"History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon." -Napoleon

"Little strokes fell great oaks." --Benjamin Franklin

January 31, 2004

January 31, 2004. Today is the birthday of Ray Kisbach and Allie Becker.

Wilkes-Barre suffered two hits Friday. A three-alarm fire roared through four apartments located above two businesses at 92 and 88 S. Main Street, leaving several people homeless. The blaze damaged apartments above Mike's Library and above a strip club. The second hit came from incoming Mayor Tom Leighton, who decided that the answer to the city's problems was to raise taxes. In fact, he calls for a 20 mil tax hike.

"Grandma's on the net again, the kitchen's not her home.
She used to make us cherry pies, and call us on the phone
She would talk to us for hours; now she leaves us all alone.
We miss her homemade biscuits, and I'll make this little bet,
If you want to contact Grandma, you'll have to surf the net."

Didja know that Barry Beck, 56, has been tying flies since he was 9?

Donald and Dottie Rabb reported seeing the Queen last night. Sailing right in front of their ocean-front Florida co-op was the brand new Queen Mary II sailing from Port Everglades at Ft. Lauderdale.

If you use Google for web searching, check out http://labs.google.com. A simple little download will give you a Google capability from your desktop if you are connected to the internet. This is not the Google-Toolbar for Internet Explorer.

In October, 1945, Weldon L. Everett and James Vance of Wyoming purchased the Market Street store building formerly occupied by H. W. Belles from Mrs. Minnie Knouse, Benton, and started remodeling the building for use as a meat market. Carol Vance still resides in the family home and the store is the production facility for the popular "Images of Christmas" line.

Miss Jessie Fine become the bride of Leonard Wenner in 1945. Proud parents were Mr. and Mrs. Herman Hess, Grassmere, and Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Wenner. Jessie at the time was in the Cadet Nursing corps, class of 1947, at the Geisinger Memorial Hospital. For the honeymoon, they drove to York to visit Mrs. Wenner's sister and brother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Ira McHenry.

Linda Lee Kline, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Lee Kline, escaped serious injury when she fell from the moving car of Mr. and Mrs. A.J. Hartman in March, 1946. Linda Lee was standing by her mother on the rear sear of the car. She pushed against the door handle and when the door flew open, Linda Lee tumbled out. The accident happened near the Orangeville bridge and the little girl was immediately taken to the Bloomsburg Hospital for X-rays. She had bruises and brush burns of the face and hands, and at the time was wearing a heavy snow suit, which saved her from more serious injury.

On February 22, 1946, Joe Dalto purchased the Ray B. Keeler building on Main Street. The building consisted of two store rooms and a dwelling. Mr. Dalto used the entire first floor for a confectionary and restaurant and Mr. Keeler moved his justice of the peace office and watch repair to another building. The Main Street building is now Village Ceramics & Gifts.

On March 30, 1946, Lillian and Betty Jane Yost became brides in a double ceremony at the Benton Presbyterian Church. The grooms were Ensign Lester J. Trout and James Edson. Rev. Barber performed the ceremony. Betty Jane's maid-of-honor was sister Geraldine Yost. Lillian's maid-of-honor was Isabel Yost.

Dr. Charles S. Sentner opened his office in Benton September 3, 1946. The Argus mentioned that they suspected he would stick around, since he purchased the "Ginter residence and office."

In an unanimous vote of 87 school directors in 1946, Ray M. Cole was renamed head of the Columbia County Schools, a position he had held since 1933. Words like "outstanding" and "no contest" were used to describe Mr. Cole, but in typical Columbia County style the secondary headline was "Salary is Set at Minimum."

An local ex-soldier lamented in a May, 1946, letter that "The Army says I can't wear my uniform after I arrive home because I'll be impersonating a soldier. The stores say I can't buy a suit of clothes because they haven't my size. The police say I can't go on the streets naked because it is against the law. I would gladly stay off the streets, but I can't find a house to live in and with the shortage of lumber I can't buy a barrel. Having been wounded, the Army won't take me back because I'm not physically fit."

We often write with great admiration about Sue Laubach and her travels around the U.S. and the stories that she would bring Back Home to Benton, PA. She was a wonderful family friend, an avid card player and an excellent story teller. Pat Boyle remembers that as a child growing up, she and her sister spent summers in Benton, two weeks with her aunt Sue and her husband Earl, two weeks with her Aunt Carrie Yost and the rest with her Grandma Perry.

Pat recalled how her Aunt Sue loved to travel. Sue had a viewmaster with slides from California and the Midwest and could whip out a great story about all those places. Pat recently recalled the story about Denver's The Brown Palace Hotel, a sophisticated establishment frequented by presidents, celebrities and tourists--a place that Sue could not afford. Sue and a lady friend by the name of Peg Davis met each other in Denver from time to time and then traveled west and east from their meeting.

Sue once called The Brown Palace Hotel and said she was a ailing senior and could never afford to stay there. The hotel management listened to her story and agreed to provide a room at a good price. Sue then walked from the phone booth across the street to the hotel, and was greeted by a wait staff and a wheel chair in the shadows of the sweeping nine-story atrium lobby, the soothing strains of a harpist playing during the Afternoon Tea, Sue was thrilled, and the hotel staff never figured out why Sue didn't look more elderly and more ailing...

Jim Edson has a needlepoint stool that came from Sue and Earl's house. Sue always said that Paulette Goddard gave her the wool for that stool.

Sue had a number of favorite sayings, including (about the weather) "It is Hotter than the Hinges of Hades," and (about people she had a momentary dispute with) "You don't have the brains that God gave an oyster cracker."

Husband and former Benton High School math teacher Earl Laubach passed away in 1984. Sue passed away two years later, in 1986, after spending the final five years of her life in Bonham's Nursing Home, Register, a victim of Alzheimer's disease.

January 30, 2004, 50 days from the official start of Spring. On this date in 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany, the same day as Franklin Delano Roosevelt's birthday. On this date in 1941, vice president Dick Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska.. He earned his bachelor's and master's of arts degrees from the University of Wyoming. His career in public service began in 1969 when he joined the Nixon Administration, serving in a number of positions at the Cost of Living Council, at the Office of Economic Opportunity, and within the White House. Mr. Cheney served on the transition team for Gerald Ford, and later was Deputy Assistant to the President and White House Chief of Staff, a position he held throughout the remainder of the Ford Administration. He served as the state's sole Congressman in the U.S. House of Representatives and was re-elected five times. He is currently serving as Vice-President of the United States.

In 1814, after capturing Washington, D.C., the British burned the U.S. Capitol, destroying the Library of Congress and its 3000-volume collection. In 1815 on this date, President James Madison approved an act of Congress appropriating $23,950 to purchase Thomas Jefferson's library of 6,487 volumes. A second fire on Christmas Eve of 1851, destroyed nearly two thirds of the 6,487 volumes Congress had purchased from Jefferson.

A year ago today, the NFL Dallas Cowboys defeated the Buffalo Bills, 30-13, in Super Bowl 28, the fourth straight Super Bowl loss for the Bills. The groundbreaking ceremony took place a year ago today for the Home Depot store at Buckhorn.

Coming up on Sunday, the Carolina Panthers sit in for the Philadelphia Phillies in the Super Bowl, taking on the New England Patriots; on Monday, Punxsutawney Phil hopefully will not see his shadow and using all the super powers of a special Pennsylvania ground hog will give us a well-deserved early spring; on Tuesday, the Guv presents his budget for the 2004-2005 fiscal year to a Joint Session of the State Legislature; on Wednesday, the State Legislature begins budget hearings

"He secured a position on an ice wagon
Where his collateral was soon frozen."
--W. C. Fields

Want to contact your representative? Here is the information for Rep. George Hasay of the 117th District. The phone numbers are (570) 477-3752 and (717) 787-1117. The email address is www.georgehasay.com .

A group called Nothin' Fancy, another of the groups appearing at the 2004 O.A.T.S. Bluegrass Festival over the July 4 weekend, has been been nominated for a Dove Award for Bluegrass Recorded Song of the Year, for the Mike Andes-penned tune "When The Angels Take My Hand" from their current release Once Upon A Road. Read the list of nominees for the 35th Annual Dove Awards on April 28, 2004 at the Gaylord Entertainment Center in Nashville. Have you made your O.A.T.S. reservations yet?

Thomas Hart Benton (1782-1858) was a U.S. Senator and a national figure in the Jacksonian era. He hailed from Hillsboro, North Carolina. As a young man, Benton helped farm, taught school, and studied law. He was licensed to practice law in 1806, became state senator in 1809, made lieutenant colonel during the War of 1812, and served on the staff of Andrew Jackson. Benton became editor of the St. Louis Enquirer in 1818. With the backing of conservative interests, he was elected U.S. Senator from Missouri in 1820. He rapidly became recognized nationally for his support of Jacksonian principles. Benton sought to guard against any encroachment of federal power within a state. By 1850, Benton had fallen out of favor in Missouri and was defeated for reelection to the Senate, though he served one term in the House of Representatives from 1853 to 1855. His later years were devoted to writing, and he died in Washington, DC.

Benton Township was formed from part of Sugarloaf and Fishing Creek Townships in 1850. The new township drew its name from Thomas Hart Benton, U.S. Senator from Missouri, a brother of Elizabeth Benton Mendenhall, wife of Eli Mendenhall.

The 2003-04 Celebrity Artist Series will present the Moscow State Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus on Sunday, February 8, at 3 PM in Mitrani Hall, Hass Center for the Arts. The event includes a full symphony, chorus, and violin, piano, and voice soloists.

On February 3, there will a PBS program entitled "Dogs and More Dogs" which examines whether (a) prehistoric humans choose dogs to become their "best friends" by domesticating wild wolf pups and then selectively breeding them for various desirable traits, or (b) wild wolves chose human beings as food providers. This Nova program looks at why there are so many breeds and at genetic disorders possibly caused by overbreeding.

One of the famous "manors" of the Penn family was established in 1769 . These divisions of land were set apart for the exclusive use of the Penns themselves, and in many instances were the last of the lands in the Commonwealth to be disposed of. The manors in Columbia County were two tracts of 530 acres each and were "situate on a large branch of Fishingcreek, eight or ten miles above the end of Fishingcreek mountain, or about two miles north of the present town of Benton. (You can see an 1850 map showing the Manor Lands as part of the Swarthout Story under FEATURES.) In the original survey the name of "Putney Common" was applied to those lands. The first recorded settler in the township was Benjamin Coleman, who bought land from Daniel McHenry and founded what was later the "Laubach farm." Jonathan Colley was another settler who came to this section prior to 1797. The house in which he lived was built near the Swartwout mill and a few of the trees in the orchard he planted was still growing just a few years ago.

During this week in 1945, an agreement was reached between Edgar Baker and the Charles W. Hess heirs for the purchase of the Benton Meat Market and equipment. Mr. Baker, a successful merchant and business man, moved to Benton from Talmar during the previous year and purchased the former W. W. Smith residence on North Main Street.

The house where John and Zane Unbewust live was built in 1876 by Eli Mendenhall, one of the first settlers of the Benton area. It was the birthplace of Dr. Frank C. Laubach.

"If Momma ain't happy, no one is happy."
--Karen Boston

"Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint." --Mark Twain

January 29, 2004

"Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out." --Chekhov

We are currently 1,648 miles from being Back Home in Benton, PA, and we compute that to be 30 hours and 13 minutes of actual driving. We normally drive about 450 to 500 miles a day.

Texas is a huge state (275,416 square miles and 254 counties). We remember hearing about the Texas rancher who bragged to a Pennsylvania farmer that he could get in his car at six in the morning, drive for six hours, spend an hour eating lunch, drive for another six hours and still not reach the end of his property. "Yeah," the Pennsylvania farmer said, "I had a car like that once."

The distance between Houston and Big Bend National Park is 603 miles--or ten hours driving at 60 miles per hour without even leaving the state. The state is 880 miles long if you drive across it on I-10 and tomorrow will be our third straight day of driving in the state. We enjoyed Dallas last night.

Keep your eyes on the name Parmalat. The 'Brazilian dairy unit operations in Brazil filed for bankruptcy protection, due in part to the effects of the accounting scandal at its Italian parent. The Brazilian dairy unit owes some $160 million and its total debt of other holding companies in Brazil could reach up to $1.8 billion according to reports filed in that country. In Italy, the CEO of the company has been jailed and 11 employees of the company arrested. Any how does this affect us? Hundreds of dairy farms in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.stand to lose millions of dollars in milk payments if the financially troubled food company defaults on payments to suppliers. About 600 of the state's estimated 9,000 dairy farms ship their milk to Parmalat. Farmers in most northeastern Pennsylvania counties along the New York border sell to Parmalat subsidiaries and the company supplies 70% of New York City's milk. Milk is sold under the Farmland Dairies label and other labels.

Many towns in Pennsylvania were named after taverns, and if you think about it for a bit you can come up with a couple in our own area. Eight miles outside of Lancaster on the Old Philadelphia Pike (Route 340) is the town of Bird-in-Hand which dates back to 1734. The town was named for a picture of a man with a bird in his hand. Also in the picture was a bush in which two birds were perched.

Each of the old inns in the area had a distinctive sign, and all the signs made a distinctive creaking sound as the sign waved in the wind. Signs in front of each Inn identified the inns in either English or German. The signs were frequently in the form of pictures, since German-speaking people couldn't read "Bird-in-Hand" and an English-speaking person could not make out "Vogel in Hand." Team drivers usually couldn't read and were simply told to stop at a certain Inn based on a description of the artwork on the signboard. The Old Philadelphia Pike included other signs including The Ship, The Wagon, The Plough, The Buck, White Horse, Black Horse, and The Hat.

Perhaps myth, perhaps legend, perhaps truth, the inn's name came from a discussion between two road surveyors as to whether they should stop at the Bird-in-Hand Inn or go on to Lancaster to spend the night. The more persuasive of the two men was of "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" philosophy. Both men remained overnight. Today the inn is known as the Village Inn of Bird-in-Hand.

"A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on."
- John F. Kennedy

"By the year 2000, we'll have eliminated the pot and pan."
- a representative of Swift and Company explaining that microwaves would eliminate the need for such dishes, 1966.

