Category Archives: Puffin Tales

Random stories of the activities and friends in or around North and South Puffin.

Supporting Parents?

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Back in the 80s (that would be the 1980s for those in school now), our local high school had more than a few problems. Test scores were down. Graduation rates were down. “Post-secondary attainment” was down. Teacher salaries were down. Community involvement was down. School morale was down. We fixed it.

“A college education has spoiled many a good garbage collector.”

Our solution was to bring together a bunch of parents of middle school age kids to form what ended called the “Parent Support Group.” I always thought it sounded like a warm and fuzzy safety net encounter group but I was the first chair of this gang and got outvoted.

These were the Go-Go 80s. No, not the heady, speculative 1880s when real estate prices went berserk and steam trains rumbled west. As Tom Brokaw said, “Money was flowing out of Wall Street for Bacchanalia.”

It wasn’t flowing to Vermont.

I thought Management by Wandering Around could have. Maybe a little Theory Y. And some old-fashioned MBO. For building rapport in a team or a community, it sure beat hiding behind closed doors.

7th grader Jimmy Kominsky set a goal to do his homework every day.

Missisquoi Valley Union High School was about a decade old, then, a “new” school for the area. It had Florida architecture with circular brick pod-like turrets clustered to face out toward the invading hordes. It was a district school with three feeder towns, rather than the very local Town K-12 school with the schoolmarm living above your neighbor’s garage. The enrollment averaged about 1,050-1,100 students in the mid-80s. My memory pegs the annual budget at around $2 million then (the Inflation Calculator tells us that $2 million in 1985 dollars would be $4.4 million today).

The school board and the school administration were sequestered in this fort and the community stayed away. Educational changes were in the wind and the community stayed away. Budgets climbed and the community stayed away.

8th Grader Jenny Laroche set a goal to birth a foal.

Part of our charter as the Parent Support Group was to be a Booster Club to bring the community back in. MVUHS has a stunningly excellent theater; our arts council started there with the Franco Voyageurs, the Ketch dance troupe, McGill Jazz, Vermont Symphony performances, and more. Good arts and good sports bring people into the building and enrich the kids. They can even improve school revenues.

Part of our charter as the Parent Support Group was to give the then-new “Middle School” its own identity. Somebody had decided kids in 7th and 8th were too young to mingle with the older high school students and the idea of a “junior high” was demeaning.

OK.

Oh, I understand all the buzzwords, that middle school is student- not subject-oriented and “emphasizes affective development” and that “teachers and students work together in interdisciplinary teams” with experiential learning and teamwork and that the awful junior high was subject- and teaching-centered with nothing but traditional instruction for hours and hours per day. Junior high kids have to suffer through study halls and homerooms.

Jeezum.

8th grader Brown Connery set a goal to skateboard in the snow.

You’d think it was impossible to do any of the neat, new wave, high tech schooling in the Junior High building. Moreover, I still wonder why kids in middle school today have lower achievement than kids in junior high did a generation ago.

Back to the story.

The school pulled the 7th and 8th graders out of gen pop and gave them a pod of their own. Teachers shuffled around so a dedicated group shepherded these kids for those couple of school years. And we parents supported all that with in- and after-school activities.

We had music and art. We had trips. We had clubs including a goal-setting club. I don’t remember if there was a fishing club but I do remember math and cooking and tutoring and shop. Come to think of it, I don’t think we had a rocket club. Missed the boat there, we did.

Jimmy Kominsky’s goal to do his homework, no matter how tired he was after school, was because he was bored. “It’s so boring to sit there wasting your time,” he told me, “but it’s better than learning to flip your eyelids inside out.”

Jenny Laroche had some trouble finding a horse to foal. This is dairy country and there were fewer horses around even in the 80s than ever before. Benoit Laroche (no relation) let her stop every day after school. Benoit milked about 100 head, a fairly large farm for the day, and had six Morgan horses he used for sugaring.

