Category — David Andrews

:: Republican City Councilwoman Maribeth Cosgrove currently has a nine point lead over Democratic incumbent Joseph Wilders in polls released this morning in advance of the mayoral election.

:: City Treasurer Donald Munro reports that Mayor Wilders has spent $1,192 of his own funds on clothing during his current re-election campaign. An additional $29.95 in campaign clothing expenses was reported, purchased by an anonymous donor.

:: If you think showing up to a Halloween party this year as “Joe the Plumber” will show off your creativity and topicality, perhaps you’d better think twice. Local costume shop Alter Ego reports the ubiquitous everyman has been so popular as a costume, that they’ve been forced to back order “prop plungers, bald caps and prosthetic ass-cracks.”

:: This October 29 marks the 120th anniversary of Industry Island, an experimental community founded by the virulently anti-Catholic Rev.Callum Fry in 1888. The original community was disbanded in 1891, but the many parks and trails crafted by the Reverend’s community remains a popular destination for day-trippers.

:: City Marathon winners (men’s open division) by nationality since 2001: 3 Kenyans, 2 Mexicans, 1 Ethiopian, 1 Eritrean and 1 U.S citizen (Orlando, FL)

:: City Symphony guest conductors by nationality since 2001: 3 Germans, 2 Austrians, 1 Finn, 1 Russian and 1 Chinese

:: City Founder’s Day Parade Grand Marshals by nationality since 2001: 7 U.S. Citizens and 1 Canadian (William Shatner)

:: Number of pancakes served per attendee on average at each Autumn’s “Dia De Los Pancakes” celebration to benefit Sauncha County’s Volunteer Fire Department #76: Eleven

:: Average number of attendees per year since 1981: 12,150

:: Quantity of batter required to make 133,650 pancakes: 1,044 gallons

:: Number of rental trucks required to carry supplies to the Sauncha County Volunteer Firefighter Open Air Kitchen: 14

:: Number of chefs required to produce 1,044 gallons of pancake batter: 70

:: Additional amount of batter used for “Pancake Batter Belly Flop” contest: 30

:: Number of inflatable kiddie pools used for “Pancake Batter Belly Flop” contest: 3

:: Total cash value of the ‘grand prize’ for best “Pancake Batter Belly Flop”: Seventeen Dollars

:: Dia De Los Pancakes will be held on Saturday, November 1, from 7am to 7pm at the Sauncha County Volunteer Fire Department Community Center.
- David Andrews, Ray Ingraham, Jon Morris, RJ White

Recent news about the economy has been unsettling, to be sure- but the entire last decade has also seen a steady decline in manufacturing jobs locally, particularly within the city itself. In a welcome reversal of fortune, Mayor Joseph Wilders will announce today that Nihar Products Limited (NPL), the world’s fifth leading manufacturer of buttons, eyelets and aglets has officially signed a deal to move its largest factory to the old McKennick Screw Works building on Industrial Boulevard and relocate its U.S. headquarters to the Chandler Building downtown. The addition of NPL to the local manufacturing community had been the subject of insistent rumor ever since Mayor Wilders “vacation” to southern India last winter.

NPL was founded in Bangalore, India in 1971, but in recent years has found itself competing for office and warehouse space against a tidal wave of software and telecommunications companies, filling every unoccupied piece of commercial real estate in the Indian state of Karnataka with technical support phone banks.  Unable to expand in their home region to meet the needs of a growing number of contracts and a thriving clientele, Nihar dispatched representatives to scout six municipalities around the world, including Dibrugarh (India), Shanghai (China), Hamburg (Germany), Manchester (England), and Zevenaar (Netherlands), before settling on our city as their new base of operations, due partly to the current weakness of the American dollar.

Assuming immigration technicalities can be resolved, eleven executives from Bangalore will take up residence on the fortieth floor of the Chandler Building this coming December, while four Indian manufacturing supervisors will oversee operations on the south side. NPL anticipates adding only one executive position here in the city, but expects to hire as many as fifty local employees in the Industrial District. This is good news indeed for a region that has found very little to cheer about in the current economic climate.