"Winning is not a sometime thing; it's an all time thing. You don't win once in a while, you don't do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing."
- Vince Lombardi

January 28, 2004. Today is Ellen Lensberg's birthday.

Wednesday, January 28, 2004. On this date in 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff from Cape Canaveral, killing all seven crew members. In 1945 on this date, Allied supplies began reaching China over the reopened Burma Road.

Local residents are waking to see 3-7 inches of new snow piled up this morning, following several inches of snowfall that fell between 5 and 8 PM. That snow fell on top of snow from the storm Monday night. Between the two storms, there is probably more than seven inches of snow on the ground. There was a two-hour delay in the opeing of local schools Wednesday.

Over a million school children will not have school is New York city today, but the weather there is not as bad as it was on this date in 1805 when a three-day snowstorm dropped two feet of snow.

Republican David Millard leads Democrat Paul Reichart by about 350 votes in a special election for state representative following yesterday's voting. Millard received about 51.7%, compared to Reichart's 48.3% with absentee ballots as yet uncounted. The two were duking it out to replace former Rep. John Gordner. The Press Enterprise reported that about 29% of registered voters turned out. The state House now has 107 GOP members, 94 Democrats and two formerly GOP seats vacant. On the national level, John Kerry defeated Howard "I have a Scream" Dean for his second consecutive victory in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Reminds us of the politician out Chicago way who called his wife to tell her that he had just won the election. "Honestly?" she responded. The other end of the line went blank.

Uni-Marts Inc. will merge with Green Valley Acquisition Co., a private company formed by Uni-Marts executives for the purpose of acquiring the chain. Uni-Marts operates 286 convenience stores in New York, Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania, including one Back Home in Benton, PA. They also operate Choice Cigarette Discount Outlets.

Robert Frost knew when he wrote inGood-Bye and Keep Cold," that "No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm
But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm."
No chance of that in the immediate future.

There is a widespread outbreak of a new email worm that spoofs the sender's email address; i.e., the person in the FROM: address is NOT the person who sent it to you. Please take the time NOW to update your antivirus software, and go to the web site of the antivirus software that you use and get the details of this virus.

The email-generating computer worm dubbed "MyDoom" was responsible for as many as one of every nine Internet messages sent around the world yesterday, slowing networks and flooding some in-boxes with the nuisance. MyDoom disguised itself as an email that had not been delivered properly, fooling recipients into clicking on an attachment that launched the worm.

Many people tell us they hate the new Luxeon light-emitting diodes that brighten up the night in front of many new automobiles. Perhaps those people are jealous of the up to 10 years or 100,000 hours promised for these lights, or perhaps they don't like the color of the lights, or perhaps they don't like the fact that they are very directional. But for the plain people, they are a godsend, and the Amish are dumping the halogen headlights they have been using in favor of the new lights in order to get longer battery life and more light--and more safety at night.

We love the state signs sprinkled around the Texas highways. The sign says:

Littering
Is unlAWFUL

The Benton News was not published Tuesday, January 27, 2004. We continue to have technical problems because of the lack of cell phone and internet service from Pecos, Texas, where we are spending the night.

If you should see Tami Letteer or Dexter Ribble, wish them a happy day and a happy birthday.

The best vitamin for a Christian is B1

January 26, 2004

Can't Sleep? Try counting your blessings.

To belittle is to be little.

What part of "Thou Shalt Not"
don't you understand?

Father Joe Hess, long associated with St. Gabriel's Church, tells the story from a few years back when he attended an Elderhostel at a Methodist Retreat Center at Lake Junaluska in the Great Smoky Mountains of Western North Carolina. Father Joe met a medical doctor from Minnesota who was also a member of the Elderhostel group. Father Joe told the doctor that his family was connected to the pioneer settlers of Columbia County in a mountain valley of The Fishing Creek in Pennsylvania. That prompted the doctor to tell Father Joe that his mother had originally come from Pennsylvania and that her maiden name had been Laubach. The good news of a newfound "kissing cousin" did not end there.

While returning home from Lake Junaluska about lunchtime Father Joe stopped at a roadside rest station near Baltimore where, while eating a sandwich, he became engaged in conversation with a lady eating next to him. Soon Father's Joe's wife, Helen, joined in the conversation and the first thing she said was, "Have you found another relative?" This prompted telling the newfound luncheon friend the story of meeting a somewhat distant relative while on an Elderhostel in North Carolina. When Father Joe came to the part of the story about the doctor from Minnesota’s mother and that her name was Laubach, the women’s eyes just about popped out of her head. It turned out that she was the secretary to Dr. Bob Laubach of The Laubach Literacy Foundation.

We wish Republican Dave Millard and Democrat Paul Reichart good luck in the special election tomorrow for the 109th House seat. We expect to see both names again running for the same seat in just a few months. Since we can't vote for either one, since we live in Benton Borough, we are neutral on this one.

We do like to poke around and read old newspapers. Today we look at...
• Benton Argus files for May 26, 1910: "Mr. S. B. Karns, of town, purchased a 50 h.p. Kessel-Kar. It certainly is a beauty." "William Perry is having his hotel painted, at Elk Grove." "Mr. Joseph C. Doty of near Cambra sustained a sun stroke on Tuesday. His condition is improved today."
• The Benton Argus for January 31, 1935. The Benton Meat Market, Chas. W. Hess, Prop., was selling "NUCO, Nut Margarine," and pushing "pure kettle-rendered lard." The Benton Bakery's "old fashion round loaf," "Good to the last crumb," was selling for "12 cents for the round loaf."
• The Benton Argus for January 17, 1935: The J. C. Knouse Service Station, "At the Bridge," was selling Tydol gasoline. The Benton Shoe Rebuilders, in the "Ernest Hess Bldg." (now the site of the Colonial Pharmacy) "guaranteed satisfaction with perfect shoe building." Men's half soles were $.85 and "the same for ladies at $.65." Albert Casey was serving lunches and meals at the Blue Plate Café. J. P. Laubach was selling "famous Reading Anthracite" to anyone who would call 30R2. The Benton Store Company was selling their "ribbed union suits for men at $1.29, and reduced their blankets to 79 cents each.
• The Benton Argus for February 14, 1935: "The quarantine on the Elk Grove Forestry camp, scheduled to have been lifted Friday, was renewed with the outbreak of another case of diphtheria." The Columbia County National Bank, T. Carl McHenry, Cashier and M. D. Pennington, President, promised to "serve you with the most modern, yet conservative practices in Benton."
• The Benton Argus for March 14, 1935: A party was held "in honor of Master David Strauch Friday in honor of his fourth birthday. The following little friends were his guests: Katherine Plank, Janet Laubach, Elaine Taylor, Barbara Ann Long, Barbara Ann Sherman, Ross Pennington, Jr.. Percy Brewington, Jr., Richard Casey, Huber Kline, Bobby Smith, Hubert Conner, Richard and David Strauch." Some of the students with perfect attendance records for February included, first grade: Dayne Hartman and Buddy Savage. Second grade: Evelyn Rose McHenry, James Chapin; third grade, Jennie Brewington. Fifth grade. Elery Hess, James Kline, Robert Brown, Ellsworth Doty, Gayle Harrison. Sixth grade: James Edson, Franklin Klase, John Mather, Delbert Doty, Caleb Hoyt, Betty Jane Yost. Seventh grade: Donald Rabb, Harry Lockard, John Unbewust, Robert Sands, Blanche Savage, Guild Conner. Eighth grade, Jane Dildine. Robert Miller, Bruce Sutliff.
• The Benton Argus for March 14, 1935: The Argus talked a great deal about "East Benton," mentioning residents like Raymond Baker and Woodrow Creveling. We are not quite sure where East Benton was. Can readers help us out? The paper also reported that "a school bus driven by Paul Laubach mired down in the mud Monday night and it required two teams to pull it out." Local schools were preparing to close for the summer, and the Iola school was the first to close. Donald Bennett was the teacher, and the school was scheduled to close April 17, with other schools in the district closing the next week. The Benton Grange "will hold a ham and egg supper at their hall March 30. Price 20 cents and 40 cents."

We looked at the copies of the Argus newspapers at the Chandler, Arizona, home of Helen Gammon, a native of Berwick, following a delicious dinner in "Joe's BBQ," Gardner, Arizona, the only restaurant we know of that includes a John Deere A in the middle of the dining room. We were especially interested in the June 13, 1935, issue of the Argus, where the death of Orange Township Genealogist Kenneth E. Yocum, then 29, was reported. Yocum was author of "the Pioneer Families of Columbia County." Helen Gammon typed his entire manuscript and placed it on a disk for us for future inclusion in the Benton News.

"The faintest ink is more powerful than the strongest memory."
--Old Chinese Proverb

January 25, 2004

At one time in the mid-1800s, Williamsport was home to more millionaires per capita than any other town in the United States.

Pennsylvania towns include both a Tippecanoe and a Tyler, too. We have a Forest as well as a Gump.

You can Waller in Hungry Hollow, be Savage in Thumptown, have Desire for Husband in Hope. But for some reason, the town of Vim does not have a corresponding Vigor.

January 25, 2004. Penny Fritz celebrates her birthday today. The coldest temperature we heard Back Home in Benton, PA, Sunday, was a minus 8, and that brought out the buckwheat cake eaters for the firemen's breakfast.

Three adjoining farms formerly owned by Alvan and Ellis Sutliff, just north of Benton and totaling about 279 acres were sold at public auction in August, 1963, according to the Benton Argus. Otto Little, proprietor of the Otto Little and Son lumber yard in Benton, purchased the main farm of 100 acres owned by Alvan Sutliff and David Floyd Sr. bought the 47-acre airport farm, also owned by Alvan. Lyle Benjamin, Waller, purchased the 83-acre farm owned by Ellis. Each had a house, barn and other outbuildings. A fourth farm, owned by J. B. Sutliff, 86 acres, remained for sale. The sale was attended by an estimated 500 persons. Also sold was a herd of 130 purebred Guernsey milk cows for a total of $25,000, with the top cow bringing $485. At least a dozen of the cows were purchased by Canadian dairymen and many others by herdsmen from New York. The sale of farm machinery totaled $16,598 and more than 100 tons of hay were sold for an average price of $30.50 per ton. John Merryman, Sparks, MD, was the auctioneer and the sale was managed by the Pennsylvania Guernsey Breeders Association.

We include a number of articles about the Golden Guernsey breed on the pages of the Benton News, and today with the continuing cold it would be a good day to refresh your memory of when butterfat was king.

In 1972, Ray Tomlinson sent the first email, using the @ symbol to indicate the location of the email recipient. Tomlinson knew that he needed to use a symbol that wasn't common in anyone's name, and his best choice was the "at sign," both because it was unlikely to appear in anyone's name and also because it represented the word "at." What is the origin of the @ sign? Well, 14th-century documents have been found that show the @ sign indicating a measure of quantity: the "amphora," meaning jar. The amphora was a standard-sized terra cotta vessel used to carry wine and grain among merchants. The use of the @ symbol led to its contemporary meaning of "at the price of."

Marine Corps Pfc. Skyler Galgon recently completed basic training at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, SC. , Skyler is a 2002 graduate of Benton Area High School and the son of Karen and Anthony Galgon, Benton,

We are writing from Quartzsite, Arizona, this morning, a guest at the home of Joe McHenry and his wife Gail. Joe was a son of Roland and Sadie McHenry and a graduate of Benton High School. Joe's family lived in Fishing Creek township "on the other side of Kramer Hill." Many will remember Joe from when he lived in Benton and teamed with Bill Arter to run Bill & Joe's Appliances, at that time headquarted in the present Kozy Korner restaurant for about three years following the death of the former owner of the Kozy Korner, Roy McHenry. Bill and Joe later moved their electronics business to Berwick when UHF television stations broadcasting started in Wilkes-Barre. Berwick seemed like a straight shot down the Susquehanna River for the line-of-sight signal and everyone wanted television. The move to Berwick was prompted by the poor television reception in the Benton area, a fact that has not changed a lot over the years.

Joe McHenry's son David, a coin dealer, is recovering in a Phoenix hospital, but now out of ICU. David opened a can of coins that had not been open in 40 years. A strange smell came out of the can and David became progressively sicker until hospitalization was required. The illness is of undisclosed origin at this point.

In Windows XP Home & Professional, you can use MSCONFIG to control windows start-up. Click start, run and type in MSCONFIG and hit enter. Click the startup tab at the top,, but don't remove the check marks next to anti-virus, any installed 3rd party firewall products or Windows systems applications. Remove the boxes next to programs that don't need to be starting up with Windows like photo editors, chat programs, file sharing programs, MS Office Applications, RealOne Player and mail programs. Your computer will work a lot better. Consult the HOW TO section of this web page for more information.

And speaking of the web page, which we do a lot of around here, you'll find that the Benton area goes back a long time. The first school in the Benton area was built in 1799. The McHenry Distillery was founded in 1812. The McHenry house at Stillwater, later owned by Silas McHenry, was the site of the Daniel McHenry cabin in 1782. The New Columbus Academy was built in 1859. Greystone near Camp Lavigne was the site of Cole's Mill in 1800. The Quaker Meeting House at Millville was built in 1796.

The term "bandwidth" refers to the range of frequencies, expressed in kilobits per second, that can pass over a given data transmission channel within a frame-relay network. The bandwidth determines the rate at which information can be sent through a channel--the greater the bandwidth, the more information that can be sent in a given amount of time. It is usually measured in bits-per-second. A full page of text is about 16,000 bits. A 56Kbs modem can easily move 16,000 bits in less than one second. The more "bandwidth," the faster data can move and the faster your connection.

Family friend Sue Laubach, wife of former Benton math teacher Earl Laubach, gave me a present when I was very young. It was a book on the wonders of the world, written by travel writer Richard Halliburton, who, if still living, would be 104 years old now. We read his illustrated books of riding an elephant over the Alps, flying a red bi-plane upside down over the Taj Mahal, and swimming the length of the Panama Canal. His adventures were captured in books like The Royal Road to Romance, The Flying Carpet, and Seven League Boots. His books were so popular that his publishers let him do whatever he pleased. In 1939, he tried to sail a Chinese junk from Hong Kong to San Francisco. His last written words were "Southerly gales, squalls, lee rail under water, wet bunks, hard tack, bully beef, wish you were here instead of me." His body was never found.

