Upstate New York |
He couldn’t hit the priest.
Altar server Kevin Braney, then 15, again found himself trapped in a side room at St. Ann’s Church in Manlius with then-Monsignor Charles Eckermann, the light streaming through the small window in sharp contrast to the dark things happening within. He couldn’t run, either. Outside, many were gathered, preparing for Mass and probably talking about their weekends. That was more than 25 years ago. “There’s no way to process it at that age,” said Braney, now 42. “I thought, ‘I’m just going to pretend that this isn’t happening to me right now. I’m just going to check out and freeze.’” Now, Braney is one of several calling on the Roman Catholic Diocese of Syracuse to release the names of all priests against whom credible allegations of sexual abuse have been made. It’s something Bishop Robert Cunningham has been considering since he heard Braney’s story last summer, Director of Communications Danielle Cummings said. It wasn’t until October of last year, though, that the Vatican found Braney’s allegations against Eckermann, who began working as a priest at St. Ann’s in 1988, credible. At that point, he was removed and stripped of his ability to function as or be presented as a priest. Attempts to reach Eckermann were unsuccessful. If Cunningham decides releasing the names is the best move for the diocese, Syracuse would be among the first 25 percent of the 195 United States dioceses to do so, even though the first diocese to release the names, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tucson, did so back in 2002. It’s not an easy decision. Releasing the names In New York, one can look only to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rochester for an example of how a diocese functions after releasing the names — it opted to do so in June 2012. Rochester diocese officials didn’t respond to several requests for comment. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Gallup, New Mexico, however, has important insight: It just released a list of 31 names in December. Diocese Media Coordinator Suzanne Hammons said the reaction to Bishop James Wall’s choice has been “a mixture.” “I don’t know if a lot of Catholics think about it often if it hasn’t directly affected them,” she began. “But some say (releasing the names) is good for transparency. Some say it doesn’t go far enough — you’ll always have that.” Read more at http://www.uticaod.com/article/20150201/News/150139899#ixzz3QWpXzwhD.
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WOODGATE
In 1918, Ilion resident Samuel Russell had a hunch. He was inspired by the relatively new Boy Scout movement, and he thought it might do well on his property around White Lake. He was right. Over the years, Russell’s initial donation of 15 acres to the Scouts of Utica, Rome and Ilion grew into the popular Camp Russell, where thousands of Boy Scouts from New York and beyond have learned rope work, swimming, conservation and more. But this year, three years before its 100th birthday, likely will be the last for the camp. Last month, the executive board of the Boy Scouts of America Revolutionary Trails Council voted to sell Camp Russell and its Cedarlands property, which hasn’t been used as a camp since 2011. The sales, Scout Executive Steven McEwan said, will be made as soon as possible, with the agreement that Camp Russell is to remain open for the duration of the 2015 camping season. Although McEwan couldn’t remember the vote count, he said the decision to keep only Camp Kingsley was favored by a “vast majority.” Still, he said, it wasn’t effortless. “This is not an easy decision for the board,” he said, explaining that they’ve been discussing the issue with one another and with parents, youth, volunteers and more for about a year. But it goes back farther than that. For more than 10 years, the council has been watching enrollment decline as more entertainment options emerge for youth. In the early 1960s, McEwan estimated the council’s four districts had a combined enrollment of more than 20,000. Today, it’s closer to 2,000. In other words, running three camps is not sustainable any more. “We’ve put a little into all three camps, but there’s not a whole lot to show for anything,” McEwan said. “If we put everything at one camp, we don’t have to have three kitchens, three shower houses, three of everything.” And while many who are or were affiliated with the council agree with that, they have a different question: Why keep Kingsley — northwest of Rome — open, and not Russell? Orlo Burch, an Ilion resident who is a former Cub Scout Pack leader and whose son is a member of Ilion’s Troop 9, is one of those. Kingsley, he said, doesn’t have access to a body of water as big as White Lake, so Scouts could miss out on opportunities such as small boat sailing they had at Russell. “You can call any troop — they’re all upset,” Burch said. “This is taking away skill development and programs that they won’t (immediately) be able to do at (Camp Kingsley). They’ve punched every Boy Scout in the stomach.” Read more at http://www.uticaod.com/article/20150106/NEWS/150109783. ILION