Rumors of NPL’s impending move have also been quite a boon for Professor Aditi Sinha at Watson University, who was initially stunned to find enrollment in his adult-education night class entitled Dravidian Languages and Elementary Sanskrit unaccountably jump from an average of ten students to its current enrollment of 56 (divided into two sections). Sinha reports that slightly more than 200 people had originally applied to be included in the class, but that he was able to reduce matriculation to a more manageable number by informing potential students that the national language of India is, in fact, English.
- David Andrews

Many of the laws of physics quantified by Isaac Newton in the 17th Century were of great service to inventors in the centuries after his death in 1727. Even so, Sir Isaac probably never imagined that the kinetic energy released by the inherent explosive properties of fossil fuels would lead to a world nearly overrun with vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. Nor would he have suspected the only reasonable way to properly regulate the ever-increasing traffic of such vehicles was to be found in color-coded traffic signals powered by electricity. With his groundbreaking work in optics, however, he might have been able to foresee the increase in traffic accidents that has plagued the city’s Industrial District since this spring.

Over the past four months the city’s south side has been in the forefront of a program to install new energy-efficient street lighting using Variable Photon Light Emitting Capacitors (VPLEC), developed by Welkin Labs of Claremont, California. The program has been championed by both Mayor Wilders and Valley Regional Transportation Authority (VRTA) head Quentin Brucheimer. The transition involved replacing the bulbs in streets lamps south of South Industrial Boulevard – many of which had never been upgraded from incandescent to fluorescent lighting during the last major overhaul in 1978 – with the VPLEC bulb. The project was begun on April 28 of this year.

Surprisingly, traffic incident statistics from the VRTA showed an alarming increase in vehicle/vehicle and vehicle/pedestrian accidents on the south side during the month of May. These statistics were dismissed as a one-time outlier, until the June report showed an even larger number of incidents, many with serious injuries in addition to significant property damage. An emergency detailed analysis of the May and June figures, completed on July 18, revealed that the greatest number of accidents – by far – took place at night, and near intersections with flashing traffic lights. Had the VRTA not turned a blind eye to anecdotal evidence from drivers who frequented the streets of the Industrial District during the spring, they might have realized the problem earlier. But local residents’ complaints fell on deaf ears.

It seems the new upgraded VPLEC street lamps emit a powerful glow slightly tinted toward the ‘orange’ range of the color spectrum discovered by Newton over three centuries ago. When the bright white-orange radiance of the new street lamps shines in close proximity to the darker but less intense yellow or red of a typical flashing traffic signal, the two colors are made to appear virtually identical. Thus motorists at such intersections had to guess whether to slow down or come to a complete stop, and were required to make split-second decisions about right-of-way. As one might expect, with only a 50% chance of correctly interpreting an “orange light,” many drivers guessed wrong.

“Guessing wrong” is something these motorists now have in common with Mayor Wilders and VRTA Chief Brucheimer. They released a joint statement on Friday afternoon stating that the old fluorescent bulbs will be reinstalled immediately in street lamps on the South Side, beginning with those over intersections with flashing traffic signals. They further announced that the program to install the new energy-efficient VPLEC bulbs has been suspended indefinitely, no doubt until Mayor Wilders and Mr. Brucheimer have a better chance to consult with the scientists and engineers at Welkin Labs – and with Sir Isaac Newton.
- David Andrews

For a city that has hosted kings, presidents and many other world leaders, a visit from a cabinet secretary in an outgoing administration might seem like small potatoes. But Idaho’s Dirk Kempthorne, the current United States Secretary of the Interior, was here recently for a very special reason: to officially establish Carpe’s Marina as our city’s second entry in the National Register of Historic Places.

Nuncio Carpenello first went into business on the east bank of Keets Harbor in July, 1858, only days after arriving from Salerno, Italy. Local residents were amused when the burly immigrant constructed scaffolding inside his small and rickety wooden shack so elaborate that it forced him to sleep with his feet outside the walls. For many weeks afterward they heard the constant pounding of hammers and creaking of boards. In mid-September the shack suddenly disappeared, and in its place was a 26-foot long, eight-foot wide boat moored just offshore. Carpenello had built the craft on his own, from the hull up.