January 24, 2004. On this date in 1848, James W. Marshall discovered a gold nugget at Sutter's Mill in northern California, a discovery that led to the gold rush of '49 and which prompted lots of stories that Californians have been fond of telling us for the past couple of weeks. On this date in 1922, Christian Nelson, Onawa, Iowa, patented an ice cream confection that we now know as Eskimo Pie.

Ernest Borgnine is 87 and Oral Roberts is 86 today. Neil Diamond and Aaron Neville are 63.

After two days of walking around the 500,000 or so people camping on the desert of Quartzsite, Arizona, we are tired of our knees buckling and our belt not buckling. We'll just have to cut down on the date milkshakes so popular out here.

Late lies the wintry sun a-bed,
A frosty, fiery sleepy-head;
Blinks but an hour or two; and then,
A blood-red orange, sets again.
--Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)

Snow is forecast through Wednesday of next week, and Sunday night you'll need to watch the weather forecast closely. For a change of pace from television, try reading out loud something like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha. Pretend it is the opera and the fat lady is about to sing, put a lot of drama in your voice, gesture as though you were telling a foreigner how to drive to Derrs from Shickshinny, whip up a diabolical laugh and start out loud with "Once upon a time" and read the words "By the shores of Gitche Gumee,/ By the shining Big-Sea-Water," while all the time pretend you a beating up a drum set. You will be warm in no time.

We have talked about the sickness of Darlene Dickson Bartlebaugh in the past, and our update for today is grim. We won't go into detail, but your prayers are needed for the former Benton resident now living in the state of Washington and struggling with the shutdown of her liver. She was just released from the hospital after spending a week there, and is now under hospice care.

Bear hunters took 2,851 bears during the three-day season, and 149 during the extended season held in all or parts of eight counties that comprise Wildlife Management Unit 3D.

We found a poem we liked from "The Letter Box" dated back in 1941. It reads, "Benton is wonderful, Benton is grand, You must come to Benton, So you'll understand."

To the Van Campen, so clean,
Such beds! And such food!
It seemed like a dream.
The people so charming
A cheery "Hello"!
From all that you meet
As you walk to and fro.

The houses all painted
Shady streets, so clean
The flowers so lovely.
the fields so green.
The orchestra--the band
The young folks--so grand.
Real American town
The best in the land.

So now we know why
the people all say
When you once visit Benton
You sure want to stay."

Beth Holcombe wrote shortly after staying with husband Pier in a Country Inns and Suites, saying that the hotel chain has a book exchange program in which a person can take a new book from the hotel with their seal on it, and when the book is returned to the registration desk, $5 will be donated to the Laubach Literacy Fund, a program near and dear to those of us from Back Home in Benton, PA, the hometown of Dr. Frank C. Laubach, the literacy program's founder. The next time you are on the road, consider supporting Country Inns and Suites, a corporation that supports an important cause. Beth also points out that they "are reasonable, very nice, and usually have hot cookies for you in the evening."

On this date in 1901, the Morning Press asked the question "what is home without quinine?" Entertainment for the area came from "regular dances at Company F every Saturday night." Music was furnished by "Prof. Metnerall." An advertisement asked "boys or girls from 13 to 15 years of age" to apply at the Danville Knitting Mills. For those with dirty clothes, the Montour Steam Laundry, Geringer & Hodge, 269 Mill Street, suggested sending "a postal to two sixty eight." They apparently picked up and delivered, since they said "Wagon calls everywhere." The Polish Lithuanian Brewing Co, Danville, pumped out the "lager beer, porter & ale" to the tune of 500 barrels a day. On a more serious note, the paper wrote, "if England's coal supply will be exhausted by 1960, as some authorities predict, how long will it take to exhaust the country's gold supply at the present rate of cost of the Boer war?"

How did we get the Benton News out from Quartzsite, you ask? We found a little trick. We parked next to a motor home that uses a mobile two-way internet connection and we stole some of their wi-fi. It was a little like going into Starbucks, without the caffein.

Have your children while your parents are still young enough to take care of them.

Some say that the name of the DL&W Railroad stood for Delay, Linger and Wait.

January23, 2004

It is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all."
--James Thurber

"The whiter my hair becomes, the more ready people are to believe what I say."
--Bertrand Russell

Today is also the birthday of actor Humphrey Bogart, born in New York City in 1899 to an upper-class family. His father was a surgeon and his mother worked as a magazine illustrator. He began a career in medicine, but was kicked out of a college preparatory school and joined the Navy during World War I and was a ship's gunner. A splinter lodged in his upper lip during a fight while serving in the Navy, creating a scar and partial paralysis of the lip and that gave the actor the tight-set mouth and lisp that always identified the man. "Bogie" played the tough private eye, menacing gangsters, desperate criminals, burned-out GIs, an insane Navy captain, a greedy drifter, and in his most important role, played a romantic saloon owner in World War II North Africa. Bogart got his first Best Actor Academy Award nomination for "Casablanca" (1942) and was one of the top box-office draws of the 1940s. He also received Best Actor Oscar nominations for "The Caine Mutiny" (1954) and (also won in) "The African Queen" (1951).

On this date in 1973, President Nixon announced an accord had been reached to end the Vietnam War. It has been two years since President Bush proposed the biggest defense spending increase in 20 years; Kenneth Lay stepped down from his multiple posts at Enron; John Walker Lindh, a U.S.-born Taliban fighter, was returned to the United States to face criminal charges; and Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was abducted in Karachi, Pakistan.

Prospect Creek, Alaska, recorded the lowest U.S. temperature on record, 80° below zero, on this date in 1971. Temperatures in Benton aren't warm either. Forecast highs and lows Friday through Tuesday are 18/8, 20/13, 25/18, 32/21, and 31/2118/8 20/13 25/18 32/21 31/21. The actual temperature Back Home in Benton Friday morning was 3°.

Fans of Trace Adkins and his band can see them perform with George Jones September 13 at the 2004 York Fair. The fair runs Sept. 11 to 19. Tickets are available for George Jones and Trace Adkins for $25 and $28. For tickets, call 848-2033 or 848-2596 or visit www.yorkfair.org . Trace Adkins and his buddy Travis Tritt recently taped a guest appearance on the CBS sitcom "Yes, Dear" in which they play a couple of soon-to-be-released prisoners who aren't quite as rehabilitated as everyone thinks they are. While in a program designed to integrate them back into a working environment, Trace and Travis knock over a convenience store! Tune in Feb. 23 to see what happens to the boys after the heist.

And while we are on the subject of country, we should mention that the side panel on this web site has been updated to include the "Country Connection," a look at country and bluegrass music. From this page, you can get the latest information on Nashville News, the Grand Ole Opry, you can listen to live bluegrass and country music, you can find out about MerleFest and the O.A.T.S. Bluegrass Festival right here in Benton. All of the performers for the O.A.T. S. festival have provided us pictures and stories and when we aren't wrestling with the steering wheel of our motor home, we'll post them, too. Suggestions? Just tell us.

Things are slow this morning, so we though that we'd tell you about the farmer who went to church and found he was the only one who went that Sunday. The preacher asked if he should go ahead and preach, and the farmer told him, "I may not be very smart, but if I went to feed my cattle and only one showed up, I'd feed him." So the minister began his sermon and two hours later when he finished, the preacher asked the farmer how he had liked the sermon. The farmer answered slowly, "Well, I may not be very smart, but if I went to feed my cattle and only one showed up, I sure wouldn't feed him all the hay."

We were asked why we get up so early in the morning. It isn't because we don't have the need for sleep in our "decline" through the years, but rather that we have this intense eagerness to tackle the day. We'll sleep in when we hit the nursing home...

Reuters News Service issued a piece saying the rumor in the foreign exchange markets yesterday that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has been captured was not true. Well, of course it was not true. The administration will wait until early November to release that story.

Because of illness of a friend, Bill and Karen Boston head for Yuma today.

Upcoming...
• The Pennsylvania Auto and Boat Show at the State Farm Show Complex Wednesday, January 28, through Sunday, February 1, 2004. For more information, call 717 787-5373.
• There will be a "Red Herring" at the Alvina Krause Theatre, Bloomsburg from Feb. 4 - 29, 2004. Three love stories set in 1952, a murder mystery, and a nuclear espionage plot come together in this fable about marriage and other explosive devices. Tickets are now available from the BTE Office at (570) 784-8181 or 800-282-0283. Information is also available at www.bte.org. Six actors play 18 screwy characters in the production of Red Herring. The cast includes Elizabeth Dowd, Andrew Hubatsek, and Daniel Roth. Set design is by Ellen Lenbergs, granddaughter of John and Zane Unbewust. Ellen is becoming a welcome name at BTE, and has contributed greatly to recent successes.
• The Prairie Home Companion will broadcast live from Erie Saturday on PBS and will feature musician (harmonica) Spider John Koerner, dobro player Cindy Cashdollar, and one of our favorite performers acoustic guitarist Leon Redbone.
• The Benton Fire Company will hold its monthly buckwheat cake or buttermilk pancake breakfast Sunday from 7 AM. to 1 PM. Breakfast meat, eggs, home fries and gravy are included. Grits are not available. The cost is $5 for adults and $3 for kids age 4 to 12. Kids 3 and under eat free.
• The UPCOMING EVENTS on the side panel of this web page lists many more events of importance to the local area.

Ken and Ethel Kelsey head south for the winter Saturday, and will eventually pass through Quartzsite as part of their western swing.

And speaking of what is up with Garrison Keillor, here is a joke from him:
Q: How does the man-in-the-moon cut his hair?
A: Eclipse it!

The Benton News was written yesterday, but because of continuing email problems never went anywhere and is now lost. To the reader who wrote, "Just what is the problem with the email?" we respond that we are unable to use our cell phone for email, since we can't locate the connector cord and VERIZON just does not seem to stock them at the moment, we don't have access to phone lines, we can't get a SMTP from various wireless carriers we stumble upon, we--ah, phooey, just take our word for it, we essentially can't email at the moment. And when we forget and hit the SEND button, we send an email into wherever and it is lost. As Mother used to say, it is a "Mell of a Hess." Those who receive the email version of the Benton News will be out of luck for some time. In any event, we regret that it is currently impossible for us to respond to any emails.

Passing...
• Benton Argus article (August, 1951) about the death of Frank Hosler, 51, who died at Painter Den Club while vacationing. Mr. Strauch was with his grandson, Marc Strauch, at the time. Mr. Hosler "suffered with a heart condition for some time." He was born in Jonestown, and worked for the Department of Internal Affairs, Harrisburg. He was survived by his wife, Doris, a daughter Mrs. George Strauch; two grandchildren, Marc and Lynn Strauch; and a brother, Fred W. Hosler, Lynnwood, CA.
• Benton Argus article (January 4, 1948) about the death of Robert W. Rabb, 58, U. S. Marshall. Mr. Rabb died in the Philadelphia Presbyterian Hospital. He had been ill for three years and "his condition grew worse in the past ten months and for three and a half months he was hospitalized." He had been flown from the Benton airport to Philadelphia ten days before he died. Mr. Rabb had been United States Marshall of the Middle District of Columbia County since 1935, succeeding the late Percy Brewington. He was a druggist by profession, a graduate of the Temple University School of Pharmacy. The paper reported that his "wife and two children, Miss Betty, Philadelphia, and Donald, a member of the Benton High School faculty, visited him in the hospital on the day of his death.

Quote of the Day:
"To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing." --Quoted by Marland Earnest, Millville and other locations

Ford Motor Co. widened its losses to a reported $793 million in the fourth quarter, six times its year-ago loss. Revenue in the latest quarter rose 11% to $46 billion and worldwide vehicle sales rose to 1.88 million from 1.79 million in 2002. Its division of what we used to call "foreign cars" reported a pretax profit of $108 million for the quarter, compared with a loss of $388 million a year earlier. The cars in that division include Volvo, Land Rover, Jaguar and Aston Martin.

An article in the September, 1945, edition of the Benton Argus reported that approval for an airport was given to Benton by the state. The article reported that the Borough has an option on the Harold Yost farm and "have been asked to transfer it to a group of thirty local men who are interested in flying." The State Aeronautics Commission granted approval in the name of Doyle Sutliff, who made the application.

We recently mentioned Winton Laubach's account of the apprehension of a criminal in Benton. Father Joe Hess wrote that he heard this story many years ago, probably near the time of its happening, but as Father Hess remembers it, the story also concerned his cousin Bobby Detrick. Donald Rabb says that his uncle Art Rabb was the sheriff of Columbia County at that time and he was on the porch of his parent’s drug store directing a group of volunteers who were stationed at the old bridge near what is now the golf course in Edsons, PA. His father and several others had shotguns and were hiding on both sides of the bridge. Donald remembers asking his Uncle Art what he planned to do if he saw Shaeffer driving past the store and the sheriff jokingly told him that he would go inside the store right away. Actually, Shaeffer did drive by the store but no one recognized him. After his capture, Shaeffer was interviewed, he was asked if he was scared while making his get away. He said the only time that he was scared is when he saw the men at the bridge above town hiding on both sides of the bridge with shot guns. He said he was fortunate that they did not recognize him.

The Press Enterprise reported yesterday that Alicia Schlichter scored 26 points for Benton giving the Tigers a 51-47 win over Sullivan County in girls basketball Tuesday.

We are in Palm Springs, California, today, and will be in Quartzite, Arizona, Friday. We wanted to see Bill and Karen Boston while we are in Quartzsite and received the following email directions from Karen: "We're in Quartzsite at La Posa South Campground. It's the 2nd BLM land on the left coming out from Quartzsite on 95 south. What a place! You'll see. Oh! We're 1/2 mile in on the right just past the port-a-potty. Love, Karen

Those directions may sound strange to the casual reader, but to understand them you need to know more about Quartzsite. The stop in the Mohave Desert is 125 miles west of Phoenix at the intersection of Interstate 10 and U.S. 95, near the Colorado River, in the shade of the Kofa, New Water and Plomosa Mountains. Many campers just "squat" on BLM, Bureau of Land Management, land, where camping is free and the weather approaches perfect.

