All tagged 2019/08
311 Cedar Lane is my family’s house, owned by my uncle Robert Keighton. The address of the adjacent property is 409 College Avenue, which backs away from Cedar Lane. 409 was originally owned by my ancestors as a single dwelling around the 1870s, and 311 was built onto it as an addition in 1899. My great-grandfather Charles Paxson, an amateur architect, designed 311.
The abandoned house at 311 Cedar Lane in Swarthmore was recently brought to my attention by a resident of Swarthmore who was lamenting its demise and invited me join him for a visit.
Bicycle riders traveling from Cornell and Rutgers avenues to downtown: please stop using the driveway of 107 Rutgers Ave. (the building next to the post office) as a cut-through.
I want to give a huge shout-out to the Co-op employees who rallied to help me on August 21, when I tripped and fell on the outside steps and badly twisted my foot. After a passerby alerted them, several rushed out.
Last month, a team of neighbors and other nature lovers got together to make the wonders and surprises of the outdoors more accessible. In a weeklong project led by Jim Audley, more than 1,200 feet of chronically muddy segments of trail in the Saul Wildlife Sanctuary were converted from unpleasant to exemplary, thanks to the efforts and commitment of volunteers who worked about 250 hours.
I have a new pet peeve, and it’s not trivial — in fact it could be life or death. It concerns the relatively new pedestrian crosswalk lights installed at key, busy Swarthmore intersections. They are not working as intended, and the answer is simple.
Thanks to all who came out to last Friday’s Co-op Movie Night. For our first time running this event, it was very successful. From admission donations and sales of food from our grill, we raised more than $600 to go towards essential freezer repairs. Everything was run by Co-op owners who volunteered their time to make sure all profits went directly to the freezer fund.
It was wonderful to read Chris Reynolds’s piece on the Stones concert at Lincoln Financial Field. I, too, was there, with a couple of girlfriends, and we were sitting in the nosebleeds as well — thankful for the protection from the rain, if finding Mick’s spoken words a little garbled from the windy distance at times! My first Stones concert, too.
The voice on the phone was furious. Atta Arghandiwal, Co-Director of the Swarthmore-based Global Kindness Revolution, was reacting to President Trump’s recent rant about how he could end the war in Afghanistan by bombing the country into oblivion, killing 10 million people…but he just “didn’t feel like it!”
Solving the problem of ever-spiraling college tuition may not require either Jim Riviello’s or Mary Gay Scanlon’s solutions. Rather, can we now question why college tuition has spiraled this high and whether all the expenses are necessary?
In the July 26 Swarthmorean, Marty Spiegel reminded us how lucky we are to live in such a wonderful small town, thanks to both public and private efforts. We would like to add some more specific thanks: after the severe July 22nd storm, when a huge downed tree blocked Chester Road and the lights were out at the busy College Avenue intersection, we came upon Mayor Spiegel himself in a yellow safety vest, expertly directing rush hour traffic.
The Swarthmore community and beyond came together on Saturday, July 27, to raise money to help the children at the southern border of the United States. The Children of the Wind fundraiser, sponsored by Young People’s Theatre Workshop, was able to raise $6,400 for the children through music, financial donations, and the generosity of spirit of all involved.
I watched Robert Mueller answer questions about the Mueller report on TV last Wednesday: not fun, not comfortable, not entertaining. I almost shut it off a few times; that’s when my inner voice kicked in with “If he can sit there, after two long years and take it, so can I.”
