a disgrace to her husband and a great joy, and acknowledged loving the father of her unborn child while regarding their relations as “a sin.” “It’s hard for people to understand and hard for me to explain how I can be experiencing tremendous pain and mourning while at the same time experiencing joy and rebirth,” Pierson said. “I can’t explain how it’s possible ... but I do have those things in me.”

None of this is really anyone’s business. But without her voice, the narrative belongs to the know-it-alls, and a woman who propped up an entire city in its darkest hour will be branded a harlot instead of a human. Pierson said she agreed to speak to set the record straight about her pregnancy and because, as she put it, “I’ve lived in the public eye, I’ve been supported in the public eye, I’ve sinned in the public eye, and I need to repent in the public eye.” So, for the record, Pierson said she is 13 weeks pregnant, and denied “proudly plastering her ultrasound pics all over Facebook,” as the blog had claimed. In fact, Pierson said, it was a relative of the father who posted the photo of them and tagged her, meaning the image, which was intended to be a private moment, ended up on her Facebook page and might have given the impression that she had posted it. As for her blue tank top, Pierson explained that she wore the top to the cemetery and again two days later when the ultrasound pictures were taken and posted online. The entire community learned about the baby the same day she and the father told his family. “I didn’t go from the grave to celebrating with his family,” she said. Pierson described the father, Stephen Denny, 28, as a man she’s known for four years and with whom she’s shared a friendship and spiritual connection. She said they became romantic in January, and denied the blog’s claims of an extra-marital affair between them. The biggest beef Pierson’s critics seem to have with her is their perception that she bamboozled them to keep the condolences and cash donations coming. Pierson said she’d probably have the same reaction if she weren’t the object of their scorn. All that people ask when they give money to a cause is that the cause be genuine, that it be real. Here are some things about Pierson that are real: The chalk hopscotch board etched on her driveway; the funeral flowers bearing Daryl’s name outside her door, her 5-year-old boy who kisses her swelling tummy; an infant daughter who will never know her birth father. Pierson is still the woman who dutifully spoke so eloquently about anger and love and justice and keeping the city together when it was at a boiling point. She did those things to honor her husband and the police department he served. There’s nothing disingenuous about that, and authenticity should be the only condition to charity. Pierson earned whatever goodwill she received. If people gave with the expectation that she be cemented in place and time, that’s their problem. With the exception of a car she was given by a local dealership, Pierson said, all donations are in trust for her and Daryl’s children and can only be withdrawn for specific purposes, such as educational or athletic pursuits. She said she lives on his pension and benefits. Pierson and her children have a right to live their lives, a fact of which she said a relative of her late husband recently reminded her. “I don’t want to shed any part of who I’ve been or what I’ve done through all of this, but I want to be able to move on and not drop anchor here as Daryl’s widow living in mourning,” she said.

“Daryl will always be in my heart and I will always love him, but I need to be able to move forward with my life,” she said. “I need to be allowed to love somebody else.” Amy Pierson has a life. The know-it-alls should get one, too. “Amy Pierson has a Life” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on July 30, 2015.

Great-grandma’s Comfy Chair Defies Town Code Rose St. George is 93 years old and enjoys sitting in the plush leather chair that time and sunshine have turned from green to beige on the porch of her Irondequoit home. “It’s very comfortable,” she said the other day as she demonstrated sitting, propped up by a thin yellow throw pillow. “Sometimes you get a nice breeze.” St. George doesn’t get out much anymore, not since she broke her pelvis and had those falls. So, she sits and takes in the scenery on Ellinwood Drive, where she’s lived since 1961. “I don’t bother anybody,” she said. But her chair does bother the town’s code enforcement officer, who last week sent St. George a notice explaining that her “indoor chair” violates Irondequoit’s bulk refuse by-law. The notice also cited two trash cans and a plastic bin in front of the house, and gave St. George until Sept. 18 to store the cans and bin elsewhere and remove her chair from the porch or face a $350 fine. St. George’s son, Robert St. George, who lives with his mother and cares for her, conceded that he’d left the trash cans and bin out front too long. He said he’d been using them to weed the garden but abandoned the job during the recent heatwave. “I’m happy to move the garbage cans. I get it. They shouldn’t be out front,” Robert, 59, said. “But the chair? Jesus! This is ridiculous.” Jeff McCann, the town's director of development services, explained that code inspections are conducted only upon receipt of a complaint. In other words, the code enforcement officer doesn’t patrol the town looking for violations. In the case of St. George, someone complained. Whether the gripe was about the trash cans or the bin or the chair, McCann couldn’t say. St. George’s son said the chair has been outside since the spring. “If it was just the chair, it’s very possible that (the complainant) might not have called to complain,” McCann said. When a complaint is received, however, the code enforcement officer is obligated to record all apparent violations – and a plush leather chair on the porch is an offense. McCann said such a chair runs afoul of Section 192-19: “No person shall accumulate or permit the accumulation of refuse upon any premises owned or occupied by him or her . . . ” If you don’t believe it, you’re not alone. As St. George recalled, when she got the notice in the mail she said, “I can’t believe it.” Now, St. George’s chair wouldn’t win any beauty contests. It wouldn’t even place or show. If it were in a living room, one could conceivably call it ugly. The chair is faded, worn and stained. Against the backdrop of St. George’s blue ranch house in her tidy suburban neighborhood, though, her chair’s not an eyesore. It’s certainly more appealing than the white