Quartzsite was established in 1867 on the site of Old Fort Tyson, a privately built structure constructed in 1856 by Charles Tyson for protection against Indian raids. Named because quartz was occasionally found in the area, the name evolved to Quartzsite simply because someone didn't know how to spell. Beginning when the nights start to cool around the country, nine major gem, mineral, and over 15 general swap meeting shows attract more than 1.5 million people. Agates, limonite cubes, gold, and quartz are found in the area.

The Government has been here, too. The Hi Jolly Monument in town honors the Arab camel driver, Hadji Ali, who took part in a failed 1850's U.S. War Department attempt to use camels as beasts of burden in the Arizona desert.

And speaking of the Government, the Pentagon loves studies and one of the latest was designed to determine if it was safe to allow soldiers to vote over the Internet. The study concluded that the system is susceptible to fraud and should be scrapped. The bottom line of the study was simply that "It's not possible to create a secure voting system with off-the-shelf PCs using Microsoft Windows and the current Internet." A Pentagon spokesman thanked the experts for their advice and then chose to ignore it. "We're not going to stop it," a Pentagon wiz kid, possibly with family roots in Chicago, said.

The Guv addresses a Joint Session of the State Legislature on February 3rd to present his budget for the 2004-05 Fiscal Year. We suspect that the Guv will do much better on this budget than on the last one.

Quote of the Day:
"My work is done, why wait?"
--George Eastman (1854-1932)

We talked about George Eastman, the American inventor, a few days ago. Eastman developed a process that simplified the method of making photographic plates, and permitted the mass production of them. He introduced the Kodak box camera and other boons to photography. Eastman made a fortune and donated much to universities, dental clinics, and musical institutions. At the age of 77 and plagued by a painfully debilitating spinal disease, Eastman put his affairs in order, wrote a note saying "My work is done, why wait?" and committed suicide.

Words Worth Repeating...
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."
--The Declaration of Independence.

It has been a year since Max Hartman fell off a ladder in Florida, suffering a cut lip, skinned nose, sore jaw, really bent up glasses and a broken right arm. And since he fell and broke an ankle a year before that, we felt that it best that someone watch over the man this year. That is why he is Head Navigator on our current trip through California.

Why do some sausages have meat at one end and corn meal at the other? Because it is hard to make both ends meat.

Winton Laubach reminded us that during his senior year in high school, "the winter of '37-'38, newspapers had been highlighting the manhunt for David Shaeffer, a murderer who had escaped from the state prison. Bruce Sutliff, my classmate and close friend, was walking home from a nighttime school activity. He was between Kozy Korner and the bridge, a section which was icy at the time. A car speeding by him, skidded on the ice and slammed into the bridge. Bruce was able to open the driver's door and discovered that the driver was unconscious and that there was a revolver on the floor. Bruce then got to the passenger's identification and learned that he had the escaped convict. Doctor Confair was contacted and the captive was given an injection to keep him subdued until the authorities arrived."

Quote of the Day:"
"I want to rush for 1,000 or 1,500 yards, whichever comes first." --New Orleans Saint running back George Rogers

We take some things for granted today. In a 1926 column from the Benton Argus entitled, "The dream of years is to come true," readers were told that "there seems now to be no obstacle in the way of building of Route No. 237, from Benton to the Luzerne County line." The article says that bids will be advertised for the building of the road and are to be opened on February 6. "If the low bidder's figures are within the estimate of the engineers, and the contractors responsible, there should be work started on the road by March 1st, as much of the grading can be done in the winter as well as the summer." The promised route would up the "dug road" using "the present road at the summit of the hill at the first field of Jacob Minnier, and from there on goes in a straight line, touching the old road in but one part and that for a very short distance." The article states that four miles of road will be completed in 1926 and will leave only about four miles of dirt road between here and Shickshinny, "which will no doubt be contracted for before the close of 1926."

Two lovers who had been apart for some time were reunited on a foggy day. One whispered to the other, "I mist you."

The northernmost town in England for which Berwick was named has been listed at various times as Berwick-on-Tweed and Berwick-upon-Tweed, both with and without hyphens. The letterhead of the town uses both the hyphen and the word "upon." The town is in the English county of Northumberland for administrative purposes.

We celebrate the life of Martin Luther King Jr. with a federal holiday today. The preachers and the politicians will tell stories of him doing battle with segregation, his many eloquent speeches, and his never-ending fight for voting rights. Nevertheless, the FBI dubbed him the "most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country." If King were alive, he most probably would preach that only through treating our enemies as children of God will we will ever have global security. He would arch his back and steadfastly maintain his belief in the power of nonviolence. Today would be a good day to sit back and reflect on the teachings of Dr. King.

Edgar Allan Poe was born on this date in Boston in 1809. His poem The Raven appeared in the New York Evening Mirror in 1845. He was also a journalist and edited the Broadway Journal, but was best known for his poems and short fiction, His short fiction is exemplified in Ligeia (1838), the tale Poe considered his finest, and The Fall Of The House Of Usher (1839), which was to become one of his most famous stories. The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) is considered by some to be the first detective story. His musical, mellifluous style is shown in The Raven (1845) and The Bells (1849). Edgar Allan Poe died October 7, 1849, in Baltimore after he was found unconscious on a Baltimore street. The Baltimore Clipper reported that Poe had died of "congestion of the brain."

Once upon a midnight dreary,
while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping,
suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
" 'Tis some visitor," I muttered,
"tapping at my chamber door;
Only this, and nothing more."
--from The Raven, by Edgar Allan Poe.

James Watt (1736-1819), Scottish inventor and mechanical engineer, solved the condensation problem with steam engines, thus improving the steam engines invented by the English engineers Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen. Such engines were used at the time to pump water from mines. He was born in Scotland on this date in 1736.

Our next Friday the 13th comes along in February. But why is Friday the 13th considered an unlucky day? Lets start by looking at Friday, October, 13, 1307, when the Pope and the King of France carried out a secret death sentence against "the Knights Templar" and ordered the torture and crucifixion of their Grand Master, Jacques DeMolay, who was arrested, tortured and crucified before he was killed. The Templars were terminated as heretics, never again holding the power they once had.

The Romans dedicated the sixth day of the week to their goddess Venus, and later the Norsemen adopted the Roman method of naming days. Their closest translation for Venus was Frigg, or Freya, which eventually evolved into Friday. The sixth day of the week has often been considered unlucky, as has the number 13. The combination, which occurs one to three times a year, leads to the inevitable superstition.

The Scandinavian belief that the number 13 signified bad luck sprang from their mythological 12 demigods, who were joined by a 13th demigod, Loki, an evil doer. The number 13, in the Christian faith, is the number at the Last Supper, with the 13th at the table being Judas, the traitor. Christians combine this day and number and give it special significance.

Whether or not you consider Friday the 13th as unlucky, superstitions stem from beliefs man used to explain events beyond his control. As facts and scientific reasoning is introduced and people still do not dispel the ancient beliefs, these beliefs become superstitions. Today's beliefs may very well be tomorrows superstitions. Until then, carry an acorn to bring good luck and ensure a long life!

The Carolina Panthers kept the frazzled Philadelphia Eagles out of the Super Bowl! The Eagles, the NFC East champion and 13-4 coming into yesterday's game, became the third team to lose three straight NFC title games and the first to lose back-to-back title games on their home field. The Panthers knocked quarterback Donovan McNabb out of the game with a rib injury and intercepted four passes in their 14-3 victory for their first NFC championship. The Panthers now head to Super Bowl XXXVIII in Houston and a meeting against the AFC champion New England Patriots on Feb. 1.

"Terry from Detroit" gave us the following information to pass along to our country music fans: Here are some sites that will help Country fans.
WSM650, Nashville Radio is found at www.wsmonline.com
The Grand Ole Opry can be found at http://www.opry.com/
The 50,000 watt WWVA can be found at www.wwva.com
WWVA Jamboree can be found at http://jamboreeusa.com
We are making up a "country music page" for inclusion in this web page, and we invite you to send in your favorite country music references.

Jim Laubach wrote that "the photo of the B&S #1 {Bloomsburg & Sullivan
Railroad) at the water tank looked familiar," except that the "1" on the number plate is backwards. We have no idea how the picture became reversed, since we have the original of the photo as displayed on the web page. Jim says that the caption on the back of his photo reads "Bloomsburg & Sullivan Railroad, Stillwater Water Tank." The four crewmen are James Casey, Charles Ash, John Banting and Roland Hess." Jim writes that "Roland was my Aunt Viola Bray's father and was killed in Bloomsburg when he fell off a signal tower in front of a moving train. James Casey was Mrs. Chapin's father." You can examine this photo in detail by going to the side panel on this web page, under Jamison City, picture entitled "B & S Railroad.jpg." Maybe people are right when they say we don't know North from South!

Men are such handy things to have around the house! A local husband decided to wash his sweatshirt. Seconds after he stepped into the laundry room, he shouted to his wife to find out what settings should be used on the washing machine. "It depends," she replied," What does it say on your shirt?" He yelled back, "Penn State."

In area happenings...
•There will be a benefit magic show for Greg Kelchner Saturday, January 24, starting at 7 PM in the Benton Elementary School auditorium. Mood Magic will perform illusions, David Jay will demonstrate mind reading and the master of ceremonies will be Keith Culver. Donations will be accepted at the door. Greg has been diagnosed as being in an advanced stage of ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. ALS is a progressive neurological disease with no known cure. Greg and his wife, Michelle live in Benton with their daughter Teela.

• We all know how the Methodists can cook, and they will do it again with a ham supper Saturday, January 31, at the Benton United Methodist Church on Main Street. The menu includes ham, mashed potatoes, gravy, corn, string bean casserole, pickled cabbage, gelatin salad, pie or cake, ice tea/hot tea/coffee. The cost is $7.50 for adults, and $3.50 for kids from 6-12. Those under five are free.

• Indoor target and video archery leagues are held at Suttons Archery on Camp Lavigne Road. The leagues for all ages and abilities start next week and run for 10 weeks.
• The North Mountain Fire Company will hold a coyote hunt Feb. 5-8. There is a $15 registration fee. More information and applications can be obtained by contacting the North Mountain Fire Company, 991 Elk Grove Road, Benton. Last year's kill of eight coyotes ranged from 29 to 41 pounds.
• Ora Karns, 21 Livi Street, Lightstreet, will be 91 February 27. Ora has been having some medical issues, but seems to be on the mend. Her many Benton friends who remember her from her years of association with the Horace Harrison Grocery Store might want to fire off a card to Ora at her Livi Street address, via the Bloomsburg 17815 post office. A phone call would be a nice gesture, too.

• Travis Dayne Kline, a senior English education major, made the Dean's List at Bloomsburg University. He is student teaching during the spring semester at Central Columbia High School. He is the son of Tom and Denise Kline and grandson of H. Dayne and Ruth Kline.

• IND Life Tech of Vancouver, Canada, plans to expand into the Mattern Building, Mildred. The company's produces fertilized cattle embryos and freezes them for export to China to improve dairy herds.

We rearrange the canned goods this morning, tidy up a bit, cast a last look around the beautiful California countryside, get our final hugs, say our final goodbyes to two great people, seven Icelandic horses, five well-trained dogs and one reclusive cat, and start the engine. All good things regretfully come to an end! We head south on the 101 this morning to Dockweiler State Beach, Playa Del Ray, California, where we'll go back to the mode of not having good email service. We will, however, from time to time update the news and we'll report where we are. Our plans for the immediate future includes Los Angeles; Ontario, California; Palm Springs; Quartzite, AZ, where we'll see Joe and Gail McHenry and Bill and Karen Boston; then on to Phoenix, Chandler and Tucson; through Tombstone and Bisbee. We'll consult a map at that point and chart a course from there.

"People generally quarrel because they cannot argue."
--G.K. Chesterton

"Everyone wants to be Cary Grant; even I want to be Cary Grant." - Cary Grant

"Those who give have all things. They who withhold have nothing."
--Hindu proverb

"I am always ready to learn, but I do not always like to be taught."
-Winston Churchill

January 18, 2003

A nice part of getting older is that you don't lose any of the ages that you have passed through.

It's the birthday of Joseph Farwell Glidden, born in Clarendon, New York, in 1813. We talked about Glidden on January 6 as we crossed the northern border of Texas where his impact on the area was significant. For centuries, cowboys followed herds of cattle to make sure no harm came to them. Glidden saw a wooden rail with nails protruding from it keeping livestock at a distance. He rigged up an old coffee grinder to twist strands of wire around each other, then clipped off the protruding ends to make barbs. His barbed wire factory made him a very rich man and brought an end to the Wild West. Long cattle drives were no longer necessary, and longhorn cattle began to disappear since it was no longer necessary to breed cattle tough enough to survive the range.

Pilot Eugene B. Ely landed the first aircraft on a ship, the USS Pennsylvania, an armored cruiser, in San Francisco harbor on this date in 1911. The Navy yard at Mare Island constructed a temporary wooden platform over her after deck and gun turret. Ely managed to halt the plane on the 120 by 30 foot platform by using a series of ropes, with sandbags at each end, stretched across the temporary deck and held above it by boards laid along its length. Hooks were attached to the airplane's landing gear to catch the ropes, and the weight of the sandbags brought the machine to a rapid halt. In case of an overrun, Pennsylvania's crew rigged canvas awnings in front and to the sides to catch plane and pilot. This arrangement eventually lead to the arresting gear and safety barrier system that is employed on the Navy's aircraft carriers to this day.

It is the birthday of...
. Archibald Leach, born on this date one hundred years ago today in Bristol, England. Most know him as Cary Grant.
. Norvell Hardy (1892-1957), born in 1892 in Harlem, Georgia, and known to the world as Oliver Hardy. He studied law and sang professionally before he met Stan Laurel. Together, they won an Oscar for a short film called The Music Box, in which they attempted to get a piano up a steep staircase. If you want to know anything about any of the 423 movies Hardy made, turn to http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001316/ .
. Alan Alexander Milne (1882-1956), born in London in 1882. He authored the "Pooh Books," like When We Were Very Young, Winnie the Pooh (aka Edward Bear), Now We Are Six, and The House At Pooh Corner. The four Pooh books were printed in over 25 languages, including Russian (Vinnie Pookh) and Latin (Winnie Ille Pu). A stroke in October 1952 left Milne invalid although he lived for another three years and three months.

