When texting gets out of hand

In the hours before the Penn Street stabbing, Oct. 2 had been a slow day on the police desk at the Reading Eagle.
I was going through my e-mail when I came across a press release announcing the Pennsylvania Turnpike is now the first text-free tollway in the nation.
Statistics show that since Jan. 1, 2009, there have been 213 distracted-driver accidents on the turnpike.
I remember thinking how much texting has become a part of the social fabric. I often text my kids before I call them to make sure they’re not in class or working. Calling without warning is considered rude by some.
Around 11 a.m., the scanners crackled out a report of a stabbing in the 400 block of Penn Street.
When I got there I saw Christina Espinoza, blood streaming down her face, telling police that her boyfriend, Hector Leonel Pinto Catalan, 34, had just stabbed her in the forehead with a kitchen knife. Hector fled but was arrested later and charged with aggravated assault.
I had a camera with me and took a few pictures.
In one photo, as police, firefighters and paramedics tended to Christina, she appears to be texting someone on her cell phone.
“Now, that’s efficient,” I thought.
Anyway, ever since that day I had been wondering what important message required her immediate attention. After all, she just got stabbed in the head, right?

I ran into Christina on Oct. 15 in Reading Central Court, where she was waiting to testify at Hector’s hearing. I asked her who she was texting.
Christina said she actually had just received a text from Hector.
“He was asking me why I called the police on him,” she said.
Christina told me Hector didn’t stab her. She said they were wrestling over a kitchen knife when he let go suddenly, causing her to stab herself in the head. She said she wasn’t going to testify against Hector.
Assistant District Attorney David Golberg said that without Christina’s testimony, the charges were dismissed.
“This stuff happens all the time in domestic violence cases,” Golberg said.
OMG.

Jello Pudding Packs and other senior moments

One reason my parents have lived as long as they have in relatively good health is my mother's wonderful sense of humor.

Take for example, the case of the missing pudding pack.

One day, Mom was doing a load of wash, when something went awry.

Ever since they moved into a rancher in a 55-and-older community in Montgomeryville, Mom and Dad have been cramped for space. They used to have a three-story twin home in Norristown where I grew up, and they had a house in the Poconos until a few years ago.

Anyway, there are always things other than clothes and laundry detergent on top of the dryer. Diet sodas, canned goods, and various and sundry other items she can't find a place for in the kitchen cabinets reside there temporarily.

On this occasion, as Mom stuffed a load of colors into the washer, a Jell-O pudding pack got swept in with the clothes.

The pudding packs survived the wash cycle, but when Mom put the clothes in the dryer, she and Dad got their first clue something was amiss.

"It smelled like I was baking a cake," Mom said, unable to stifle her laughter.

All that tumbling around in the hot dryer proved too much for the pudding packs and they began releasing their chocolatey goodness, coating the damp clothes like some ill-conceived fabric softener.


It took a few minutes for Mom to figure out what had happened.

Dad stood behind her, wondering aloud if she wasn't having an episode of some sort.

"Why did you put pudding in the dryer?" Dad asked incredulously.

"I didn't do it on purpose, you dope," Mom responded, equally nonplussed.

Back in Norristown, the laundry room was in the basement. God only knows how many similar incidents occurred when the laundry was something Mom did away from prying male eyes in between her full-time job as a key punch operator at Bell Telephone and making dinner.

Mom preferred it that way and, truth be told, Dad and I also liked it when the laundry was squarely Mom's province. Now, with everything on one floor, foreign objects in the laundry are more easily detected by otherwise oblivious males.

To her credit, Mom rarely treated us like laundry morons except the time she accidentally splashed bleach on my favorite golf shirt.

When I complained about the white blotches on the shirt, Mom showed her true colors.

"Here," she said. "Let me rinse that out."

