Autobiography- Early morning 4/12

 The first school year I was in New Orleans, I had a roommate named Jack. We found each other from Tulane's housing office, and rented a shotgun house a block from the Mississippi near Audubon Park.  Jack was a senior undergraduate in engineering; I was a first year grad student in Urban Studies. Jack was from a prominent South Alabama family, and a good student, but tried to be rough. He bathed infrequently, rode a motorcycle and liked to sky dive as a hobby. He had a disturbed girlfriend from a decaying Chattanooga family. Jack was crazy handsome when he cleaned up, not that I noticed. 

We moved in together fifty years ago this coming fall. We only stayed together that one school year. He wanted to keep the house, so I took an apartment alone the next year, and we rarely saw each other after that. I left New Orleans a year later.

I still think about Jack, mostly what he said to me when we split up our household. He said " I think you're gonna make it big one day, Wendell, but I ain't sayin' how old you'll be." I didn't sleep well tonight, maybe because I had my second booster shot against COVID-19 on Friday, maybe because of what I ate ( I cooked tonight), or because I walked in Core Arboretum for nearly ninety minutes this afternoon and overdid it. 

So as I lay awake, I thought about what Jack said to me in May of 1973. Maybe he was right. I've been with the same man for more than sixteen years now. We're married, we own a home and two cars, and we have an old cat, who is on "home hospice" with us. And I'm running for United States Congress. Others are shocked that I could run for Congress, and maybe I'm surprised, too. I know enough now, and while I am not likely to win, it's not because I can't do the job or lack qualifications. It's taken me the fifty years since Tulane to become that person who is stable, confident and capable.

 Maybe some other night when I can't sleep, I'll write more about what I've gone through.

Prejudice

I sent this as an op-ed piece to The Charleston Gazette-Mail.  They said they would run it, but couldn't say when. It's why we need to teach about the history of  racial and religious prejudice.

When people ask where I'm from, I say "The South, Maryland." Usually the response is "That's not The South. They didn't have segregation." I patiently explain that I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, and everything was segregated. Black people couldn't sit at the lunch counter at Read's drugstore, couldn't watch a movie at The Ambassador, couldn't bowl at Northwest Lanes. In northwestern Baltimore County, where I lived, Gwynn Oak Amusement Park, Milford Mill Swim Club and Price's Dairy (all gone now) were not open to Black people. 

My parents were New Yorkers, and my mother moved to Baltimore when she married my father in 1947. She was nineteen, polite and stylish and got a job selling women's hats at Hutzler's Department Store downtown. She told me she was once chewed out by a manager for allowing a Black woman to try on a hat.

Most of the neighborhood where I grew up was built in the 1950s, by two different builders. The difference was that one sold houses to Jews (and advertised in The Baltimore Jewish Times) and one builder would not sell houses to Jews. Black folk couldn't live anywhere in the neighborhood, except for one street that was there before the suburban boom. And the children from that street (only one girl in my year) went to a separate school until 1959, when I started fifth grade.

The John Waters movie "Hairspray," the stage play that came later and the movie of the stage play, portray realistically how things were. If you were a child or a teen in Baltimore in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as I was, you would immediately recognize "The Corney Collins Show" as a take-off on "The Buddy Deane Show."  When I saw the first movie in 1987 in Los Angeles, friends thought it was a fantasy. I had to correct them. They said there could not possibly have  been separate days for Black teens to be on the show. "That's crazy," they said. Maybe it was, but that's how it was.

We Jews, as well as Blacks, were not permitted to join the neighborhood swim club in Lochearn, the religiously segregated neighborhood immediately adjacent to our development. I was probably ten or eleven when that club opened, and I was disappointed to learn that we would not be able to swim there. The summer I was ten, we stayed with my grandparents in Long Beach, New York. I was surprised, but secretly pleased, to see Black children in the pool. 

I admit that I did go to racially segregated places as a teen. They were what there was for us, and I wanted the best time possible for myself in those years. 

I'm telling this story because politicians want to scare people into erasing history, and at 72, I want to make sure there is a record before my time runs out. The blather about making kids uncomfortable is pointless. High school students aren't children and they already see a lot more than politicians give them credit for. They are old enough to know the truth.

Barry Wendell for Congress

 Thanks to redistricting, and our state's population loss over the last ten years, West Virginia has gone from three congresspeople to two in this year's election. Our representative, David McKinley, was placed in the same district as another incumbent, Alex Mooney. People have been looking at this as a contest between two Republicans, McKinley as a "moderate" and Mooney as a full-on MAGA devotee. While McKinley did vote for the infrastructure bill, he calls Build Back Better "reckless social spending." He also claims President Biden has done nothing to stop the pandemic. His party has not proposed anything to help. Mooney criticizes McKinley for supporting Nancy Pelosi and the infrastructure bill. He also touts his own endorsement by the previous President.