There once was a Dormouse who lived in a bed
Of delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red),
And all the day long he'd a wonderful view
Of geraniums (red) and delphiniums (blue).
--A A Milne, The Dormouse and the Doctor, which appears in When We Were Very Young.

Annabelle Follmer, 86, (Nov. 5, 1917-Jan. 17, 2004), Main Street, died Saturday morning at the Bonham Nursing Center. She was a daughter of the late William and Edith Mae Harmon, Centralia. She was preceded in death by her husband, Freas S. Follmer, on Dec. 29, 1986. Surviving are two stepsons, Calvin Follmer, Hometown, and Samuel Follmer, Unityville; numerous stepgrandchildren, stepgreat-grandchildren and nieces and nephews. Funeral services will be held 11 AM Thursday at the McMichael Funeral Home, Inc., with burial in the Benton Cemetery. There will be no public viewing.

In 1877, six convicted Molly Maguires were hanged in Pottsville while four more were hanged at the jail in Mauch Chunk. In all, twenty Irish immigrants, suspected of comprising a secret terrorist organization called the Molly Maguires, were executed in Pennsylvania for the murder of sixteen men. The event became known as "The Day of the Rope." There has been disagreement over who the Molly Maguires were, what they did, and why they did it, as virtually everything we now know about the Molly Maguires is based on hostile descriptions of their contemporaries.

A book available from the Columbia Country Historical Society, entitled Molly Justice, describes this turbulent era. Molly Justice is about Pat Casserly and his family in 1875 Mahanoy City. It conveys a time of real turmoil in the heart of the hard coal region. Molly Maguires and rival Welsh Modocs fight for control of the region and justice is one sided. Fighting between rival volunteer fire companies, one Irish and one Welsh, helps to highlight the action as Pat and his son Bernie are caught between the opposing forces.

A reader asked about the impact to Santa Ynez of the Michael Jackson hearing out here Friday. We'll try to put the location in perspective. The 2,738 square mile County of Santa Barbara, is roughtly divided into the upper section and the lower section. The hearing where Michael Jackson pleaded not guilty Friday to seven felony counts of child molestation and where he blew kisses to the crowd was held 34 miles north from Santa Ynez in Santa Maria, in the upper half of the county. The county seat of Santa Barbara is 29 miles south of Santa Ynez. Jackson's Neverland Ranch is three miles east of Santa Ynez.

The conservative ranchers of the Santa Ynez area don't give a hoot about Michael Jackson, since he isn't a rancher and does not seem to engage in activities common to ranchers. Dancing on the roof of a Suburban doesn't help win Michael friends in the area, either. But it was hard to ignore the commotion when a two-mile backup on Figueroa Mountain Road, a two-lane path through the foothills similar to the Waller Road, gets clogged with two thousand or so fans. And those invited inside the Neverland Ranch were not expecting to see the anatomically correct male bronze statue in front of the main house. A local resident was quoted as saying, "Call it Mercury...nearly rising."

Readers seem to love to read about the ability of Google to solve problems. Here are three more:
. Airline Flight Tracking. Enter an airline name or code and a flight number (e.g.: AA105 or American 105) and you'll get two links to flight information, from Travelocity and fboweb.com. This feature does not work for puddlejumpers or cropdusters.
. Vehicle ID Numbers. Enter a Vehicle ID number (VIN) (e.g. JM1BJ225431170254) and you'll head for carfax.com for a page with more information about the year, make and model of a specific car.
. U.S. Postal Service Tracking Numbers. USPS tracking numbers generate a direct link to the USPS website with information about the shipping status of a package.

Pennsylvania is expected to pull in $422 million in federal grants, the seventh-highest in the nation, in the spending bill awaiting Senate action, according to data released Thursday by a fiscal watchdog group and reported by the Associated Press. Most of the pork was shoveled on the plate by the Senate Appropriations subcommittee.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) would celebrate his 298th birthday today. Franklin signed every document associated with the founding of the Republic. He was a scientist, an inventor, a statesman, a printer, a philosopher, a musician, and an economist. He invented bifocals and the glass harmonica, charted the Gulf Stream, and chased tornadoes. He loved to flirt and succeeded in this endeavor into his seventies. In 1731, he founded America's first circulating library so that people could borrow books even though they could not afford to buy them. Beginning in 1732, he authored, printed, and published Poor Richard's Almanac, an annually published book of useful encouragement, advice, and factual information, It included corny advice like the Benton News often quotes, tidbits like Early to bed and early to rise, Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise; Many have quarrel'd about Religion, that never practis'd it; and In this world nothing can said to be certain except death and taxes.

Although he was born in Boston in 1706, Philadelphia is remembered as the home of Ben Franklin. In Philadelphia is his gravesite and the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial and The Franklin Institute Science Museum.

The man is short, balding, ornery and downright ugly. We're not looking in the mirror this time, we're talking about Popeye who made his first public appearance on this date in 1929 in Elzie Segar's comic strip, "Thimble Theatre." Popeye has always been the underdog, but he has a long fuse and plays by the rules until he is pushed too far. When pushed too far, we love to hear him say,"Tha's all I can stands, and I can't stands no more!" His heart throb is the sex symbol Olive Oyl who, like the song, is "straight as a chalk line and right as a rule." She has a pickle-shaped nose and a fickle heart and this "goil" really puts Popeye through his paces. Her only real competition is spinach. Spinach growers over the years credited Popeye with a 33% increase in U.S. spinach consumption, much to the dislike of many children! Today, Popeye-brand canned spinach is the No. 2 brand behind Del Monte.

"Thimble Theatre" originally revolved around Olive Oyl's family. Popeye was introduced as a minor walk-on character, but "muskled" into the limelight eclipsing other characters. Popeye brought with him the "infink" Swee'Pea, J. Wellington Wimpy, a hamburger-obsessed moocher; and Brutus, the hairy "heavy" with the glass jaw.

Popeye made his first movie in a 1933 Betty Boop cartoon entitled Popeye the Sailor. Almost 600 Popeye cartoons were made and still viewed on The Cartoon Network. Paramount Pictures released a musical in 1980 in which Robin Williams played the part of Popeye and Shelley Duvall played Olive Oyl.

Tom Ridge sailed through Senate confirmation hearings a year ago today on his way to becoming the nation's first Homeland Security Department chief.

Hard drives fail, data is lost, a fact of life... If you are saving pictures of your favorite places and people on your hard drive, you are at risk, and we know you are knowingly nodding your head up and down. But it can happen to you! Backups are easy, especially with Windows XP. You need a CD or DVD burner, so buy one if you don't have one. Burners are under $50, ones that plug into the computer a little more. CDR rewritable blanks are about 20 cents a disk. Most CD burners come with Ahead's Nero or Roxio's Easy CD Creator and Windows XP comes with a tool integrated right into the operating system. Read the directions and back up now!

The Press Enterprise features a story this morning about the 82 hunters participating in the second annual weekend coyote hunt put on by the United Sportsmen of Huntington Mills. And while you turning the pages of the paper, head on over to the sports section and read about Benton beating rival Millville in overtime, 55-53, the Tigers fourth win in the last five games. The team draws lots of spectators, and you should be one of them!

A local plumber was holed up in a sewage holding tank trying to get it pumped out. His boss had too many appointments, too many broken pipes, too much pressure. He told the harried worker to hurry up. The worker replied that he had no status with the company, no benefits, he was making minimum wage, the temperature was well below zero, he was back home in Benton, PA in the middle of the coldest winter that he could remember, and he was pumping sewage out of a hole in the ground. He simply asked his boss, "Just what in the world could you do to further punish me?" Robert Parks wrote that this story is about the same plumber who fell into the septic tank; he didn't drown, but he sure went through the movements.

Sing a song of Winter,
The world stops dead;
Under snowy coverlid
Flowers lie abed.
--Cosmo Monkhouse

To the reader who asked about buying a cell phone with built-in camera, we say "go for it." Remember that in the Benton area, VERIZON still provides the best reception. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, Audiovox unveiled their new CDM-8910 mobile handset with a built-in digital camera and flash. The phone has a 1.3 megapixel digital camera with macro function, is Java-capable, and data capable with a USB interface.

Country singer Patsy Cline's family moved 19 times before she was 15 and as a result more than a dozen Virginia towns claim her as a native daughter.

According to the Insurance Information Institute in New York City, homeowner insurance will go up by 8% for 2004, an average of $46 more than last year.

Father Joe Sica, assistant pastor at Saint Aloysius, Division Street, Wilkes-Barre, heads to Hollywood this weekend to tape a guest spot on the ABC sitcom Life With Bonnie. On Monday, he and the cast will go over the script and will tape on Tuesday. The episode will air on Friday, February 6, on WNEP-TV. Father Sica will appear as himself as a guest on Bonnie's TV talk show. Chris Barnes, one of the show's co-stars and a native of Scranton, is getting married to a family friend of Father Sica. Father Sica gave Barnes a copy of his book, "Embracing Change," for Bonnie Hunt and in the book wrote the note, "Dear Bonnie, if I ever come on your show, I'll give you a year's free confessions." The rest, as they say, is history.

Crittercam (National Geographic Channel, 8-8:30 PM tonight) is a wildlife show which borrows an idea from reality-TV. A "crittercam" is attached to a humpback whale to explain about their hunting rituals. Each member of the pod has a specific duty to perform, such as coaxing the food upward or herding the food together for the feed.

History includes several Florence Nightingales, besides the fundraising nurse, bustling from one sickbed to the next, comforting the sick and dying Florence Nightingale who was born in Italy in 1820 and who raised nursing to the level of a respectable profession for women.

Florence Nightengale Graham was born in Ontario, Canada, learned about cosmetology and massage and later opened her own salon. She chose an exotic new name, "Elizabeth Arden," and developed her own cosmetics including a face cream, so we are told, with the consistency of whipped cream. Cream Amoretta was released in 1914 and over the years Elizabeth Arden cosmetics became a great success. Elizabeth Arden died in 1966 when she was either 81, 82 or 88.

Here is the January 17 Grand Ole Opry Saturday night schedule (time is Central Standard Time, of course)
6:30-7:00: Porter Wagoner, The Whites, Jimmy C. Newman, Connie Smith
7:00-8:00 (televised on GAC): Ricky Skaggs, Rhonda Vincent, Jimmy Wayne, John Conlee, George Jones
8:00-8:30: Jimmy Dickens, Billy Walker, Osborne Brothers, Riders In The Sky, Opry Square Dance Band, Opry Square Dancers
8:30-9:00: Bill Anderson, Mike Snider, Craig Morgan
9:30-10:00: Jeannie Seely, Connie Smith, George Jones
10:00-10:30: Ricky Skaggs, Jim Ed Brown, The Whites
10:30-11:00: John Conlee, Jan Howard, Rhonda Vincent, Opry Square Dance Band, Opry Square Dancers
11:00-11:30: Bill Anderson, Mike Snider, Jimmy Wayne
11:30-12:00: Riders In The Sky, Billy Walker, Jack Greene, Craig Morgan

You have your choice of listening formats: WSM-AM (650khz), SIRIUS Satellite Radio Stream 137, or Direct Internet Audio Links:
http://wtn-stream.alsw.com/Player.asp?STA=WSMAM&SPD=LO
http://wtn-stream.alsw.com/Player.asp?STA=WSMAM&SPD=HI

Use the first link for dialup connections and the second for high-speed hookups. These links connect you directly to WSM streaming audio without going through the station's home page, thereby saving you time, trouble and several key strokes.

Grand Ole Opry information is furnished courtesy of Richard Sutliff. If we get five or more emails from readers who will use this information, we'll include it each week.

It's the birthday of poet Robert Service, born in England in 1874. The Shooting of Dan McGrew sold three million copies. The Cremation of Sam McGee was another of his popular poems about life among sourdoughs in the Yukon. Sam McGee was a real person, a customer at the Bank of Commerce where Service worked. The Alice May was a real boat, the Olive May, a derelict on Lake Laberge. Brad Cole's favorite is The Call of the Wild, and we suggest that you take a read of this poem, too.

Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there's nothing else to gaze on,
Set pieces and drop-curtain scenes galore,
Big mountains heaved to heaven, which the blinding sunsets blazon,
Black canyons where the rapids rip and roar?
Have you swept the visioned valley with the green stream streaking through it,
Searched the Vastness for a something you have lost?
Have you strung your soul to silence? Then for God's sake go and do it;
Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost.
The Call of the Wild, Robert W. Service

On this date in 1920, Prohibition began in the United States as the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution took effect. The United States and its allies began bombing Iraq in the Persian Gulf War on this date in 1991.

This is National Nothing Day, set aside each year for people to sit around for the entire day and just hang out. No celebrating, observing or honoring anything. It was created by Harold Pullman Coffin. We intend to observe the day, and for everyone who can stay in out of the cold today we recommend that you do the same.

Some new features of Google include these two gems:
. Area Code Information. Enter a U.S. telephone area code into Google (e.g. 570), and the results will give a thumbnail map naming the geographic region at the top of the results page. Clicking the thumbnail displays the full Mapquest approximation map of the area, not an exact map, of the area code's coverage zone.
. Universal Product Codes. Want information about a specific product? Enter its Universal Product Code (UPC), the number on the bottom of a bar code displayed on product packaging, into Google (e.g.: 074101420241). If the product can be found, results include a link to the UPC Database for more information.

Bette Palmer, signing the Benton News guest book from Camdenton, Missouri, is looking for relatives of George Kocher, and anyone who might have known her parents. Howard H. Palmer (b.1917) and (Mary) Evelyn Kocher Palmer. (b. 1924) "and any relatives of and would love to hear some stories of."

The coldest day on Earth registered 129° below zero on July 21, 1983, in Antarctica. We hope that you feel warmer now!

Many things can destroy or corrupt the data in your email software. Email Saver Xe is a backup utility which works with Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Netscape Messenger, IncrediMail and PocoMail. Archive your messages and backup your attachments, address book and contacts, users and accounts, message rules and filters, and other settings and information. Transfer email information from one computer to another for simple Windows upgrades and migrations. The automatic backup feature allows you to schedule regular unattended backups quietly in the background. Download here. Be aware that this is not a free product.

