Who Moved the Meetinghouse?

Penn Charter and George School Students ’share’ a very old building.

[This contracted piece appeared in the Penn Charter Alumni magazine, Penn Charter Today, Spring 2009 edition.  The images are owned by Charles S. Hough, and used here by permission. Click here for the PDF version:  Meetinghouse.]

In the pre-rush hour dawn of July 10, 1972, a police escort and two flatbed trucks carrying eight magnificent hand-hewn wooden trusses from the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse inched north, throwing a shadow on Center City Philadelphia for the last time. The centuries-old roof trusses—measuring 20 feet high by 58 feet wide—wound their way north from Twelfth and Market streets, veering in and out of parked cars and beneath overhead cables, turned right on Spring Garden, then north on Delaware Avenue, the entire caravan seeking the breathing room of Interstate 95 and the final destination. The new home of the Meetinghouse would not be William Penn Charter School, whose students and faculty had used the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse for 50 years, from 1875 to 1925, prior to the school’s move to its present location. The Meetinghouse’s new home was destined to be George School in Bucks County, 35 miles up the Interstate. How the complex move occurred is a fascinating story. Why the building didn’t end up on School House Lane is a question often posed by members of the current Penn Charter community. The answer, like much of Penn Charter history, is recorded in a leather-bound volume of the Minute Book, the recorded minutes of meetings of the school’s Overseers.

Handling the Herculean move and reconstruction process was Charles S. Hough, a 1944 George School graduate and a founder of Hayes & Hough Architects. Hough later served as the principal architect for Penn Charter, from 1975 to 1995, and his son, Paul H. Hough OPC ’77, has also been an enthusiastic supporter of the school. Hough orchestrated every aspect of the de-construction and move as well as the reconstruction of the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse at George School. Workers began with the roof, peeling off one layer at a time. After the wooden “skeleton” of the roof was fully exposed, they dismantled the rafters and the horizontal timbers, leaving the trusses—the thick triangular vertebrae of the roof—visible from below. They reinforced the trusses and lowered them to the ground, wrapped the entire assembly in polyethylene and laid them on flatbed trucks. Brick by brick, workers dismantled the façade of the building, carefully chipping away the mortar and saving the bricks for future use.

The crew salvaged most of the building’s structure and historically significant artifacts and transported them to George School for reuse. The materials included the eight trusses, exterior doors and hardware, porches and marble steps, exterior trim, windows and shutters, stone paving bricks, about 50 percent of the exterior bricks, several foot-scrapers, wainscoting and stair railings, pine floorboards, many of the wooden benches and cushions, and the facing bench. Capping off a remarkable list of items was a floor joist, signed “1755 AC + IC” —initials for Abraham Carlisle, the master carpenter, and Isaac Coates, his apprentice. The carpenters’ initials were formed by handmade nails driven into the face of the beam, a pre “John Hancock” of sorts. (Some perspective: The Boston patriot John Hancock would not attach his prominent signature to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence at Independence Hall, a few blocks away, for another 21 years.)

Once relocated to George School, the smaller parts were stored in the school’s old cow barn, while the trusses were stored in a temporary, weatherproof shelter in the woods. Work began in the spring of 1973 and concluded the following year. The architects and George School officials emphasized a recycling and “greening” philosophy that was rare in its time. The builders relied heavily on meticulous architectural notes, diagrams and photographs of the Twelfth Street structure. The building was modernized, but Hough worked to retain the harmony and spirit of the original. Hough opened up the pitched part of the roof and exposed the bottom half of the trusses to the gathered meeting below. Honoring the value of honest work and the resiliency of good craft, Hough embedded Carlisle’s initialed joist in the wall directly above the facing bench.

On September 24, 1974, a little more than two years after that pre-dawn journey from Center City, the George School community rededicated the structure, providing future generations of friends, faculty and schoolchildren the opportunity to worship and assemble in one of America’s most notable meeting houses.

The Meetinghouse that now resides on a gentle hill amidst a cluster of trees on the George School campus can trace much of its material to the original 1812 structure at 20 South Twelfth Street. Some of its material—six of the eight trusses and some of the floor beams—dates even further back in time to The Great Meeting House. That predecessor, a smaller structure erected in 1755 at Second and Market, or High Street as Market was then called, was the principal place of Quaker worship during the Revolution and the presidency of George Washington. In fact, the Great Meeting House site was in use well before 1755, and older meeting houses on the plot can be traced back to 1695, predating the city’s Colonial courthouse, which was built nearby in 1707. Centuries later, the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse is now into its third decade in the care of George School—and the building has been magnificently restored and cared for and looks as if it has always existed in that zip code.

Henry Cadbury, a Quaker historian and birthright member of Twelfth Street Meeting—and also an 1899 graduate of Penn Charter—documented the centrality of the building to Penn Charter and the Friends community in a paper presented in 1962 at the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse in honor of its 150th anniversary. “The worship and ministry and the organized life of the meeting differed little from those of other meetings in the city or out of it,” Cadbury wrote. “The most distinctive features were perhaps what I might call extra-curricular—organizations loosely attached to it or located near. Two of these connections are particularly conspicuous, each lasting about a half century. One was the William Penn Charter School, whose staff and students attended midweek meeting in this house every Wednesday in term time. . . . The other major connection . . . is the American Friends Service Committee from 1917 to 1960.”

Since 1917, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has organized humanitarian and relief endeavors around the globe, fighting for social justice, human rights and peace in some of the world’s most violent and disadvantaged places. In 1947, AFSC received the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the British Friends Service Council, on behalf of Quakers worldwide, and Cadbury accepted the prize on behalf of AFSC. Not bad for an organization that migrated from the Friends Institute next door, to the lobby of the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse, to the dining room, and finally to small offices in the Meetinghouse’s attic, girded, literally, by those giant trusses. In the spring of 1975, AFSC moved into the Friends Center, a modern-looking structure adjacent to the Race Street Meeting House.

As Cadbury noted, Penn Charter students and teachers attended meeting “in this house” from 1875 when Penn Charter built a new schoolhouse at the corner of 12th and Market until 1925 when Penn Charter departed Center City for the green space of Germantown. School documents from the late 1800s explain the reason for the move: Headmaster Richard Mott Jones believed the school should offer students physical education and sports as part of the curriculum, but the Center City school did not have adequate space. Mott looked for short-term fixes—including trying to get permission from the Pennsylvania Railroad YMCA to use a playing field at its 52nd Street Station—and advocated for a long-term solution: 20 to 30 acres of land outside Center City. The school acquired acreage on School House Lane and, in the early part of the 20th century, began using the property for athletic fields. Mott Jones, who resigned in 1917 because of poor health, did not live to see the move to the new property in 1925.

