Legislators used Pa. Dutch dialect to confound reporter
When I wrote a while back about the importance of local journalism, I was rewarded with lots of support and the following great story.
It came from Bill Cameron, a former Morning Call employee whose tenure dates back even further than mine. He wrote:
“Those summers as I worked for The Morning Call as a reporter, I frequently covered borough council and township supervisor meetings. I remember a township whose three supervisors met in the kitchen of one of them, a farmer. I’d pull up a chair and accept a cup of coffee and sometimes a piece of pie.
“The meetings were uneventful and mostly uninteresting, but once there was a hot issue. I’ve forgotten what the issue was — it may have had to do with sewerage — but what I’ll never forget is that when the supervisors began to discuss it, they switched from English to Pennsylvania Dutch and left me in the dust.”
I have lots of my own stories about public officials who hoped to avoid sharing their activities with the public, but none that amazing.
All these years later, it is a reminder of how important it is to have journalists in those local meeting rooms, just to keep everyone honest.
The effort to keep the Call and other Tribune newspapers from the clutches of newspaper killer Alden Global Capital suffered a setback when one of the wealthiest alternative buyers bowed out of the picture. But it is not over.
There are people ready and willing to return The Morning Call and other Tribune papers to local control if they get the opportunity. The best hope is that prospective Baltimore Sun savior Stewart Bainum will find another financing partner who agrees with his plan to buy all the Tribune papers and sell them off to people in their communities.
Meanwhile, here’s another reminder about our local version of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, the international competition inspired by Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton and run by San Jose State University.
The goal is to submit the first sentence of the worst possible novel.
I’ve already received some excellent entries, including two from contestants well outside the Lehigh Valley. To answer one of the questions I’ve heard since I announced this year’s contest last month: There is no imminent deadline. It tends to drag on, particularly since I only write twice a month.
That said, I want to hear from you as soon as possible, so I’ll share more successful entries today to help you
understand what a winner looks like.
Although bad writers from the Lehigh Valley have fared well in San Jose’s contest over the years, the only 2020 place-winner was Steve Cormier, also a place-winner in my contest last year.
However, I’ll note that the most prolific contestant in our local contest has been Andy Lundberg of Los Angeles, who sends me a raft of entries every year and routinely is a place-winner — and he also fared very well in the 2020 international contest.
Among his winning 2020 entries there was this Dishonorable Mention in Historical Fiction:
“Deep within the Great Pyramid, Pharaoh Khufu gazed at the walls of what would eventually be his burial chamber, asking himself what he had been thinking in entrusting its adornment to the teenaged Prince and Princess, but comforting himself with the certainty that the younger generation would soon tire of these annoying ‘emoticons’ and return to the rich thirty-character Egyptian alphabet.”
I didn’t place last year, but I have been honored a couple of times in the past. My 2017 Western Category winner was this:
“Baking under the blazing New Mexico sun as he stood in the dusty street outside the saloon, Old West certified public accountant Arthur W. Fetterman Jr. hovered his sweaty hand over the butt of his borrowed six-gun, advanced another reluctant step toward famed gunfighter John Wesley Hardin and wondered for the hundredth time what had possessed him to correct the man’s use of ‘supposably’ during their poker game.”
Finally, I’ll share last year’s winning entry in our local contest, from Julie Cleary:
“Chef Rosemary, due to her lack of thyme, took her Uncle Kirk Cumin’s sage advice with a grain of salt as she assaulted and peppered her breasts of chicken with parsley, chili powder, and paprika all while marveling again at how spice is the variety of life.”
Although I call this a bad-writing contest, it’s not really. It takes a good writer to craft a winning sentence.
It could be you. So start writing.