Soon “Nunce’s Ark” was a familiar sight, tooling around the harbor and navigating the tricky eddies of the Ostahanoc River. Large as it was, the “ark” drafted barely four inches deep, and could travel safely far upstream, even in the river’s shallow north branch. For the many businesses that lined the river, Carpenello’s craft provided both delivery and waste removal services that were cheaper and more reliable than the horse carts of the day, particularly given the uneven condition of the city’s roads in the late 1850s.

By early 1862, Carpenello’s wife and fifteen children had joined him in the United States, and in addition to his regular rounds upriver – extending from before dawn to well after dusk – he and his brood erected the building whose foundation still stands. Carpe’s Marina has been built and rebuilt at least a dozen times, surviving fires, floods and the remnant winds of half a dozen hurricanes. But the substructure supporting the building was as sturdy and thick as Carpenello himself. It had to be.

Beginning in autumn of 1861, Carpe’s Marina had become one of the principal stations on the Underground Railroad, the covert network of shelters for fugitive slaves on their way to freedom in the northern United States and Canada. The marina’s status as a secret hiding place for former slaves was so well-guarded, and the substructure of the building so solidly built, that evidence of its role was not re-discovered until 2002, when the marina was scheduled for demolition in advance of the new Happenstance Landing at Keets Harbor entertainment and shopping complex. Explosives experts surveying the lower levels of the building were surprised to find the foundation extending nine feet below their expectations.

That extra nine feet contained a sub-basement with a veritable treasure-trove of Civil War-era artifacts. As it turns out, Nuncio Carpenello’s delivery business had added those late-night and early-morning runs not to carry supplies safely past the uncertain roads leading to the north end of the city, but to transport people beyond the uncertain attitudes and prejudices of their fellow man. The demolition crew was soon replaced by a film crew from the History Channel, whose documentary footage of the subsequent excavation is expected to air this September. That’s about the time construction on the Happenstance Landing at Keets Harbor is scheduled to be finished – the property line now 653 feet north of its original location.
- David Andrews

:: Number of consecutive weeks the Griswold Arthouse has featured Jaws as its “Friday Midnight Movie”: 1,664

:: Number of “Jaws Burger” fried fish sandwiches sold at the adjacent President Heights Cafe’ during in that time: 41,679

:: Percentage sold between the hours of 2 am and 5 am Saturday morning: 83

:: Number of stars awarded the President Heights Cafe’ by irascible Alternative Weekly food critic Gram Sanders: one-half

:: To the Jaws Burger fried fish sandwich specifically: zero

:: The annual Founder’s Day Film Festival (FFF) will be held from August 8 – 11 this summer, with the official celebration of Founder’s Day to occur on Monday, August 11. This will also, as usual, be a paid holiday for all city employees. The theme for this year’s festival is the highly appropriate ‘Summer in the City,’ and the Monday afternoon Founder’s Day matinee will be Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. The comprehensive FFF schedule will be released on Friday, June 6.

:: Today, the City Council is scheduled to repeal a 1946 ordinance which banned from city limits any and all stand-alone arcade devices and games. The measure was intended to curb the use of pinball machines in casual gambling, but had the unintended effect many years later of making it illegal to own or operate any cabinet-style video game within city limits (although that aspect of the law was rarely observed and even more rarely enforced, with the city boasting 230 video game arcades during the peak of the fad in 1984).

The Video Game Museum at Mabel Tripp Gardens will be celebrating the occasion by making available for play many of their exhibited games, including Galaga, Defender and Altered Beast.
- David Andrews, Shek Baker, Jon Morris

:: Mayor Wilders’ recent initiative to “clean up” the city’s catalog of archaic, outdated, obtuse or redundant ordinances begins in earnest next Wednesday when he plans to unveil his self-authored C.O.M.B. (Consolidate Our Municipal Bylaws) Initiative. Among the ordinances targeted by the measure are a 1988 ban on prostitution services for pets, last year’s activist “pro-smoking” initiative, and a late 17th-century punishment which calls for “stabbing centrely amidst the fleshie organs” for anyone caught “dealyng with goods of a gypsie nature.”