In the ensuing decades, Penn Charter bought adjacent land, and by the 1970s owned almost 40 acres—enough to make room for the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse, which was in need of a new home. In 1956, two downtown meetings, the Philadelphia Monthly Meeting for the Western District, popularly known as the Twelfth Street Meeting, and the Philadelphia Meeting of Friends, called Race Street Meeting, merged to become the Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting. In her book In the Shadow of William Penn, Margaret Hope Bacon gives a concise history of Central Philadelphia Meeting and she chronicles how, for nearly a decade and a half, the newly created meeting was challenged by complicated talks about how to deal with redundant property, including Twelfth Street and, on Race Street just above Fifteenth Street, the meeting house that survived and is still used today. In September 1969, Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting entered into an agreement to sell the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse and land for $810,000 to the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society (PSFS) with the option of being able to move the building. PSFS had long since bought and razed (in 1929) the five-floor William Penn Charter School building, which resided on the southwest corner of Market and Twelfth Streets, and replaced it with a towering skyscraper. For nearly four decades, PSFS had been eyeing the Meetinghouse property, just to the south, as a site for further expansion.

Perhaps driven by negative publicity over the pending destruction of a structure with significant ties to Philadelphia and Quaker history, PSFS delayed razing the Meetinghouse and instead left it in the care of the seller, Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting, which spent many meetings trying to find a proper home for the building. Penn Charter was interested, but so were many other organizations, including the Philadelphia Community College and a local synagogue. Some members of the Meeting objected to selling and moving the building at all. Others pondered the best use of the money once a deal was finalized. According to Bacon, the Meeting proceeded with the sale of the building to PSFS on October 10, 1971, with this justification noted in the minutes: “Since we are an urban meeting our main thrust should be toward the urban crisis and urban development.” During the 1960s, the problems associated with urban decay, inner-city poverty, and racism prompted many urban churches and community organizations to rethink how best to use resources and influence public policy.

Roger Hillas OPC ’45, currently a senior Overseer and then treasurer of the Penn Charter’s governing board, clearly recalls discussions four decades ago about moving the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse. “We were interested,” said Hillas, “but it was going to cost a fortune.”

Hillas’s recollection is supported by school records. Among the dozens of leather volumes on the bookcases in the office of Head of School Darryl J. Ford are four Minute Book binders (earlier volumes are stored in the school archive) recording the minutes of the “Overseers of the Public School Founded by Charter in the Town and County of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania.” Minutes for Dec. 15, 1970, signed by Clerk Barbara S. Sprogell, read: “Expression has been made by several Friends of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting that since the ground under the 12th Street Meetinghouse has been sold and the Centers Committee has no interest in moving the 12th Street Meetinghouse to 15th and Race Streets that one solution might be to give the meetinghouse to Penn Charter in Germantown. Overseers expressed their great willingness to have this Meetinghouse on their property if arrangements could be made to have it moved with funds not belonging to the School.”

Then, almost a year later, this entry for the meeting of Nov. 23, 1971: “Overseers again talked of the possible acquisition of the 12th Street Meeting House for Penn Charter, and arrived at the decision that while desiring it, they thought it unwise as well as impossible to consider spending four to five hundred thousand dollars on moving it to the School grounds. Nor was it deemed the best use of the school’s money to spend upwards of fifty thousand dollars to salvage the beams and woodwork of the Meeting House for their possible later use in a new Meeting House for the School.”

Forty years later, Hough said that it cost $60,000 to deconstruct the meeting house and transport it to George School and, although he did not have a cost on the reconstruction of the building, the figure of $400,000 to $500,000 “did not surprise me.”

The Minute Book not only confirms Hillas’s recollection, it puts his comment in perspective. Penn Charter’s entire budget for 1970-71 was $1,091,945 and the half-million dollar cost of the meeting house project was almost equal to the sum Penn Charter spent that year on teacher salaries: $523,500. (In 1970, teacher salaries ranged from $7,000 to $12,500.) The Minute Book also shows the school engaged in long-range planning for building projects, including renovations to the Main Building and, attached to the kindergarten building, construction of a new Lower School with classrooms for grades 1 through 5.

With the withdrawal of Penn Charter, the problem of what to do with the Meetinghouse still remained. But not for long. In December 1971, Eric Curtis, then head of George School, announced that an anonymous donor—later identified as the Spruance and Alden families— offered to pay to reconstruct the building on its campus if the Meeting paid to dismantle and transport the building. It appeared to be a win-win situation.

The Twelfth Street Meetinghouse, completed in September 1974, continues to throw beautiful shadows on the lives of those who assemble under its giant trusses in Bucks County. For those in the Penn Charter community who wish the historic building was on our current campus, the solace in this story may be the understanding that the building went not to a better home, but to an equally suitable one.

Mark Franek is the former dean of students at the William Penn Charter School. He is currently the academic dean at the Rock School for Dance Education.

 

Philadelphia Friends Schools (book)

[I recently co-wrote and published a modest little book about Quaker education called, Philadelphia Friends Schools.  The book was a joint-project between the Friends Council on Education and Arcadia Press. The co-writer, Janet Chance, is the lower school director at the William Penn Charter School.  Gathering the photographs required the help of archivists from ten of Philadelphia's oldest Quaker schools.  Writing the captions and chapter introductions appeared to be a straightforward task, but the peculiar components of Quaker education did not lend themselves to easy explanation.  Below are two excerpts.]

Excerpt from the Introduction to Philadelphia Friends Schools:

This book contains a unique series of photographs from the archives of the Philadelphia-area Friends schools that were founded before the 20th century: Friends Select School and William Penn Charter School, both of which trace their roots to 1689; Abington Friends School, 1697; Plymouth Meeting Friends School, 1780; Westtown School, 1799; Frankford Friends School, 1833; Friends’ Central School, 1845; Germantown Friends School, 1855; Greene Street Friends School, 1855; and George School, 1893.

After a glimpse into the origins of each school (chapter one), this book focuses on the unique pedagogy of the Philadelphia-area Friends schools during the 20th century. The chapters highlight distinctive features of Quaker education: Meeting for Worship (chapter two), Inquiry and Innovation (chapter three), Community and Collaboration (chapter four), Experiential Learning (chapter five), and Peace and Social Justice (chapter six). An introduction explains the importance of the each chapter’s theme and its relevance to Quaker pedagogy. Concluding the collection is a chapter on the Friends Council on Education, the umbrella organization for Friends schools in the United States.

Curiously, many of the images and captions in this book would not surprise Quaker schoolchildren in a bygone era of modest schoolhouses and meeting rooms, of cobbled streets and dirt roads, nor would this book seem quaint or mysterious to current students. Friends schools have always had a distinct philosophy of education. Friends believe that each person has the capacity for goodness, and the school takes responsibility to nurture that goodness. Friends schools believe that education is preparation for the whole of life: the lively development of intellectual, physical, and social-emotional capacities, as well as the development of the spirit. Friends schools are spiritual communities based on the belief that there is that of God in everyone, yet Friends schools do not proselytize or seek to convert students or faculty.