toilet on the front lawn of a house a few doors down that St. George said has been there for months. Ordinary outdoor chairs won’t do for St. George, a great-grandmother with the softest hands you’ll ever feel. She uses a walker with tennis balls on the feet to get around, and standard outdoor chairs are either too hard or too flimsy for her. She and her son said they have no intention of getting rid of her chair. Their defiance presents Irondequoit with the dilemma of either turning a blind eye to what it considers a blatant code violation or robbing an elderly woman of feeling the breeze on her face. McCann said he couldn’t predict what would happen when the code enforcement officer returned to Ellinwood Drive to check on St. George’s compliance. But he ventured a guess. “If the house was in compliance with the exception of the chair being on the porch, I’m not sure that would be something that we’d be interested in pursuing in and of itself,” he said. That’s the right answer. “Great-grandma’s Comfy Chair Defies Town Code” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on September 15, 2015.

The Late, Great Art of Meat Cutting Watching Scott Buisch bone a deer, it’s easy to see why his customers call him “God on Earth with a knife.” He wields his instrument with the finesse of a sculptor and traces the spine like a map. “I’ve been accused of being a surgeon,” he says with the wry humor of a man who has an arsenal of one-liners. It’s also easy to see why the craft of meat cutting that Buisch has practiced so diligently for 42 years is being lost to time. His workplace is cold, bloody and tinged with the acrid odor of bone sliced with a high-speed saw. “Who would want to do this?” Buisch asks as he sponges blood from his cutting table. “The pay’s not great, and you stand in the cold.” But there’s no place Buisch (pronounced BISH) would rather be than in that old converted barn behind the home he shares with his wife, Susan, in Clifton Springs, Ontario County, where they raised two children. He was born a meat cutter, he’ll die a meat cutter, and that’s the way he wants it. “I knew what I wanted to do with my life when I was 12,” he says. “Never in my life have I ever been tired of cutting meat.” Every fall hunting season, the Buisches take two weeks off from their day jobs – she’s a nurse, he works in a supermarket meat department – to process cuts of venison for hunters who rely on his skilled hand. She packages the meat, adding a humorous cartoon strip to every box as a personal touch. Hunters pull into the Buisch driveway at all hours of the day to lay their prizes at Buisch’s feet. “That man is God on Earth with a knife,” said David Clement, who lives in Las Vegas but hunts each fall in his native upstate New York and recently brought a buck to Buisch. “He’s an over-the-top meat cutter. At 60, round-faced and rosy-cheeked wearing a white coat stained red, Buisch looks the part of an old-time butcher. But don’t call him that. Butchers, he says, slaughter and skin livestock, while meat cutters are the closers who render a carcass into dinner-sized pieces. The distinction is a long-running industry quarrel. Meat cutters like Buisch, who learned to process meat with precision and confidence over an apprenticeship spanning four years, have largely been replaced by specialized meat mechanics that Buisch calls “nickers” who’ve never worked with whole carcasses. “They nick here, they nick there,” he says. A generation ago, virtually every local grocery carved steaks, chops and other cuts from hanging carcasses. That began to change in the 1970s, when a sharp rise in beef prices pushed slaughterhouses to break down carcasses centrally and ship them in pieces in boxes to supermarkets for trimming and finishing.

