Remembering My Mom on Mother's Day

Part of the photo display we arranged for my mother's memorial service last month.

Today is my first Mother's Day without my mother in the world. 

Barbara Louise Rescorla Brandt died quietly on the morning of Feb. 20 in her beloved log home in Jamestown, New Mexico in the arms of her beloved long-time caregiver Priscilla Cadman.

She was 90.

My mom, Barbara Brandt

Unlike with the death of my father in November of 2024, I did not immediately turn to the keyboard to write a memoriam.

My father was a semi-public person, a known author of several books, long-time magazine writer and an appointed government official in his beloved Sag Harbor.

My mother was a much more private person who seemed less like a candidate for a write-up.

And so I struggled with what to write, if anything, and if she would even want me to.

But here we are at Mother's Day and here I am at the keyboard.

I was driven here, I suspect, by a clear, plastic box.

It is a box of old family photographs going back generations which was presented to me in the parking lot of Skeeter's  Bar-B-Q restaurant outside Lewisburg, PA.

The presenter was my step mother, Lorraine Dusky, who was on her way to her new home in Detroit. After my father's death, she decided to sell the Sag Harbor house and move back closer to her family. She was driving all the way with her granddaughter Kim and was stopping in the middle of PA for the night. So my wife Karen and I drove up to have dinner with her and say goodbye.

Yesterday, having nothing on my agenda, I opened the box sitting on the radiator in the dining room and generations of Danish and Swedish relatives stared back at me, along with the U.S. citizenship document for my great-great-grandfather Henry Brandt.

Many of the photographs had IDs on the back, sort of: many like, "my great grandmother's sister." Without knowing who had done the writing, it wasn't much help. Especially when Karen and I discovered how similar my father's handwriting was to his mother's.

And the hats. My God the ladies' hats were amazing.

The contents of box of old family photos I opened Saturday.

But I had dabbled in Ancestry.com and so had she, so we began using logic and the process of elimination to identify as many as we could. And as we did that, I began to think about all this is lost with death.

All these photos of all these people which were taken because they were precious to someone. 

To keep a record.

To preserve their memory.

But of course few of us are librarians, so we make a pass at it and write things on the back of grainy photographs like "me and Brud at the farm" -- which was a real caption on the back of one of the photos. We put them in a box and stash it in the attic until the next generation finds them, cleaning out the house of our dead parent. 

These captions are, of course, only good for the person who wrote them when they are alive. We're usually not thinking about our own death when we write things like that.

And I've been facing a lot of death in the past few years and I decided my mother more than deserves a tribute, some record of her life. I owe her that much, and so much more.

Besides, she put up with a lot.

My mom was born in January, 1936 outside Forty Fort PA to the late Arthur and Mildred (Jenkins) Rescorla. Her father was a stern man, the only child of a man who put food on the table by being a boss in a coal mine. A teacher recommended that my grandfather go to college which he did, the first in the family to do so, earning a chemistry degree from Penn State.

He was the quintessential self-made man and, like his father before him, he did not brook weakness in any way, hurling logs at my mother and uncle as children when they were not stacking them fast enough, so the family legend has it. 

Having met him, I have little doubt that story is true.
(After meeting my mother's parents the one and only time on a trip to Florida, my wife was speechless after 15 minutes when my grandfather stood up and said "well, it was nice seeing you" and ushered us out. "I tried to tell you." I said. "I thought you were exaggerating" she replied.) 

Not this time.

Arthur worked for Citi Services, a petroleum company we know today as Citgo, and he dragged his family all across the country as his job dictated. As a result, the only place my mother, who remembers living in Louisiana for a time, could really call home was her grandmother's house in Forty Fort, where she spent most of her summers and some of her school days.

She and I visited there once and the people who lived there at the time were kind enough to let us look around inside.

My mother as a young woman

When Citi Services brought the family to the New York metro area, my grandparents bought a cozy Cape Cod-style home in Westfield, N.J., my father's home town. 

He was the awkward younger brother of Westfield's Big Man on Campus, his brother Charles, and was less good at football, and basketball, and had suffered from horrible acne.

My mother was the new girl in town and as awkward and tall as he was, mom was diminutive (she was under 5 feet with a badly curved spine when she died), and pretty. 

The two of them needed each other. He needed a girlfriend and she needed a known name to enter Westfield teen society.

They dated throughout college. She was getting her nursing degree from Cedar Crest College and he was studying English literature at Princeton.

They married almost immediately after graduation, with my mother attending Cornell's college of nursing at New York Hospital and he attending graduate classes at Columbia. They lived in a tiny apartment on the west side of Manhattan.

Eventually Dad decided he did not want to teach and got a job at Fairchild Aircraft, writing a biography of the founder Sherman Fairchild and the company he founded. They moved to the suburbs, Shrub Oak, NY, and Mom got a job with the visiting nurse services of Westchester County.

Eventually Fairchild died and the company board of directors no longer wanted the expense of employing my father. So he decided to write his first book, "Reality Police: the experience of insanity in America," while my mother put food on the table. 

And went hiking. 

Always we went hiking as a family, often against my will and my sister's. But we went. We knew the trails in Fahnestock State Park and Piano Mountain like we could find the bathroom in the dark.