Excerpt from Chapter Two, “Meeting for Worship,” of Philadelphia Friends Schools:

Simple in design, minimally comfortable and as broad as space allows, the Meeting bench has been a Friends school’s most important learning tool for more than 300 years.

—Robert Smith, Quaker educator

Meeting for worship—or simply, meeting—has played a central part in the curricula of all American Friends schools since their emergence in Philadelphia more than three centuries ago. Even though meeting does not appear anywhere on the transcript, it is the spiritual and educational center of the school. Not only do Friends schools discuss the importance of community, they also deliberately protect and nourish their community. In perhaps no other sustained educational activity is the interconnection and possibilities of the individual and the group publicly under construction each week. Quaker educators and philosophers have variously described meeting as a budding flower, a waiting stream, and a night sky. While no two meetings for worship are exactly the same, the general idea is that members of the community assemble in the meeting room, settle into silence, and remain in silent reflection unless someone—from a kindergartner to the head of school—is moved by the spirit or an inner voice to stand up and speak. The messages are surrounded by long periods of silence. Occasionally a story is shared that is so powerful and memorable that it illuminates the room like a northern star. Other messages come and go like fireflies. At still other times, the message emerges from the communal silence and washes up on shore of the individual mind, like a true unexpected treasure. Genuine reflection and the notion that all lives are hopeful and intertwined are difficult concepts to model and teach week after week, yet that is what Friends schools are doing. This chapter contains images of meeting for worship from the archives of Philadelphia-area Friends schools. The photographs are not ordered by date; instead, they show how the meeting unfolds from the perspective of schoolchildren, who arrive at Friends schools with a wide variety of religious beliefs and practices, including some with solely secular backgrounds.

[To buy the book, visit the FCE website: Philadelphia Friends Schools.]

[Mark Franek is the academic dean at the Rock School for Dance Education in Philadelphia, and Janet Chance is the lower school director at the William Penn Charter School, also in Philadelphia.]

 

Question of Authority

The Presidency is an office of enormous but not unlimited power.

[This piece appeared in the Philadelphia Lawyer Magazine's spring 2009 edition.  Here is the PDF version.]

Andrew Patel is probably the only lawyer in the United States who has stood at ground zero moments before the ground shook, and then, in the terrible wake of the tragedy, went on to vigorously defend suspected terrorists, just like he did before the towers fell. His clients have uncommon names like El Sayyid Nosair—a convicted murderer, suspected of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing from prison—and José Padilla—the so called “dirty bomber” and the man whose case is the basis of this story. No one would accuse Mr. Patel of having an easy job. His clients are often demonized by the media. His opponents often have unlimited resources.

The federal government arrested José Padilla, an American citizen, in Chicago on May 8, 2002, and detained him as a material witness until June 9, 2002, when President Bush designated him an “enemy combatant.” Mr. Padilla was subsequently transferred to a military prison in South Carolina where he was held, without trial and in extreme solitary confinement, for over three-and-a-half years on suspicion of plotting a radioactive “dirty bomb” attack inside the United States. For over two years he was denied counsel. After pressure from civil liberties groups and lawyers, including Mr. Patel, the Padilla case was eventually moved to a civilian court.

In a dramatic turn of events, the federal government’s November 2005 indictment did not mention the alleged crimes that had lead to Mr. Padilla’s “enemy combatant” status and his forty-three months of solitary confinement. No mention of a dirty bomb, no mention of planned attacks—or of “planning to plan” attacks—on U.S. soil, and no direct references to Al-Qaeda. Instead, the indictment accused Mr. Padilla of conspiring to murder, kidnap, and maim people overseas. Furthermore, the indictment was handed down several days before a pending Supreme Court hearing on the Padilla case, which would have lead to a showdown between the Court and the President, and likely to more clarity about the limits of the President’s power during war-time.

The change in strategy ultimately worked in favor of the government. After only three days of deliberation, on August 16, 2007, a federal jury in Miami, Florida, found Mr. Padilla guilty of charges that he conspired to kill people in an overseas jihad and to fund and support overseas terrorism. He was sentenced to seventeen years and four months in prison. In one of his first public statements after the conviction, Mr. Patel, in a radio interview, observed: “You have to excuse me. It’s hard to summarize what, to me, is a human tragedy in a sentence or two. We were very sad, very disappointed, and had been hoping for a different verdict. We had been hoping that José would be home with his family today.”

Recently, Mr. Patel spoke to Philadelphia Lawyer magazine editorial board member, May Mon Post, about the Padilla case. Ms. Post and writer Mark Franek took the transcript from the telephone interview and nixed the original questions. Where it seemed appropriate, boldface was added and Mr. Patel’s answers were reordered. The goal was to tell a story in the manner of Esquire magazine’s “What I’ve Learned” column.

I was in lower Manhattan. I will never forget. I was so close. We could not see the building fall. According to the New York Times, if you look at the photographs of the South Tower, which was the first one to fall, and there’s an amazing photograph of it just starting to collapse. And if you look at the bottom of the photograph, you’ll see this brown cloud. According to the The Times, that cloud was moving at 140 miles an hour. I can tell you that from where I was standing, which was two blocks away, when something’s coming at you at 140 miles an hour, you get two steps and then the lights go out. I actually put my hand in front of my face and could not see it. You couldn’t see, you couldn’t breathe. I had been standing shoulder to shoulder with two people from my office, and they just disappeared. I eventually—if you’ve seen people covered with white ash—looking like ghost people. I was one of those people. I had chemical burns in my eyes from the material. As I explained to a friend of mine, for some of us, 9/11 was not a television experience. When you say I will never forget it, that much is beyond the shadow of doubt.

The Padilla case is about Mr. Padilla and the Constitutional principles that came out of this case, but it wasn’t really about the Constitution [itself]. That sounds like a trite answer, but it’s really not. This case concerned, as the Supreme Court eventually put it, the authority of the most powerful office on the planet. Can the President order someone to be held by the military as a matter of executive whim? I don’t use the word “whim” lightly. But when you’re a judge, jury and sentencer, then whim becomes the appropriate word.

The notion that the law applies equally to one and all broke down in this case. Here we had the President himself say: “I order that this person be detained by the United States military,” and essentially argue that no court would have the authority to overrule, limit, or interfere with the President’s power to order someone’s detention. And that was really an extraordinary claim of authority by the President of the United States.