People are talking. And in the shadows of the Remington Arms plant, Daniel Stracquadaine of Dr. Dan’s Tattooing welcomes their comments — employee and resident alike. “I heard from three, four different people they’re going to only keep 70 people there, just for assembly,” Stracquadaine said of the factory. The rumors are flying, as they would in any small town where more than 230 people had been laid off in two-and-a-half months. The latest came on Veterans Day when 126 workers learned their time with the company was over. And unlike in August — when 105 laid-off workers were allowed to finish the week — those employees were sent home that day. Stracquadaine, of course, doesn’t know if more layoffs are planned, but he said the recent rounds already have affected the area. “There’s not even enough jobs out there now, now that (Remington is) dropping 100 people at a time,” Stracquadaine said. “I don’t know where they’re going to get new jobs.” It’s not the first time the 198-year-old company’s workforce has fluctuated with the market. It’s not even the first time Remington has moved some part of Ilion’s production to an out-of-state location. But it is the first time the combination of a new Alabama facility, New York’s SAFE Act and high taxes has made some wonder: Could Remington leave completely? And what would that mean for Ilion? Flux and flow Farmhouse Restaurant owner Ellen Jones — who worked in Remington’s canteen for about 17 years between the early 1980s and late ’90s — said it’s not the first time the plant has seen a build up in employees followed by layoffs. “They’ve always had layoffs,” she said, noting that rumors typically accompany the cuts. “I think this is probably a little scarier because of the constant rumor of them moving out of the state.” Still, she said, “people don’t think to the past.” In a late 1987 Herkimer Evening Telegram article, the late Richard Heckert, then-chairman and CEO of DuPont — which owned Remington at that point — said: “A shrinking firearms market has forced changes at the local arms plant. In the 1970s, the company employed 2,700 employees. With a callback of 47 full-time employees this month, it currently has just over 1,000.” A July 11, 1987, Associated Press article went back even farther: Remington employed about 14,000 during World War II. But after the booming 1970s, a combination of things — primarily the declining steel, oil and car-making industries coupled with farmers going out of business in droves — dropped Remington’s workforce to 800 and forced it to adapt again. Read more at http://www.uticaod.com/article/20141130/NEWS/141129387. UTICA
“I’m going to die.” That’s what 90-year-old Joe Rositano, who armed bombs as a member of the 15th Air Force during World War II, thought as he was drifting through the air, waiting for the right moment to pull the ripcord on his parachute. Minutes earlier, he’d been in the back of a B-24 Liberator after an all-out air raid over Austria, hearing the pilot confirming the worst: They’d been hit and were on fire. Rositano grabbed the side gunner’s window, holding on desperately as the plane went into a tailspin. “All of a sudden the plane just broke apart, just blew up,” Rositano said. Instinct kicked in and he successfully launched his chute — something he’d never done before. But when he looked down, he saw guns trained on him as he floated back to earth. “I’m going to die.” * * * German troops ushered Rositano, after a not-so-friendly greeting — one solider gestured that he was going to shoot Rositano — to a train to Stalag Luft IV, a barbed-wire-lined prison camp for allied airmen in northern Poland. But when an airstrike temporarily interrupted the trip, Rositano found himself in a culvert, face-to-face with another prisoner — a gentleman named Anthony Tomaselli, who’d been stationed in England. They made small talk as the planes passed, learning the almost impossible was true: Of the hundreds of prisoners en route to the camp, they were both from Utica. And they were both dating women who lived on the same small street: Wetmore. “You talk about chances,” Rositano said with a laugh. The two grew their friendship throughout their stay at Stalag Luft IV, where they landed before D-Day — June 6, 1944. Tomaselli later would be Rositano’s best man. But with scarce food supplies — often just one loaf of bread and some potatoes each day — to share with nine roommates, it wasn’t an easy year. “Prior to the barbed wire they had another, which they called the warning wire,” Rositano said. “If you stepped over that wire, there’s no excuse, you were shot.” He saw it happen twice. The prisoners got by listening to war updates on a rigged-up radio and rationing parcels of cigarettes, margarine, sugar and canned meat from the Red Cross. Read more at http://www.uticaod.com/article/20141111/NEWS/141119944. 9/24/2014 0 Comments HIGH anxiety, down on the farmUTICA