“We don’t have many people anymore who know how to break down a (carcass),” said Joe Leonard, president of the New York State Meat Processors Association. “Only the older guys know how to do it.” Deer season keeps Buisch sharp, just like the knife he rubs against the foot-long rod of honing steel between incisions. His hands are spotted with scars – 23 stitches here, six stitches there – and his workplace is covered in memorabilia. There’s a story behind every photo, every cleaver, every set of antlers affixed to the walls. Buisch doesn’t mind telling stories, but he doesn’t want to hear any about the deer he processes. A sign on the wall outlines the cost of infractions. “Free = ‘I was there. The deer was there. I shot it,’” the sign reads. “$10 = Any other deer story. $20 = If you want me to pay attention to your deer story. $30 = If you tell the story twice.” “I want to hear a deer story like I want a hole in the head,” Buisch says. Buisch’s deer hunting days are behind him. Harvesting whitetail deer was never the same for him after he killed that black bear with an arrow in who-knows-where Canada in 1997. Processing deer, though, will never lose its luster for Buisch. His job is as much a labor of love as an act of rebellion against the inevitable march of time. “This is really a lost art,” he says. “I’m a dinosaur. I know it.” “The Late, Great Art of Meat Cutting” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on December 6, 2015.

Santa Opens his Heart, Wallet at Wegmans Somewhere at this very moment, a child is debating the existence of Santa Claus. She tells her parents she believes, but secretly she harbors doubts. Her head is swimming with questions and logistical concerns and the skepticism of her schoolmates. Explaining to her that Santa Claus is as real as love and kindness and generosity does nothing to quell her uncertainty, for she must see him to believe. If only that child were at the East Avenue Wegmans late Tuesday. For there, wandering conspicuously about the checkout counters was Santa Claus himself. He was dressed in a tailored blue Italian suit and a pair of black Salvatore Ferragamo shoes, but his white hair and rosy cheeks and eternal smile betrayed his disguise. Had there been a trace of doubt, what the man did next was a dead giveaway. He started paying for people’s groceries. Not everyone’s groceries, of course. Even Santa Claus can’t use Apple Pay at 21 aisles simultaneously. Instead, he went lane-to-lane just as he goes house-to-house on Christmas Eve, dropping $39 here and $82 there as though money were useless, which at the North Pole it is. But his bigheartedness meant everything to his recipients. There was Kimberly Perdue and her family, who arrived at Register 4 with $45 in groceries and a $20 gift card to pay for them when Santa intervened and told them it would be his honor and privilege to foot their bill. “What a blessing,” Perdue, 50, said. “We’re struggling with even the little that we have.” Patricia Frazier, 57, could scarcely believe her good fortune at running into Santa right there at Register 9. “Oh, my God! He just paid for my groceries!” she said as she wheeled a cart loaded with $196 worth of turkey and ham and everything else she figured she would need to cook for her family of 30 for Christmas. “Nothing like this has ever happened to me.” Because Santa Claus knows all and sees all, he knew a journalist was watching. And because he has a giving spirit, he agreed to share his story so long as he was not identified by any other name. So it was understood that here he would not be called St. Nicholas or Kris Kringle or any name by which he might go. Who was this journalist to deny a wish of the man who makes wishes come true? He explained that he wasn’t always so well-dressed. As a child, his was a large, poor family. He recalled being a boy with his mother at the supermarket and watching her return items that she realized she couldn’t afford when she got to the register. A few years ago at Christmastime, he said, he stood behind a woman in the checkout line at that Wegmans on East Avenue who did the same thing. She had a couple of children in tow.

“It reminded me so much of my mother,” he said. “I just reached forward with my credit card and said, ‘You’re not going to go without what you need.’” He felt so good afterward, he recalled, that he later returned to the store to buy more groceries for people he suspected might be in need. The practice has since become a Christmas tradition for him. On Tuesday, he bought groceries for a man who was about to return a birthday cake for his son, and for Tamra Arnold, who was shopping for her mother, who was ill at home with lung cancer. “I told him I had a gift card and he said, ‘You save that for later,’” said Arnold, 41, whose bill came to $41. “Sometimes you forget how nice people really can be.” When Santa heard that he took a moment to compose himself. “It does feel good,” he said, “but at the same time it feels inadequate because there’s so much need.” Santa spent an hour and many hundreds of dollars that day. He said he planned to do so again at least one more time before Christmas. As everyone knows, he’s busy this time of year. “Santa Opens his Heart, Wallet at Wegmans” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on December 24, 2015.