Starbucks just opened in Paris, but received lukewarm reviews. A French documentary filmmaker said of the coffee, "We call it jus des chaussette (sock juice)."

Eastman Kodak announced it will stop selling 35 mm cameras in the United States, Canada and Western Europe this year and will concentrate on digital photography, except in countries like China, India and Eastern Europe where the cost of digital photography and personal computers is high. The move follows a year where 12.5 million digital cameras were sold in the US in 2003, compared with 12.1 million film cameras. The company will also halt global production of Advanced Photo System (APS) cameras, but will continue to support the film format for existing APS users. Nikon Corp. and Konica Minolta will also cease production of the APS cameras, but Canon will continue to manufacture them for now. Kodak will continue to make 35 mm film, its biggest moneymaker, and will keep making disposable cameras. Last year, Kodak announced it would stop producing slide projectors, while continuing to produce profitable slide films. Kodak sales have slumped over the last three years. Last year, Kodak reduced dividends to shareholders. The stock, trading under the symbol EK, closed yesterday at $26.07, down 0.72%.

George Eastman (1854-1932) launched his first Kodak camera in 1888. Twelve years later, he introduced the Brownie camera, which sold for a dollar. The company was an innovator, bringing out the first pocket camera, the Instamatic, in the 1960s and 110mm film cameras in the 1970s. The company invented the digital camera in 1976 and later introduced the advanced photo system. Eastman made the University of Rochester the beneficiary of a gift to establish the Eastman School of Music and to build the Eastman Theatre, home of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra.

The George Eastman House at 900 East Avenue in Rochester is now the International Museum of Photography and Film. Eastman's 12.5-acre site includes the restored house and gardens, an archives building and research center, galleries, two theaters, and an education center. The Museum displays the art and technology of photography and motion pictures over 150 years, and interprets the industrialist and philanthropist life of Mr. Eastman.

A good resolution for genealogists is to preserve the stories of living family members. You can start by simply writing them down. With equipment like camcorders and scanners, you can combine many different kinds of media into a true family history on CD-ROM or DVD. However you choose to do it, don't put it off. Resolve to get out that camcorder, cassette recorder, or yellow pad and start saving those memories for future generations.

Here is the January 16 Grand Ole Opry Friday night schedule (time is Central Standard Time, of course)
7:30-8:00: Porter Wagoner, Connie Smith, Osborne Brothers, Brian McComas
8:00-8:30: John Conlee, Jimmy C. Newman, Mike Snider, Mandy Barnett
8:30-9:00: Jimmy Dickens, Jim Ed Brown, Andy Griggs
9:00-9:30: Bill Anderson, The Whites, Ricky Skaggs
9:30-10:00: Jeannie Seely, Stonewall Jackson, Jack Greene, Marty Stuart

You have your choice of listening formats: WSM-AM (650khz), SIRIUS Satellite Radio Stream 132, or Direct Internet Audio Links:
http://wtn-stream.alsw.com/Player.asp?STA=WSMAM&SPD=LO
http://wtn-stream.alsw.com/Player.asp?STA=WSMAM&SPD=HI

Use the first link for dialup connections and the second for high-speed hookups. These links connect you directly to WSM streaming audio without going through the station's home page, thereby saving you time, trouble and several key strokes.

Grand Ole Opry information is furnished courtesy of Richard Sutliff. If we get five or more emails from readers who will use this information, we'll include it each week.

January 15, 2003, the birthday (in 1929) of civil rights leader, minister, and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Martin Luther King, Jr. King was born in Atlanta, later lead a boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama. Find out more at http://www.nps.gov/malu/ .

With anywhere from 1 to 4 inches of snow on the ground, overnight temperatures below zero in places and a 20 mile wind today, snap up your snuggies and prepare for a hard day! And tomorrow could be colder! Elsewhere: Santa Ynez, 70° and Daytona Beach 65°. Remember that you can get local school closings on the side panel of this web site, under the heading of the high school.

William J. Schnitzler, 68, (Aug. 1, 1935-Jan. 14, 2004), 280 Hollow Road, Stillwater, died Wednesday at home. He was born in Abington the only child of the late William E. and Jane G. (Luszcak) Schnitzler. He was a self-employed carpenter, retiring in 1997. He also farmed at his home for many years. Surviving are son William J. Schnitzler Jr., Shickshinny; and daughter Sharon L. Schnitzler, Stillwater; two grandsons: William A. Schnitzler, Stillwater and Jamie Allan Ruckle, Shickshinny; and one great-grandson, Jamie Allan Ruckle Jr., Shickshinny. Graveside services will be held 1 PM Monday in Hamline Cemetery, Route 239, Benton, with the Rev. Gary Emrick, hospice chaplain, officiating. Arrangements are in charge of the Dean W. Kriner Inc. Funeral Home, Benton.
--from an obituary in the Press Enterprise

And while we are mentioning the Press Enterprise, we should also recommend that all readers turn to the pages of the new and revised Press Enterprise on line. Turn to http://www.pressenterpriseonline.com/
to see the electronic version of the newspaper. And while you are there, take a look at the article entitled Arrowheads are his passion, by Chris Krepich. It is an article about collecting arrowheads by Stillwater resident Barry Harrison. There is a related article with pictures under FEATURES at the top of this page.

Quote of the Day:
"The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men."
--Martin Luther King Junior (1929-1968).

We have added a link to this web page that will take you to a clickable image map of townships and boroughs in Columbia County . The township images are cropped from a 1/50,000 USGS Geological Survey Map of Columbia County dated 1979; based on 1/24,000 maps dated 1953 through 1969. Adjacent counties are also shown. Go to Benton News' side panel or
http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/maps/pa/county/columb/usgs/ to view.

Quote of the Day:
"Computers can figure out all kinds of problems, except the things in the world that just don't add up."
--James Magary

If you would like to read about "Delayed Harvest Artificial Lures-Only" fishing rules that apply on a half-mile section from 180 yards upstream of the upstream Benton Borough line to the upstream Richard Kriebel property line, head over to the current Pennsylvania Game & Fish Magazine .

Although not all will agree, the magazine claims that the water quality in our trout streams has been improving, creating new options for trout anglers and "anglers are catching bigger trout, as proven by our many new state records."

Last year, the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission stocked about 3.95 million "catchable" trout into the state's lakes and streams, although the size of stocked trout was reduced so more trout could be raised. Trout stocked this year should average about 10 inches in length and weigh slightly less than a half pound.

We continue to receive emails from well-intentioned readers about things that sound too good to be true. In fact, they usually are. When we got a chance yesterday to read some of the emails in our inbox, we found four emails about M&M candies teaming up with the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation to raise funds through the sale of "pink & white" M&M candies. As always, we turned to www.snopes.com to verify the story. As usual, it is too good to be true--the promotion ended in December 2003 and the candy maker capped its potential donation at $650,000, which meant once 1.3 million bags of the pink and white candies were vended the campaign ended.

The Guv has a wager with North Carolina Governor Michael Easley on this Sunday's NFC championship game between the Eagles and the Carolina Panthers. Easley bet a pound of barbecue and sauce and a pint of slaw and hushpuppies while the Guv bet a Philly cheesesteak and a Pittsburgh Primanti Brothers sandwich. The wager comes on the heels of the Guv's suggestion for a state slogan of "Our Governor Can Eat More Than Your Governor."

The Huntington Mills United Sportsmen will be having their coyote hunt starting Friday, January 16, through Sunday, the 18th. There is a $15.00 entry fee for the hunt which begins at 6 AM on Friday. The hunt will end at 1 PM on Sunday. Coyotes may be taken in any part of the state. There will be cash prizes given out on Sunday at the club house which is just outside of Huntington Mills on Waterton and Cann road. You can get Waterton road at the end of the bridge in Huntington Mills on State Rt. 239 There will be a breakfast buffet served at the club house on Sunday from 9 AM to 1 PM. Everybody is welcome to join. There is still time to get your applications and the rules for the hunt by calling Brian Bower @ 683-5472 or Jon Kleintob @ 864-3592 or Jean Dodge @ 256-3933. You can pick an application at the club house on Friday from 6 PM to 9 PM, Saturday from 3 PM to 9 PM and on Sunday from 9 AM to 1 PM. These hours are also for the hunters to weigh their coyotes at the club house.

Make sure that you vote for the new state slogan that you like the best. You can go to http://www.visitpa.com/visitpa/home to do your voting. The five slogans you can vote on are as follows (with the percentage of votes as of press time:)
Pursue Happiness 10%
Discover our good nature 25%
Liberty's Landscape 14%
Liberty Loves Company 18%
The State of Independence 31%

We tuned to NBC the other night to watch The Apprentice starring Mr. Tightwad, Donald Trump, a rich guy who looks like he has a strudel on his head. Mr. Trump is a billionaire, we suspect, who will remain "well to do" by not giving any money away. Another wealthy guy by the name of Bill Gates, owner of a company we just don't like a whole lot, nevertheless makes a whole bunch of significant donations.

The Donald J. Trump Foundation donated $287,000 in 2002 after a probable ten-figure income, but donated nothing to the 9/11-related charities according to the IRS. David Geffen donated $1 million to be split between the American Red Cross and police and fire widows and children's funds. The "Queen of Mean" Leona Helmsley donated $5 million. Anyway, The Apprentice was good, and we suspect that we'll tune it in again.

After driving 3,440 miles from Back Home in Benton, PA, to Santa Ynez, CA, we have decided to sit back and let the world turn by itself, without us trying to push it. And in response to a reader's question, you can take a look at where we are staying by going to www.hobhorse.com .

On this date in 1952, NBC-TVs "Today" show premiered, with David Cunningham Garroway (1913-1982) as the amiable, low-key host. Dave Garroway, 69, never achieved great success after the Today Show, and was eventually found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot following postoperative complications of open-heart surgery." Mr. Garroway's trademark on the show was signing off by saying, "Peace," and extending the palm of his hand.

To learn more about the "Today" Show, either turn to WBRE-28 or http://talkshows.about.com/cs/todayshow/ .

Marian (Goss) Pursel wrote in the Benton News guest book that "My mother went to Mossville school about 1939-1943 with a family by the name of Young. The parent's names were Grant and Kathrine Young. The children's names were Donald, Betty, Doyle, Shirley, Robert and Carl. "If anyone knows their whereabouts, please contact me via the Benton News."

It isn't good news to hear that NBCs "Frasier" will call it quits in May. "Frasier" won the Emmy for best comedy for five straight years, from 1994 to 1998. Kelsey Grammer's 20-year run playing Frasier Crane ties James Arness of "Gunsmoke" for the longest stretch an actor has played a single character in prime time. "Frasier" will also have lasted 11 seasons, the same as "Cheers." NBC will have two large holes to fill with the end of "Friends" and "Frasier."

The Benton News is happy to be in one spot for a few days. We are writing from Santa Ynez, California, this morning, following a cross-country trip dating from New Year's Day. During that period, we were mostly unable to send any email for reasons that we will go into another day. We are happy to see your smiling faces this morning! We have from time to time updated the web page www.bentonnews.net, but those who relied on the news via email were out of luck. The temperature when we turned off the engine yesterday was 70 degrees, by the way.

As the road winds, ahead of me
there unseen beneath skies clear
the living forests of city seas
each one tells its unknown dream
there on the road, in front of me ...
--Eugene Borkowski.

Being on the road and not Back Home in Benton, PA, keeps us in the dark about many things. For example, the special election for the 109th District January 27 to fill the vacant seat in the House between Democrat Paul E. Reichart and Republican David Millard is of special interest to us, even though that district does not represent either the Benton Borough or Benton Township, The winner will complete the year remaining in the term of John Gordner, who was elected to the Senate in November. And the winner will have to turn right around and do it again in the spring primary.

Three weeks after the Guv signed $1 billion worth of tax increases to complete this year's state budget, the Pennsylvania Turnpike is planning to raise its tolls 44% August 1. If the five-member Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission approves the plan, the toll for a car trip along the entire 359 miles of the east-west route would jump to about $21.30, up from the current $14.80.

In three more weeks, the Guv must present the fiscal 2005 budget to the General Assembly. Freshly back from basking in the Florida sun, the Guv vowed Tuesday that he would not propose any major new taxes. "There'll be no General Fund tax increases at all in the budget" he'll propose to lawmakers February 3. The Guv promises "It will be a much less controversial budget" than the fiscal 2004 budget.

A winter bluegrass concert is coming up Saturday, February 14 at the Wellsboro high school, featuring Gary Ferguson and Sally Love and their band, as well as The Lonesome Road Ramblers. Information and tickets are available from www.canyoncountrybluegrass.com.

Frank Winfield Woolworth was born in 1852 in New York State and later opened an unsuccessful "Great 5-Cent Store" in Utica. He tried again, this time in Lancaster and this time a success. In 1911 the F. W. Woolworth Company was incorporated. Woolworth later added 10-cent items, creating the first "Five and Dime." A generation grew up buying sodas from lunch counters in "dime stores," a term that is rapidly disappearing as 10 cent items become more and more scarce and dollar stores, sometimes called "Mini Wal-Marts," become popular. At one time, Woolworth had more than 2,100 variety stores throughout the world. The last Woolworth stores were closed in 1998. The Woolworth Building was erected in New York City in 1913, the highest building in the world (792 ft.) at that time.

Woolworth's stores specialized in the sale of household and personal items at bargain prices, making a profit through high sales volume rather than through large mark-ups on the prices of individual product lines.

We'll leave you for today with this old chestnut... Papa Lion and Mama Lion had irreconcilable differences and were going to get a divorce. The case ended up in Judge Judy's court room. After having hammered out the property settlement, Judge Judy figured that all that remained was to decide on the custody of Baby Lion. She looked him over, determined he was a pretty well-grown cub, and decided to ask him what he wanted.

"Baby Lion," said Judge Judy, "Would you like to live with your father?"

"Oh, no!" said Baby Lion. "Papa Lion beats me!" Judge Judy was horrified and asked if he wanted to live with his mother.

"Oh, no!" Baby Lion said again. "Mama Lion beats me, too!"

That's absolutely awful!" Judge Judy said, giving both the adult lions a scathing look. Then she turned back to Baby Lion and asked gently, "Well, Baby Lion, if you don't want to live with either your father or your mother because they both beat you, who would you like to live with?"