In the southern district of New York and in almost all of the federal courts, there is a panel of private attorneys who have sufficient experience in federal criminal investigations where the court will ask us to represent individuals who can’t afford to hire an attorney. I am a member of what is called the Criminal Justice Act Panel in Manhattan. It was Chief Judge McCavey who asked me to get involved with the Padilla case. There’s a very clear rule of federal litigation; when a judge asks you to do something, the answer is always “yes.” That’s how I got involved in this case and these cases.

The public basis for initially declaring Mr. Padilla to be “an enemy combatant” was a declaration by an employee of the Department of Defense—a lawyer—containing certain factual allegations of which that individual had no personal knowledge. In other words, it was entirely hearsay.

At that time there was no redefined definition of an enemy combatant. It basically comes out of a Supreme Court decision from World War II, and at that point what it really meant was an “enemy soldier.” But it’s been somewhat more defined as the litigation went along. But this is not a term that prior to this round of activity by the United States government was generally used in the discussions of the law of war. For example, if the term “negligence” is a legal term that lawyers and jurors understand, and the court can define, and has defined, there will be a dispute about whether a specific act is or is not negligent. The term “enemy combatant” has no such definition. If it sounds bizarre, that’s because it was.

The general allegations were that they had information—there was what was called the Mobbs Declaration, which was the basis for the President’s order, and there was an affidavit from an FBI agent that was the basis for the warrant for Mr. Padilla’s arrest. To answer your question, Michael H. Mobbs, Special Advisor to the Undersecretary Defense for Policy, declares that he is a government employee in the Department of Defense, government reports in records about Mr. Padilla, relevant to the President’s June 9th determination that he is an enemy combatant—I’m sort of paraphrasing this. The information is derived from multiple intelligence sources regarding Abu Zubaydah and Binyama Mohammed. The term “intelligence source” is a broad term. It can be anything from a newspaper report to anyone who talks to someone who then talks to an intelligence officer.  As to these two intelligence sources, the government has admitted that Zubaydah was water boarded. There has been a great deal of litigation and media coverage concerning Benyamin Mohammed. He experienced a rendition to Morroco where he was treated in a manner that would make water boarding seem like a day in the park.

It is distressing that the warrant [in Padilla’s case] was supported only by information obtained by torture. When the source of information is obtained by torture, and the person providing information has no personal knowledge of the source, then you have unreliable information being reported as hearsay. So you have unreliability on top of unreliability, and based on that unreliability, which the government has now to a certain extent admitted, wouldn’t stand up in court. You have someone being thrown into a military brig and held in complete isolation for over three years. In other words, just because someone wants to say something bad about somebody, doesn’t mean it’s true.

For example: If the government obtained an affidavit that said [a person named] Muhammad had met with you, and you had planned to perform a terrorist act in the United States, but there’s no statement from Muhammad, the person who gives the statement never met Muhammad. There’s no information about how the statement was obtained from Muhammad. And yet, you’re thrown in jail, not even a jail that a judge has sent you to, but a jail the President has sent you to. That’s essentially what happened to Mr. Padilla.

When you say “allowed to happen” you assume there must have been a rational basis for it. But this happened because the President said, “I have the authority to do this.” This is exactly what the Constitution was designed to prevent: that level of assertion of power by any branch of government.

The important thing was not what Mr. Padilla said [during interrogation that resulted in a “confession”], but the fact that he was held under military detention by order of the President, and not by order of a judge. He was taken outside the Constitutional system. So what he said is really irrelevant, and has never been and probably never will be used in a court of law.

A conspiracy is an agreement between two or more people to do something unlawful. That’s a classic definition of a criminal conspiracy. The question is, can you have an agreement to agree to commit some crime that hasn’t happened? And the crime that Mr. Padilla was charged with was a conspiracy to commit murder overseas. So it was a conspiracy on top of a conspiracy. And it really kind of stretches the very logic of conspiracy law.

There was no dirty bomb. And the government brought an entirely different set of accusations against Mr. Padilla [in Miami]. The dirty bomb rumors, to be polite, were irrelevant to the charges in Miami. He just was not charged with anything to do with the dirty bomb. Because there was none.

Well, it’s because the Attorney General of the United States went on television and said, “We stopped this guy from setting off a dirty bomb.”

This case was about some very fundamental basic issues. Does the President have the authority to hold someone on his own authority? Does a court have a right to say, “I’m sorry, Mr. President, you can’t do that.” And a number of courts did say, “Mr. President, you don’t have the right to do that.” You don’t have the authority. The Constitution does not give your office the power to do that. It is an office of enormous but not unlimited power.

You don’t have to wait for terrorists acts to be completed before you begin an investigation or a prosecution. That’s certainly true. Because, when guys are clearly involved in attempting to build a bomb [or planning a terrorist attack], that’s one thing. But you also have people who are involved in more advocacy kinds of things. And then the question becomes, Where do you draw the line?

I’m a solo practitioner, but there was a team of us working on the Padilla case. One of the things that really pleased me and made me very proud of our profession was the way lawyers from medium firms, big firms, and small firms rose to the occasion and didn’t say, “Oh, no, this is too controversial for me.” But wrote magnificent amicus briefs at every level. At the District Court level, at the Circuit Court level, and then the Supreme Court. They made themselves available to discuss some of the very arcane issues involved. So it was really the support that we got from the legal community. I think it’s something that all of us can be very proud of. I thought it was extraordinary. It was not, “what’s in it for us, or for our firm?” Instead, it was, “We think this is important. What can we do to help?”

                                                         #   #   #

[May Mon Post, an editorial board member, is the owner of the Post Law Firm and President of the Asian American Bar Association of Pennsylvania. Mark Franek is a freelance writer and a member of Cabrini College’s English department.]

 

With a Little Help from Friends

People who are out of work tend to take things personally. It helps to rally around friends and family.

[This piece appeared in the Baltimore Sun on Thursday, April 2nd.  The original version appears below.]

My fiancée and I have six college and graduate school degrees between us. For nearly two decades, we’ve worked in non-finance-related, white-collar professions. Last winter she was laid off without warning and without a severance package. This spring I found out that my contract will not be renewed at the college where I teach.

With no kids and good credentials, we are fairly advantaged members of the swelling ranks of the unemployed. The situation for us isn’t dire. Yet. But we are experiencing a variety of emotional and financial realities that our parents and our professors virtually promised us would never happen.

To quote the last line of a poem by Emily Dickinson called “After Great Pain”: “First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go.”

My fiancée, who has been jobless for about six months, is in the “letting go” stage. She has started her own business and is busy every day chasing potential clients, updating her Web site and organizing her home office. Her business is showing signs of life. Our friends have helped immensely by referring potential clients to her services via word of mouth, e-mail, Facebook and LinkedIn.

The social networking aspect of the Web has been a godsend. It doesn’t translate immediately to dollars, but it makes one feel a part of a wider community.

I, on the other hand, am still in the “stupor” stage, which for me is a state of mental numbness and bodily lethargy. But it’s fading.

