Then-Mayor-elect Michael Nutter, at last year's Thanksgiving Parade, with Yours Truly.

This time last year, I was prancing down Market St., dressed as a clown, happily taking part with my family in the city's annual Thanksgiving Day Parade.

I can't march this year  - I'm still hobbled by the foot surgery that laid me up for six weeks.  (This thanksgiving, what I'm most thankful for is my medical insurance...). 

But I thought I'd share this photo of Yours Truly from last year's march, where I encountered Michael Nutter, who'd just won the mayoral election by a landslide.

Looking at it, I get wistful for where we were back then, as a city.

It was a glorious day. The temperature was warm, the air soft and lovely; people stripped off their jackets, tied their sweatshirts around their waists, marveled at the sunshine that gave the day a feeling of surreal giddiness.

Nutter worked the curbside crowds like a rock star, and people jostled to shake his hand, slap his back, tell him they'd voted for him. He couldn't stop grinning.

Nutter was in a fabulous honeymoon with us, having won the mayoralty after a civilized, thoughtful campaign against Al Taubenberger, a gentlemanly sweetheart of an opponent. Their competition was smart, respectful and pleasant - nothing at all like the venomous battle that had pitted John Street against Sam Katz back in 2003.

There'd been no City Hall bugs. No allegations of fiscal malfeasance. No nasty race-baiting. Just a straight-up election and the feeling, afterward, that it really might be a New Day in Philly.

You could almost feel the city's self-esteem righting itself.

The many police officers who lined the parade route wore small, black ribbons in honor of slain Philly Police Officer Chuck Cassidy, who'd been buried just two weeks before. There was a tenderness in the air, as citizens smiled at the officers who waved them across the street. Or shook the cops' hands and thanked them for their service to the city.

What a day it was: A mix of silliness and sadness, pride and anticipation, set against a backdrop of ridiculously perfect weather that made you believe that anything was possible.

A year later, so much has changed.

Mayor Nutter's honeymoon with the city is officially over, the specter of a ballooning deficit prompting him to close beloved libraries, pools and firehouses. Voters who scrambled over each other to shake his hand last year may today angrily turn their backs on him - or worse.

And four more officers - exemplary, wonderful sentries of our city's streets - have perished in the line of duty since last Thanksgiving, leaving us numb and disbelieving.

What a difference twelve months makes in the life of a city. How tough it is to feel hope today. And how dearly I wish that, by next Thanksgiving, our city is in a better place.

A family photo of Antonio Quinton Clarke, whose body was found a year ago today.

And now, for Marie Clarke, allow me to reprint here the column I wrote this time last year about her son, Antonio Quintin Clarke - known as "Q" to family and friends.

Q was a nice kid, a truly good kid, who was murdered on Nov. 26, 2007 in a manner so gruesome, it's hard to imagine the kind of monsters who could savage a body the way they did his.

Marie Clarke recently contacted me because, a year later, police still have no suspects or motives in Q's murder. She doesn't want anyone to forget that she and her daughters are still missing their beloved Q, still desperate to know why he was taken from them, still frantic for someone to come forward and share what they know with the police.

So here, once again, is my column. And if you know anyone who knows something, anything, please call Southwest Detectives at 215-686-3334.
 
Mom Struggling To Cope With Son's Slaying
By Ronnie Polaneczky
Originally published on Dec. 18,2007

NO GUN LAW would have saved Antonio Quintin Clarke.

Known as "Q" to family and friends, the 15-year-old's body was found on Nov. 26, bloodied, beaten, partially nude and wrapped in plastic on the loading dock of a Grays Ferry electronics store.

His throat had been slashed, and he'd been stabbed nine times in the back. Clear plastic bags covered his head and feet.

Mob informants have been killed with less brutality than this teen was.

Marie Clarke wants to know what kind of monster would do this to her son.

"Q was afraid to go to school for three days, because he said some boys were going to hurt him," says Marie, sitting in the dining room of her Southwest Philly rowhouse on Bonaffon Street.

The table before her is adorned not with Christmas greens but dozens of sympathy cards and photos of Q, a sophomore at Bartram High.

"He wouldn't talk about it," she said. "But then he seemed better, like something got worked out. But then this happened. Someone has to come forward here, because whoever did this took out a really good kid."

So far, police are stumped.

According to Philadelphia Homicide Sgt. Tim Cooney, Q had no criminal history. That's why his body went unidentified for several days after he went missing the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

Police were unable to match Q's fingerprints with any on record, because he had no record.

"It's a gruesome case," says Cooney. "We're asking the public for help. We need anyone with information to come forward."