Brown Connery failed at skateboarding in the snow but he learned enough to skateboard on it. That wasn’t magic, but common sense. He and his dad cleared out some space to set up a small skateboard yard with flatbottom, a nice downslope, and hard, grindable edges. It was winter-ready because he had a really big shovel.

Jimmy is 43 this year. He never did learn to flip his eyelids but he did learn to swallow swords. I ran into him again this spring in Key West. He works the slack wire in Mallory Square most evenings. He owns a house and has two kids in the Horace O’Bryant School there.

Jenny is 44 this year. She went to UVM and then Cornell and is a large animal vet in Alaska.

Brownie never did invent the perfect skateboard but he moved halfway down the Banana Belt, that part of far western Vermont where temperatures are more clement. He drives a truck over the road and serves on the school board in Bridport, I think.

Overall, the Parent Support Group was a success.

Those early middle schoolers set goals for their own enjoyment. They saw rising test scores right through graduation. Commencement rates came back up. More than half went on to some form of higher education. Neighbors as well as parents attended the musical and sports and shows there. School morale came up.

[Years passed]

Things have changed at schools in 30 years. The 2015-16 enrollment at MVU is 930 students with a student-teacher ratio down to an amazing 10:1. The 2015-16 budget is $15,231,150. USNews reports the College Readiness Index at 23.5, the mathematics proficiency at 1.7, and the reading proficiency at 2.8. In the New England Common Assessment Program, 16% of Missisquoi Valley Union 11th graders are now Substantially Below Proficient in reading and 51% are now Substantially Below Proficient in math (that’s more than half the kids for those in that category). If you add up the bottom two categories, one-third of MVU 11th graders are now NOT Proficient in reading and 80% are NOT Proficient in math overall.

There must be a lesson in there somewhere but it’s up to you young parents to solve. See, I have a different emergency. I ran out of cookies.

Next up, what Vermont’s governor and I were joking about on stage in 1984.

 

Adventure

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Floridian Ilse Telesmanich sprained her ankle hiking in South Africa. She was 90.

A retired builder, Englishman Tom Lackey, took up wing-walking at 89. His family thinks he’s mad.

Adventures come in many forms.


Superboat in Marathon

In 1982, Boppa looked around and said, “I’m 92 years old. Let’s move to Florida.” It was the first wanderlust he had given in to for 67 years. My grandmother, though, came from a family of semi-wanderers.

Her great-x-5-grandfather, Richard Barnard, wandered from England to the Colonies in 1642 to follow William Penn into what became southeastern Pennsylvania. His grandson (my first cousin six times removed) Isaac was an American lawyer who served as a United States Senator and in the Fourteenth Regiment Infantry of the United States Army Militia as a Major General in the War of 1812. Odd role for a Quaker. Another early cousin, Cyrus Barnard obtained a patent for a mowing-machine as early as 1820. He was also the first to import merino sheep into Chester County. Another odd combination. A subsequent Richard Barnard (my first cousin five times removed) was perhaps the first Chester Countian to go to California in search of wealth.

My neighbor sold his air conditioning business in Maryland and moved to the Keys to buy a boatyard. My own parents couldn’t stay put despite the fact that their lives were based in Chester County for five decades and in the Keys for a couple more. They wandered in road trips and in the boat and one hurricane season moved to Gallup, New Mexico. They are now circumnavigating the globe on a rose petal but that’s another story.

My path has been a little different because I got a variant “adventure” gene. I flew to Europe to ski the Alps and then later to work and annoy German waitresses. I conned a 50′ twin-screw diesel boat in the Chesapeake and built a 30-foot boat in the barn. I’ve rappelled down the Palisades.

Now much of my travel across New England, Florida, and the American Southwest is to get the light right on a bat tower, lie in the grass for a view of brown cows against vibrant foliage, view an ancient cactus bloom against biosphere glass, or capture the vanishing end of a seven mile bridge over clear green water.

I have visited 40 US states, but I tend to settle in. Although I’m a ninth-generation Pennsylvania native and I’ve resided in only four states, I found a home in the Keys.

There are adventures here.