This race leaves an opening for a Democrat, someone open-hearted, who favors social justice spending by the government, who is  pro-family, pro-choice, pro-science and willing to do whatever is best for the country, not just for a political party. I've asked at the last few monthly county Democratic Party meetings if anyone had signed up to run against McKinley and Mooney, and was met with silence. 

I'm a Maryland native who lived in Miami and Los Angeles for most of my adult life. I'm Jewish and a gay man in a same-gender marriage. I'm also seventy-two years old. I used these as an excuse not to put in my name for this contest. But I'm younger than David McKinley, and I've lived in West Virginia longer than Alex Mooney. I was elected twice to Morgantown's City Council, the second time, in 2019, with seventy-three percent of the vote. 

There is now another candidate for the Democratic nomination in our district, a woman in Martinsburg. I don't know her. Nominations must be postmarked by tonight (Saturday, January 29), so it will be a few days before we all know if there are other candidates.

I've done interviews with news sources already, and I have calls and emails to return tonight. I still need a treasurer and a campaign manager, and I have ethics forms to complete, so everything is canceled while I get to work on my campaign.

I know it's a long shot, but West Virginians need a candidate who stands for civility, working people, unions, the environment and the science of public health. I'm that person.

Contact me at barryforcongress2022@gmail.com

The SAG Awards nominating committee

 There are about 160,000 members of SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), and 2,500 are selected every year to nominate films for the upcoming SAG Awards. There are two groups: one for television and one for film. This year, in September, I was selected to be an alternate to the nominating committee. Somewhere along the line, I became a full member.

I paid to join AFTRA in 1986, before the unions merged, and I got an "under-five" part on "General Hospital" in April 1987, through an acting class showcase. That made me eligible to join SAG, which I did. I didn't work a lot or often for them over the years, but I kept up my membership. Now that I'm over seventy, I don't have to pay any more dues. 

I am no longer an active movie-goer. I did see "In The Heights" and "West Side Story" in a theater. Joe and I saw "Summer of Soul" when we were in San Francisco this summer, but because it is a documentary, it's not up for SAG awards. We also watched " tick, tick...BOOM" on cable when we visited my sister over Thanksgiving. I received forty DVDs in the mail of nominated films, and sixty-four digital links to films on my computer. For some, I received both a digital invitation and a DVD. These are not transferable and many of the DVDS will not work after January 10. Don't even ask. 

I didn't get right on this because I was teaching a class at Life-Long Learning for six weeks in October and November. It took some weeks for me to figure out a way to see one movie per day, about all I could do. 

I wasn't going to nominate people in films I didn't like, but after consulting with my sister, a film buff who said I should look at the acting, since that was what I was supposed to do, I did vote for the actors, even if I didn't like the film. 

Here's what I saw, alphabetically:

"Annette," "Being The Ricardos," "Belfast," "C'mon, C'mon," "CODA," "Cyrano," "Dear Evan Hansen," "Don't Look Up," "Drive My Car," "The Humans," "The Electric Life of Louis Wain," "The Eyes of Tammy Faye," "The French Dispatch...," "The Hand Of God," "House of Gucci," "In The Heights,""Language Lessons," "Licorice Pizza," "Lost Daughter,""No Time To Die," "Parallel Mothers," "Nightmare Alley," "The Power of the Dog," "Spencer," "Swan Song" (the one about the older gay man in Sandusky), "Tango Shalom," "tick, tick...BOOM," "West Side Story," and "The Worst Person In The World." 

The votes were for "Lead Actor-Male," "Lead Actor-Female" (no non-binary characters), and the same for supporting actors, then "Cast", and "Stunt Ensemble." I only saw four films with a stunt ensemble, so I voted for four in that category, five in the others.

I prefer small movies to big ones, foreign to domestic, and I like to see Jewish and/or LGBT characters, of which there were precious few this year. There were many performances I like enough to nominate, but I had to pick only five. I had more performances I liked in the co-star category than in the starring role category, and there were more males than females up for nomination, which is typical, unfortunately.

Here are my votes: 

For  Lead Actor: Daniel Craig in "No Time To Die," Benedict Cumberbatch in "The Power of the Dog," Leonardo DiCaprio in "Don't Look Up," Udo Kier in "Swan Song," Hidetoshi Nishijima in "Drive My Car."