There is no instruction manual about how to go on after your son's gangland-style murder.

So Marie Clarke is playing her nightmare by ear.

The first thing she wants to do is move out of the house she lived in with Q and his two sisters for the last eight years.

She has spent the 10 days since his funeral packing everything in boxes - even though she has nowhere to go.

She hasn't been able to make herself go through Q's things in his basement bedroom, but she plans to get to them soon. Because each day on Bonaffon Street is excruciating.

"I can't live here anymore," says Marie, a tall, slender woman who sometimes speaks so softly, it can be hard to hear her - even when she's speaking angrily of her son's killers. "I moved here with three children. I can't live here with two."

Her daughters - Shante, 19, and Kwanesha, 16 - are heartsick over losing Q. He and Kwanesha, who is disabled by cerebral palsy, were inseparable. He lifted her wheelchair in and out of the house, carried her up and down the stairs, made her laugh herself silly.

"Your death is hard for me to handle," Kwanesha wrote in a letter to Q after he died, "but I hope we can get through this as a family. It is crazy that [at] my first funeral, I need to pay my last respects to you."

"Me and the girls are quiet," says Marie. "Q was loud and funny. He came in the house, you could hear him acting crazy with his friends. He made the house alive. It's too quiet now."

And she can't get used to her refrigerator staying full.

"He used to eat the food faster than I could buy it," says Marie of her lanky, beautiful boy, whose eyes and lips were hers.

Now, the food just sits there.

Q's friends are grieving, too:

The older neighbors, who'd let him tailgate with them on Sundays, when they'd set up barbecues on the block and pull their TVs onto the sidewalk to watch Eagles games.

And his buddies at the nearby Southwest Community Center. Q had attended an after-school program there for years and was so well-liked and respected, he eventually got hired as counselor, five afternoons a week.

His co-workers made a large donation box - covered with photos of Q - that they displayed at his funeral, to collect funds for the family. The pictures show Q clowning and straight-faced, mugging and posing - all the fast-changing moods of adolescence.

It's unfathomable that the young man they depict - so full of sass, nuance and affection - will never be older than 15, because he bumped up against an equally unfathomable evil.

"My whole life is my family," says Clarke, who is single. "This has torn us up. Whoever did this has no idea what they've done to us. No idea."

Anyone with information about the murder of Antonio Quintin Clarke is asked to call Southwest Detectives at 215-686-3334.

"Fifty cents, Uncle Ebenezer? That's a lot of halfpennies!"

 
Last week, I blogged about reader Kevin Towey's complaint that Philly cabs still tacked a 50-cent gas surcharge onto each cab fare, despite the fact that gas prices have plunged in the last few months.

Well, Christmas has come early for you, Kevin, because that surcharge is being lifted. Not sure if my blog post had anything to do with it (ahem ... modest cough ...) but the 50-cent fee will be a goner as of 12:01am this coming Monday, Dec. 1st.

Here's what I wrote in today's Daily News. Read it, then repeat after me, in your most precious-sounding Tiny Tim, grateful-for-Christmas voice, "God bless, every one!"

kids research school projects on computers and get homework help from library aides. It's also a refuge for some seniors who live nearby.

My column today about the importance of saving our city's libraries evoked passionate response from readers about what makes a place a real community.

I want to give a special shout-out to neighborhood and schools activist Helen Gym, who forwarded to me a truly beautiful piece of writing by activist Debbie Wei, who is working feverishly to keep casinos from opening at the Gallery - a move that would critically impact the life of Chinatown and its residents.

Wei's essay has nothing to do with libraries, but everything to do with community. So her words speak eloquently to my column's point that closing eleven libraries will be the equivalent of stilling the heart of the communities they serve.

Read Wei's words for yourself. She makes the point better than I ever could have.

A Question of Place
By Debbie Wei
Published Nov. 15, 2008
AsianWeek.com

"As Philadelphia’s Chinatown fights a proposed casino mere feet from its doorstep, I’ve been thinking a lot these days about why saving Chinatown means so much to me.

"Several years ago my youngest son, who studied kung fu and Beijing Opera in Chinatown, told me: “My favorite place to be is Chinatown. I know everyone there. I can walk around and hang out. The guy in the laundromat always gives me candy and everyone knows I’m a lion dancer and the old people all smile at me.”

"Chinatowns around the country represent an increasingly rare phenomenon. They are communities in the deepest sense: places not only defined by geography but also by memory and relationships. It is why my son would rather buy his candy in Chinatown even though he could get it cheaper at Walmart. When he buys his candy in Chinatown, he knows the clerks, he feels happy to see them and they are happy to see him.