Once upon a time, long after the pirates stopped sailing square-riggers, the Keys had powerboat races in the waters off Key West, Marathon, and Islamorada. Somehow, we lost the Marathon and Islamorada events but the Super Boat Grand Prix will return to Marathon on Fourth of July weekend. There should be 20-25 boats, the big iron, there. These boats can hit 150 mph going under the 7-Mile Bridge and past Inch Beach. And they’ll be back at the marina behind Faro Blanco.

I drove race cars for several years but I’ve never considered driving race boats. See, when I tried that I discovered that I don’t think in the third dimension at speed. Race cars go up and down but they stay (mostly) attached to the ground. Race boats go up and down and the driver needs to remember to land the darned things.

There may be a different approach.

On the news last night, SWMBO and I watched a piece on seniors (that means people waaaaaaay older than we are) taking up kiteboarding. Now-74-year-old retired science teacher Louis Self writes that “Riding and jumping with a wake board, being propelled only by the wind gives an unimaginable rush.”

Hmmm.


Surfing to Infinity

She told me that I can’t do it. A boy does love a challenge if I can just figure out how to land the darned thing.

I’m not going to try to master a headstand, though. I’m not nuts, after all.

 

The Seven Words I Can’t Use Anymore

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(And It Makes Me Mad)

Girl.
Boy.
Guys.
Lady.
Gentleman.
Old.
Gay.

Before any impressionable younger (experience-challenged) readers get excited, none of these are the seven words that once upon a time could not be repeated on television. I’m not sure if this is a lament for the natural mutation of language or an ode to a politically correct lexicon. You decide.

There is one other caveat. Correctness is in a terrible state of flux. By the time this column appears, all the words may have changed again. Bomb shelters (underground symbols of the fearful manipulation of other-thinking nations) became swimming pools (environmentally appropriate aquatic exercise centers) a few decades ago. The millenial milestone (measured from a date Before the Current Era) has passed. Today that tumult has turned inward. Today we might hear a gentleman with a conservative agenda called a fossilized futzwuffle by a lady of a liberal persuasion. Does that mean the lady is a tramp? This column may cook my personal goose.

Ed Note: some of the names have been changed
to protect privacy. The street names haven’t.

Gay Lombard was a high school classmate. She lived up to her name: cheerful, engaging, involved in good works. The main intersection in a small Pennsylvania city is the corner of High and Gay. Except the long blue nose of Standards and Practices hasn’t allowed us to get higher since Ed Sullivan presented the Doors.

Gay was once a delightful word but because kindergartners titter, certain congressmen grow red faced, and most others with the mentality of five-year-olds get flustered when they hear it, many of us have forsaken gaiety. That’s a loss to Mr. Penn’s sylvan commonwealth, to Ms. Lombard, and to the language.

Vermont now has two cool “oldies” stations. One, serving the Champlain Valley, doesn’t quite reach our friends in North Puffin, but does play neat car tunes for them whenever they drive south of the county seat. The North Country station hits every hill and valley in the county, giving folks less reason to travel. Oldie in this sense is, of course, merely a statement of chronology that relates solely to the musical era of the baby boomers. My dad thinks oldies means big bands, but we can’t convince any radio magnates of that, so he suffers through the Beatles, and Jerry Lee Lewis, and the Sensations. We who grew up as musically challenged baby boomers enjoy the tunes. No one over the age of five would dream of using the word to describe anything (or anyone) calendar-measurement challenged. Not even my mom who complains whenever I have a birthday.

The oldies station played the O’Kaysions’ I’m a Girl Watcher. One of the songs of the sixties with the usual intricate melody and complex lyrics:

“I’m a girl watcher.
“I’m a girl watcher.
“Watchin’ girls go by.
“My my my.”

Liz Arden scowled at me again recently for describing a colleague as “the tall girl with gray hair.”

My mom always joined the “gals” (her word, not mine) for bridge club. Your dad went out with the boys. Although mine are in their seventies (persuns-of-a-chronologically-advanced-stature), they can’t use those terms either. And the word cop best not catch us calling them oldies.