My mother in the 1970s in her visiting
nurse uniform, with me (in the
red hat) my sister Kate and Stephen and
Susan Migliaccio, our neighbors.

If it seems like my father is in a lot of this tribute to my mother, its because she was devoted to the idea of their marriage, even as my father was less and less so. He drifted further away, leaving her more than once, including shortly after I was born, only to return. And she always forgave him.

They were married for 15 years.

And then finally he didn't return. Sure to stick the cliche, he left us for a younger women just a few years old than my sister. (In the end, she left him and he ended up married to my step-mother, a much better match).

Never a master of timing, my father decided to inform my mother he wanted a divorce as the three of us were driving across country in an old Ford Econoline van with two seats and an ancient Greek name -- Psyche.

He delivered his news in Canyonlands National Park while I was taking photos of everything in sight and, unknowingly, took a photo of the moment he told her he was leaving. 

I can tell you the drive home from Colorado is not a memory I dwell upon. We even had to outpace a tornado in that old van. It was like some kind of Victorian epic.

(My sister Kate was not there because she had transformed at puberty from daddy's little girl genius into a teenager and had been banished to a private school upstate for her teenage transgressions.)

The break between her and our father lasted decades and for much of my life, I was the only person who spoke to everyone in my nuclear family.

My mother collapsed emotionally. The worst thing that can happen to a person who spent her life in search of stability and a loving family had just happened and she had no one to turn to. Too often, it was 11 year-old me.

But somehow, she carried on. She bought a new house in Pleasantville, NY because it she wanted me to grow up in "a real town" like Westfield. She went back to school and got her masters and eventually the equivalent of a Ph.D. and became a geriatric nurse practitioner. 

This training never left her and she could recite the names of her medicines until the day she died. And shortly after she died, I had to notify the organizers of a life-long study of nurses being conducted by Harvard University. Twice  a year she sent them samples of her urine and her vital stats.

We created our own Victorian tableau in Pleasantville.

All this while being a single mom, working full time and keeping an eye on me. (I had learned the lesson of my sister's transgressions and made sure to stay in good standing with the parental units ... mostly.)

Finally she met a man, Mike, and he moved in. He and I got along alright because he had taken a big burden off of me, my mom's emotional needs. He was not the greatest person. He was on the run from a previous marriage for not paying child support and whenever he got a job, his wages were often garnished shortly thereafter.

But mom did not have the luxury of choices. 

Even when Mike read my sister's diary and threatened her with a gun after the the couple had moved to New Mexico, Mom did not throw him out. She did what she had finally learned to do to maintain her stability. She adapted. 

Our visits just became trips to other places, or she would make Mike leave for a few days.

But I get ahead of myself.

Yes, I did say New Mexico.

Several days after I graduated from high school, I no longer had a home in Pleasantville. My mom wanted out of her job at Westchester and had applied for several jobs including, to my horror, South Carolina. But she finally agreed to let me finish high school before moving.

She didn't wait long.

She had found her bliss in New Mexico.

She was shocked when I told her New Mexico was not my bliss and I would be spending the summer with my dad. I was always puzzled why she thought I would chose the desert over the beach, but she saw it as a betrayal and it was one of several fault lines that grew up between us.

Mom outside with her cats. Her two 
favorite things.

Mom told me once that a fortune teller said she had been a pioneer in a prior life and she absolutely loved that idea. Moving to New Mexico felt like she was returning home  to a place she had never been before.

It was good for her. This was about as full a clean break with her past as she could make and it took.

She made friends that had nothing to do with her past and not even any knowledge of it beyond what she was willing to tell them.

She and Mike traveled a lot, including to South America and often to Mexico. She and my sister traveled to Africa together and mom saw much of the world. She and Mike finally married, but only so he could get on her health insurance.

Increasingly, he traveled to China for jobs teaching English and the more Mike was gone, the more my mother finally realized she did not need a man to stabilize her life, that she could live alone and, increasingly, she preferred it that way.

She bought him off and he agreed to a divorce. We got the news it had gone through during one of our annual trips to Long Beach Island, N.J. 

As children, Kate and I had spent two weeks every summer with our parents at a small cottage my father's parents owned in, where else, Brant Beach, and they were among my most cherished memories. Even there, mom shouldered the load, taking us to the beach, back for lunch, then back to the beach while my father lounged and read Dickens.

My mom on Long Beach Island with

her two grandsons, Eli Gunther and Dylan

So when mom said she wanted to spend time with both her children and both her grandchildren, I suggested going back. She could not bear the thought of renting the cottage from my cousins and the memories it would dredge up, but she gamely agreed to meet me halfway and agreed to rent a house if I found it, which I gladly did.

We were in one of the fancy beach houses in Loveladies (which are much cheaper if you rent in June, but boy is the water cold) when she got word that she was done with Mike. We ate chocolates and drank champagne. 

It was then that Mom really seemed to flourish. 

Her friend circle grew, she joined a group trying to get the nearby city of Gallup to recycle; she became more active politically and, as he said at the memorial service we held for her last month, she taught my son generosity. 

Every birthday, he received no gift from her but certificates for money donated to others in his name. She often let him choose the cause and there are many a healthy African goat who have the two of them to thank for a full belly.

Which brings us to the one constant in my mother's life.

Animals.