Our wedding is going ahead, but not exactly as planned. We explained our circumstances to the folks at our contracted businesses, and several let us out of the deal without penalty. We are getting married in our backyard, and then heading to the city for an intimate meal with a much smaller cast.

We will go on our honeymoon when one of us gets a job with steady pay.

Meanwhile, if unemployment creates uncertainty for us, it is also terra incognita for our friends and family members who are fortunate to still have their jobs. There is very little advice out there for people who want to find appropriate ways to help friends or loved ones who recently received pink slips. Giving or loaning money is a sticky wicket, but there are other things friends and family can do that don’t require much effort but still make a big difference.

First, keep the lines of communication open and light-hearted. My father recently e-mailed me a picture of his labrador retriever, her nose brown from digging in the dirt, with this message in the subject line: “Even for the brown-nosers, times are Ruff!”

That made me smile.

It also helps to exercise empathy and patience. My friends and family—and to some degree, my fiancée—have all shown an amazing capacity to endure my rants, which are worse than usual, and part of my overall coping strategy.

For instance, last month, amid the AIG payout scandal, my credit card company informed me that my annual percentage rate had increased due to “adverse market conditions.” I suspect that tens of thousands of Americans received similar notifications. The irony was so thick, you could cut it with a derivative.

People who are out of work tend to take things personally.

Just listening, without judging—even if the rants omit facts or cast impossibly wide nets—is beneficial.

Small kindnesses go a long way. Recently, friends of ours invited us to dinner at their house. Mercifully, they didn’t use the fancy dinner plates, break out the good wine or expect us to talk about our situation.

Better times are on the horizon, somewhere. According to the pundits, it’s going to take collaboration at all levels of government and in board rooms all across America to get us out of this mess. We don’t believe that Americans—and American institutions—are inherently greedy and mean-spirited.

We will get through this. Friendship and support are the currency of compassion. They cost virtually nothing.

Mark Franek lives in Philadelphia. He is a co-author, most recently, of the book “Philadelphia Friends Schools.”

 

Bring Integrity to the Web

Unfortunately, integrity can’t be searched.

[This oped appeared in the Christian Science Monitor on Thursday, March 19th, 2009.  Please patronize the CSMonitor by reading the original article.  If you are interested in the annotated version, continue reading.]

Philadelphia- In this brave new online world of user-generated content, people are entitled not only to their own opinion, but to their own blogs and websites, tens of thousands of them crawling out of the ooze daily, climbing up Google’s rankings, linking to one another and bringing their content to a screen near you.

Most of this stuff is harmless. Some of it is truly breathtaking. There is real power in the fingertips of people who only 10 years ago wouldn’t have had much of a voice past their front porch. But increasingly, online words and images are causing dismay and real damage for other people who never wanted to be in the public spotlight, much less one that’s accessible 24/7.

Today, anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can post defamatory statements to the Web in a matter of seconds. The fact-checking apparatus and journalistic integrity standards that once provided a healthy buffer and filter between words and a wide audience have come crashing down.

Beware what appears in its place. The First Amendment gives people without integrity on the Web tremendous power, too. We need to develop an awareness among Internet users of the importance of acting with honesty and in good faith.

I spent seven years as a dean of students at an independent school in Philadelphia. I’ve watched fights break out, friends break up, and parents appear at my door, in tears, all over some nonsense posted online about their child that they were virtually powerless to remove.

Megasites like MySpace and Facebook have clear policies, but their rules invariably have more bark than bite. There is no telephone number to call. Sometimes days go by before the webmaster responds, usually in an unsigned e-mail. And even then there’s often a catch.

Your child’s anguish may not trump someone else’s First Amendment rights.

Principals have more leverage, but they are busy people. Sometimes the parents of a scared or depressed child can get the principal to invite the posters of the offending material and their parents into the office for a conversation. This often results in the deletion of the material in question; that is, if the posters aren’t anonymous, or from another school.¹

You don’t have to be a teen to be adversely affected by the confluence of powerful new communication tools and average people using those tools with the intent to do harm.

Right now I am in the midst of an inane conflict with a webmaster of a high-traffic site who refuses to remove an offensive blog about me that is laden with epithets and defamatory statements.²

It was all fun and games until the content of the blog was brought up during a recent job interview. Could it be that the interviewers took Google’s search results – literally, the high ranking of the Web page in question – as evidence of some kind of merit?

The Internet, led by the pervasive power of Google’s ranking system, has become an extension of your résumé. And here’s the real kicker: When thwarted by a webmaster who refuses to give ground, an average citizen can have a very hard time getting links that lead to offensive material off the first page of Google’s search results.

The problem with the Internet is not that there are too many writers. It’s that there aren’t enough gatekeepers with integrity, and there is no clear and consistent way to resolve disputes. Graffiti on the street can be erased or painted over. The critical and sometimes harsh opinions in newspapers and magazines undergo careful scrutiny by editors who get paid, in part, for knowing the legal definition of libel and how to avoid it. The text and images on today’s websites are not always vetted properly. In some cases, they are not vetted at all.

This is yet another reason to lament the dark clouds that have formed over the newspaper industry.

The only kind of text-based information that gets removed from searches immediately by Google are social security numbers and credit card numbers.³ Just about everything else is fair game and food for the machine.

Google may need to consider the loopholes in its “do no harm” mantra.

The lure of the Web is powerful in large part because of its lack of accountability. But that lack, combined with questionable integrity, tilts that power onto a path we should not continue down.⁴

What little control individuals have boils down to several unreliable options: Plead with the blogger or webmaster for mercy. Remind him or her of the real effects words can have on real people. Be cautious. Don’t be surprised if what you write in an e-mail ends up on a website. Ask the website’s host company to investigate the offensive material (sometimes the host will shut down a site if its content violates the host’s “terms and conditions”).⁵ Contact the advertisers on the website in question, and complain. As a last resort, hire a lawyer.

It would be nice if popular bloggers and webmasters of high-traffic sites joined professional associations, pursued continuing education credits, and pledged to uphold a code of ethics.

Some schools are starting to teach net etiquette and online citizenship. Some bullies, however, never grow up; for them, the online world is one giant playground.⁶

For the rest of us, our real power is our moral high ground. Unfortunately, integrity can’t be searched.

 •Mark Franek is a member of Cabrini College’s English department in Radnor, Pa., and former dean of students at William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia.

¹ Principals are on shaky Constitutional ground asking anyone to do anything, assuming the content was produced off campus. I’ve written about cyberbullying and the law before.

² Don’t Google my name and click on the offensive blog. You’ll only make it climb higher.  The blog in question is not worth your time–it was written by a BigSoccer.com blogger in response to a Daily News oped I wrote last year, criticizing Major League Soccer.  There is nothing more boring than reading a blog about soccer complaining about somebody else complaining about soccer.  Trust me.

