LETTER: 9/11 Juxtaposed Man’s Inhumanity with Humanity
August 25, 2013
DEAR EDITOR,
Last week my spouse and I took a mini-vacation to the Inner Harbor area of Baltimore. While walking over to visit the National Aquarium I noticed a pile of twisted steel girders outside a tall building. The building turned out to be the Baltimore World Trade Center and the girders were part of a memorial to the 68 Marylanders who perished as a result of the 9/11 tragedy.
While I continued walking, my mind returned to what I was doing and where I was on that fateful day. Whenever I think back, it is always with an overriding sense of sadness.
9/11 Memorial at Baltimore World Trade Center (Photo: Don Woods)
LETTER: Save the Bottlenose Dolphins
August 24, 2013
DEAR EDITOR,
Over the last few months this summer, many of us that have been out on the water have been discovering dead dolphins, stranded in and around the Bay. What at first appeared to be a local event has turned out to be more widespread. Bottlenose dolphins are being found stranded all up the mid-Atlantic coast from North Carolina to Maine, with at least 124 strandings (45 possible deaths) reported since July, a death rate seven times higher than normal.
This has led the National Marine Fisheries Service to declare a federal UME, or “unusual mortality event.” At the top of the list of possible causes is a measles-like infection called “morbillivirus,” which has been associated with previous sickness events of dolphins and seals. Since mid-summer, marine science organizations such as the Virginia Aquarium, the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in New Jersey, and Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation in New York began documenting an increase in bottlenose dolphin strandings along the mid-Atlantic coast, and these strandings are continuing into late summer.
So far, all ages of bottlenose dolphin strandings have been reported. The NMFS reports, however, that there are no unifying necropsy findings aside from some dolphins having been found with pulmonary lesions. Preliminary testing of tissues from one dolphin indicates possibly a morbillivirus infection, although it is too early to say whether this is the cause of the UME. [Read more…]
LETTER: ‘The Old Man and the Fountain’
TONY SACCO
August 22, 2013
DEAR EDITOR,
The street has its lights, garbage cans, and sewers, but is rare to find a water fountain in Cape Charles.
Imagine an old man nearing 90 in front of the Palace Theatre on a blistering summer day, filling the air with music of many years ago, accompanied by the sounds of water spurting at the top of the fountain and returning from the bottom in a perpetual ecstasy of affection with itself.
The mosquitos and flies biting those with short sleeves, the gang of motorcyclists wheeling by with blaring muffler pipes, muzzling the lyrical melodies specified in an instrument of pride from the gray baldish instrumentalist perhaps making his last performance before he joins the angels of strings.
Inside the climate-controlled theatre, a proud gentleman on stage in uniform of a Confederate soldier reads letters from loved ones. They were fighting a war between the American states that destroyed millions of lives.
The old man standing outside in front of his vehicle with license plate CV-12 (the identification of the USS Hornet aircraft carrier of World War II that engaged the enemy in the Pacific Ocean) received three war medals to save the human race from domination.
Now less than a million remain out of 18 million that served gallantly in the war. [Read more…]
COMMENTARY: 26 Years Later, School Fight Continues
By LENORA MITCHELL
August 21, 2013
Looking through some old files recently, I reflected on how much time I had spent being a community servant, running up and down Highway 13 attending board and committee meetings in Northampton and Accomack counties. And then I found a file that documented the demise of the Cape Charles school system 26 years ago.
I was appointed to the Cape Charles School Board in 1982. As I looked at documents from the United States Justice Department Civil Rights Division, Northampton County School Board, the county superintendent, Cape Charles School Board, the town superintendent, the State Board of Education, and numerous letters from attorneys involved in the case, including from the Department of Justice, I remembered how long and intensive the battle was to retain the independent school system in Cape Charles, along with ownership of the building.
The battle started civilly, but then it turned into a major war. The Town was divided and there were heated exchanges wherever you went, especially at the Town Council meetings.
The Cape Charles School Board accused the Northampton County School System of violating a consent decree by allowing Cape Charles students to attend their schools.
The Town Council charged the School Board with malfeasance or misfeasance and demanded an investigation by the State Police.
Meanwhile, the Cape Charles School Board charged the Town with siphoning off funds earmarked for the school. These were just a few of the allegations and charges being thrown around during that time. [Read more…]
OPEN LETTER:
Old School Cape Charles to Historic District Review Board
August 20, 2013
(EDITOR’S NOTE: The Cape Charles Historic District Review Board meets at 4:30 p.m. today (Tuesday) at Town Hall to further consider an application by developer J. David McCormack to convert the Old School, basketball court, and playground parking lot at Central Park into an apartment building and private parking lot. Town Planner Robert Testerman has recommended that the Historic Board approve the developer’s application, even though it has not been approved by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, and yet-to-be-met conditions have been stipulated by the National Park Service. On the eve of the meeting of the Historic Review Board, the community group Old School Cape Charles has submitted an open letter documenting why the Board should wait until the developer meets conditions required by the relevant state and federal bodies.)
TO THE HISTORIC DISTRICT REVIEW BOARD:
Old School Cape Charles is committed to the common good of our town. One of our town’s most valuable assets is Central Park, which until recently included the Old School, the basketball court, and the playground parking lot.
