On Bob and Tulsa, Buffalo and Roy Commentary by Ted Potrikus Our route home to Cooperstown from Tucson took us through Tulsa, Oklahoma, last weekend, and there was no way I’d pass through town without stopping at the new Bob Dylan Center. It did not disappoint. I love every twist and turn of Dylan’s work, have read at least a few dozen books about the guy, own all his records, the whole deal. The Center isn’t just a shrine…
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Columns - Page 46
News from the Noteworthy The importance of local news Hello from Arizona and Jim Kevlin A few days ago, the first edition of the Tempe Independent – Volume One, Edition One – showed up in the mailbox. Inside, I learned local Congressman Greg Stanton presented Tempe City Council with a $500,000 check to renovate the Rodeway Inn on Apache Boulevard to accommodate up to 200 of the city’s 380 homeless people. I learned miles-long Warner Boulevard, a major east-west road…
Column by Ted Potrikus The unifying power of baseball My wife and I stopped by the Stax Museum of American Soul Music as we passed through Memphis, Tennessee on Saturday — we’re on a long-planned, twice-delayed drive from Cooperstown to Charleston to Tucson to visit our kids. “Where ya from?” the clerk asked. “Upstate New York,” I said. “Cooperstown, to be exact.” “The Baseball Hall of Fame!” he said happily. “I drove up there a few years ago. Loved it.…
Column by Dr. Richard Sternberg Out of My Shell Last week, I took a major step for myself and poked my head out of my shell. I decided that the situation with COVID is really not going to get much better. It is going to be endemic like the flu or the common cold and we’re going to have to deal with it. It’s time to get life back to as normal as possible. I decided to take a trip…
Column by Ted Potrikus ‘At Rest’ bill needs to rest, permanently History will forever remember cocktails-to-go as one bright spot amid COVID’s Darkest Age. We might not have been able to dine out, but we could order take-out and our favorite beverage too complex to craft at home. It’s not like Those Who Imbibe weren’t also giving plenty of business to retail liquor stores (mercifully deemed ‘essential’ from the start of the pandemic shut-down) and the wholesalers that serve them,…
Column by James Dean Saving Main Street USA As a non-retail small business owner and an astute observer of Main Street USA, I have great sympathy for the economic struggles of Main Street USA storefront retailers. Main Street USA, and its storefront retail businesses, can define their communities desirability and quality of life, by whether they look bright, attractive, welcoming, thriving, and growing, or dusty, dark, stuck in time, just holding on, or dying. The centuries-old, only game in town,…
Commentary: Don’t be fueled A few weeks back I wrote in this space about New York’s gasoline tax; predicting lawmakers from various corners would be calling for its temporary roll-back as a means to relieve the price at the pump. If I remember correctly, I confidently wrote that it couldn’t be done – that lifting the sales tax on anything, however temporarily, is too complicated, too much of a political and logistical lift. I also picked Iowa and Gonzaga for…
Helios Care salutes its volunteers [Editor’s note: This week’s “News from the Noteworthy” comes from Tammy Christman, Director of Community Outreach and Volunteer Services for Helios Care.] April 17-23 is National Volunteer Appreciation Week, and organizations across the country are celebrating the wonderful works of volunteers. The value of hospice volunteers cannot be overstated. The desire to give time and talents freely, to those on the end-of-life journey, emanates from a heart of compassion and a spirit of giving. Whether…
Line 59: “Let me tell you how it will be.” A commentary IKEA opened its first northeast enormostore just outside of Newark, New Jersey, in 1990, at a time when the sales tax there stood at four percent. The company filled New York City subway cars with signs enticing the locals to take a ride over the bridge where they could buy all the things they need and save a bundle on sales tax (the combined New York state and…
Join us for ‘Breakfast with the Board’ Commentary by Mayor Ellen Tillapaugh, Village of Cooperstown Two years ago, in a May 2020 “Mayor’s Message” in the Village Voices newsletter, I wrote this: “The residents of the Village of Cooperstown should be proud of the way they have responded to this unprecedented health crisis. Recommendations to stay home, to physically distance from others and to wear a mask when not possible to distance, have all been willingly adopted and are successfully…