:: In addition to police officers, emergency response and medical personnel, it is technically illegal in the city to pose as a practitioner of the following professions: Plumber, baker, cobbler, milliner, grocer, asphalt-mixer.

:: Number of local coyote attacks sparking the “Coyotes: This Summer’s Sharks?” three-day investigative series on Channel 8’s newscast next week: 0

:: The Woodbridge District of the city boasts more hair salons, Thai restaurants and British import shops than any other district in the city (124, 70 and 17 respectively).

:: Tourism in the city is down 15% over the same period last year. The Valley Regional Tourism Bureau attributes the decline to budget cuts, leading to a lack of presence for the city in print and internet advertising over the past few months.

:: Ten most common words found in print advertisements in local publications during March 2008:
1. Sale
2. Free
3. And
4. Discount
5. The
6. P.M.
7. A.M.
8. Pork
9. Credit
10. Rebate

:: The Interactive Orwell exhibit celebrates its fifteenth season this year at Agnew Community College’s Wonsley Blvd. campus. Popular with young children and preteens, the “Living Or-world” features an “Animal Farm Petting Zoo”, the “Oceanian Tele-Screen Playground” and “Ministry of Truth Big Brother Relay Race”. This weekend - June 25th, Orwell’s birthday. As always, with purchase of one child ticket, big brothers get in free.
- David Andrews, Shek Baker, Jon Morris, RJ White

In 1980 the only remaining state correctional facility within the city limits - Amandour Prison - closed its heavy iron door for last time. The order to shut down the facility, once home to as many as 494 inmates, actually occurred in 1951. While it is not surprising for the wheels of justice – or the wheels of bureaucracy – to grind slowly, in this case neither the State Department of Corrections nor any combination of city government officials was responsible the long delay. If any person held the key (so to speak) to the 37-year gap between decision and action, it is former Judge Marvin Kristolich. But the ultimate determining factor in the long, slow decline, and eventual demise of Amandour Prison was the remarkable constitution of its final inmate, John Stuart Powell.

Powell was the principal suspect in the sensational murder of Charles Kerry O’Keefe, Commissioner of Police, in August 1949. In the summer of 1950, with the still-unsolved case becoming an ongoing embarrassment for the police department, interim Police Chief Donald Connolly announced the apprehension of a suspect connected to the homicide by a barely credible trail of conjecture and circumstantial evidence. That suspect turned out to be John Stuart Powell, who had not only acquired two prior convictions for armed robbery and assault, but also declined to furnish police with a plausible alibi for the time of the murder. Although when pressed he claimed no knowledge of the O’Keefe homicide, he did not invest much effort in his own defense.

Despite his client’s reticence, public defender Thomas Judson very nearly won the case, despite relentless pressure from District Attorney Peter Moltrie to plead his client guilty. Three times the jury reported themselves hopelessly deadlocked, until a last-minute, and some would say suspicious, change of heart on the part of several jurymen brought back a verdict of guilty for murder in the first degree. Judge Kristolich stated his disagreement with the jury’s decision, believing that the crime warranted a finding of murder in the second degree, but he declined to overturn the verdict. He did, however, unexpectedly sentence Powell to life imprisonment, rather than execution.

What the public didn’t know was that Kristolich knew Powell was innocent. In 1996, the records of the case were requested by the Journal-Clarion under the Freedom of Information Act; they revealed the startling truth. Mrs. Marvin (Margaret) Kristolich had been having an affair with Charles Kerry O’Keefe, and had killed him in a lover’s quarrel. Judge Kristolich had pulled every string he could fit between his dirty fingers to have the case assigned to his court, including threatening to reveal incriminating photos of Connolly and his ‘very good friend,’ District Attorney Moltrie.

Kristolich’s peculiar brand of ‘mercy’ in sparing from execution a man he knew to be innocent was entirely at the behest of his wife. In addition, it was Margaret Kristolich who inserted the clause in the sentencing decree that Powell never be moved from Amandour Prison. Mrs. Kristolich was soon spied making visits to the prison almost daily. In exchange for Judge Kristolich’s legal – and apparently also marital – largesse, his wife had agreed to keep the lid on a few sordid tales of her own.