"The responsibility that comes with relationships and knowing that there is something bigger than yourself is part of what makes a community live — it is part of what makes us fundamentally human. It isn’t just about a geographic area. It is about emotion, about connection to a place.

"Real communities like Chinatown support and sustain close relationships, and an understanding of each community member’s dependence on one another. Children growing up with a sense of connection to a place, who are part of a community, have a stronger sense of self. With roots. With commitment to the city in which their community sits.

"The myth of a narrow view of economic development in Philadelphia is that we no longer need to be connected to a place for it to develop economically. Tourists will supply the economic engine. And we no longer need small, local businesses. Our every need can be met by distant corporations, driven by technology and machines. Our contact with other people can be through electronic media. Who needs community any more?

"Another vision for economic development, however, seeks to have communities come together around common local experiences and our hopes for the future of our communities and cities.

"The 'economic development' plans that place stadiums, mega malls and casinos in residential communities reflect a type of thinking that doesn’t give a damn about people or the environment. If these fields of schemes don’t pan out economically, we can just build more, expand and move on to other people and other places.

"A different economic development model would recognize the value of permanent residential communities in Philadelphia and place concerns about the health and safety of people and places in equal regard to dollars — money which is speculative at best.

"Historically, in real communities, people knew each other. People had relationships. Therefore, people acted with the belief that the economic is not as important as the ethical and the social. Without communities, the ethical glue that has held us together through the millennia becomes undone.

"True progress has to do with the human heart and the relationships we build and sustain over time. Our future as a city is not about me and mine, not about rugged individualism, but about collective
responsibility. It’s about what is ours — all of ours.

"When you see us in the streets protesting, this is why we fight. By keeping intact our love for a place — for a community — we keep alive our hope for humanity and become a part of a much broader global movement with our need to prioritize the local, treasure our relationships and recommit to our collective responsibilities as a species.

"And if we allow Chinatown to die, with Chinatown will die the hopes, dreams, memories and connections of thousands of people to a city they no longer can claim as their own."

……….

Debbie Wei is a founder of Asian Americans United and the principal of the Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures Charter School. For more information on the Philadelphia Chinatown casino struggle, contact Asian Americans United at (215) 925-1538, or sign a petition and get more details.

PhillyGasPrices.com chart shows gas under $3.50 since the end of September.

The plus side to our dismal economy is that gas prices are plunging as quickly as they once skyrocketed.

So here's my question:  When will the Philadelphia Parking Authority get rid of that 50-cent gas surcharge it placed on Philly taxi fares in early June?

Cab riders hated the surcharge back then, obviously, but not many begrudged it. Hey, when gas prices soar to $4.14 per gallon, the way they did in July, everyone knows they have to share the pain.

But now that pump costs in Philly are averaging $2.14 per gallon, and predicted to head lower through the winter, isn't it time to drop that 50-cent surcharge already?

I put that question in a voicemail yesterday to Jim Ney,  head of the Philadelphia Parking Authority's Taxicab & Limousine Division, which regulates fares in the city's 1,800 cabs and 2,000 limos.

I'll post his answer here as soon as he returns my call.  Meantime, here's how I happened to ask him about it in the first place.

Last month, Daily News reader Kevin Towey read my column about how some Philly taxi drivers pretend that the credit-card system in their cabs is broken, thereby forcing riders to pay cash. They do this because they don't want to pay the vendor fees incurred by offering credit-card use to their customers. 

Towey, a frequent taxi rider, contacted me to say that he was equally peeved by the Philly-cab industry's use of a 50-cent gas surcharge, which he thought was no longer needed, given how dramatically gas prices have dropped.

Specifically, he noted that the PPA's initial order to institute the gas surcharge also directed the PPA's Board to stay abreast of daily price changes, ostensibly to make sure the surcharge was still warranted.  

As for criteria about ditching the surcharge, here's what the order says:

"The fuel surcharge may be lifted by this Board or upon recommendation of the TLD in the event the ten (10) day average cost of regular gasoline in the City of Philadelphia recedes to below $3.50 per gallon, or otherwise in the best interests of the public."

According to Jason Toews, co-founder of the website PhillyGasPrices.com, a comprehensive, pro-consumer guide to finding cheap fuel, prices have stayed below $3.50 per gallon since Sept. 30th.  

Better still, over the last ten days, gas in Philly has averaged a cheapo $2.14 per gallon.

"We predict they'll continue to fall until at least February, rebounding toward Memorial Day," Toews told me yesterday.