What to do? I teach a college course most semesters. Since I enlighten male and female students alike, I need an acceptable device showing my thoughtfulness when addressing the entire class. “Girls” obviously fails. “Boy” is perhaps worse. I thought guys might work, as in, “Hey guys. May I have your attention?” Honk! Wrong answer.

They told me Youse guys would be all right if I could fake a Brooklyn accent.

I suppose we could rewrite the song:

“I’m a persun-of-the-XX-chromosome-persuasion
observer, which is not to demean those who
watch persuns-of-the-XY-chromosome-persuasion
or those who don’t watch anybody at all on the
principle that the least eye contact with an
individual’s shadow invades the shadow’s domain.

“I’m a persun-of-the-XX-chromosome-persuasion
observer except for ignoring those persuns
who fear the least shadowy eye contact.

“Watchin’ persuns of any chromosomal variance go by.

“Huh huh huh?”

Do you think that changes the melody, too?

It occurs to me, in these days of political correctivity, that if boys weren’t girl watchers and girls weren’t boy watchers, there would be darned few hupersuns here to watch.

Editor’s Note: This column first appeared in the Burlington Free Press in 1996. I have made only minor updates.

 

Perp Walk

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Back in the days that our kids were still in school, I got roped into helping to found and run the North Puffin Parent Target School Development group (fortunately both kids were graduated and have gone on to live happy and productive lives with only the slightest of tics) and the Mooselookmeguntic Rural Health Center.

Northern Vermont was rural and underserved in telecommunications, in the arts, and in medicine three or four decades ago. RHCs answered part of that by staffing small, local storefronts with a team that usually included a nurse practitioner or physician assistant, and often a nurse-midwife, and a physician to supervise the mid-level practitioners.

Our acute care regional hospital provided the expertise and the towns found grant money to found the Mooselookmeguntic Center. We provided outpatient primary care services and basic lab work on site but the hospital was close enough to transfer patients or samples easily. RHCs qualify for Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement.

I got to know an osteopath, Ned Mitchell, when he was a young doc at a clinic in one of the neighboring towns. He subbed for us at the Mooselookmeguntic Center as well as volunteering in sports medicine for a hockey team that played in the North Puffin Arena.

Nice fellow. And unusual for an osteopath these days since he still practiced bone crunching.

“I crunch,” Dr. Mitchell told me, “to restore movement to the stiff joints of the spine.” Manipulation is becoming something of a lost technique as more and more docs move to ultrasound and other gadgets that let them avoid touching a patient.

“I need to touch,” he said. “That connection often tells me more than a normal patient interview.”

As Gregory House liked to remind us, “patients lie.”

Ned wasn’t “our” doc because his practice and clinic was a couple of towns over but he has laid hands on my back more than a couple of times and managed to keep me standing upright. At least he did until the cops perp walked him out of the Arena in front of the TV cameras one cold, snowy afternoon.

It was a divisional championship game between the fierce rival North Puffin Hawks and the South Burlington Rangers. Ned was subbing again as team doc for the Hawks.

Channel 3, the local CBS affiliate, was on site broadcasting the game.

Justin Dupuis had just scored his second goal. That tied the game.

Three Vermont State Police cars and two Sheriff’s deputies rushed the parking lot. The deputies covered the western exits to the arena. Two troopers took positions at the south and north corners of the building. Four more troopers moved into the arena and onto the ice.

The game stopped.

The troopers located Ned on the home bench. They forced him to the ice, searched him, handcuffed him, and walked him out.

This isn’t a story about priests or boy scout leaders or teachers diddling kids.

Page 1, Above the Fold.
Physician Arrested
PUFFIN CENTER (UPI)–Edward G. Mitchell, D.O., a 35-year-old physician in Vermont, has been arrested for allegedly instructing students to cut and burn themselves to get rid of demons.
Mitchell faces charges of aggravated child abuse and child abuse.
One teenaged student suffered second-degree burns. “Dr. Mitchell told me to spray deodorant on my hand and light it on fire,” he said in an affidavit released by the Vermont State Police. Mitchell allegedly also cut that student with a broken bottle and cauterized the wound with a key he heated up with a flame.
Authorities were alerted after one of the hockey teens told his parents.
Mitchell is being held on $50,000 bail and has been put on unpaid suspension from his Rural Health Center clinic.