In most cases, she would choose animals over people and even when she chose people, it was a near thing. If I told her a story about how I was almost mauled by a bear, she would ask "is the bear OK?"

From left, Merlin and Oliver (I think)

Most of all, she loved cats. 

Much of our family's life can be divided up into eras defined by the cats we had at the time: Shelly, Oliver, Portia, Prudence, Guinevere, Merlin (changed from Lancelot when we learned what a coward he was).

And that was just the east coast crew, most of whom were Siamese, although some made the transition to New Mexico.

She learned some hard lessons out west when she lost a few cats to coyotes. 

But because her cats were always outdoor cats (she could not bear the thought of keeping them indoors), she actually had a fenced and netted enclosure built on her property with a wooden, above-ground tunnel connected to the house so the cats could go in and out as they pleased.

Mom and Kate at the little stairway over the
cat tunnel at her house in Jamestown, NM.

As it turned out, the tunnel was also a way for mice, rabbits and snakes to pay mom a visit, but they were animals so she didn't mind much.

Her favorite cat was Cindy-Lou, who went on her daily walks around her property or up the road to visit the horses kept there.

My mom also had a rather unusual sense of humor. 

She laughed in the midst of daily disasters. When I would be on a trip with her and the car would be near to running out of gas in the middle of nowhere, or the power went out, she would burst into hysterical laughter.

We learned that if you heard her laughing, you should come running. The only time it was safe was when we played the game she loved best, Trivial Pursuit. She was not very good, but found her wrong answers hysterical. 

That was always a fun time.

In addition to her cats, she loved the amazing friend group she had amassed.

They are among the most stalwart group of people I have ever met. As she aged, they would drive her places, shop for her.

And, after she returned from the hospital to die after being diagnosed with heart failure, they rallied in a selfless way to oversee her care 24/7 until my sister could cobble together a group of professional caregivers to supplement Priscilla's daily routine.

I tried to help, but it turns out I am better at dealing with all the bureaucracy that accompanies the modern American death. Kate is better organizing people. "Women are collaborative," she said simply and I watched in amazement as a group of about eight women worked out the schedule and I realized my best contribution would be to stay out of the way.

We will never be able to thank Priscilla Cadman enough

for the love and care she showed my mother over the years.

My mom also discovered Buddhism.

We had never been a religious family, although both my parents were raised in the Methodist church.

My mom's church was the outdoors. And when she discovered she could do her Buddhist practices outside, she was all in.

In many ways, this was her greatest discovery beyond her own self-reliance.

After so long a life trying to make herself happy, Buddhism began to expand her perspective. She was seeing beyond herself, examining herself and trying, as she said to me once, "to be a better person."

This was when I was most proud of her. She had been through so much, endured so much and done it in, dare I say, a very unapologetic manner. Now she was seeing past herself. 

We should all be so enlightened and willing to make that journey.

Below are the remarks I made at her memorial service last month, which I wrote that morning in a moment of stillness.

About 20 friends gathered for my mom's memorial service.

"As most of you know, my mother could be plainspoken to the point of bluntness.

There was rarely any doubt about her opinion on anything.

I recall having a Facetime chat with her and letting her know my son Dylan had taken in a cat named Shamrock and she said "Oh, that's a stupid name" and Kate, who was sitting beside her could be heard to say quietly “don’t say that.”

She was equally decisive and it could take effort to get her to change course on anything.

But she was genuine. There was no artifice in her, so when she told you she loved you, you knew it was true.

Mom on one of her walks

And she did say it to me often.

After she began to explore Buddhism, which opened her mind a bit to the perspectives of others, she took those lessons to heart.

She would say things to me like “I shouldn’t say that. It’s hurtful.”

That she never stopped trying to be the best person she could be made me very proud of her.

She had a difficult childhood and the first half of her life was very fraught.

But it is, I think, through and with the friends she met here that she found a path to her best self.

She died how she wanted to, where she wanted to, and that is as much as any of us could hope for.

I believe she is happy wherever she is."

The rock meditation garden where my mother was buried naturally, with no embalming, so her body would reunite with and feed the desert she loved so much.

The Memory Tree

Growing up, I was the only member of our family of four, until it fractured, that was a full-on  advocate of Christmas.

I was always the one who wanted to decorate, much to my parent's dismay, setting up the tongue-depressor manger my sister had made and playing with the resin Creche figures (especially the winged angels) like action figures.

Kung-Fu Jesus had a mean side-kick.

It was certainly not religious fervor that drove this. We were not churchgoers in our family. I think it was more that I understood that this was a special time. Like everyone having a birthday at the same time.

And it was not because of the gifts.

Don't get me wrong, like any kid I wanted the toys I wanted (particularly Dinky's James Bond Aston Martin, with the ejector seat and pop-up bullet-proof shield) and moon-based interceptors from the British program UFO. But even so, that was not top billing for me.

In fact, I'm not very good at gift-giving at all. Always late, always panic-buying and misjudging what people would like, always on the receiving end of the wan smile and a "thank you so much" upon the unwrapping. 

One year when I was a child, I determined to be organized and bought them all in August, hid them in my closet, and then totally forgot about them and went into my usual panic three days before Christmas.