In order for an historic property to receive tax credits it must adhere to the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation, (Click to read) including the following:
A property will be used as it was historically or be given a new use that requires minimal change to its distinctive materials, features, spaces, and spatial relationships.
Converting our historic Old School, playground parking, and basketball court into an apartment house and private parking lot is a far cry from creating minimal change to the building and its use.
The historic character of a property will be retained and preserved. The removal of distinctive materials or alteration of features, spaces, and spatial relationships that characterize a property will be avoided.
The developer wants to call the side of the building the front, even though there will be no front door. Not only will the historic character of the building be lost, but the developer hopes to attract vacationers to rent the apartments. Town Council’s giveaway of a park resource thereby becomes competition to vacation and other rental property owners. [Read more…]
COMMENTARY: Does Bay Creek Control Town Council?
By DEBORAH BENDER
August 13, 2013
Several years ago I had a shop on Mason Avenue called Scarlett’s Closet where I sold women’s clothes. So I know how shoppers think. Let’s say someone wants to buy a linen top: One of the first things she will do is look at the price tag. She will consider buying two if there is a sale that offers a second garment at half price.
A shopper will consider how much money she has in her wallet — or if she gets out her credit card, what that will mean to the family budget.
But our Town Council jumped feet-first into building a new wastewater treatment plant without knowing for sure where the money to pay for it would come from. Now they want us to foot the bills.
In accordance with the 1991 Annexation Agreement, Town Council asked Bay Creek’s developer Dickie Foster to pay its share of the cost of the new state-of-the-art sewage treatment plant. But when he just said “no,” Town Council backed down.
Now, instead of demanding that the developers of Bay Creek pony up the money, Council is expecting the people of Cape Charles to accept two large increases to our water bills. In the last five years the cost of wastewater treatment has gone from $24 a month to $60.85.
Not only that – Council expects people to pay those bills whether their house is occupied or not. They get billed even if the house has the water turned off because the owner can’t afford to pay.
What are they thinking?
When a homeowner gets behind in paying his water bill he is hit with a $30 late fee. I wonder how much late fees Bay Creek has to pay for the $42,000 invoice they received in July 2008? Have they paid anything yet? Do they have any more invoices? [Read more…]
SHER: Art Through the Eyes of Those Who Love It
Marty Burgess gears up for Sunday’s Cape Charles Quick Draw. (Photos by Sher Horosko)
By SHER HOROSKO
Cape Charles Wave
August 7, 2013
I came up in a world where everyone wanted to be like everyone else, which is to say, just the same.
It was a universe of perfect patterns: Carnation Instant Breakfast (always chocolate) for breakfast, Raymond and Glen throwing apples at me on my way home from school, a potato, some meat, and a vegetable at 5 p.m., a father who ate too fast and a mother who told him so every night without exception, religious school on Saturdays, church on Sundays, and best of all, hot rye bread from the Jewish bakery I devoured in the back seat of our white Galaxy.
It was an excruciatingly bland world for a little firecracker girl. I suffered it daily, and vowed to never acquiesce. For those who may be interested as to whether I succeeded at whistling my own sweet song: I did. And yes, I paid for it.
When I was growing up, art was something you hung from a six-penny nail tapped into a long tan wall. Art was a wall covering, really, that acted pretty much the same as a windbreaker on a Kansas prairie. It broke the wind and it broke the tan. It filled an empty space on a tan runway that stretched farther than my little eyes could see. That was art.
Last Saturday night I went to the IVir Danza performance at the Palace Theatre. There may have been 40 or 50 of us in that impossibly intimate jewel on Mason Avenue. Four men and four women from Italy danced on a stage in your yard. They moved like cougars and gazelles; their muscles pulsated with the blood thirst of the Kalahari. They went quiet, and turned into each other, like coils of smoke or butterflies finding each other through scent alone.
It is not often I wish I were young enough to start on a new course. I felt that on Saturday. And you will feel it too if you catch their last dance on August 16 at the Palace. [Read more…]
SHER: On the Shore Eight Weeks
Photo by Sher Horosko
By SHER HOROSKO
Cape Charles Wave
July 31, 2013
The road to Custis Tomb is lined with snowflakes perched on arching green stems. I capture the beauty-burst and the swaying flowers filled with winged ones I cannot name.
Then comes the inevitable fading. Crocheted saucers fold into urns. Their time here is nearly done.
I have been on the Shore eight weeks. It is my spirit to watch closely, to be curious and to mark the comings and goings of life:
—the wheat fields trimmed and seeded with soybeans, tinkered with to withstand this concoction or that;
—the winged and petaled ones birthing and blooming and moving on or folding back into the sandy earth;
—how guts are transformed from expansive ripples of water where all may pass to bright white stakes marking territories like fences in the land-bound world.
I notice these things. They are subtle. The disappearance of what one loves happens slowly.
We get used to Beauty, fading, much like the lines streaking across our cheeks. Only when we see a photograph of what we looked like ten years ago, or even five, do we realize what is becoming of us: our bodies, our skin, our hair whiter and whiter. [Read more…]