Golisano’s Big Beef with his Big Boat After dropping $7,692 on four chaise lounges and $2,252 for “dream cushions” to cover them, Paychex Inc. chairman and founder Tom Golisano thinks he paid too much to furnish his luxury yacht – about $400,000 too much. Now he’s suing his Rochester-based interior decorator to get it back. Most civil lawsuits never go to trial. They’re either dismissed or settled out of court. But if Lady Justice has an ounce of compassion in her scales for the tired, poor and huddled among us who can only live vicariously through the super-rich, she’ll see that Golisano v. Vitoch Interiors goes to trial in Monroe County state Supreme Court. The case revolves around the 240-foot Laurel, which you can lease for around $605,000 a week. Well, not you, everyman who probably evaded an online pay wall to read this, but someone with money to burn. The ship is currently moored off the coast of West Palm Beach, Florida, among what appear on Google Maps to be a fleet of Star Destroyers. Golisano claims the decorator, Norma Goldman, overcharged him by reneging on a verbal agreement allegedly witnessed by the ship’s captain and Golisano’s wife, tennis star Monica Seles, to sell Golisano the furnishings at her wholesale price. Goldman, who decorated Golisano’s residence in Mendon, denies promising that the furnishings wouldn't be marked up. She claims Golisano got the same deal on the yacht as he did on his home, which was a discount on the suggested retail price of the furnishings. According to the complaint, Goldman spent about six months in 2013 and 2014 devising color schemes, wall coverings and window treatments, overseeing the refurbishing of wall panels and built-ins, and having carpets, drapes, bedding and furniture installed on Laurel. Her bill came to just under $845,000, which included about $34,000 for 242 hours of work at $140 an hour. Golisano paid in full with a few complaints in June 2014, then rented out Laurel for a cruise to the Mediterranean. By the time Laurel returned a month later with her six state rooms, on-deck hot tub, gym, and 20-person crew, Golisano had concluded that he’d been had to the tune of $400,000 and notified Goldman that he planned to sue. The court papers and accompanying exhibits don’t indicate precisely how Golisano figured he was ripped off. Was it the $2,820 headboard fabric in Guest Suite 2, or the $3,338 ottoman in the library that cost another $600 to upholster listed in an estimated bill of sale? Maybe it was the $12,672 drape fabric in the Owner’s Suite. In his deposition, Golisano lamented having so many $500 pillows on Laurel that he had to put 32 of them in storage. That’s $16,000 worth of pillows in storage! On a boat! A boat that carries four kayaks, three Sea-Doos and two WaveRunners! Last week, a judge denied a motion from Goldman that asked for the case to be dismissed, potentially setting the stage for the case to settle or go to trial. Please, Lady Justice, let it go to trial. Let us marvel at the excess. Let us mock it in envy.

But let us, too, live vicariously through a man with the means to fight having his pockets picked, as so many of us have experienced and couldn’t afford to do anything about. This lawsuit, like Golisano’s property tax challenges in Mendon, affords us that opportunity. As easy as it is to ridicule Golisano’s extravagance – and it is easy when he spends $522 on trim for pillows in Guest Suite 6 – he’s entitled to protect himself from those who would take advantage of his great wealth. That’s not to suggest Golisano was bilked on his own yacht. In court papers, Goldman maintains she was upfront with Golisano about what discount he would get, and in his deposition, Golisano said his $400,000 claim was based on his own “research.” But if Golisano has a case, why should he leave $400,000 on the table? Because Forbes magazine estimates his wealth at $2.5 billion is not a good enough answer. Where would you draw the line on being ripped off? Personally, I’d draw it at the $785 wall sconce. But that’s just me. “Golisano’s Big Beef with his Big Boat” was first published in the Democrat and Chronicle on May 4, 2016.

About Democrat and Chronicle columnist David Andreatta David Andreatta is a news columnist and reporter for the Democrat and Chronicle known for his humorous and serious work. David joined the newspaper in 2008 as a member of its investigative team and began writing columns in 2014. His coverage has earned national and state honors for depth and beat coverage and his commentary has been recognized as among the best in the state. Outside the paragraph factory, David writes and acts in the theatre and coaches youth hockey. He lives in Fairport, NY with his wife, two sons and two fat cats.