The hospital released this statement: “Edward G. Mitchell is a physician in our Rural Health Center system and has privileges in this hospital. He has our full support but has been put on leave per hospital policy.”

Page 1, Above the Fold.
New Charges Against Physician
PUFFIN CENTER (UPI)–Edward G. Mitchell, D.O., the 35-year-old physician in Vermont arrested for allegedly performing cutting and burning rituals on students, has been arrested again.
“Our continuing investigation shows that Mitchell was allegedly selling and employing hockey players to help sell, prescription drugs around the sports centers” according to a Vermont State Police statement.
Mitchell was housed in the Northwest State Correctional Facility in lieu of $100,000 bond.
“I’m okay,” the 17-year-old teen forced to participate in the sales and the ritual burning told the Gazette. “I’m fine. All I know is he’s in custody.”

The hospital released this statement: “Edward G. Mitchell was a physician at the East Puffin Rural Health Center from June 1980 through May 1986 and had privileges in this hospital. His contract was not renewed effective the end of May 1986.”

Page 12, Section 2.
Charges Against Physician Dropped
PUFFIN CENTER (UPI)—Edward G. Mitchell, D.O., the 35-year-old physician in Vermont charged with felony drug possession, drug dealing, pandering, theft of services, and performing rituals on students, has been released.
“The student recanted his statement,” according to the Vermont State Police.
That former student, now 19, told police he was angry with Dr. Mitchell for benching him for drug use during a playoff.
“The Centers for Medicare Services Inspector General’s Office performed a complete audit of the prescription medication inventory and of the complete financial books of the clinic and of his private practice,” a CMS spokesman said. “We found no discrepancies.”

After his release, Ned Mitchell, D.O., moved to open a new practice “far from the rumor mill.” He accepted a post in the Emergency Department at a small hospital in rural western Maryland.

Someone uncovered the page 1 stories.

In December of 1989, Dr. Mitchell’s new posting in Maryland told reporters, “The employee has been terminated. As termination is a personnel matter, we will not make any further comment.”

Ned Mitchell, D.O., is now working as a commercial fisherman, catching sockeye salmon, Bering Sea crab and pollock, in Alaska.

And I have no one to keep me straight, all because some kid lied and the system ran with it.

 

I Haz a George!

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Another in the continuing saga of South Puffin maintenance. When my dad died, he took with him the stove, television, stereo receiver, OTA Interweb modem, and pretty much anything else that plugged in.

Now I find out he forgot to fix the roof, too.

I found a few little leaks here when I got back here in November. Bought a lot of buckets. Started looking for ways to repair it and for an engineer to “bless” my drawings for a clerestory “bump up” that will solve all my problems: room for insulation above the roof deck, a better roofing material (steel panels), and more.

Old retired (Florida-licensed) engineers are surprisingly hard to find in the Keys and the couple of guys with shingles out are backed up until June.

Meanwhile, I have to patch the leaks. Happily, we didn’t get much rain over the winter and the buckets mostly worked, even when Rufus was here.

Like most “low slope” roofs, this house has a Built Up Roof.

“Please don’t make me crack open a browser to look stuff up in order to understand you!” Liz Arden said.

Built Up Roof LayersBuilt Up Roofing is (somewhat) self explanatory in that it is a waterproof covering made of layer after layer applied to the roof deck. Tradesmen refer to Built Up Roof membranes by the acronym “BUR” or, more commonly as “tar and gravel” roofs. The roofer applies alternating layers of bitumen (tar) and reinforcing fabrics such as tar paper or “felt” to create something that looks a lot like a single, gihugical (< ==technical term) shingle. In other words, the roofing crew mops down hot tar, lays tar paper in it, mops down more hot tar, lays tar paper in it, and so on. Once they have enough layers, they spread a couple inches of stone on top.