Profiles in Courage: Battle of the Paymaster's Shed

He doesn’t talk about it much, but my father, Dan Kelly Sr., was one of the heroes of the Battle of the Paymaster’s Shed.
The little known skirmish took place at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1952.
Until then, Dad spent most of his time on the streets of West Philadelphia, hanging out on 53rd Street, combing his hair and smoking Lucky Strikes.
This did not please my grandparents, Eugene and Rosalie Kelly.
One night grandpop and Uncle Jack, a sergeant and Marine recruiter, invited my dad out for a few beers.
Early the next morning dad woke up on a bus to Parris Island, S.C.
Dad was only 17, so even though most of his Marine Corps training class went to Korea, he was detailed to the navy yard.
Marines were working security details. They got to go into the city and carouse on leave.
Their biggest concern was making it back to their rack before the shore patrol got them.
Then one morning a bugler sounded general quarters.
Turns out someone misplaced the key to the paymaster’s shed, rumors abounded, and the longshoremen and pipefitters started rioting.
The paymasters shed was located on a macadem strip about 50 yards wide between huge warehouse-like buildings where all the work was done.
I can see this nervous bean-counter pulling on the door knob of the shed as the angry workers approached.
Dad said he’d never seen so many angry men (not his words), all armed with lug wrenches and pry bars.
The Marines, all new recruits, and their green lieutenant marched past the paymaster’s shed toward the angry men. The men kept coming.
The lieutenant ordered the Marines to form a V. Still the men kept coming.
“I was pretty scared,” dad said. “There were only about 30 of us and there were hundreds of them.”
When the longshoremen were about 20 yards away the young lieutenant raised his saber and shouted one final order: “Fix bayonets!”
“They parted like the Red Sea,” dad said.
There were no injuries. The lieutenant kicked in the paymaster’s door and the workers were paid. But the event lives on in Marine Corps. and Kelly family history.
He doesn’t talk about it much, but there’s a flag hanging on our front porch 365 days a year and on Veteran’s Day he’s one of the first to arrive for the flag raising by the Neshaminy Falls Veterans Association.

Bulletin: Kate Gosselin is actually a nice person

Carol Wells and her Wyomissing neighbor Lillian Landau got together every Monday night to watch “Dancing with the Stars.”
So they were thrilled when Lillian’s son, Duane Landau of Wernersville, won four VIP tickets for the show in a raffle for the Lancaster Country Day School.
Duane offered the tickets to Lillian and Lillian invited Carol to go with her to Los Angeles and be backstage for two days of filming for the season finale.
“It was very cool,” said Wells, owner of Sweet Surprises, 544 Penn Ave., West Reading.
Carol, Lillian and two of Lillian’s granddaughters, Christine Landau of Sinking Spring, and Elise Landau of Wernersville, flew to Los Angeles on May 23.
They were given a front-row look at the show and went backstage to watch the dancers prepare.
“We had VIP passes, so we got to see the stars coming out of their trailers,” Carol said.
Carol said Kate Gosselin had donated the four tickets to the school, where Lillian’s granddaughters attended.
“Kate Gosselin was so warm,” Carol said. “She was very nice and went out of her way to introduce us to everyone.”
Carol said she was also surprised by how friendly all the stars and dancers were.
But the show was only half the fun, she said.
“We stayed at the Beverly Hills Hilton and Queen Latifah was there filming a commercial,” Carol said. “It was great.”
Three days later the girls took a bus trip to Santa Monica.
On the bus, Carol met Christopher Hansen of Germany, who was on vacation in California and was leaving in a week to visit family in Pennsylvania.
“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “He said he had family in Allentown, Lancaster and Stevens.”
Hansen, through an e-mail, said he was sitting in the back of the bus on his way to Venice Beach when Carol, Lillian, Elise and Christine boarded.
“I asked them if they knew where I should get off for Venice Beach and they said they weren’t locals,” Hansen said. “It was pretty cool to be in L.A. and meet people who are living about 4,000 kilometers away and then they are ‘neighbors’ of my family.”
Minutes later, a second bus passenger, a college-aged man named Chris Reuling, said he overheard them all talking about Lancaster, and Reuling asked Carol if they were talking about Lancaster, Calif., or Lancaster, Pa.
“When I said ‘Pennsylvania,’ he said his name was Chris, and he was from Strausstown and went to college in California,” Carol said. “It was like this small circle of people from Pennsylvania meeting on a bus in California.”
Carol said Christine and the two Chrises were all Facebook friends before they got off the bus.