³ Google will also remove names of people that turn up with pornographic images when Safe Search is turned on. Further, Google will remove text for copyright infringement reasons, but the process takes time. The material has to be researched and the copyright owner identified.

⁴ I didn’t write this sentence; the editor did. I like everything else she did with this piece. Don’t irritate the gatekeepers.

⁵ It should be no surprise that Web hosting companies are re-writing their “terms and conditions” policies with little or no mention of libel, defamation, and copyright infringement. Web hosting companies want clients/customers; they don’t want hassles with individuals calling up or emailing them about potential violations. It’s just one more example of passing the buck down the digital line. Newspapers are caught in the reverse-situation. Most newspaper people care deeply about journalistic integrity and net etiquette. And they have clear policies.  But most newspapers don’t have the personnel to vet user-generated comments, so they have quietly shut down all or most of their comment functionality. Unfortunately, this only increases the migration of people to parts of the Web where there is little or no accountability.

⁶ Maybe the parents of the next generation will think twice about giving their child a peculiar name.  Peculiar names and defamation are a deadly search combination.

 

What I’ve learned (about Education)

[In the style of Esquire's "What I've Learned" column.]

• Life’s a group project.  But there’s still a leader in every group.
• Society puts its best foot forward in kindergarten. 
• It never mattered where your mother went to college.
• Men make a lot more money than women do over their lifetimes, even though women are generally more emotionally intelligent than men.
• All I have to do is accept the consequences of what I do know.  Why is that so difficult?
• 90% of learning takes place outside of the classroom.
• For the other 10%, pray (or pay) for good teachers.
• We’ve all had good teachers.  They’re memorable.  They taught us–or gave us–something specific.
• I still have a model house (now with a sagging roof) that I designed in my high school architecture class.  Each day my teacher spent the beginning minutes of class modeling good design and showcasing possibilities.  For the rest of the class, we were left to our own creations.  Why can’t more classes be like that?
• You learn more from a better-than-average pet, like a dog, than you do from an average teacher. My dog’s name was Lichen.  She taught me how to throw sticks. And smile.
• While we’re at it: “Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.”  William Carlos Williams never quit his day job (doctor).
• Learning grammar out of a workbook is like fishing on dry land.  The only way to learn grammar–and graduate to style–is to read and write a lot.
• Fishing is sometimes a lot like Waiting for Godot.
• One time I caught a fish without even trying.  I left the bare hook dangling a few inches above the water and went to look for worms.  When I returned, viola!, a fish.  Sometimes ideas hit you like that.
• Most students have something valuable to teach the teacher.  Listen.
• You shouldn’t have to read between the lines.  If you don’t know what a writer is trying to say, the first question is: Who owns the problem?
• A Swiss Army knife.  That’s what a good education should be about. More process, less product.
• The Internet ranks a close second to every child’s best teacher.
• On Ezra Pound’s deathbed, he said he was right about 89% of the time.  That was before grade inflation.  So, what did he mean?
• I am not comparing myself to Ezra Pound.
• I don’t teach like I write, but sometimes I write what I’d like to teach.
• Praying Mantises don’t pray.  They evolve.
• The quality of education depends more on what’s going on at home than at school. Corollary: There are some tasks even Hercules can’t perform.
• Doesn’t mean educators should throw in the towel.
• Towels make good rags. Don’t believe me?  Use your Swiss Army knife.

 

Advice from Dear Old Dad

Times are Ruff!

(even for the brown-nosers)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An Annotated Description of My Philosophy of Education

As an English teacher who has a particular fondness for stories, I was struck by Steve Farber’s parables in his slim management book called The Radical Leap: A Personal Lesson in Extreme Leadership. I especially enjoyed the gruff observations of the mentor character—who encourages the narrator to “Read the Signs” all around him as a way of making sense of the world. Inspired by this approach, I recently borrowed a biology textbook from a colleague and studied the chapter titled “Plant Structure and Function” to see if the images there could help me explain my educational vision. It would not be a radical leap to suggest that sometimes all the answers we really need are right there in the book.

Diagram #1: Potato Rot

The disease potato rot, which nearly wiped out Ireland’s food supply in the 1840s, was caused by the fungus-like organism called “late blight” (phytophthora infestans). In schools today, watch out for similar “diseases,” which have the potential to wipe out good instruction. One such blight is an over-reliance on summative assessments, such as the recent emphasis on high-stakes tests. Drill-and-kill teaching methods, including lock-step approaches to all kinds of literacy, are the enemies of all inquiry-based instruction. Beware the blight.

Diagram #2: The Shoot and Root Systems of a Flowering Plant

A plant’s root system anchors it in the soil, absorbs and transports water and minerals, and stores food. Everything that happens above ground—all those optimistic buds and flowers—is dependent on what is happening down below. Why, in education, do we spend so much time pruning the easy stuff instead of concentrating on developing a deep root structure?  Good teachers set goals for lessons that stimulate the optimal development of students along a vast number of interconnected strands.

Diagram #3: Tendrils Help Plants Climb Up Supports

In most plants, leaves are the primary sites of photosynthesis. Generally, a leaf consists of a flattened blade and a stalk, or a petiole, which joins the leaf to the stem. A modified leaf called a “tendril” can help plants climb up their supports to reach more optimal lighting conditions. Teachers are like tendrils. They can help kids reach for their optimal learning conditions. Teachers do this in many ways. One way is by allowing students to construct new meanings out of their own understandings, and by observing others, learning as they “scaffold up.”

Diagram #4: A Busy Bee

Flowering plants and land animals have had mutually beneficial relationships throughout their evolutionary history. A busy bee, for example, gets the reward of food (nectar), while some of the pollen picked up by the bee will find its way to the next flower it visits (pollination). Education, in the grand scheme of things, ought to be similar. It ought to be fun, creative, active, and exploratory. What sweet nectars will our students discover in school? Where will these discoveries lead them? To what other flowers or lands will students take their new knowledge, and what new flowers will bloom? For children, the process of asking questions, investigating phenomenon, gathering evidence, and solving problems is a process orchestrated by the teacher, who is a busy bee indeed.

Diagram #5: Giant Redwood Trees Reach Skyward

Redwood trees are the giant products of photosynthesis, the process by which a plant uses light energy to make sugars (and other organic food molecules) from carbon dioxide and water. Education is a life-long journey. The opportunity to learn and pursue knowledge should be open and equal to all—while the specific pursuit may be different and varied in practice over the course of a lifetime. All trees—even redwoods—start out as saplings. Take care of them.  Their journey begins in school.