Baby Lion thought for a minute, then said, "I'd like to go live with the Nittany Lions. They don't beat anybody."

We continue to poke around in local newspapers, looking today at The Morning Press for March 10, 1904. Events reported of local interest included...
• Five cases of smallpox have hit the families of Frank Hess and Watler Hess of Fritz Hill.
• An "ice gorge" caused waters at Rupert to rise to 31 feet and "back water" near Bloomsburg rose to 36 feet. The Danville-Riverside bridge, the Catawissa bridge, the Pennsylvania "trestling" with four loaded cars, and the Catawissa covered bridge were carried away by the ice and water.
• Miss Richmond, "late of New York City, wishes to make engagements with the ladies of Bloomsburg at their homes for shampooing, scalp treatment, facial massage, manicuring, electrical treatment for the scalp and face steaming."
• H. J. Shoemaker, driver of the Millville stage, encountered "all sorts of difficulty" driving the stage home from Bloomsburg, all the time fighting the ice-covered roads and the high water. The stage carried seven passengers, six women and one man, plus a large amount of baggage. The stage slid off the road on one hill and into a ditch. Everything on the stage had to be unloaded and the stage pushed out of the ditch. The article reported "that at almost every hill the wagon slid into dangerous positions and at one place the one horse fell and the other losing his balance fell over it."
• F. P. Pursel, Market Square, Bloomsburg, advertised that "It is a season of dignified stuffs--all the colors one wants, but no freakishness of weave. Such a season calls for good goods--quality shows on plain fabrics. Quaint grays, modes and browns are good. Big splotchy designs are not in good form."

Ever wonder what the top ten searches were last year on Google. Wonder no longer. Here they are:
1. Britney Spears
2. Harry Potter
3. matrix
4. shakira
5. David Beckham
6. 50 cent
7. Iraq
8. Lord of the Rings
9. Kobe Bryant
10. tour de france

I don't feel old.
I don't feel anything until noon.
Then it's time for my nap.
~Bob Hope

January 8, 2003. Our travels today brought us from Kingman, Arizona, to Las Vegas, via the Hoover Dam. Federal marshalls inspected the motor home inside and out, as part of the Homeland Security Department's war on terrorism. Commercial vehicles are currently precluded from going across the dam. A new development since our last trip is that a Hoover Dam bypass is being built, and as far as we can tell the new road won't even be within sight of the dam.

"Las Vegas" means "The Meadows" in Spanish. The area was once abundant in water and vegetation, but now is in such a drought that the fine for even washing a car is $300 and our car after being drug behind the motor home most of the way across the country looked like a vehicle just back from a dirt road on North Mountain. Farming is so difficult in this area at the moment that we heard about a local farmer who bought 50 axe handles at $49.95 each at the Home Depot. Two weeks later, he bought 50 more. The store manager quickly asked him what he was doing with the axes. The farmer said that he was selling them for $45 each. The manager pointed out that the farmer was losing $4.95 per axe. "Sure," said the farmer, "but anything beats farming."

A Mexican trader first found the oasis that is now Las Vegas in 1829 when he took a wrong turn off the Spanish Trail. Mormon settlers from Salt Lake City soon followed. The railroad first came in 1890 and a town soon formed and in 1905 the city was founded. The growth of the city started in 1935 when the Nevada Legislature legalized gambling. A few years later, the construction of the Hoover Dam brought huge employment to the area.

Getting married is popular here. Last year, 120,385 knots were tied. A Nevada license costs $65, and blood tests and waiting periods are not necessary The license bureau is open 64 hours straight if you go between 8 AM Friday and midnight Sunday. During the week, the license bureau is open from 8 AM until midnight.

Saturday we head into Death Valley National Park, California,the lowest place in the United States. We continue to apologize for the lack of news from Back Home in Benton, PA, and warn that normal service will not resume until Wednesday of next week. We are unable to send any email, and in Death Valley we will not have and email or phone service--but thanks to modern technology we will be able to watch local television stations from the Wilkes-Barre area via satellite.

Here lies Martin Elmerod.
Have mercy on my soul, good God,
As I would do were I Lord God
And you were Martin Elmerrod.

Over the past couple of weeks, Pat Wary has been telling us in on a book that she inherited from her grandmother entitled The Correct Thing in Good Society, by Florence Howe Hall, Copyright July, 1902, by Dana Estes and Company, Colonial Press, Electrotyped and Printed by C.H. Simonds & Co., Boston, Mass, USA. Here's an excerpt from the chapter, "In Speech."

In life, "It is NOT the Correct Thing...
• To use slang, especially where one does not know its derivation, many slang words having a secondary meaning and low origin.
• To say 'folks' for 'family' or 'people.' Thus one should not say 'How are all your folks?'
• To use the abbreviation 'gents' under any circumstances.
• To say Green-wich, Nor-wich, Bruns-wick. (Those who laugh at the pronunciation of 'Ber-ick' and 'Ber'ck' should take note, Pat adds.)
• To drop the 'g' final, as in 'goin',' 'doin',' etc.
• To say 'you was' for 'you were.'

When traveling, "It is not the Correct Thing...
• To think that any clothes, no matter how shabby they may be, are good enough to wear .
• To talk or laugh loud or to giggle.
• To carry bandboxes, bird-cages, newspaper bundles, growing plants, more than one basket or numerous packages of any sort.
• For ladies traveling with gentlemen to annoy the latter with unpunctuality or unreasonable and unnecessary requests, or for gentlemen to 'harry' those under their charge by constantly worrying lest they should miss the train."

"It is the Correct Thing...
• To be well dressed in garments of quiet colors and made of woolen or some other suitable material.
• To remember that traveling is one of the severest tests of good breeding, and that a gentleman who is worthy of the name will behave as well abroad as at home.
• For a lady to carry as little luggage by hand as possible, especially when traveling with a gentleman."

Florence Howe Hall also reminds her readers "to use words of Saxon rather than Latin origin whenever it is possible to do so, thus gaining terseness and vigor rather than a large number of syllables with diminished force.

Thursday, January 8, 2003. Expect low temperatures below ten degrees until this weekend. If you are traveling west on I-80 today, expect a twenty-mile delay in the Milesburg area and a result of an accident involving 50 vehicles. Six people have died so far as a result of that accident.

On this date in 1935, rock-and-roll legend Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo, Miss. Ten years ago on this date, Tonya Harding won the ladies' U.S. Figure Skating Championship in Detroit, a day after Nancy Kerrigan dropped out because of the clubbing attack that injured her knee.

We are writing this morning from Kingman, AZ, the current home of former Bentonian Marie Boudman. We have a wonderful filing system but a terrible retrieval system, so we are not able to find a phone number to say "hi."

We need to drive over the Hoover Dam today on our way to Los Vegas (which people around here seem to call "Lost Wages") . From there, we'll head into Death Valley for a few days, then on to Los Angeles and the Getty Museum, then north toward Santa Barbara and end up in Santa Ynez, CA. About Wednesday of next week, we'll be able to return to reporting the News from Back Home in Benton, PA, and we will be able to return to providing the email version.

In Southern California where we are headed, the weather is about the same year around. We wonder how we'll ever get a conversation started!

An eight-day series of cooking demonstrations, exhibits and themed dining events begins Saturday at the Farm Show Complex, Cameron and Maclay streets, Harrisburg. Demonstrations will run through January 17 and will be interspersed with seminars on honey extraction, maple syrup production and clear toy candy making, along with demonstrations by some of the state's foremost chefs. Cookbooks will be for sale, and several of the cookbook authors will be making appearances at Harrisburg restaurants. Carol Vance, author of Wild Game Cookery: Down-Home Recipes for Foods from the Wild, is one of the featured chefs.

We love to twaddle around in old newspapers, just to see what we can turn up. One of the newspapers that we always enjoyed looking at is The Morning News, once published in Danville. We'll pick some days at random from 1901 and let you know what was of importance to the Montour County area then. We'll tell you that we don't know how many papers were ever sold, but the paper boldly advertised that they delivered more papers in Montour County than any other paper. The paper cost one cent a day, or six cents for the week in 1901, but the price went up slightly by 1904--to $.25 a month.
• January 23, 1901. Fifty-one Danville residents signed a petition to the state legislature not to abandon the Pennsylvania canal. The petition also urged the passage of a measure to compel the Pennsylvania Canal and Railroad Company not to discriminate against boat traffic in favor of the railroads.
• January 23, 1901. Queen Victoria died January 22 at the age of 81. Her reign was the longest is English history: over 63 years.
• March 9, 1904: Under the headline, "Situation Grows More Critical," the paper reported that the "Danville bridge has gone." The article talked about the Susquehanna River "still rising," following the collapse of the Shickshinny-Mocanaqua Bridge. Bloomsburg was 'completely cut off from the rest of the valley." On the same day, the Bloomsburg Daily recorded that on Market Street in Bloomsburg, water rose at the rate of "five inches in five minutes." As ice dams on the river broke, the situation became critical. The water rose "16 inches in an hour" at Beach Haven. In some some streets in Wilkes-Barre, water covered the ground by five feet and an estimated 500 people were homeless. In Bloomsburg, the "Carpet Mills" had water 14" about the level of the first floor. The Pennsylvania Railroad Company expects "the Sunbury bridge will go."

Those of us in later generations know that water travels down the river and the Harrisburg area can get flooded. The paper, however, reported that "A feeling of greater security prevailed in Harrisburg along the river banks today than at any time since the floods first became threatening and the general impression seemed to be that the danger is passed as far as that city is concerned."

January 7, 2003. Country singer Trace Adkins is 42 today. It's the anniversary of the first motion picture ever made. On this day in 1894, Thomas Edison Studios filmed a man by the name of Fred Ott while he was sneezing.

We camped overnight in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart superstore (where avocados are selling for $.77 each). We are in the "Indian Capitol of the United States," Gallup, New Mexico.

We visited Merton and Geraldine Laubach, formerly of Benton, now living in Vanderwagon, New Mexico, adjacent to Zuni and Navajo Indian reservations. We talked with Merton about rodeos and eating and pickup trucks and the evils of computers. We talked with Geraldine about life Back Home in Benton, PA.

Geraldine loaned us some wonderful pictures of Benton and some of the people who made Benton what it is today. When we can do it we'll upload some of them to the Benton News Website. We don't have access to the Internet or to email again today, so it may be a while before you get to see them. We'll tell you about a few of them, though.

There is a great picture of Frances Reed and Jean Ash standing in front of George Yost's milk truck. There is a picture of the one-room school house at Five Points with teacher Carrie Perry Yost teaching. We have two pictures of what is now the Benton Sub Shop, but once was Yost's Restaurant. One of the two pictures looks for all the world as the restaurant now looks. The other picture, if we didn't tell you where the restaurant was you might not be able to guess it. We have a picture of a baseball team from the 1930s with youthful coach Earl Laubach. There is a picture of the 1937 Benton baseball team with names we know like Bruce Sutliff and Donald Rabb. Emery Miller was the coach. There is a picture of the Benton High School graduating class of 1915 taken in the Presbyterian Church. The last picture is on of the Benton Sewing Club. On the picture is Nell Sutliff, Helen Mendenhall, Evelyn Kline, Larry Taylor, Darl Mather, Mary Ruth Taylor, Ruth Taylor, Gertrude Yost, Ruth Linskill, Mary McHenry and Mary Louise McHenry.

We notice oil wells as we drive through the Western New Mexico countryside, which reminds us of the story about an oil millionaire who showed up for his annual dental examination. The dentist took X-rays and carefully examined every tooth. Everything was in perfect shape. The oil millionaire looked thoughtfully at the dentist and told him to drill anyway, saying, "I feel lucky today."

Aging is a fine art.

Life is short. Do it up big!

It is what you learn after you learn it all that counts.

January 6, 2003

"The citizens who live in the next century are not going to pay two cents for a letter postage stamp. The price will be reduced to one cent."
- Thomas L. James, Postmaster General, 1893.

Tuesday, January 6, 2003. The outside temperature is 6° at press time. We parked our motor home last night beside historic route 66 in Quay County, New Mexico, just outside the town of Tucumcari. Between the year of 1926 and the mid 1960s, many travelers got plenty of kicks on route 66 as it threaded through New Mexico. The road became the model for the present I-40, an interstate that links the east coast with the west.

By way of comparison, we think of the Susquehanna and Tioga Turnpike Road that ran from Berwick to the present Elmira. The Berwick Turnpike started its life much earlier than route 66, but it never became the route of migration that 66 grew into. Both roads today are either gone in sections or serve limited functional use.

Tucumcari began life as a "tent city" in 1901 when the news came out that the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad planned to build a line across New Mexico to connect with the El Paso and Northeastern Railroad. Tucumcari became the county seat in 1903. Route 66 followed the old Ozark Trail, and came into prominence during the Dust Bowl Days as a "westering" movement swept the country during the Great Depression. U. S. Highway 66 was created in 1926 and became a gateway to the Southwest.

We love to wade in with both feet and find out why certain names came about. The Indian name Tucumcari comes from the mountain just outside of town. A folktale says that Tucumcari Mountain was home of a group of Apache Indians. Two warriors were fighting it out to become the next chief and win the heart of the Indian maiden Kari. Tocum, Kari's sweetheart, was slain by Tonopan. Kari is said to have killed Tonopan and then taken her own life. As Kari's father was told of the death of his daughter, he stabbed himself crying, "Tocom-Kari, Tocom-Kari." The spelling changed to Tucumcari.

Our travels yesterday took us across the panhandle of Texas near the Palu Duru Canyon. Now this is one whopper of a canyon, and yet you may never have heard of it. It is 1,000 feet deep, 20 miles wide and 100 miles long. It is second only in size to the Grand Canyon. There is no hint of a canyon--then poof, there it is. The canyon was carved out of solid rock over millions of years by the Prairie Dog Town fork of the Red River. People have lived in the canyon for an estimated 12,000 years.

Our travels took us by the former site of the XIT ranch. Back in the 1880s, the Texas state capitol burned and the Texas Legislature traded three million acres of panhandle land to a Chicago contractor. We didn't figure out how the name "XIT" came about, but it could have meant "Largest in Texas," or "Ten in Texas," since it covered all or part of ten counties in the state. There were 315 windmills on the property, plus 100 dams and 1,500 miles of fences. The last of the ranch was sold in 1963.