For Lead Actress: Penélope Cruz in "Parallel Mothers," Alana Haim in "Licorice Pizza," Rachel Zegler in "West Side Story," Lady Gaga in "House of Gucci," and Kristen Stewart in "Spencer."

For Supporting Actor:  Anders Danielsen Lie in "Worst Person In The World," Robin DeJesús in "tick, tick...BOOM," Tyler Perry in "Don't Look Up," Koli Smit-McPhee in "The Power of the Dog," and Ben Whitshaw in "No Time To Die." 

For Supporting Actress: Nina Arianda in "Being The Ricardos," Kate Blanchett in "Don't Look Up," Vanessa Hudgins in "tick, tick...BOOM," Dakota Johnson in "Lost Daughter," and Amandla Stenberg in "Dear Evan Hansen."

For Cast: "Dear Evan Hansen," "Don't Look Up," "The Hand Of God," "Licorice Pizza," and "Nightmare Alley."

For Stunt Ensemble: "In The Heights," "No Time To Die," tick, tick...BOOM," and "The Power Of The Dog." 

The nominations close Sunday, January 9, and the nominees will be announced Wednesday, January 12. It should be interesting. 

I didn't see everything I was sent, and many of the nominees did not send me DVDs or digital screeners. If you want to argue with me, you can comment on my Facebook page, if we are friends. If we're not friends yet, shoot me an email at doveliezer2001@yahoo.com or send a note to Barry Wendell at P.O. Box 831, Morgantown, WV 26507. If you have my phone number, you can call. 

Franklin and Fulton Counties, Part Three: Fulton County

 Day four of this trip (December 15) was to Fulton County, just west of Franklin County over Tuscarora Mountain, in what was the wilderness before the American Revolution. It's twenty-two miles from Chambersburg, the seat of Franklin County, to McConnellsburg, the seat of Fulton County, along Pennsylvania Route 16, and U.S. 30, The Lincoln Highway. There are fewer than 15,000 residents, making Fulton the fourth smallest county in Pennsylvania by population. I've been to the smallest and third smallest, Cameron and Forest. This is also the county with the highest percentage of votes for the last president in the 2020 election in Pennsylvania, with more than 85% of the votes for the then-incumbent. The population is more than 98% White and English-speaking.

I left the motel in Chambersburg about nine for the short drive over the mountain. The weather was much cooler on the west side of the mountain, and overcast, just as Morgantown seems much cooler and cloudier than cities in Maryland across the mountains. There are eight places on the National Register of Historic Places, and I visited six of them. McConnellsburg is only a few square blocks in size. There is a pretty central business district along Route 16, and an imposing courthouse. 

A few miles north of town, in Dublin Township, is Burnt Cabins, named because the Native Americans sued settlers who had moved into their territory and the U.S. Government burned the settlers' cabins. It was a short-lived victory for the Native Americans. Today there is a small community, a church, a post office and an old grist mill. The Pennsylvania Turnpike is downhill from the village. 

On the way back to McConnellsburg, I visited Cowan's Gap State Park in Todd Township, a Works Progress Administration project with an artificial  lake, and beach, and historic cabins. I enjoyed the quiet there in the off-season.

Back in town, I looked for a place to eat. There were two restaurants on Lincoln Way, both closed at noon on a weekday, and a McDonald's and a Sheetz, the gas station-convenience store that is ubiquitous in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and some places in Maryland and Ohio. I opted for Sheetz, got a chicken, cheese and marinara sub on their "healthy" menu, toasted, an apple, a Diet Coke, and a cookie, for a total of about six dollars. The drink was free on points. I ordered on their touchscreen and the sandwich was waiting at the cashiers by the time I got my drink. They had a seating area off to the side. I was the only one eating there. The store was crowded; it must be where everyone goes who doesn't go to McDonald's. If I saw fifty people, five of us were masked. 

After lunch, I walked around a bit in town, then drove south on U.S. 522. which passes from McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania  to Hancock, Maryland to Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, to Winchester, Virginia over a sixty mile stretch. There are only three miles in Maryland separating Pennsylvania and West Virginia. I was home by four, in time for a nap and dinner.

Fulton House, about 1793, originally a hotel. 

I thought the brick building was the McConnell House, but I guess not. This was on  Lincoln Way, Route 16. U.S. 30 is a bypass up the hill from town.