I've have enjoyed the experience of finding the actual "perfect gift" for someone on my list, as has happened a few times, but then there was everyone else -- getting something awkward and destined for the attic or the white elephant table at the church store.

One year, before we were married but working and living together in Cold Spring, NY, my big gift for Karen was a hair dryer. She was (is) always running late and getting into the car to go to work with wet hair. I was often saying she would get a cold and I thought this showed how much I cared. 

She told me gently, with a wan smile, she was going to consider the art book I also gave her that year of paintings from the Hudson River School as her "big gift."

I was cynical for a time in that way that only young people who know everything can get. "It's just so commercial." You know that mindset. It's still true, but I'm less militant about now as I mellow with age.

Shortly after we started dating, I foolishly tried to skip her family's Christmas celebration, hoping to duck out on the whole thing. But the next time I came for a visit, we all sat down and they all gave me all the presents I would have opened at Christmas. And it was a lot, including a full-on tool box.

I had arrived empty-handed. It hadn't even occurred to me to get them gifts.

Not my finest moment and the very definition of painfully awkward to the point that I tried to justify being mad at them for getting me gifts and putting me in that position. Weak tea I know.

This ornament shows Karen holding our sleeping

baby, Dylan, on his very first Christmas.

I had thus learned that Christmas was big in her family, so I reached back to my younger days and let it be big for me too, just not the presents.

I love the music of Christmas and my collection of wide-ranging Christmas music from Motown, to Irish, to Blues to Medieval monk chants is banned in our house until after Thanksgiving, although I do cheat a bit on my attic office CD player as the mercury dips. 

(In fact, I have some on as I write this.)

I like the food at Christmas, particularly because my son has turned into an enthusiastic cook and I love watching he and Karen work together, concocting and creating new recipes for baking or dinner, while I continually wash dishes and cut vegetables.

And of course, there is drinking and the celebrating together. What's not to like?

If we could do all that without the gifts, I would be fine. But both my wife and my son are natural and excellent gift givers and I would be robbing them of their primary enjoyment if I tried to stop it. 

So I don't.

We have a very extensive decorating scheme at home, perfected over the years by my wife's good taste.  I am the mostly willing labor, given that my wife Karen walks with a cane and it's hard to decorate with one hand. Besides, she is busy with afore-mentioned gifting, which I am happy to leave in her capable hands.

One year at the Kristkindlemarket in Bethlehem, Karen

discovered these works by an artist named Connelly.

They keep mysteriously accumulating.

Over the years, we have assembled quite the collection and it takes me a good two weeks to get it all in place, although it's a little easier now that we don't set up the train and the little Christmas town.

As I bring bin after plastic bin down from the attic (no longer kept in the crawl space thanks to the squirrels -- see my previous works) I grumble and grouse. But I am always gratified when the whole thing finally comes together. 

(Facebook friends will know this from my relentless postings)

But the centerpiece of it all for me, as by now you have surely guessed, is the tree.

I have tried gently advocating for a fake tree over the years, but Karen is a purist and argues as long as we (me) can still carry it in and set it up, we're getting a real tree. (The day this is no longer possible is fast approaching).

She likes the smell and I can't argue, it does smell nice.

We have the routine down. Years ago she ordered a "swivel straight" tree stand which has a detachable clasp I bring to the tree lot we go to every year on Cedarville Road to make sure the base of each year's very big tree can be shimied into it. 

This year's tree is about seven feet. Our house was built in 1916 and we have eight-foot ceilings, so why skimp? Besides, we have a lot of ornaments to hang.

I finagle the eight-foot A-frame ladder into the living room and together Karen and I put on the lights, and the ribbon, passing them around to each other on each side and I tie off the tree with fish line.

Sebastian, one of the two cats we inherited

from my late sister-in-law is no stranger

to Christmas decor.

Experience is a hard teacher and we began using the fish line after having more than one tree tip over on us. 

Most famously, a tree we called Sasquatch, was free, but oh the price we paid. 

Our late friend Matthew had cut it down in his yard and offered it to us. Ever the sharp-eyed bargain hunter, I jumped at the chance for a free tree. Karen had her doubts.

But Sasquatch had not grown up on a tree farm and Sasquatch was not tame, as was made plain the morning we heard him come crashing down one tragic morning as we bustled about getting ready for work and school.

Many an ornament lost their luster that morning.

There was another tree, in the apartment on Farmington Avenue we rented right after moving to Pottstown, that was dubbed "the Suicide Tree." We had not noticed it's twisted trunk when we purchased it. And no matter how we turned it, it always looked like it was struggling to hurl itself through the second floor window.

But tree lore aside, what matters to me in all this is that the tree, vital though it may be, is the vehicle for the ornaments. 

I have seen people who have theme trees, white or red, with matching ornaments, and I wish them the joy of their choices. For us, me in particular, each ornament is a memory preserved in frosted glass, felt, wire or plastic.

Our tradition is we buy one new ornament every year, a rule I frequently violate. After 32 years of marriage, 26 of them with a child, you can imagine the collection has grown, not counting the ornaments we each brought to the relationship.

I have two I painted as a child, a felt Joseph and Mary my mother's mother made and Karen has some from her family. One heirloom from her grandmother was a victim of Sasquatch's pique.

These ornaments from my sister-in-law are
'Old School' Oz.

