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.

My father looked out the front window of our house in Delanco, N.J., and sighed.

There I was pushing my sister's baby carriage through the puddle at the end of our driveway. Over and over again, laughing hysterically.


"At least he has his boots on," my mother consoled. "He'll grow out of it."

Over the years I grew out of nearly everything, except the thing my father feared most.

In sixth grade Sister Helen Ann, tired of tardiness, ordered the class to write a theme entitled: "Punctuality: the Etiquette of Kings."

My friend Jimmy Cooley and I each penned papers feigning ignorance and wondering how having good punctuation had anything to do with being a king.

After that incident I got an F in Helen Ann's art class for continuously making a mockery of her assignments.

Dad had no choice but to shave my head.


When it came time to go to college, even though I had aced accounting classes in high school, I insisted on becoming an English major.

Dad knew he was losing control of his only boy.

"Where did I go wrong?" he thought. "I knew I shouldn't have worked night shift all those years."

Actually, even though dad and I didn't see much of each other during the week, he had an indelible impact on my life by way of the Bernie Herman Movie on Channel 48.

Every day I'd race home from school, drop my book bag on the floor, and Dad would be sitting down with a giant bowl of oyster stew. He'd toss me a couple of those dense oyster crackers and start explaining the day's movie to me.

"This may be one of the greatest movies ever made," he would invariably begin.

His all-time favorite was "Gunga Din" featuring Victor McLaglen, Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

"Though I've belted you and flayed you, by the livin' Gawd that made you, you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!" Rudyard Kipling wrote in his famous poem by the same name.

Despite all his efforts, when I moved to Berks County in February 1995, and joined the Reading Eagle staff, I also made a trip to the courthouse.

It was there that I was true to myself and registered independent.

It's no fun being the family snoring champion

As the sun sticks around longer each day, flowers bloom and I'm awakened by birds chirping, I'm reminded to keep my windows closed at night so my snoring doesn't wake the neighbors.

I come from a long line of blue ribbon champion snorers.

My grandfather on my mother's side snored so loudly that my grandmother, who also snored, eventually went deaf.

Uncle Tommy Ryan, a barrel-chested Irishman, woke up one morning with concussionlike symptoms that his doctors attributed to the thunderous drumming of his uvula against his soft palate.

He also eventually lost his hearing and later became slightly cross-eyed, we thought from the tremendous suction of his massive lungs against his small windpipe.

My first experience with public snoring occurred shortly after college. My friends all gathered at the large home of one of our parents in the suburbs of Philadelphia for a New Year's Eve party.

We did this so no one group would be faced with a long drive home late at night.

The guys let the girls and kids have the beds, and we slept on floors and couches around the house.

I ended up sleeping on the floor of a walk-in closet in the master bedroom.

I was awakened about 9 a.m. the next day by one of my friends kicking my foot.

As I opened my eyes I saw my friend Larry standing in the closet doorway holding the hand of his 3-year-old son, who appeared to be crying.

"Kel, wake up," Larry said, turning the closet light on.

"What's wrong?" I asked, rubbing my eyes.

"You're scaring the kids," he said.

Alas, I inherited the snoring gene. But instead of the thunderous variety, my snoring has been likened more to the song of the humpback whale.


I had a sleep study done about 10 years ago, and the grad student doing it woke me up early and said he had had enough.

"So, you've collected enough data?" I asked.

"No, I just can't stand your snoring anymore," he said. "I've never heard anything like it."

Poor guy. The needles of his snore-o-meter must have been spiking all night.

I bring this up because my doctor is scheduling another sleep study for me.

Until then, I'll remember to keep my bedroom windows closed at night so my neighbors aren't out with flashlights looking for the source of that strange howling noise.