Fulton County Courthouse, 1852

House decorated for Christmas with an old-time sleigh, McConnellsburg

The post office for Burnt Cabins is in this building

Burnt Cabins Grist Mill, 1840

Lake and beachfront at Cowan's Gap State Park

Across the lake at Cown's Gap

Historic cabin at Cowan's Gap State Park

Franklin and Fulton Counties, Part Two : Along Route 16

 Have you ever had a day when you planned exactly what you wanted to do, and the weather and traffic worked well, and you were able to do everything? Me neither, except for December 14, 2021. I had planned to visit Pennsylvania Route 16, across southern Franklin County from Tuscarora Mountain on the west to the Blue Ridge on the east, through the towns (boroughs in Pennsylvania) of Mercersburg, Greencastle and Waynesboro to Blue Ridge Summit on the Maryland line. 

The weather was way too warm for mid-December (as it has been through most of December in the Middle Atlantic states), about 55 in the afternoon from just below freezing in the morning. I had breakfast at the motel, then headed out about 9 west on U.S. 30 to Fort Loudon at the base of Tuscarora Mountain, then south to the birthplace of James Buchanan, the United States President from 1857 to 1861, the years leading up to the Civil War. The plaques there say that Buchanan's father ran a stop for people heading over the mountain, the "frontier" after the American Revolution. People needed help getting over the mountain. The house where Buchanan was born is no longer there, but there is a monument to Buchanan. 

I headed southeast on Route 16 to Mercersburg. There is a historic district in the center of town, the Mercersburg Academy, where James Buchanan went to school, and the Lane House from 1828, where Harriet Lane, Buchanan's niece, was born. She served as hostess in the White House for her bachelor uncle. I don't have a pic of the Lane House.

From there, I continued to Greencastle, a more upscale town, where there is also a historic district, containing an old-fashioned non-chain department store. I walked around in the warming weather.

By lunchtime, as I planned, I was in Waynesboro, the largest borough on Route 16. There is a several block long commercial and historic district. I found a few restaurants, but they were all closed at noon on a Tuesday. I finally spied Nikki's on Main Street near the center of town. No one was in there, and I thought it might be closed too, but the door was open and I walked in. It seemed an Asian fusion place with Kim-chi burritos. I don't know. I got a chicken ramen bowl, made with chicken broth. It wasn't cheap at $16.99, but it was huge and delicious, with chunks of chicken, noodles, scallions, green, um... something, not too salty. It was better than Grandma's chicken soup. A few more people came in after me. I wandered around the historic sites in town, and found suburban housing tracts, the reason why this county is included in Baltimore-Washington. It's far to the central cities, but fifty-four miles  to Gaithersburg in Montgomery County and  Owings Mills in Baltimore County.

I found out that Route 16 was the road from the frontier mountains, heading southeast through Waynesboro to Westminster or Emmitsburg, Maryland, then to Baltimore, the closest tidewater port city, by way of Reisterstown Road, near where I grew up. 

I headed to Blue Ridge Summit, on the Maryland Line, where there is a library in a former railroad station. Camp Louise, the Jewish girls' camp that was paired with Camp Airy, the camp for boys that I attended in the early '60s, had Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania as its post office, even though the camp was in Maryland. 

I went north from there to find Penn State, Mont Alto, set up as the forestry school for the Penn State system. Mont Alto Park was Pennsylvania's first state park. I drove past there to the Appalachian Trail, along the Blue Ridge. I found a place to park just off the road, and determined to walk fifteen minutes up the trail. The trail is narrow and rocky, and I'm not in great shape, but I did it, snapping some pics along the way. 

From there, I drove back to the motel and crashed for an hour. I had figured out where Panera is located and ordered from the counter (not the touch screen). I sat in a corner away from others. Many of the people who came in had ordered carry out to pick up. 

I was happy that I checked off everything I wanted to do for the day, that the weather was beautiful (good for me, bad for the planet), that I learned a lot, had a good meal, and didn't get lost. 

Wednesday, I drove back west across Franklin County to Fulton County, where I spent a few hours before heading home. 

Monument to President James Buchanan, 1907, near Cove Gap

Buck Run, James Buchanan State Park

U.S. Post Office, Mercersburg

Mercersburg Historic District

Burgin Center for the Arts, Mercersburg Academy, 2006, 

On campus at Mercersburg Academy, now a boarding and commuter high school, formerly Marshall College

On the square, Baltimore Street, Greencastle

Stone and log house near Greencastle

Waynesboro Armory, 1938, now the office of a real estate firm

Waynesboro Theater, renovated 2015

Oller House, 1891-2, Waynesboro

Borough Hall, 1881, East Main Street, Waynesboro

Alexander Hamilton House (not the guy from Hamilton), 1816, East Main St., Waynesboro

Wall mural, Waynesboro

Royer-Nicodemus House, about 1812, Renfrew Park

                                            

Barn at Royer-Nicodemus Farm, Waynesboro

Waynesboro Historic District, Main Street

Blue Ridge Summit Library, originally Western Maryland Railroad Station, 1891

Mont Alto State Park

Penn State, Mont Alto

Along the Appalachian Trail near Mont Alto

Franklin and Fulton Counties in Pennsylvania, Part 1: Chambersburg

Franklin County does not look promising when one drives in on Interstate 81 from Maryland. There are acres of beige boxes off the interstate, each with a giant truck in front. The highway is two lanes in each direction and jammed with trucks. 