Karen's late sister Patty took Christmasing to unimagined levels and when we cleaned out her apartment, we found an indescribable volume of decorations, gifts and ornaments that boggles my mind to this day. 

Two entire Christmas villages, one of which I suspect was never set up. Gifts and ornaments still in their original packaging. 

A select few of hers, including a full set of Wizard of Oz ornaments she was keeping as a gift for Karen but never got the chance to give before cancer took her, now adorn our tree as a way for us to remember her at her favorite holiday.

She also gave us the re-usable twisted tin Victorian tinsel whose hanging marks the end of the often days-long tree trimming process.

There are the ornaments Dylan chose at the Virginia Museum of Transportation in Roanoke, purchased while visiting my late in-laws.

An entire set of wooden animal ornaments date back to before Karen and I were married and were on a newspaper-funded travel assignment to Boston, back when newspapers paid for such things and before we had a one-ornament-per-year rule. 

Those who have followed our recent struggles with Pottstown's psychotic and destructive urban squirrel sub-species will understand that each year I vacillate between putting up the squirrel ornament: "will it summon the destructors, or appease them by hanging it in a place of prominence?"

We have an extensive set of Harry Potter ornaments (including a Sorting Hat as our tree-topper) that ultimately will belong to Dylan. The timing of those books hit the sweet spot of his childhood and I read them all to him out loud (including on a plane ride on which a passenger in front of me asked me to keep going when my throat got sore. Apparently, she was a fan of my Hagrid, my best voice impression. I suspect the other passengers were less enamored.)

Each year, we watch all the Potter movies between Christmas and New Year's, calling out our favorite lines from the kitchen while fetching another cocktail or another cookie.

There are a few Star Trek/Star Wars ornaments, a Thor and a dancing Batman from the 1960s TV program; and a U.S. Senator Blutarski, in full toga. (If you know, you know). 

Edna Mode screams 'NO CAPES' whenever you press the button.

And of course there is the house and "major award" from "A Christmas Story." 

There is a cat popping out of a box that represents one half of the exceptionally long-lived "bachelor cats" I brought into the marriage -- Jake and Elwood. This one is dubbed the "Jake in the box."

There is a "spoon licker" ornament, one of the "Yule Boys" from Iceland's holiday traditions, a well-chosen gift from Karen's sister Jennifer, who, more adventurous than we, visited there with her husband David last year.

My sister-in-law Evie, who wisely married Karen's brother Tommy has gifted us with several very artful ornaments which go up ever year, this despite the short-lived "gifts-only-for-children" rule I tried so hard to implement.

Among the most treasured are the hand-made ornaments. 

There was no way Karen was going to let Dylan grow up without being a dedicated gift-giver and each year, she would pick a craft project for the two of them to work on, often an ornament, to give to the family that routinely gave him so much. 

My favorite are the gold-wire ornaments wrapped around a Christmas tree bulb and shaped to look like insects.

The older I get, the sappier I get, trying to choke back tears at the end of "It's a Wonderful Life," and failing miserably.

Each year, as I pull one ornament or another from its box or paper wrapping I call out to Karen in the other room, invariably busy with her own Christmas business, "honey, remember this one?"

"Yes dear," she'll respond, even though she can't see it. 

Like a family Bible, the tree ornaments tell the story of our family's life together. 

But unlike a fixed written record, each year we get to re-create those memories in a new pattern on the tree, a new way to treasure them each Christmas.

It's the best gift of the season. 

When Your Local News Source is 'Stripped for Parts'

Photo Courtesy of John Armato

Prior to showing the film to the Pottstown community April 8 at The Hill School's Center for the Arts, director Rick goldsmith, right, and I spoke to students at Pottstown High School about the role local journalism plays, or should play, in a healthy democracy.

When I watched "Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink" at the free public screening in Pottstown on April 8, I was seeing it for the fourth time.

It is unquestionably a good film, and it has won many awards. If you come across another opportunity to see it, I can't recommend it strongly enough. But then, I do love a good documentary. 

However, given that the film's subject is about the willful destruction of something I love, it can get a little hard to watch over and over again. Just ask Rick Goldsmith, the director of the film, who has taken it to so many screenings, he does not show up to speak until the film is over.

Specifically, the film is about how Alden Global Capital, which owns The Mercury, began buying up newspapers across the country a few years ago not to run or improve them, but, as the title suggests, to strip them of their assets, and their value and run them into the ground until there is nothing left to feed on.

The screening I helped arrange would not have happened without the graciousness of The Hill's head of school, Kathleen Devaney, who agreed to host the showing, and The Newspaper Guild/CWA Local 38010 out of Philadelphia, of which I am a member. The Guild covered Goldsmith's travel and lodging expenses at The Three Daughters Bed & Breakfast on High Street.

The post-film discussion panel fearuted, from left, myself,

film director Rick Goldsmith, Bill Ross from the News Guild 

and former Mercury Sports Editor Austin Hertzog.

The Guild even lent us their executive director Bill Ross for the evening to be part of the panel discussion which followed the screening. 

Also crucial was Hill School journalism teacher Alec Swartz, who helped arrange the technical aspects of the screening and acted as moderator for the panel discussion which followed.

As I tried to convey when I fumbled my way through the introduction to the screening, at its essence, the film is about loss.