So what do you say, Mr. Ney? Riders shared cabbies' pain when there was pain to share. Now that relief has come, how about we share that, too?

Liza, beloved pup of Vince Fumo's neighbor, NickPappas. ( Steven M. Falk / Staff Photographer )

So maybe Liza was more of a bitch than her owner let on to me?

Liza, for those who didn't catch my column about her last week, is the mixed-beagle owned by Nick Pappas, next-door neighbor to Vince Fumo.

During the indicted state senator's still-unfolding trial, prosecution witness Christian Marrone, Fumo's estranged son-in-law, told how Liza's incessant barking drove Fumo so batty, Marrone and others were continually ordered to find ways to resolve the yap-fest. The cops were  summoned, L&I was brought in, the SPCA got involved, all at the behest of Fumo's lackeys.

The headline-grabber during Marrone's testimony came when he testifed that Fumo suggested poisening a piece of meat and tossing it to Liza - an allegation, it must be said, that Fumo's lawyer vociferously challenged in the courtroom.

Still, Marrone's claim was startling enough that I went looking for Liza, whom I presumed would be a gigantic, fierce and snarling hound, the scary kind that makes you break into a cold sweat and gingerly back away while whispering,"Good doggy, nice doggy, good doggy...".

So imagine my surprise when I met Liza, still living next door to Fumo's Green St. mansion, and she made not a peep the entire time I was there. Nor did the smallish, sweet-faced pup yip, even once, at the photographer who later stopped by to snap her photo for my column.

I spoke to many neighbors on the block who said they'd never had a problem with Liza - one former resident didn't even know Liza existed - and I said as much in my column.

After my column ran, though, I learned that another former resident did indeed remember Liza - and she said Liza's endless barking made her nuts, too. Maybe not nuts enough to enlist the services of many others to get the Liza to cease and desist with the yelping already, but the dog was a pain in the ears.

Liza's owner, Nick Pappas, admits that he did eventually receive a citation from the city, which he claims was a form of unwarranted harrassment.

Just thought I'd provide this update, in the interest of full disclosure, as this shaggy dog story unfolds.

Anytime you can find an excuse to share a picture of yourself with a celebrity, I say go for it. Even if it’s a celebrity with whom you’ve publicly taken issue, the way I did with Martha Stewart, three years ago, when I wrote a column about how she should become an advocate for the rights of children of incarcerated parents.

But did she follow my advice?

No. She did not.

I, however, would like to take hers. So I made a point of asking Martha where I could find a good recipe for pierogies. Despite my Eastern European heritage, I’d never bothered to learn from my pierogi-makin’ Granma Veronica how to make the doughy little crescents, which are stuffed with potato, cheese and other fillings that are, let’s be frank, just different ways to eat butter-drenched dough.

I figured Martha would know how to advise me. She, too, comes from Eastern Euro stock - her Polish mom, Martha Kostyra, taught Martha the ways of borscht, stuffed cabbage and pierogi. And Martha happened to be visiting the  Daily News, promoting her 500-page, $45 new book, Martha Stewart’s Cooking School, which is heavier than a doorstop but still lighter than some bread loaves I’ve made (my baking skills need honing).

Martha informed me that one of her earlier books, Entertaining, had all the recipes I needed to whip up a batch of mean pierogies.

So I will try.

And if  - no, when - I blow it, I’ll feed the mess to the dog and head over to The Pierogi Kitchen (648 Roxborough Ave., just off of Henry) in Roxborough, whose doughy little sensations, friends tell me, are to die for.

They’re probably also lighter than doorstops, which mine would not be.

Rick Hunter, a crew chief for Goodyear Gemini, a sponsor of the TV show "NASCAR Angels," shows a beaming Betsy Betancourt her Chevy Blazer, which his company helped refurbish.

Back in June, I wrote about a 24-year-old single mom named Betsy Betancourt who feared she’d have to drop out of nursing school in order to raise the teenage children of her sister, who died unexpectedly of a catastrophic infection.

Response to the column was compassionate and overwhelming, though not without some measured words for the decisions Betsy’s sister had made while alive that were now impacting Betsy in such a tough way.

One of the coolest responses to Betsy’s plight came from the producers of NASCAR Angels, a do-gooder reality-TV show that focuses on Good Samaritans in need of car rehab. Here’s the column I wrote about that

And – ta da! – here’s the show that resulted, which is now airing around the country (it has a has a brief, short ad up front). It also contains some brief footage of Yours Truly, where you’ll see that my hair needed combing that day. Other than that, it’s a great piece about a lovely young woman.

Go, Betsy! And tank you, NASCAR Angels. You guys are, well, angels!