I had in my head that it was 132 miles from Morgantown to Chambersburg, but I had written down 162. I thought I would be in Chambersburg by twelve, but it was after one when I finally got there, hungry and with a full bladder. I wanted to park in the middle of downtown, but I neglected to stuff my pockets with quarters before I left home, so I couldn't park at the meters. I knew there was a shopping center a few blocks from the center of town, and I found free parking and a Chinese restaurant. The sign on the door said "Sorry. We will be closed on Mondays." It was Monday. I retraced my drive on US 30, Lincoln Way East (you know you're not in Virginia when the street is named "Lincoln") to Hardee's, a place I don't typically eat because of a homophobic owner thirty or forty years ago. They had free parking, the bathrooms were in a vestibule just inside the door, and clean, and a real person took my order. I had the breaded chicken sandwich, no fries, thanks. I felt like Anthony Bourdain, of blessed memory. I bit into the too-yellow roll and the fried, crusty piece of chicken finished with a mayonnaisey dressing and dill pickles. I had to look at the sandwich after biting into it, and try to think of something complimentary to say about this exotic cuisine. 

I got four quarters from the nice young man at the counter and tried again downtown. Chambersburg has a pretty downtown, with a traffic circle at the junction of US 11 and US 30, the center of town. I found ten places on the National Register of Historic Places , and a synagogue that says it's been there a hundred years. I took a pic of the synagogue, in a narrow building at least a hundred years old, but it didn't show up on my phone/camera. Many of the stores were vacant. I found a bookstore (closed Monday), and there were a few stores with booths where people sell their old dishes, toys, books, records, CDs, clothes and general junk. I looked for the six CDs from my list, but couldn't find any of them. Many of the storefront windows had model trains set up with miniature snowy little towns. I found Wilson College at the north end of town. It's a pretty campus and I took a few pictures there. The nearby neighborhood has big old houses on wooded lots. 

The motel at "The Usual Chain" was two exits up from downtown, not walking distance to anything. There was a farm behind it. Chambersburg Mall was a short distance down the road. Like so many malls, it was almost empty. There was a movie theater and a J.C. Penney store open, and a mammoth store selling "stuff" in booths, like in town. Many of the booths looked like rooms in my house. I spent close to an hour there looking for the CDs on my list.  It doesn't help that I'm only looking for six titles. 

I looked for restaurants for dinner after my nap. All I could find were chains, all grouped around the exit off I-81 between downtown and my motel. I thought I would go to Panera, but I couldn't find it in the maze of parking lots. I found a Giant Food supermarket, which had some options, but nothing appealing. I ended up at Subway down the row from Giant, and, contrary to my usual custom, got carry-out, because I had hardly seen anyone in a mask, and listening to the radio, all I heard was that Covid infections were multiplying and hospitals in Pennsylvania were jam-packed. I listened to the television news, on cable from Washington. Wikipedia says Franklin County is part of the Washington-Baltimore SMSA. Washington is one hundred miles from Chambersburg. I planned out a complicated day ahead, along Route 16 from James Buchanan's Birthplace to Blue Ridge Summit and the Appalachian Trail. Part Two will be that, and part three will be Fulton County, twenty miles west of Chambersburg, where I spent most of Wednesday morning.

Memorial Fountain and Statue, 1878, Junction of US 30 and US 11 in downtown Chambersburg

Franklin County Courthouse, 1865. The prior courthouse was burned by Confederate  troops in 1864.

Coyle Free Library, 1891

Franklin County Jail, 1818. Cell block behind it is from 1880

Ritner Boarding House, also known as John Brown House, because he roomed there in 1859 prior to his raid on Harper's Ferry.

Masonic Temple, originally 1823-24

Storefront, Chambersburg Historic District. This is the office of a radio station now.

Townhouse Row, North Main St.

Shop window before Christmas on North Main St.

Wilson College Campus

Zion Reformed Church, 1811-1813