Skaneateles was always known as a safe town that had its own rockin’ electric department and pretty girls.

Well, Bruce Famoly is back this week after a several year hiatus on writing his popular Famoly Forum column. He had never written before he started this Press column; well, except for his famous town hall poetry.

I loved to read him. His thoughts on Skaneateles were so well crafted. But he said he wrote diligently until he wrung the words out. I would ask him to write more and he would tell me the words just weren’t rising to the top.

Well, he got really inspired this week. It is only unfortunate in that it took one more incident to finally inspire him...

Permalink Comments (View)

I’m ripping this column idea off of my fellow editor in Cazenovia, Willy Kiernan. Why reinvent the wheel when he rolled the information out so well?

Each week we’re bombarded with information for insertion into the newspaper by snail mail, many land-lines, cell phones, telegraph, fax, ESP, carrier pigeon, by hand, drop box, whispered or the much-preferred e-mail. I even had one contributor write me a letter, then fax it to me from the West Indies and then roll the missive up and insert it into a bottle and throw it out into the ocean.

Well anyway, as the editor, I take all this information and decide one of two things – whether it applies to my coverage areas and whether there is room for it in the next newspaper...

Permalink Comments (View)

This was a book review I wrote in Decemeber of 2005. This book, "The Tender Bar," still haunts me.


I was on a 'have to take it or lose it' vacation, and among
all the sleeping I caught up on, I read a memoir by a young
journalist, "The Tender Bar." He has a rather unusual name, JR Moehringer, which was one of the many themes in his book...

Permalink Comments (View)

In 1968 my parents again loaded my brother Steve and I into the back of our station wagon. We were to make the long trek down route 81 to drop my oldest brother and his trunk off at college in Virginia. He was going to be an engineer, a ceramic engineer. We used to say he was going to learn how to make toilets. But in reality, he worked in the glass business after obtaining his masters from his alma mater, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, or what is now called Virginia Tech.

Tech was at the end of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was one of those big rolling lawn campuses with formal gray stone buildings, sort of like a more rural, more gracious Cornell. It was a hubbub at the end of a long valley. Almost like Oz in the Wizard’s story...

Permalink Comments (View)

My Italian professor, Dr. Georgio Renzi, once told me our lives are like books. He said some people we know are words, some sentences, and some are even paragraphs.

I lost a page in my book last week, as Joe Strodel Sr. slipped away peacefully at 4:20 a.m. Thursday April 19 at Francis House in Syracuse.

I knew him as a father to several of my favorite people Skaneateles has ever coddled, a husband to the former Queen of Baldwinsville’s Mary Fran, a self-proclaimed wordsmith (he taught me the word), a friend to my father, a regular at Riley’s Restaurant in Syracuse and as a buddy...

Permalink Comments (View)