Diagram #6: A Household Plant Grows Towards the Light

The directional growth of plant shoots in response to light is called phototropism. For instance, if you rotate a plant on a windowsill, it will re-orient itself until its stems and leaves once again grow towards the light. Without it plants would be floundering around,  shooting off in all directions. Phototropism is like formative assessment, which engages teachers and students early enough in the inquiry process so that adjustments can be made. How would students and teachers know where they’re going without light–or a compass sensitive to light? They’d be like mushrooms down in someone’s basement.

One more . . .

Diagram #7: The Praying Mantis

Praying mantises don’t pray. They evolve.

 

Youth: Ready to Lead a Revolution?

[This piece was accepted for publication by the Philadelphia Daily News, but I retracted it two days before press time because I'm in the middle of a job search.  I don't want people to think I'm willing to throw my own students under the bus just to spill some ink.  To be fair: I teach some great students, but they occasionally say dumb things, just like I did back in college.]

Every so often—and for the good of the country—teachers ought to put aside their Dr. Jekyll persona and let Mr. Hyde out in public.  This is one of those times.

So much positive political hay has been made by the Obama bandwagon about the energetic involvement of young people in the recent Presidential election that you’d think college students and their 20-something peers are ready to lead a revolution.  I’m not so sure.

A student in one of my classes recently told me that “More kids are becoming evolved and understanding the importance of voting”—and there is some truth to this “evolvement.”  This past November, voter turnout for 18 to 29-year-olds (the so called “youth vote”) was about 53 percent. This number represents an increase of about 5% over 2004 numbers, and about 11% over 2000.  Progress.  Still, young people didn’t set any records.

The record was set in 1972, the first year 18-year-olds could vote for President and the last full year of the military draft.  Even the novelty of voting, the dread of the draft, and the continuing protests against the Vietnam War couldn’t inspire more than 55.4% of eligible young people to pull a lever.

The voter turnout for 18 to 24-year-olds over the past 36 years is even worse.  They have never broken 50%.

“It’s at least half so that’s better than less,” offered another student.

An incentive: “One way to give young people an incentive would be like school extra credit, or maybe holding a party/barbeque at the site to vote.  Although it might take away some of the significance of voting, it might be able to link voting with a good time.”

A cynic would say that young people will always have more pressing concerns, like doing their homework, giving their Facebook sites a lift, or trying to score.  And those are the ones who do vote.

The American poet ee cummings has said that those who care about “the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you.”  I’m not so sure about this, either.  Syntax matters.

“I know a lot of college students who didn’t register or fill out an absentee ballet.”

“An obscene ballot.”

“Absinthe.”

According to my students, the Internet, famous people, and parents can improve voter turnout.

“I feel the internet could help a person with politics because on the internet they write articles on the champaigns and put them on the internet.”

“Young people need to be informed in a way that is not so boring. Like when Brooke and Robin (Real World) promote voting.”

“In my high school government class my teacher tried to make us all register to vote.  Those who did not had to get a note signed from their parents saying they did not have to.  About half of my class did not register.  A lot of parents were very angry @ my teacher for trying to force us.”

I am very angry @ this student’s teacher, too.  Shame on my colleague.

Of course, the real world—lurking just around the school block, like a bully—will help immensely with citizenship training.

“Most students don’t pay morguages so they are uniformed.”

Dr. Jekyll would point out that polling older people who vote slightly more often than young people (by a few percentage points) would result in similar syntactical deformities.  Older people have more access to cars, public transportation, and polling places—but not necessarily to a better command of the English language.

Be honest.  Most of us wrote and said some pretty dumb things back in high school and college.  I know I did. 

My first handwritten love letter (this way way before email and text-messaging) was returned to me with my spelling and grammatical errors circled in red.  (She’s a lawyer now.)  In college, I wrote a paper titled “The Power of Edjucation.” I also misspelled my professor’s name.

For most of us, it takes years of paying rent and “morguages” to sort out the difference between a donkey and an elephant.  Most of us evolve. More Jekyll, less Hyde.

Just don’t count on young people leading a revolution.

Mark Franek lives in Philadelphia.

 

Review of The Best American Sports Writing 2008

A few years ago a friend gave me a worn copy of The Best American Sports Writing circa 2003 or 2004.  Since then I’ve devoured every story in all of the anthologies, going the whole way back to 1991.  The books have a privileged position on my bookcase, just beneath Shakespeare but above my old PlayStation games.

The series editor and guest editor usually do a good job of winnowing to the surface the best sports stories from print and online media each year and presenting them all in one place.  Some editions are better than others, of course.  In each issue you’re guaranteed to come across at least a few very poignant and uplifting stories.

The 2008 edition is no exception, though this particular one falls short of being exceptional or even really good. There are far too many stories about the Big Three (football, basketball, and baseball) and the line-up is almost universally male (all but one story).  In the context of stiff competition from other years’ performances, I’d give this season a reserved thumbs-up—sort of like losing in the first round of the playoffs.  What follows is a brief description of the stories in “The Best American Sports Writing 2008.”

Death in the Baseball Family. A tragic story about a minor-league foul ball that hits and kills a first-base coach.  The victim, a father of two boys, dies instantly.  How do the family members—and the batter—pick up and move on in the wake of this heartbreaking tragedy?

G-L-O-R-Y! Everything you wanted to know about professional football cheerleaders (well, almost everything).  The tone of this piece is hard to pin down—it’s equal parts heroic, mocking, and disdainful.  The story weaves interviews of cheerleaders into a narrative about the incredible passion these women have to put on tights and bounce for fifty-thousand-plus people every Sunday for sixteen consecutive weeks.  Why do they do it? Why do we care?

Forgive Some Sinner. This story is about sports writing and about the unique relationship between a father and a son (both professional writers).  Written by the son, Mark Cram Jr., this piece is a tribute to the father, but jr. doesn’t shy away from exposing sr.’s faults and talking candidly about the trials of working with words as a life-long profession.  Can a son help redeem his father’s legacy?

Above and Beyond.  A quest to find the tallest living tree in northern California’s Redwood National Park, this story would appeal to conservationists, backpackers, or to anyone who cares about the environment.  How tall is the tallest tree?  Have you ever felt the wonder of being/trekking/living in the woods?

Dogged. A six-time “US athlete of the year” in endurance running falls off a cliff and is left for dead on an abandoned trail.  Will her running companion—a dog named Taz—be able to retrieve help in time?  A story about survival . . . and a three-year-old reddish-brown mutt.

Following Terry Fox. Terry Fox is a legend in Canada, equivalent in name-recognition to our own Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan.  During the spring and summer of 1980, Fox ran more than halfway across Canada (a total of 3,339 miles)—logging nearly a marathon a day for over 143 days—on one good leg and one prosthetic leg, before finally succumbing to cancer.  Fox was twenty-two.  What drives a person to stare death in the face, and keep on running?  What is Fox’s legacy for cancer patients and for cancer survivors, including their families?