Gosselin: CIA stole my babies

Being in the communications business, I find it troubling that we can't work together to come up with a cohesive, cogent strategy for gathering intelligence and delivering our message to the rest of the world.

I'm speaking of The New York Times story about the CIA tattling on a Defense Department official for using private contractors in an intelligence gathering operation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. CIA's reason: "That's our job."

Then The Washington Post reported that computer experts at the Defense Department had shut down a CIA Web site that was spying on insurgents.

In response, Defense Secretary Robert Gates last week ordered Pentagon officials to find out if there were problems in our so-called information operations. Months earlier Gates announced he was trying to get a handle on who was spying on whom and how much it was costing.

Some say our information operations - getting good data to allies and spreading disinformation to enemies - have been a shambles since 1999 when the U.S. Information Agency was disbanded in a cost-cutting move, a "peace dividend."

Big mistake.

One could argue the insurgents and terrorists do a better job of public relations and disinformation than we do, despite the millions and possibly billions being spent across several agencies.

Like Dr. Doolittle's pushmi-pullyu - the llama with a head on each end of its body - anytime you have two or more bureaucracies doing the same job you're begging for inefficiency, confusion and failure.

In 2005, President George W. Bush and Congress created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to fade the heat focused on the intelligence community after Sept. 11, 2001, and the weapons of mass destruction fiasco.

Patrick C. Neary, deputy director of the relatively new agency, in an analysis of the current state of our global information operations, wrote: "The American people should know that the quiet they sense is not the peace of security assured by the best intelligence, but the deadly silence of the graveyard we are collectively whistling by."

That's pretty effective communication.

I just don't like the message.

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Living in the land of the lost

Always eager to perform an act of public service, when I read in Monday's Reading Eagle that Berks County Controller Sandy Graffius was having trouble locating people the county owed money to, I sprang into action.

It didn't take long to locate a missing person.

Marie Ketty Antoine, 326 N. Fifth St., is the first name on the controller's list.

I checked court records and found that Antoine has more than 70 different citations for code violations and parking tickets dating back to 2002.

I asked District Judge Wally Scott if he recalled Antoine, and he said he had.

"Sure, I know her," Scott said. "She was in here last week. She's a very nice lady."

Scott said Antoine was in his court for a city codes hearing and that she has another hearing in his court on March 3.

"If the controller wants to come here on March 3, she can give money to Mrs. Antoine then," Scott said.

Other individuals and entities on the controller's list of the elusive include the Ott Funeral Home of Boyertown, the Neversink Fire Company and City Councilwoman Marcia Goodman-Hinnershitz.

The biggest puzzler on the controller's list of the lost was the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The only address the controller has for the Commonwealth is Harrisburg, PA 17120. I did a Google map search, but it dead-ended at the state Capitol.

Next, I located the Rev. John C. Studenroth, former pastor of the Kutztown Bible Fellowship Church, on his cell phone.

I asked Studenroth what country he was in.

"I'm retired, but I'm still right here on Main Street in Kutztown," Studenroth said. "I'm in the phone book."

Not everyone was as easy to find. Sue Ann Sterner's is the last name on the controller's memo on the missing. Actually it's retired Reading Constable Sue Ann Sterner. Up until Dec. 31, she was getting paid by the controller's office.

"My gosh, I can't imagine them not being able to find me," she said.

If the controller still can't find Sterner, here's a hint. She's the wife of City Councilman Dennis Sterner.

He can be found at City Hall on Monday nights around 5 p.m.