The loss is not just mine, but the greater Pottstown community's loss, and the country's.

As the last local reporter at The Mercury, I have lost support, working in a newsroom with colleagues and resources to be able to do this vital job as well as it needs to be done.

The greater Pottstown community has lost coverage of important local news, insight into why things are happening when they are happening, and that ineffable connection that comes from everyone working off the same set of facts.

And, as Professor Peggy Abernathy makes clear in the film, the hollowing out of local news means the nation is losing an engaged public. The loss of local news means people vote less, volunteer less, run for office less and it means a growth in corruption.

But there are glimmers of hope to be found at the film's end. There we learn about the journalists who left, or were let go, from The Denver Post, who formed the non-profit news site, The Colorado Sun, to see if there is another way to provide this vital service.

And it is a public service, as Goldsmith said during the panel discussion that followed the film, like public schools, or the fire or police departments, none of which are required to generate a profit to preserve their continued existence. (In fact, police departments are usually the most expensive part of any municipal budget.)

The April 16 edition of Voices of Monterey Bay.

We also learned about Julie Reynolds -- the apex level investigative journalist featured in the film who revealed the inner workings of Alden Global Capital  -- who helped to start a local news site called Voices of Monterey Bay after leaving the Alden-owned local paper where she worked, The Monterey County Herald.

Hopefully, each community will find a way to replace what is being lost. Otherwise, it will be replaced by something that does not see local news as a public service, but as a way to mislead voters. 

Called "Pink Slime" after the "it's almost-ground-beef" scandal when it was found in school lunches across the country, these replacement news sites look like local news, but are actually owned by partisans pushing misinformation.

"According to a report from NewsGuard, a company that aims to counter misinformation by studying and rating news websites, the websites are so prolific that 'the odds are now better than 50-50 that if you see a news website purporting to cover local news, it's fake,'" The Guardian reported last June.

We couldn't let Rick goldsmith's visit to Pottstown

pass without paying a pilgrimage to old Mercury building.

This is particularly worrisome when considering the state of news literacy among the younger generations That was a subject former Mercury reporter Frank Otto raised during the audience question period after the screening.

Ryan Johnston, assistant principal at Pottstown High School, had said something on this subject to Rick and I while we were waiting for the students to file in to the auditorium and it was a bit of an epiphany for me.

"For these kids, 9-11 is history. It happened before they were born."

That set me on my heels, and I thought about the news environment in which they have been raised. Forget Walter Cronkite, they never even had the experience of only three TV channels and news anchors being "the most trusted man in America."

Instead they grew up with and endless stream of possible information sources, most of them more interested in being entertaining and attracting clicks and likes than with being trustworthy.

Rick Goldsmith speaks with Hill School students on

April 8, prior to the screening of his film.

When Rick and I spoke to students who run The Hill News later in the day, we explored that topic some more and most of the students did not even have a favorite, trusted source for news.

Many happen upon it in their feeds on their phones and do not necessarily differentiate between real news and chatter.

This is not their fault. 

We cannot condemn them for not doing something no one ever taught them to do. For many my age or a little younger, we grew up with news in the house. Our parents got the paper, or watched the 6 O'Clock news and it is second nature to us. 

We are the ones who invented smartphones, and social media without setting any kind of guidelines for its use or much thought to the impact it might have. Frankly, we did not know ourselves.

But that only makes the threat of "Pink Slime" all the more insidious as this generation moves up the aging ladder into adult life and become the people who vote and run everything.

This is one of several reasons I am passionate about informing people about the importance of local news and the need to preserve its function.

More than 100 people showed up April 8 for the 

free screening of the documentary "Stripped for Parts:

American Journalism on the Brink."

And, as I replied to Frank, it's our jobs as local news providers to reach out and find a way to connect with kids, where they are; not relying on "but this is the way we've always done it" and expect them to fund us.

It is also worth observing that for many young people, their first real connection to local news is through athletics. When the local sports reporter interviews them about their performance that day, or their team's chances in the big game, that is often their first experience with local news. 

And often, it's a good one. We should capitalize on that.

To drive the point home, as the evening wound down, Austin told me someone came up to him and said that Austin had interviewed him years ago, and then he produced the clipping of the story.

Youth sports is also one of those crucial common ground areas where adults can put aside their political labels. As I said Tuesday night, the MAGA father and Libtard father can both agree on one thing, they want to root for their kids' team.

So I've mentioned the panel discussion and question period several times. All of this, including the film itself, was captured by our friends at PCTV and is being aired this week around 9 p.m. on channels 22, 28 and 98.

Rick is still trying to get his movie picked up by HBO, PBS or even Netflix, so he asked PCTV President Gus Tellis to refrain from showing the movie on his YouTube channel, for obvious reasons.

However, I have helpfully shot full videos of both the panel discussion as well as the question period, which I have posted on my YouTube channel.

But as you have no doubt already noticed by now, I have embedded them here for easy viewing.

Please forgive the shakiness and questionable audio, I shot it from my TV sitting on my couch accompanied by two very curious cats.

Here's hoping you get something out of all this -- if nothing else, a better understanding of the challenges local news faces -- and perhaps together we can come up with a way to save it.

Anthony Brandt: 1936-2024

Some of the books my father wrote or edited over his lifetime.