The Legend of Bo and Bo Knows Best. These two stories explore the incredible (but short) career of Bo Jackson, a dual-pro-athlete in football and baseball, and the making of a myth.  These stories also hit on the extraordinary marketing campaigns surrounding pro athletes.  Long before Nike’s Just Do It campaign, there was Bo Knows.  Do you want to know more about the making of a myth, via marketing?  Impossible aint nothing.

The Kick Is Up and It’s . . . a Career Killer. NFL kickers are a breed apart from the rest of their lockerroom behemoth buddies.  Kickers often don’t even have a locker in the main changing room.  This story explores the awkward and oppressive pressure—and often social ostracism—experienced by the professional football kicker.  What would it be like to have your entire career built on a series of moments, recorded in seconds, where one mistake could just about wipe out your legacy?

Casualties of the NFL. Have you ever wondered what happens to NFL players who get banged up and pushed around year after year and never find a way to properly save and prepare for retirement?  How do they live with their injuries?  Who takes care of them?  This piece explores the failure of the Players’ Union to address the widespread physical and mental ailments that follow an alarming number of ex-players, sometimes to an early grave.

Atkins a Study in Pride and Pain. Another story about residual NFL pains and traumas, except this story is really a non-story (by the usually insightful and delightful Rick Telander) about trying—and failing—to get an interview with Doug Atkins, seventy-six, the legendary Hall of Fame defensive end for the Chicago Bears.  If Telander were Thomas (who?), would this story have made the cut?

Hammering on Hank, The Rocket’s Descent, and Family Carries On After a Tragic Day at Rose Bowl. These three stories are all very short and all pretty dull. In this order: Hammering on sportswriters for hammering on Hank Aaron, Clemens’s shooting star of a steroid-drenched legacy, and a tragic day for a family but a wilted rose of a story.

Getting a Second Wind. A young girl’s suicide leads her father and mother to donate her organs to recipients around the country.  Her heart goes to Gainesville, Georgia, to a man named Len Geiger who brings new meaning to the phrase “getting a second wind.”

Golf in Geezerdom. This is a story about learning how to enjoy golf in the declining years of one’s life.  Would appeal to anyone who enjoys golf—and can see the game as a metaphor: don’t sweat the bogeys, the bunkers, or the traffic.  Enjoy the ride, even if the latter part is in a golf cart.

Joining the Club. Another story about golf, but this one’s a coming-of-age story about a young man and his one-weekend caddying experience with one of golf’s greatest female professionals: Patty Berg.  This story would appeal to readers who have had a mentor/coach influence them at a young age, or who have had a memorable run-in with a superstar—a run-in that lasts a lifetime.

The Old Ba’ Game. This is a fun little story about a peculiar annual game in Kirkwall, Scotland, where the town breaks out into a gigantic all-male rugby match, encompassing all the streets and buildings—literally no out of bounds.  The game plan: rival factions (two teams, made up of families and neighborhood-ties going back centuries) try to move a four-pound handmade leather ball either to the wall (“Uppies” win), or to the sea (“Doonies” win).  If you like rugby, or are curious about the “old world”—or just like Sky Sports—this story is for you.  It’s also played on Christmas.

Behind the Bamboo Curtain. This story looks at the polluted China—the parched, coal-dusty, dirt-poor areas spewing out ubiquitous “Made in China” products—the land no one got to see this past summer when China hosted the Olympic Games.  There’s not much sport in this story, unless you count the competition for economic and world domination, the by-product of which is rendering “new China” nearly unrecognizable to its agrarian past.

Murder by Cricket. A long story about cricket (the English-inspired game with those thick bats and strange wickets).  Thwack!  If you’re interested.

Go, Speed Flier, Go. Do you like flying? How about skiing?  How about doing both simultaneously. No kidding. Check out this adrenaline-rush of a story.

No Obstacles. Parkour is a French word that means, roughly, route. As a sport, or as an organized activity, parkour refers to the quasi-commando system of leaps, vaults, rolls, and landings designed to help a person avoid or surmount whatever obstacles lies in his or her path.  You’ve probably witnessed parkour in the most recent Bourne Identity movie, where Matt Damon (or the athlete playing Damon) runs—more accurately, runs-flies—over and through a series of buildings, fire-escapes, landings, and alleyways.  This story seeks the source of this relatively new phenomenon.

Run Like Fire Once More. Are you interested in ultra-endurance events of the body and mind?  Are you curious about Zen and the art of self-transcendence?  Curious about why people would pay good money to run 3,100 miles around a city block—the same city block—in Jamaica, Queens (New York) in a quest to win a five-dollar trophy, or merely (or should I say triumphantly) finish the race?

Scito Hoc Super Omnia. Do you like Philadelphia native Kobe Bryant and the LA Lakers of the NBA?  Want to learn more about this relatively aloof superstar?  He speaks Italian, some French, and quotes Latin on his website (Scito Hoc Super Omnia is Latin for Know This Above All Else).  He is one of the best players in the league.  Why can’t he get no respect?

No Finish Line. This is a runner’s story and it would appeal to anyone who runs regularly or trains for long-distance events, like marathons.  Can American runners ever catch up to their African counterparts who are currently dominating the world in long-distance running.

Not to Get Too Mystical About It. Nobody loves Kobe, but Steve Nash, that’s another story—who wouldn’t want this Canadian native to crash one of their kids’ birthday parties?  This piece gets into the “flow” of the Phoenix Suns star player, and follows him to China where a small group of NBA players competed this past summer in a series of games to raise money for Chinese schools and schoolchildren.

In the Nick of Time. If you like college football—specifically, Alabama football (“roll tide!”)—then this story will appeal to you.  From Paul “Bear” Bryant to Nick Saban, this piece buffs to a luster the Alabama football legacy and program, which has been in relative decline since the Bear retired (’82), and sheds some light on why southerners are so darn crazy about college football.

Baseball after the Boss. Those Damn Yankees—and those damn sports writers who continue to write about the Yankees.  This piece talks about the transition underway in the front office, from George Steinbrenner III to his sons . . . and ultimately to Hank, Jr., the latest scion to carry the torch for the franchise (a lot of money for very little flame, lately).  This story is less about the players, and more about the men at the top of the Yankee ziggurat.

Twenty-three Reasons Why a Profile of Pete Carroll Does Not Appear in This Space. This is a fascinating profile of University of Southern California (USC) head football coach Pete Carroll, who is a vexing combination of a whistle-toting-everyman, Yoda, CIA analyst, and friend.  This piece explores a man who does a lot of things well, and probably could be successful in just about any career.  But he chooses to coach college athletes and he keeps on winning.  He also helps quell the violence along the mean streets and gang-infested areas of Los Angeles.  All that before most of us roll outta bed.