More Quaker history

Two more dates to put on your calendar:
1. Primitive Hall, the Pennock ancestral home, will be open from 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 10, as part of the 300th anniversary celebration of London Grove Friends Meeting. The Hall is on Route 841 between Routes 926 and 842 in West Marlborough Township. Joseph Pennock built the house in 1738 and he and his family worshipped at London Grove.
2. Homeville Meeting, 4904 Homeville Rd., in Cochranville, will celebrate its 175th anniversary on Sunday, Aug. 24. Janet Witman of Cochranville will provide her lovely harp music starting at 1 p.m.; Meeting for Worship is at 2 p.m.; and Chris Densmore, curator of Swarthmore College's Friends Historical Library, will speak at 2:30 p.m.

Compact cars

I know some of you are thinking that an intervention might be in order here for Tilda, who seems to be spending an inordinate amount of time far, far away from Unionville (metaphorically speaking) at the Cecil County Fair in Fair Hill, Maryland. Last week I wrote about eating a fried Oreo; this week I'm writing about the Fair's Demolition Derby, which we attended the evening of July 23.
After dining on scrumptious "loaded" baked potatoes (cheese and butter), we settled into our seats in the metal bleachers.
"So, what is the point of this?" I asked my more learned companion. Before he could explain, the young woman in front of me turned around and said simply, "It's like bumper cars."
That was a perfect description. Junker cars bash into each other within a muddy enclosure, and the last one still running is the winner. Bumpers and tires fall off. Metal crumples. Steam pours out of crushed radiators (flames too, sometimes, causing a stoppage in the action so firefighters can extinguish the blaze). Clods of mud fly up from spinning tires. It's like a Brueghel version of the Avondale Wawa parking lot at rush hour.
Do I need to add that it was great fun? And I actually picked the winner of the second heat, just because the car looked especially agile when it first came onto the course.
After each heat, guys in skid loaders come out to efficiently clear the course of the automotive corpses. They're really talented, delicately coaxing or prodding the still-rolling vehicles off the course and just picking up and carting off the really bad ones.
The people-watching kept us entertained, too. I was enchanted by a tough-looking biker guy in leathers and a bandana who was sitting with a toddler wearing a polo shirt and madras shorts (I assume his grandson). They were totally wrapped up in each other, laughing and cuddling. The boy was fiddling with the fat silver chain attached to his grand-dad's wallet, and I thought, "That kid is probably the only person on earth who's allowed to do that."

Route 41

Those of us who often use Route 41 receive frequent reminders that it's summertime -- say, every Friday afternoon and Sunday evening, when beach traffic strains the highway's capacity and makes it even tougher than usual to pull out at the Chatham blinking light. It's easy to spot the vacationers: they're the ones with folding chairs, bikes, suitcases and sometimes boats attached to their vehicles.
A few weeks ago we were discussing where to have Sunday supper and we briefly considered one of our favorite family restaurant, located smack on Route 41 in Avondale -- until we realized it was late Sunday afternoon. Probably not good timing.

 

Sin City Band

The amazing run of good weather that the Anson B. Nixon outdoor concert series enjoyed finally ended on July 23, when the Sin City Band had to end their set after about a half-hour, with the wind whipping up and lightning flashing off to the west. It was a good call on the part of the tech guys: no sooner did my friends and I pack up our chairs and get to our vehicles than the rain came pouring down. The band did its popular "Chester County song" first and, in an unsuccessful attempt to ward off the impending storm, "Yellow Sun" and "You Are My Sunshine."
The brown-bag suppers provided by the Country Butcher were excellent: chicken salad on a roll, potato salad, pasta salad with roasted vegetables and a cookie. For only eight dollars! Fortunately we ate ours before the storm.

No slackers

Normally attendance at exercise classes plummets during the summer, but not so in one class I take at the Jennersville Y. There were so many people in class on July 22 that the instructor had to relinquish her usual "spot" to a latecomer, and we had to carefully synchronize our moves with those of the person next to us to avoid contact. One participant said she'd bring along a hay bale or a mounting block to the next class for the instructor to stand on so she could see everyone.

Cecil County Fair

I can now say that I have eaten a fried Oreo. I actually never knew there was such a thing until Sunday, when we visited the Cecil County Fair in Fair Hill, Maryland, but once I saw that sign on the food trailer, I simply had to have one.
It looked and tasted like a donut with the soggy remains of an Oreo inside. It was a far cry from my usual salad-heavy food choices, but somehow anything in the healthy eating pyramid just wouldn't strike the right note at a country fair in rural Maryland. The accompanying lemonade was very good.
We had an utter blast at the fair. We walked through the livestock barns and marveled at the beautifully groomed cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, rabbits, guinea pigs, chickens, and ducks. We wandered through the floral, vegetable, hay and egg competitions (much like at the Unionville Community Fair), the gleaming farm equipment displays (very large and very expensive), and the midway. We watched two guys carving wooden sculptures with chainsaws.
The highlight (other than the animals and food, of course) was watching the Truck Pull, in which a giant weighted sled is hooked up to a specially fortified diesel pickup truck. The truck has to drag this thing down a dirt field, wheels spinning, engine straining and black smoke belching from the exhaust pipes. Some of the competitors were successful and made it all the way down to the far end of the stadium, but one poor guy dropped a drive shaft.
The fair runs through Saturday, July 26. There's a Demolition Derby at 8 p.m. Thursday, July 24, and Friday, July 25, and at 2 and 8 p.m. on Saturday. There are rumblings that we will be returning for one of them.
(By the way, a woman at the gym corrected me, saying that "Cecil" is pronounced with a short "e." I've never heard that before, but I've gotten confirmation that "Sessil" is indeed how some old-timers say it.)

Meetinghouse tour

A huge thank you to everyone involved in organizing this past weekend's tour of Quaker meetinghouses in the Western Quarter. For a history-minded person like me with an interest in Quakerism, it was fascinating.
On Saturday we visited "New" West Grove, Pennsgrove, and Homeville meetings and then crossed the Mason-Dixon Line to visit Colora meeting. On Sunday we went to London Britain meeting. Each meetinghouse had its own Friendly charm. At West Grove, upside-down glass telephone-pole insulators held candles and the beams in the cellar still had bark on them. I thought Pennsgrove had an especially calm, gathered air about it. The hosts at Homeville had on display old newspaper articles about the meeting; I loved reading about the heated disputes over the spelling of "Octoraro." London Britain had pillows on the benches.

We got a little lost getting to Colora, and driving through the two gateposts was like arriving at an enchanting cottage in a forest clearing. The surprisingly comfortable wooden benches were made from rafts on the Susquehanna, the hostess told us (I noticed that the worshippers who sat on facing benches got footrests, a surprising touch). The small Colora burial ground is on a steep slope leading down to a creek and is the final resting place for a daughter of Betsy Ross and a great many members of the Balderston family (we passed Balderston Orchards en route to the meetinghouse).

Mr. Patton

Charles F. Patton, a longtime teacher and administrator in whose honor Unionville's middle school is named, died on Saturday, and former students, colleagues and friends have been sharing fond memories of him and how he shaped their lives (and their bridge games). I saw the news on Saturday evening on Facebook while eating ice cream at Landhope and said to my companion, "Oh, Mr. Patton died!" The people at the next table, complete strangers, overheard and said, "Yeah, I heard that!" They didn't need to ask who Mr. Patton was, or which Mr. Patton; in Unionville, there was only one. My sympathy goes out to his family.