My father Anthony Scott Brandt, author, historian, journalist and poet, died quietly in his sleep last night just before midnight at the Kanas Hospice Center in Quogue in eastern Long Island. It was seven days before his 88th birthday.

My father, left, and his brother Charles with their dog 

King, with some fish they caught in Brant Beach

Son of Grace Scott and Axel Hjalmar Brandt, he was raised in Westfield, NJ and spent his summers with his brother, the late Charles Brandt, on Long Beach Island in the section, appropriately called, Brant Beach (named after a type of duck, not our family, but who's complaining?) 

There, he learned to sail and often waxed nostalgic about being alone all day on the bay in his "sneak box" sailboat, which had a dagger board center keel you could pull up so it could go up onto the ice when duck hunting in the winter, which he never did to my knowledge.

A graduate of Westfield High School and Princeton University, in 1958 he married my mother Barbara (Rescorla) in Cranford, NJ and two years later, my sister Katherine Grace Brandt was born. I followed four years after that.

He was enrolled in the ROTC in college and afterward, he and my mother spent several very hot and uncomfortable months in Oklahoma where he was assigned to be trained as a forward observer, directing artillery fire. He became, to hear him tell it, quite good at it and the howitzer sight he gave me years ago remains one of my most cherished mementos of his life, primarily because of what it meant to him.

The young father at Christmas at his brothers' in Westfield.

After he was discharged, the young family lived first in Manhattan while my father attended Columbia and my mother attended nursing school.

They soon moved to Hunter Brook Road in Yorktown, Westchester County, NY. There he met his best friend, the late photographer Carter Jones, who, my dad said, lived more fully in the moment than anyone he had ever known. Jones died tragically in a plane crash and decades later my dad dedicated a memorial poem to him in his 2020 book of poetry, "The Only Available Word."

He got a job working for Fairchild Aircraft where he was commissioned to write history of the company and a biography of its founder, the late Sherman Fairchild, who died before the book was written. Shortly afterword, the company board of directors decided the biography was not worth the cost.

Then we moved to the hamlet of Shrub Oak into a large, rambling farmhouse built during the Civil War, and which, at one point, was a hotel, as evidenced by the numbers on the door of the three third-floor bedrooms.

In every house he lived, the walls were lined with books.

Dad worked in an office on the first floor with its own door out to the front porch, filled floor to ceiling with books. It had once been a doctor's or dentist's office. Just getting to the desk required some deft maneuvering among the stacks of books and magazines on the floor and other furniture.

He often demanded quiet of the children playing outside, myself among them, and ultimately moved his office to one of the third-floor bedrooms to get better distance from childhood mayhem.

It was in Shrub Oak that he wrote and published his first Book, "Reality Police, The Experience of Insanity in America."

To do research, he had himself committed to a mental hospital, relying on my mother to get him released when the time came, which she dutifully did.

For his efforts, he was rewarded with a lawsuit by the psychiatrist whose questionable methods he had exposed. It was a financial burden that hung over him for years, due in large part to the publishers' failure to give the book a "libel reading" before publication.

On the back deck of their High Street home with friends.

And although the book did not exactly fly off the shelves, it did attract enough attention that he was called to testify before Congress, which he did wearing his favorite blue denim jacket, an act of quiet defiance that I have always admired.

After 15 years of marriage, my parents divorced. My sister being away at private school, an educational path not of her own choosing, my mother and I moved to Pleasantville, NY and my father moved to an apartment in nearby Ossining, where he was living with the woman he had left my mother for.

Thankfully, that relationship did not last and soon enough, my father met and married, in 1981, a much better match -- my stepmother Lorraine Dusky, an indomitable and accomplished journalist in her own right who was more than a match for my dad's tendency to assume he was always right about everything.

At his favorite table at The American Hotel with his kids.

(It was Lorraine, who, in 1965 at the age of 23, had broken the newsroom glass ceiling out of the "women's pages" and into the hard news section at the "Democrat & Chronicle" newspaper in Rochester, NY where she was the only female reporter in the city room, who confirmed my growing desire to become a newspaperman with her tales of daring do in service to her readers.)

Subsequently, dad became a well-known and well-regarded magazine writer, writing for such publications as The Atlantic, Connoisseur, Esquire, Psychology Today and American Heritage.

When last we spoke last week, he recalled pieces he wrote for Psychology Today titled 'Selves,' "it was the longest piece they ever published," he told me; and "Rite of Passage" for The Atlantic, about his mother's struggle with Alzheimer's disease, as being among what he considered to be his most memorable articles.

The National Geographic explorer series

For several years, he was the "Ethics" columnist for Esquire and then a book reviewer for Men's Journal. As such, he received dozens of free books in the mail every day and every visit meant coming home with free books selected from the piles of freebies in his front office.

He and Lorraine even had a he said/she said column called "Two Sides of the Story" in Glamour magazine for a time which I found to be quite amusing, mostly because of how honest they were.

My father also edited a book of Thomas Jefferson's letters from the time he spent in Paris. I had just read David McCullough's biography of John Adams and dad and I spent an enjoyable few months debating who was the greater founding father.