Not long afterwards, the wheels of justice began to whirl at astonishing speed. Judge Marvin Kristolich was felled by a heart attack in September 1951, only a month after Amandour Prison was slated for closure, though by decree that closure would have to wait until the release or demise of John Stuart Powell. Judge Kristolich’s death also coincided with an end to Margaret Kristolich’s frequent visits to the prison. In fact, by October of that year Margaret Kristolich had moved to Healy, Alaska, now – coincidentally – home to freshly minted Circuit Court Judge Thomas Judson. Then, in October of 1952, while camping in Denali National Park, Margaret Kristolich was killed by a brown bear.

Meanwhile, John Stuart Powell, 59 years old at the time of his conviction, continued to survive in excellent health, even as he continued to be denied parole. He not only outlasted Judge and Mrs. Kristolich, but also Chief Connelly (1964), District Attorney Moltrie (1965), and even Alaska Supreme Court Justice Judson (1979). And by 1977, every other inmate at Amandour Prison had either been released or died, leaving Powell as the sole inmate in the 500-bed facility for the last 11 years of his life. Finally, on November 4, 1980, at the age of 88, Powell succumbed to pneumonia. Within a week of his death, demolition began on Amandour Prison.

In 1998, eighteen years after John Stuart Powell’s death, Val Kilmer portrayed him in Surviving Justice, a direct-to-video film directed by Phillip Noyce. And in 2008, twenty-eight years after the closure of Amandour Prison, dozens – or even hundreds – of patrons every day enjoy the mesquite-grilled flavor of San Antonio-style sirloin at the Amandour Avenue Lone Star Steakhouse, most without the slightest remembrance of the prison that once occupied the site, or any knowledge of its most famous inmate.
- David Andrews

Fire Commissioner Gordon ‘Chick’ Hall reports that an electrical fire in the 4th Floor Records Room at Old City Hall early Saturday morning destroyed some of the city’s most irreplaceable historical treasures.

The blaze was discovered by third-shift security guard Mona Chellis at approximately 2:45 am. Chellis believes the fire started some time around 2:30 am, but reports that she mistook the wisps of smoke flowing under the door for cigarette smoke from her fellow guard Gene Kruicewicz, who often used the secluded 4th floor room to take smoke-breaks (though the building has been smoke-free since September 2002). As she continued her rounds, however, Chellis heard Kruicewicz noisily trying to dislodge a Kit Kat from the vending machine in the employee break room. She quickly returned to the Records Room to discover a significant portion of the contents of a west wall shelving unit in flames.

Chellis retrieved an extinguisher from a nearby stairwell, but found it non-functional. She then raced to the third floor, retrieved a working extinguisher, and was able to put out the fire some time before 3 am, at which time she radioed Kruicewicz to call the fire department. Units from the Grant Avenue fire station arrived at Old City Hall at 3:03 am to find the situation under control, with no structural damage to the building. One floor-to-ceiling shelving unit had been damaged beyond repair, and 90% of its contents were reduced to ashes. Many other documents on high shelves throughout the room suffered minor smoke damage in the incident.

Old City Hall, ca. 1898.

Unfortunately, among those items lost was the original bill of sale for the land on which the city was founded (1829) and original copies of the first city charter (1831). Also, many vintage photographs and daguerreotypes from the 19th century were destroyed, including several mid-construction photographs of Old City Hall (ranging from 1879 to 1888). Tragically, all these items were scheduled for digitization some time before the end of the current fiscal year.

For her quick thinking in the crisis, security agent Mona Chellis will be decorated by Mayor Joseph Wilders in a small ceremony on the steps of Old City Hall on Friday, February 29 at Noon. Security agent Gene Kruicewicz has been re-assigned to the day shift. Mayor Wilders also announced that Deputy Fire Commissioner Thomas “Sarge” Santorino has been suspended indefinitely pending further investigation - Santorino was the ranking official in charge of inspecting fire extinguishers in municipal buildings – and that Fire Commissioner Hall has taken administrative leave until it can be determined why fireproof storage units were never purchased with the funds so designated in the city budget in 2005.