Built up or tar and gravel roofs have been in use for more than 100 years. Sometimes, the base sheet is mechanically fastened. Better is when they are fully adhered, meaning the first layer of tar “glues” the felt directly to the roof deck or insulation.

I planned to simply add a layer of bitumen to the top layer of felt so I had to get move the stone off.

Tax Day: I finished clearing all the stone and swept everywhere I will patch. I also cleared and swept an area down over the overhang but couldn’t get down into the stone embedded in that top layer of tar.

This is going to be harder than I thought.

I got plenty hot and sweaty but didn’t get any deeper into the roof surface. Very disappointing.

I also discovered that my roof work will cause me to do a lot of vacuuming. The entire living room got covered by white grit.

Spudding is removing the gravel and some bitumen from the top layer of the roof membrane by chipping or scraping.

I bought an ice scraper at Home Depot. Really. And I commenced to spudding the roof.

This is young man’s work. I got about 10% of it done in a couple of evenings because I work work work rest rest rest, work work rest rest rest rest, work rest rest rest rest rest.

In the meantime, I bought out Home Depot’s peel-and-stick Weatherwatch and decided I should wander down to General Rental to rent a 100-pound roof roller. And then went to sit in the Atlantic bathtub.

I draped the rest of the furniture against dust. Bought more drop cloths and two gallons of milk.

But I didn’t get a roof roller. General Rental is now “Sunbelt Rentals,” a national, full-service rental company with more than 400 locations. And they open only M-F here in Marathon.

I need help so I called my friend George.

OK, George is actually Jorge but most Jorges here say George. He and one of his buddies showed up around 9 ayem yesterday to scrape the rest of my roof.

Finding George was a lot tougher than I expected. None of my other friends or acquaintances or even friends of acquaintances were willing to go up there and I looked for a couple of months.

It was hot yesterday morning. It was hotter yesterday afternoon. It was hot yesterday evening. Woofdah. I wouldn’t mind a good rain to break the heat if I didn’t have the roof open.

George and George’s cousin quit after two hours.

Grumpy old guy outlasted the two young guys on the roof.

It was brutal up there. I worked pretty much the whole time George and George’s cousin were there but I didn’t work as hard, scraping up that rock-and-tar. Still, I was the last man off the roof because I still had to clean up the jobsite when they gave up for the day.

While we were working a city cop with a deputy sheriff backup stopped by on code enforcement. See, we can’t do commercial work on a Sunday here in South Puffin but owners can do anything. He saw I was up there sweating and said, “Have a nice day.”

He wouldn’t come up and help though.

Next up, a sad predicament. The tar repair I did last year was so good, it was unremovable. George’s cousin busted right through to the roof deck and stopped. Called me over.

I inspected.

I shrugged.

Roof deck looks good which is most excellent news.

The BUR job ain’t what I expected, though. Whoever did the roof laid a layer of ordinary tar paper with short roofing nails. Then they laid another layer of ordinary tar paper with more short roofing nails. Lather, don’t rinse, repeat. They swamped the hot tar down on top of all that paper. And poured a couple inches of stone on top of that.

I took over that part and stripped an area probably 8×8′ but I’ll open it up the remaining three feet to the east because that takes me right to the edge of the roof and makes the transition to the existing felt much shorter and much less likely to leak.

George and his cousin did a decent but not perfect job yesterday. I scraped a bit more and then started getting ready for the peel-and-stick.

I worked for a while in sunlight and then rigged a clamp on shop light on my circular saw extension stand. Worked a treat.

Between the new shop broom (best shop broom I own, bar none) and the electric leaf blower, I got the surface pretty well cleaned. Laid some Weatherwatch. I didn’t nail the edges or seal them, so I really hope for continuing dry weather. I also ran out of time and steam and roofing before I got to that open section. One can see light through the holes there. I really really hope for continuing dry weather.

My sweaty work shorts from yesterday still haven’t dried out.

George was here before 8 this morning to finish up but it killed us again so he’s gone for a while until the schefflera puts that section in shade.

I hope all this works.