(My dad admired Jefferson's endless curiosity, his obvious genius and, for obvious reasons, his way with words. I insisted that while Jefferson wrote beautifully about freedom and offered advice about being frugal and self-reliant, as a slave-holder who lived his life in debt, he was a hypocrite. Adams, although boastful and a bit full-of-himself, also tended to look inward and be much more critical and honest about his own faults. He was, I argued, much more genuine in his self and in his passion for other people's rights.)

Dad then became an expert on Lewis and Clark when he edited their journals for an explorers' series published by National Geographic. He wrote the introductions for the other books in the series on subjects ranging from the Incas, to the discovery of Tutankhamun's Tomb, the Oregon Trail and Amelia Earhart.

He also edited a book called "The Tragic History of the Sea, Shipwrecks from The Bible to the Titanic," which he kindly dedicated to his grandsons, Eli Gunther and Dylan Brandt.

That interest in explorers and his never-ending fascination with man's relationship with the sea, eventually wound up filling the pages of "The Man Who Ate his Boots, The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage," a very readable history focusing on the doomed efforts of Sir John Franklin, who famously led several failed missions to find the passage and win glory for the British empire.

(One can't help but notice how often the word "tragic" turns up in his works.)

During his many years in Sag Harbor, an authentic sailing town on the north shore of the south fork of Long Island, dad was also a public official, serving as the chairman of the Architectural Review Board.

Dad loved living in Sag Harbor.

Lorraine served for several years on the village zoning board and talk of local politics and local issues was always high on the agenda around the dinner table.

As such, dad also wrote regular newspaper columns for the local papers, The Sag Harbor Express and The Southampton Press (although never about anything on which his board would rule, at least not while in office). He even won an award for one of his columns from the New York Press Association.

In later years, dad turned to subjects closer to home.

Dad during a reading of his poems at Canio's bookstore.

He wrote a book of short stories, which included a short memoir about his boyhood days on Long Beach Island, titled "The People Along the Sand."

In the end, he came full circle, back to where he started.

He returned to poetry.

He wrote two books of poetry, "The Fast," and "The Only Available Word."

Those who were his friends on Facebook had the opportunity to read the many poems he posted there as well as the spirit moved him.

For as long as I can remember, even after his first book came out, my father talked about writing a book about the American Dream, a subject he found endlessly fascinating. He spent a lifetime collecting books on the subject.

No Sag Harbor reading was complete without the

celebration that followed. Here is dad with Harris Yulin.

I was so happy to hear that in the last year, he finally finished it, a labor of love which had become more difficult as it became evident that over the past year he had been suffering a series of mini-strokes.

Hopefully, we will soon see it published and enjoy, for one last time, his insights on the human and American condition.

We had recently discovered that his body was riddled with prostate cancer that had spread and he refused all treatment.

He said he did not want to be drawn into the medical-industrial complex and spend thousands of dollars to stay alive for a few more days or months.

I am thankful that my sister and I were able to say our goodbyes to him and that he was at peace with the coming end. I am also thankful for his wife Lorraine who handled what needed to be handled and stayed with him as much as possible so he was not alone. That was not easy.

He was ready to go, and told us so, particularly after the most recent election results.

When I fulfilled one of his last requests and gave him a summary of the headlines in that day's New York Times, all of which were about the Trump victory and transition, and climate change-driven disasters, he smiled thinly and said "looks like I am getting out of here just in time."

PHS Students Get 'Instant Decisions' From Colleges

Photos from Pottstown School District

A Pottstown High School student talks with a representative of Alvernia University during Instant Decision Day.

Blogger's Note: The following was provided by the Pottstown School District.

Pottstown High School seniors found out, when your school district's mission is to prepare each student, by name, for success, being accepted to college may only take an instant. 

Enam Robinson is getting a 'full ride' to

attend Cheyney University

Recently admissions counselors from 28 colleges were on hand at Pottstown High School to take part in Instant Decision Day. 

The event was organized by the high school College and Career Counselor Susan Pritt. 

Counselors met one on one with seniors to discuss their application and transcript for admission. 

Over 110 acceptances were awarded to students, including full financial scholarships to Cheyney University for Enam Robinson and Kennedy Cole to Lincoln University. 

Members of the junior class also had the opportunity to meet with the counselors and discuss how to best prepare for the college admission process next year. 

Pritt said "this is a proud moment for our students to see their hard work paying off. Being able to bring all these schools together with our students and take some of the stress out of the acceptance process is a relief to students and parents and gives us another reason to say, proud to be from Pottstown."

Kennedy Cole is getting a 'full ride' to

attend Lincoln University

The colleges in attendance were: 

• Alvernia University, 
• Arcadia University, 
• Bloomsburg University, 
• Clarion University, 
• Cheyney University, 
• Cedar Crest College, 
• Delaware State University, 
• Delaware Valley University, 
• Eastern University, 
• East Stroudsburg University, 
• Elizabethtown University, 
• Harcum College, 
• Harrisburg University, 
• Immaculata University, 
• Kutztown University, 
• Lebanon Valley University, 
• Lincoln University, 
• Lock Haven University, 
• Manor College, 
• Mansfield University, 
• Millersville University, 
• Montgomery County Community College, 
• Moravian University, 
• Neumann University, 
• Penn College of Technology, 
• Shippensburg University, 
• St. Luke's Hospital School of Nursing, 
• Temple University, 
• Widener University.