Captain Franklin “Freddie” Munoz, the third-ranking member of the department, will act as interim commissioner in their absences. Residents may remember Captain Munoz as the fire department official who conceived of the plan to increase department revenue by selling advertising space on city fire trucks in 1991 (as previuosly referenced here- final item).
- David Andrews

:: Number of “informational” flyers distributed this week on windshields and utility poles in the Parklawn section, insinuating that mayoral hopeful and City Councilman Terence Williams was once married to someone who may or may not have had relatives who were of the Muslim faith: Approx. 2,000

:: Number of spelling & grammatical errors in the screed: 24

:: Rival candidates/organizations taking credit for the flyers: 0

:: Williams’ current position in the latest polling: Second (by 3 points)

:: Number of 2008 major party U.S. Presidential aspirants to visit the city: 4
• John McCain’s bus passed through the city, stopping briefly for a bathroom break at the Denny’s on North Algonquin Avenue, on January 2, 2008
• Hillary Clinton addressed the local Association of Realtors at the Hyatt Regency Downtown on November 29, 2007
• Mitt Romney held a fundraiser at the local Association of Business Brokers meeting on December 9, 2007
• Barack Obama visited the city in the summer of 1981 (after leaving Occidental College and before enrolling at Columbia University).

:: Number of stories regarding the appearance of the image of Christ on the cross or the Virgin Mary reported in local media outlets (newspaper, television, radio) between 1998 and 2008: 14
[Apartment wall, apple core, birthmark, block of brie, cat (3), pony, potato (2), sidewalk crack, stump, subway tunnel, supermarket window]

:: Countries visited by Mayor Wilders for professional development seminars, mayoral conferences, or to promote economic investment in the city since taking office: 17
[Aruba, Andorra, Australia, Belize, Bermuda, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, France, Great Britain (Ireland), Mexico, Netherlands Antilles, Rwanda, Saint Vincent & The Grenadines, Switzerland, Thailand, Vietnam]

:: Number of city streets beginning with the letter Q: 5
[Quality Place, Quamog Avenue, Quentin Street, Quigley Blvd., Quine Street]
- David Andrews, RJ White

:: Number of fire department/EMT calls due to fireworks ‘incidents’ on New Year’s Eve: 211

:: Number of fire department/EMT calls due to fireworks ‘incidents’ last July 4th: 213

:: The first baby of 2008 was born in Nilsson-Presbyterian South Hospital at 12:49am on Jan. 1. He’s Jeffrey Louis Hippert, 9 lbs., 4 oz., born to parents Adima and Louis Hippert, of Edwin Falls.

:: Among the items in the gift pack traditionally awarded to the first baby of the new year from local merchants: iPod Nano, dry cleaning for a year, $25 US savings bond, passes to Daisyland Amusement Park, a gallon of paint primer, 6-month subscription to The Evening Press, keys copied free for a year, a coupon for ham.

:: Items in the gift pack which would actually be useful in the first year or so of caring for an infant: None.

:: Urgent memo from City Hall: “Please be advised that the City Slogan Contest is now over. Do not fax additional entries; they will be neither accepted nor received, as our expected shipment of toner was not delivered last week due to inclement weather and clerical oversight.”

:: Official number of entries in the City Slogan Contest: 171

:: Number of prank entries (via fax) in the City Slogan Contest: 98

:: Number of prank entries containing the word ‘suck’ or ‘sucks’: 84

:: The Department of Cultural Affairs and the Valley Regional Tourism Association’s Subcommittee on Public Art have announced that famed Swiss artist Pascal Knapp will create a series of sculptures to be placed around the city beginning in June of this year. The animal to be showcased in our city’s exhibition will be announced at a press event on Monday, January 14 at Old City Hall.

:: Municipally maintained public sculptures featuring animals: 29 (not including the subtle ‘fish pattern’ in the base of the statue of Cornelius Keets at Keets Harbor, or the pigeon’s nest that has become a permanent feature atop the World War I Memorial in Baxter Park).
- David Andrews, RJ White