We loved our trip across Texas today, our first over this exact route. We glanced out the windows at the panorama and thought back to the days of the buffalo and later the Texas longhorns as they ranged on the fields of grass, the only fences being thorny hedges that were "pig-tight, horse-high and bull-strong." A man by the name of Joseph Glidden changed all that in 1874 when he invented a fencing material consisting of short, sharp barbs of wire twisted around a single strand of wire. Gliden called his invention barbed wire and said that his invention made a fence "light as air, strong as whiskey and cheap as dirt." Life on the prairie was never the same again. Joseph Glidden’s barbed wire opened the plains to large-scale farming, and closed the open range, bringing the era of the cowboy and the roundup to an end. With his partner, Isaac L. Ellwood, Glidden formed the Barb Fence Company of DeKalb, Illinois, and quickly became one of the wealthiest men in the nation. He died in DeKalb in 1906.

The niece of Joseph Glidden, Annie Glidden, an award-winning farmer, is tied to DeKalb’s historical mainstays: corn and barbed wire. One of the DeKalb exits off Interstate 88 is on Annie Glidden Road, about 30 minutes west of former Bentonian Richard Sutliff's home.

We go on about life on the prairie since we didn't have access to email or the Internet last night and probably won't for several days. We just leaned back on the rocker and pecked out the events of the day that interested us--of course, that is what we do every day. We'll return to the News from Back Home in Benton, PA, tomorrow--unless we happen to come across another wide spot in the road that needs investigating.

I've never known a dog to wag
His tail in glee he did not feel,
Nor quit an old-time friend to tag
At some more influential heel.
The yellowest cur I ever knew
Was to the boy who loved him true.

I've never known a dog to show
Half-way devotion to his friend;
To seek a kinder man to know,
Or richer, but unto the end,
The humblest dog I ever knew
Was to the man who loved him true.

I've never known a dog to take
Affection for a present gain,
A false display of love to make
Some little favor to attain.
I've never known a Prince or Spot
That seemed to be what he was not.

But I have known a dog to fight
With all his strength to aid a friend,
And whether wrong or whether right,
To stick with him until the end.
And I have known a dog to link
The hand of him whom men would kick.

And I have known a dog to bear
Starvation pangs from day to day,
With him who have been glad to share
His bread and meat along the way.
No dog, however mean or rude,
Is guilty of ingratitude.

The dog is listed with the dumb,
No voice has he to speak his creed,
His messages to humans come
By faithful conduct and by deed.
He shows, as seldom mortals do,
A high ideal of being true.
--from the writings of Edgar A. Guest, entitled The Dog, and included just in case Buster and Chloe read today's news Back Home in Benton, PA.

January 5, 2003

"A gaffe in Washington is when you tell the truth and the Washington establishment thinks you shouldn't have."
--Howard Dean

"Success follows doing what you want to do. There is no other way to be successful."
- Malcolm Forbes

When humor goes, there goes civilization.
Erma Bombeck

Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritation and resentments slip away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.
Mark Twain

We celebrate the birthdays of three men today: Adam Worley, George Remphrey and if you knew him from Back Home in Benton he was "Brooks" Sutliff and if you know him from Harrisburg at the Sutliff Chevrolet store he is "Joe" Sutliff. They share their birthdays with actor Robert Duvall.

Martha Rebecca (McHenry) Wenner, 85, (May 7, 1918-Jan. 4, 2004), 298 Paperdale Road, Stillwater, died Sunday at the Orangeville Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. She was born in Benton, a daughter of the late Robert and Lulu (Hess) McHenry. Martha graduated from the former Bloomsburg Normal School and taught as an elementary teacher in both the Benton and Northwest school districts. She retired in 1983. She was a member of the Jackson Baptist Church, Derrs. Surviving are three children: Donna Wenner of Phoenixville; Kathleen Pollino of Stillwater; Mary Ann Cunningham of Catawissa; and two grandchildren: Cameron and Alison Rhinard, both of Stillwater. Friends will be received Wednesday, Jan. 7, from 9 until 11AM at the McMichael Funeral Home Inc., with funeral services at 11 AM. Interment will be in the St. James Cemetery, Bendertown.
--from a Press Enterprise obituary

We have been meaning to mention that our navigator for this trip is Max Hartman, a full-time resident of a motor home. Max has been most helpful at keeping us between the white lines and in keeping this complicated gadget that we drive working as it should. We'll mention more about Max from time to time. Max wondered this morning, when he heard the chill factor was 9°, why we came west instead of south!

If you are a fan of the Ford Motor Co., you need to know that the company has rolled out its new flagship sedan, the Five Hundred, and the Freestyle crossover. Ford also introduced an updated version of its Mustang sports car and the concept for a new Shelby Cobra performance car.

We seem to be getting fans from all over. The Benton News Website is used in the current advertising for MacArthur Water Gardens Home, Boca Raton FL, We don't know why, but what the heck...

And a delightful email rolled in from Janet Sadowski, writing from North Carolina. She wrote that "There are indeed some parts (or some people) in North Carolina who still enjoy pork and sauerkraut. The same ingredients are also used for the southern favorite of BBQ and slaw, a staple in the south. The two worlds are not so far apart." Janet wrote that her father and his siblings were born in Benton, and she is researching her family history. She writes, "Before my father’s death, I took him home for a visit to the area and am anxious to return. My father loved the same southern drawl you talked about and married my mother from Nash County, North Carolina." If anyone can help Janet trace her history, let us know.

We wish the very best to the 60 members of the Pennsylvania National Guard and their families. The troops shipped out Sunday from Berwick for training and eventual duty in Iraq. The men will meet up with the 2nd Battalion of the 103rd Armored Division at Fort Indiantown Gap for training before going to Fort Dix in New Jersey prior to deploying to Iraq.

America began its love affair with Marconi's radio a century ago and we have moved through love affairs with the cell phone and now the country has discovered a two-way radio technology called Wi-Fi (short for "wireless fidelity"). It promises to unplug more communications devices by making the Internet available just about everywhere and allow people to talk to each other more easily than ever before. If you eat at a Panara Bread restaurant or drink your coffee at a Starbucks, you probably have seen scads of people with laptops. Flying J truck stops, where we often stay when we are traveling, now provide over 145 locations to get Wi-Fi and will soon include more than 150 addition Wi-Fi locations at major intersections coast to coast. We are using it now to FTP the Benton News to the web site. Does it work well? It does. We sit in the motor home and hit a key and the uplink goes out. But wait! We don't seem to be able to send email reliably. As a result, we can't promise to respond to any individual emails before next week and we are unable to send the email versions of the Benton News. Isn't technology wonderful?

Up in Bradford County, the old record for rainfall was set back in 1901, when a total of 43.76 inches of rainfall was recorded for the year. That record finally fell this past year, when a total of 46.22 inches of rain fell. Locally, Dick Gearhart, Catawissa, measured 57.39 inches of precipitation for the year, but was only the "second best" on record. On average, the area gets about 39.85 inches.

Budd Fritz came through heart bypass surgery Sunday with flying colors!

Many will remember when Budd and Betty Fritz owned the Tastee Creme at the North end of the bridge over Fishing Creek. In the fall of 1970, the right side of the concrete bridge over Fishing Creek was removed and several feet of width added. At the time, the highway department promised that cars coming out of Colley Street would be able to see oncoming traffic on the bridge. A very dangerous abutment at the north-east side of the bridge was also removed at that time. The Tastee Creme was soon moved from its location on the north-east side of the bridge to its present location at the south-west side of the bridge.

There once were two cats from Kilkenny
Each thought there was one cat too many.
So they fought and they fit
And they scratched and they bit
And instead of two cats, there ain't any!

Ever wonder where the CTCO acronym comes from? Well, in part, it dates back to the 1930s and the old Northern Central Telephone Company. The local phone company was still hurting from the devastation of the 1929 stock market crash, service lines needed updating and replacing and the lack of capital precluded the growth that the company needed to achieve in order to survive. Like the small farmers of the local area today, the company was just too small to compete. The company voted to sell to the Commonwealth Telephone Company (now CTCO).

A reader wrote asking about the Farmers Picnic, an annual event always held on the last Wednesday in July. The Northern Columbia County Farmer's Picnic began during World War I to raise money for the Red Cross and at times was so popular that county businesses closed. Even the court house was known to close at noon on the day of the big event. Nothing ever held in the Benton Park attracted the attention of the Farmer's Picnic. Even the August Ku Klux Klan picnic and the Odd Fellows and the Grange picnics didn't draw the crowds that the picnic did.

Benton Grange 88 was at one time a major force in Benton, and even had enough resources to purchase a furniture store and residence on Market Street owned by A. T. Chapin. The intent was that the organization would meet on the second floor of the building and the first floor would be used for dinners and other activities. Over the years, the building was simply called the Grange Building. Later it became a medical building and today houses the dental offices of Dr. Tom Kawalski.

E. P. Chapin, the son of the owner of the furniture store, built a 16x32 building along the alley at the rear of the property in which he conducted a funeral business on 2 1/2 Street. That building over the years was used by undertakers like "Si" Holcombe and Dean Kriner, and the building is still in use as an undertaker's establishment

Saturday, January 3, 2003. Happy birthday to Amy Remphrey and to Nick Chabra tomorrow, January 4. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in South Africa on this date in 1892. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and the The Lord of the Rings trilogy, as almost any kid anywhere in the world knows.

We regret that we will not be able to provide ANY email version of the Benton News for about a week.

Since we haven't published in a while, we haven't mentioned the passing of Charles Thomas "Tom" Stackhouse, 84, (Dec. 1, 1919-Dec. 31, 2003), 266 St. Gabriel Road, Benton, last Wednesday morning, Born in Berwick, he was the son of the late Clarence and Nellie (Welliver) Stackhouse and married Beverly J. Miller on Sept. 2, 1952. The couple was married 51 years, raised one daughter, were grandparents to two grandchildren and great-grandparents to one great-grandson. Tom graduated from Benton High School and was a past school board director in Benton School District. Surviving are his wife, Beverly; a daughter, Mrs. David (Linda) Janney, Benton; a granddaughter, Diane Janney-Crist, Berwick; a grandson, Dennis Janney of Benton; and one great-grandson, Austin Crist, Berwick. The funeral was today at the McMichael Funeral Home Inc. with interment in the Benton Cemetery, Benton.

We love to read about the Fraternal Organizations that flourished in the local area following the Civil War. Some still exist, but most have vanished. Many existed, regardless of how history books state it, simply for the keeping of the black man "in his place." The KKK was one such organization, and we are attempting to research the local history of the Klan, but never seem to get the time to finish the job and put pen to paper and write it all down.

Another group with objectives similar to the KKK was the "Supreme Tent of the Knights of the Maccabees," a group long since gone from the local area. A Jameson tent existed locally about 1901, apparently named for the man who originally founded Jamison City. You'll note that the spelling of Jamison and Jameson is different. If you don't understand this, read the Jamison City section of the FEATURES.

The typical characteristics of a group like this was the abundance of American flags, the degree work, and the ladies auxiliaries. The organizations provided "fraternal protection" and "mutual brotherhood." Membership was open to almost anyone if they were in sound health, showed good moral character and were between the ages of 18 and 70. Oh, and one other detail! They had to be white. The organization consisted of "supreme tents, great camps and subordinate tents." Jamison City had the only "tent" in the local area we can find a record of.

If you have any information about the Supreme Tent of the Knights of the Maccabees or of the KKK in the local area, please contact us.

We simply don't have a lot of news From Back Home in Benton in this email. Our excuses follow:

New Year's Day was a travel day, Camp Hill to Durham, North Carolina, a day devoid of pork and sauerkraut. At a Flying J truck stop at mile marker 150 on I-40, we did ask for our favorite New Year's Day meal and a perky young thing with a wonderful Southern drawl simply responded to our request with a single word posed in the form of a question. "Huh," was her question, pronouncing as though the word contained a letter "e." She patiently explained that the New Year's Day dish "in these parts" is black-eyed peas and turnip greens, eaten for good luck. We saw some laying on a buffet line, and we decided to let them continue to lay on the buffet bar.

Pennsylvania has exported some mighty fine things, but apparently this part of North Carolina hasn't imported some of them yet! It made me think about the Slinky, and the Constitutional Congress, steel, anthracite coal, Little League baseball, Frankie Avalon and scrapple and the Crayola crayons--people and things that we have shared with other parts of the world.

Now if we could just get pork and sauerkraut introduced into North Carolina in a way that they would not turn up their noses at that dish like I turned up my nose at the thought of ripping into a mess of turnip greens, we would have something!

Friday we were in Nashville to see the world's longest running radio program, the Grand Ole Opry, and saw the first show of the new year in the Ryman Auditorium. What a Grand Ole Opry it was! Rhonda Vincent was scheduled but had emergency surgery on her pancreas December 31 in St. Louis and remained in the hospital until Friday afternoon and did not perform at the Opry on Friday as planned.

How nice it was Saturday night riding through the warm Tennessee night listening to Saturday night's version of the Grand Ole Opry on WGN-AM 650 out of Nashville and later to listen to former Bentonian Richard Sutliff as he broadcast on 720 AM on the 50,000 watt WGN megabelcher out of Chicago. We had talked with Richard by phone earlier in the day, and it was such a pleasure to hear his voice on the radio so far from the Chicago area.

On Saturday, we toured the Graceland Plantation in Memphis, the former home of Elvis Presley

Here are a couple of quick tips:
• Your cursor can snap directly to the address bar in Internet Explorer to enter a URL by simply using the keystokes ALT+D will snap it to that area where you can then enter the desired address.
• Using ten different browsers in combination, "IE Favorites Check" determines if your Favorites are current and then helps clean up the outdated ones. Tested with IE 4, 5.5, and 6, it's a free download at http://secure.sintraweb.net/public/soft/iefc/index.htm .

Jim Edson and Pat Boyle are now in Port St. Joe, Florida, staying in a house on the gulf on Cape San Blas. Hobe and Jesse Whitenight can be reached at Leeward Key #605, 2936 Scenic Gulf Drive, Destin, Fl.32550.