Archive: November, 2011
Radnor Township School District learned it made a significant achievement, just in time for the holidays – Adequate Yearly Progress for all five of its schools in the 2010-2011 school year.
"We owe the achievement to our students and staff for their continual hard work," School District Superintendent Dr. Linda Grobman said in an e-mail interview.
Representatives from the five schools, Ithan, Radnor and Wayne Elementary Schools, Radnor Middle School and Radnor High School, attended the Tuesday, Nov. 22 school board meeting to accept plaques from the Pennsylvania Department of Education for the achievement.
Julie Woldow is at her Penn Valley home for the holidays, and in addition to festivities, she enjoyed a free excercise boot camp class the morning of Wednesday, Nov. 30 because she donated canned goods to Performance Fitness trainer Michelle Collier's cause.
"Michelle has been my family's trainer for a few years now, and during a recent visit she gave me a flyer for this food drive she's having," said the 29-year-old, who excercised during Collier's class at the All Saint's Church in Wynnewood. "I thought it was a great a cause, and you get fitness classes out of it."
Woldow, visiting from her current residence in Anchorage, Alaska, took advantage of Collier's third annual Get Your Can to Class Food Drive,which allows individuals in the Main Line and Philadelphia areas to bring can donations in exchange for up to three classes.
Haverford Township police are investigating a home invasion in the unit block of Joann Circle in Havertown, Pa.
In a news release, officials said a female resident answered a knock on her door at around 10 a.m. on Nov. 30 to a man who claimed he was a member of Occupy Philly.
The suspect then entered the home, told the victim it was a robbery and instructed her to go to the second floor. The suspect placed her in the second floor bathroom and told the female victim to be quiet.
For Villanova University's third annual Lore Kephart Lecture Series, the university will host Harvard University historian Jill Lepore.
Lepore currently teaches at Harvard and writes for The New Yorker, according to the university's bio. Her most recent book is "The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History."
Lepore's lecture, "Poor Jane's Almanac: The Life and Opinions of Benjamin Franklin's Sister," will be held on Dec. 6 at 7 p.m. in the Villanova room of Connelly Center. It is free and open to the public.
Love, Kudos, Remembrance is an occassional series profiling people from the Main Line who stumble into grand loves, stand out to their neighbors and whose memories remain after they're gone.
Long after the Thanksgiving holiday Haverford School students like senior Fitz Tepper remain thankful for Headmaster Joseph Cox, who he met at the school's ice cream social in 1998.
Tepper said the junior kindergarteners were given Frisbees and while enjoying his new toy, he accidentally threw it onto the eight-foot roof of the former lower school building.
"Dr. Cox saw this happen and walked over, lifted me onto the roof and I retrieved the Frisbee," Tepper said. "That's his most important quality, his approachability, that has made him really popular among all the students here."
Staff and students like Tepper are eager to show their appreciation for Cox since his retirement for June 2013 was announced earlier this month. Although it's about a year and a half away, the Haverford School campus community already feels a loss for Cox, who has been the school's headmaster for 14 years.
"It felt like the right time, and I'm leaving it a bit of a better place than it was, and leaving it a great place for boys of all ages," Cox said.
Leafing through an old copy of the New York Times Magazine in late 2010, a familiar striped tie caught James Shecter’s eye. Shecter, then a sophomore at the Haverford School, noticed the boy in the photo wore gold in his tie – the Haverford School’s colors are maroon and gold – with a crisp blazer and khakis.
As Shecter read the accompanying article, he learned the school uniform so similar to his own was worn at Miller-McCoy Academy for Mathematics and Business, an all-boys charter school in New Orleans that opened in 2008 in response to Hurricane Katrina’s effects on the devastated city’s public school system.
Published in August 2008, the article documented the beginnings of Miller-McCoy, which when it opened only serviced the sixth and ninth grades. Shecter found himself engrossed in the story. One question, posed by one of Miller-McCoy’s principals Keith Sanders, stood out to him.
“Now we’ve been given the opportunity to be a part of the rebirth of New Orleans,” Sanders told New York Times editor Paul Tough. “How often do you get a chance to contribute to something like this?"
Shecter eventually tracked down Sanders’ and Miller-McCoy’s other principal Tiffany Hardrick and jotted their contact information on his copy of the magazine. He called them and said he wanted to help. Together, the New Orleans principals and Haverford School student began making plans for Shecter to travel to Louisiana and tutor that summer.