It was June 20, two years ago, when Ellen Synakowski returned home from work to find her then-fiancé, John, writhing on his bed, grabbing his head. He was used to headaches — “a handful of ibuprofen, two sinus pills and a cup of coffee” every morning, he said — but this was different. This was a cerebral aneurysm, and it had reached its literal breaking point. That day, everything changed. Ask any farmer and they probably would tell you their lifestyle is full of stress. A 2003 analysis of the Hordaland Health Study found farmers had a higher level and prevalence of depression - and that male farmers also had higher anxiety levels - than non-farmers. And, in a more sobering note, farmers commit suicide at a rate that's up to twice that of the average population in the U.S. and around the world. “There are so many uncertainties in production agriculture,” said Dewey Hakes, a retired dairy farmer who now works as a financial consultant with NY FarmNet. The 28-year-old nonprofit program — funded primarily by the state’s Department of Agriculture and Markets— gives farm families free, confidential consulting services to help them improve their finances and overcome an array of challenges. “We don’t know what the weather’s going to be, the market price,” Hakes said. “It generally demands at least 12 hours a day if you’ve got any kind of livestock, and seasonally, 16 or 18.” For John, 57, pressure had been building for a long time. When the price being paid for milk plunged in 2009, he found himself unable to pay his bills and losing thousands. After 30 years, his wife walked out, leaving him with a pile of debt. If a cow wasn’t loose, a water line was breaking or a tractor was malfunctioning. “Before, my day used to start at quarter after, 20 after 6 in the morning, and it would go till whenever at night,” John said. “Last winter … I looked at (Ellen) and I said, ‘How did I handle this seven days a week?’” In the eight years Hakes, 72, has been working with FarmNet, he’s seen almost everything — from drug and alcohol abuse, to divorce, to bankruptcy, to suicide. “There are unique issues farming families have in being around each other all the time, not being able to close the door to the business and go home for the weekend,” FarmNet Executive Director Ed Staehr said. And that’s where FarmNet comes in. Each time they receive a call — be it strictly financial, familial or both — they choose the consultant from their pool of about 40 who’s best able to help. Depending on the situation, the consultant will schedule an appointment, show up the next morning or call immediately. Read more at http://www.uticaod.com/article/20140924/NEWS/140929718/13406/NEWS. BROOKFIELD
When the power goes out, it can be hard to find something to do. You can’t watch TV. You shouldn’t open the refrigerator or freezer because food might spoil. You might not even be able to use your stove. More than 86,000 people were reminded of that as recently as July 8, when they were left in the dark after tornadoes and violent winds and rain ripped through Upstate New York. Hobie and Lois Morris, however, were not among them. Situated in a tall, larch wood A-frame home 10 minutes outside the heart of Brookfield, the Morrises have been living without electricity since 1980. “All the things that you basically need electricity for, we’ve replaced by doing other things,” Hobie explained. Around the world, almost 1.4 billion people — nearly a billion of whom live in Africa or India — don’t have electricity. Most of them don’t have a choice. The Morrises’ lifestyle, however, is a preference. Inside their tent-like, cozy home, kerosene lamps reveal heating and cooking wood stoves imported from Norway. Items more often seen in museums — such as a shoulder yoke water bucket carrier Hobie made from scrap wood — line the slanted walls. There’s a sink, but no running water: Hobie bails buckets from a spring down the road. When nature calls, they use an outhouse. And, while summer bucket baths often occur outside, once it’s cold, they happen right next to that sink. “You develop different ways of doing things,” Hobie said. When their clothes are wrinkled, Lois heats a solid-metal sad iron on the stove, doing a “spit test” to know when it’s ready to go. If the rug in the upstairs loft gets dirty, she pitches it out the window, hanging it on a two-by-four and thumping it clean with a rug beater. A 30-gallon can in the ground acts as the Morrises’ refrigerator, often keeping potatoes, carrots, beets and other food fresh through the winter. Everything else — the tomato juice, apple sauce, jellies and jams — is stored in cans on shelves inside the home. “I can’t think of anything where we’d need electricity,” Lois said. “I don’t really miss it.” They often spend mornings and evenings in town, but afternoons are spent maintaining the home: Hobie chops wood and push mows the lawn while Lois cares for the garden, full of various vegetables sitting in 30 years’ worth of compost. Lois, 76, and Hobie, 75, get by on $8,000 a year, which comes mostly from Social Security and a pension. Read more at http://www.uticaod.com/article/20140809/NEWS/140809557. |
ABOUTPieces that were published during the eight months I spent covering Herkimer County and other topics in upstate New York. Archives
February 2015
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