Before Shecter left for New Orleans, Sanders, Hardrick and 10 Miller-McCoy students traveled to Philadelphia, stopping at the Haverford School for a tour and lunch at the OK of the Haverford School’s Headmaster Joseph Cox. Shecter and his peers senior Fitz Pepper and junior Sam Bloch gave them a tour of the school, shared burgers and talked about what young men that go to an all-boys school talk about: girls and sports.
On their visit, Sanders and Hardrick told Shecter about a fundraiser: An anonymous donor said he or she would double any money raised by June 21. Shecter jumped at the opportunity to do more for Miller-McCoy.
For all of November on behalf of the Narberth Community Food Bank, Mayor Tom Grady's Narb Net newsletter has asked, "Going to Aunt Millie's for Thanksgiving and need something to do with that bird?"
As it turns out, a lot of people went to Aunt Millie's.
Gigi Tevlin-Moffat, the food bank's coorinator, told Neighbors some people donated two turkies. Yesterday, with help from the community, the food bank delivered 52 Thanksgiving boxes, which included the all-important bird, stuffing, potatoes, vegetables and some chocolate treats. Because Tevlin-Moffat and other volunteers noticed some of their visitors were vegetarian, 10 of the boxes had vegetarian lasagnas in lieu of the turkey.
The Wednesday before Thanksgiving is considered a big drinking night by event promoters, bar owners and the police, trailing only New Year's Eve. The whole weekend, in fact, is a concern to police, and officers on the Main Line and elsewhere have been preparing to keep the roads as safe as possible.
According to 2009 report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 411 alcohol-related deaths occurred over the four-day Thanksgiving period.
Pennsylvania-specific statistics from a 2010 PennDOT report state that there were 1,425 crashes and 19 motor vehicle-related deaths Pre-Thanksgiving, out of a total of 17,856 crashes and 233 deaths happening on holidays that year. Pre-Thanksgiving crashes were the second highest percentage of holiday crashes at 8 percent, with the highest being Post-Thanksgiving crashes at 8.6 percent.
Standing in front of a four-burner stove in his old college t-shirt, Jeremy Boehm carefully pulled a nylon bag full of grains from a silver pot. The dark brown liquid dripping from the bag signified the beginning of a long night for Boehm and his childhood friend, Eric Woods, who would stay up until the early morning caring for their “baby we hope to drink one day.”
Home brewers, Boehm and Woods, both 27, were hard at work on a blend of chocolate, coffee and cinnamon, a brew the two tentatively named the Santa Java Stout. The Santa Java will be a new addition to the Narberth residents’ homebrew line, Narbrew, something they hope to one day turn into a full-bodied brewpub where people can come to make their own beer.
“It takes a lot of money, and there are a lot of brewpubs, but that also means there are a lot of success stories,” Woods said. “The entire industry is steadily increasing.”
Though Philadelphia has a pretty saturated brew market, the Main Line isn’t overflowing with brewpubs. In July, Tired Hands Brewing Company began gutting an old physicians' office along Ardmore Avenue to open a brew cafe, set to open in the coming months. Villanova graduates Trevor Hayward and Luke Bowen partnered with Mark Braunwarth to create Evil Genius Beer Company, but they don’t own a brewpub and use Four Horsemen Brewing Company in Indiana to brew and bottle.
But with a lagging economic scene, legal restrictions and only occasional pockets of time, opening a brewpub wouldn’t be easy, something Boehm and Woods acknowledge – but it’s certainly a viable business venture. Not only do people like beer, but they, like Woods and Boehm, want to brew it, too.
Matthew Pieters of Havertown began brewing more than 10 years ago, and over the years, his friends began brewing too. He started meeting people through church from different towns along the Main Line who expressed the same interest, and over a couple of beers in November 2010, Pieters and his fellow brewers officially decided to create the Main Line Brewers Association. In December, they planned how the club would work, and by February of the next year, MLBA convened for its first meeting at the Flip & Bailey’s Bar & Grill in Rosemont.
Zachary Crippen was the first half-hour interview of 12 finalists on Saturday, Nov. 19. He felt relief immediatley after exiting the room in the Wells Fargo building in Colorado Springs, where an eight-member committee drilled him on academics, extracurricular activities and anything else involving his higher education and work experience.
"I worked as hard as I could to get to that point and nothing at that point would have changed their minds," Crippen, 20, said. "I went in with the peace of mind that I had done all I could and from then it was in God's hands."
Nearly two hours after the final interview ended, the 12 finalsts walked back into the room. The eight-member committee named two finalists Rhodes Scholars from District 13 ; Crippen, a cadet at the Air Force Academy, was one of them.
