If You Ask Me / By Martha Knight

Funerals aren’t performances to be reviewed, but sometimes there are aspects that bear a mention.

If it is appropriate for a great jazz musician to receive a final send-off in the form of a procession to the graveyard accompanied by “live” music (say, 50-some choruses of “Saints,” and other numbas, depending on the distance), and the group playing the “joys” on the return trip with lots of verve, it was just as fitting for there to be good singing at Chuck Boller’s funeral.

It made sense for there to be some anthems by choral groups, and for some of the Passion Play Choir members to sing, and for there to be a community choir, and for there to be congregational singing.

I noticed that JoAnn was murmuring words of comfort to people who spoke to her near the casket. She knew the community, and these individuals, were feeling keenly the loss of someone they cared about.

•    •    •

I wish we had a complete archive of “Reporter Argus” issues. There are so many times it would be wonderful to be able to research a topic in the newspapers, bearing in mind that today’s news is the first draft of history.

Back when some of us were putting those weekly chapters together, with our headquarters in the Grand Theatre building, there were some shelves along the far wall where there were stacks of old “Reporter Argus” editions. Sometimes when we were pursuing some topic George and I would access those archives very gingerly, for they were very brittle. I don’t know what happened to those, but I suspect that what was left by then was discarded later by Tioga Publishing.

Years before that, the local Rotary Club (I think it was) had sponsored a microfilming project. Several copies were made of the RA archives up to then. There was a copy at the high school, I believe, one at the paper, one at the library.

The microfilm spools and the reader at the RA were passed on to a local business person when the local newspaper operation or the print ship closed. That set wound up in a yard sale on Skinner Creek. A news buff from here bought the set—I heard later that he gave $15 for it. I know who he is but not where, nor whether he still has those microfilms.

There are a couple of projects for which it would be so nice to have access to those back issues, now; and you can think of many more.

As the community gears up to plan a celebration of its 200th birthday, it would be very helpful to have all those early chapters of that first draft of history. People have retained a smattering of photos and other memorabilia saved from the Centennial in 1916. There are more from the Sesquicentennial in 1966. But the “Reporter Argus” issues from that period would provide much, much more.

Some clippings have turned up and Lanny Nunn has scanned and uploaded them to the Port Allegany Remember When... Facebook page. Computer and smart phone and tablet users can access “archives” from the Remember When page. Others might want to use computers at the library or the Senior Center to visit that source.

Another project for which it would be great to be able to peruse hundreds of back issues would be a collection of Chuck Boller’s weekly “Ramblin’s” columns.

Of course Chuck did much of the reporting and much of the photography in this paper, for decades. As his father had, before him, he strove to use a “news style” that was impersonal, with no literary flourishes. In those days bylines were few and far between.

If anyone out there has a trove of old RA issues or clippings, we’d love to hear about it. One approach to preservation would be to digitize them using a large-bed scanner. Photos that have been printed in a newspaper or magazine or book or calendar need to be “descreened” or processed with certain algorithms to eliminate the screen-on-screen patterns that appear as strange checks or plaids; but there’s software for that.

•    •    •

A financial wizard made a presentation to the school board a few weeks ago, and I followed along in the nicely prepared booklet, which contains many interesting facts about the school district and its debt—our debt—and about the firm of which he is a part.

This representative praised the board and administration for its prudent management of district finances, and for keeping its debt manageable.

This set me to thinking of a nearby school district with a fiscally conservative point of view, where the board and administration decided to become debt free, and then to accumulate some savings and then do some renovations without borrowing.

You guessed it. Oswayo Valley School District engaged some architects who took it by the hand and led it down the PlanCon path. Its two fairly new school buildings suddenly became worfully inadequate and outdated, and in need of some middle school facilities, and a transplantation of the administrative quarters from one building to another, and so on and so forth.

A few years later as our elementary school approached PlanCon maturity (20 years of age), our then board president Dr. Frank Rackish urged a pay-as you-go approach to upgrades, rather than a massive PlanCon project, requiring a massive bond issue. We had, what, about $4 million? socked away for that purpose.

However much it was, it was a foregone conclusion that the pay-up-front approach would not be the recommended option, once the architects got involved. That $4 mil or so was a mere down-payment.

PlanCon is more a scheme than a plan, but certainly a con. Basically it lures public school systems, vocational school consortia and intermediate units into massive renovations (or enlargements) every 20 years, always with huge bond issues. The state kicks in some help, in the form of contributions to the bond payments as they occur (or maybe a bit later, as “reimbursement”).

Best thing a district like ours can do is manage its debt as well as it can. And then—stay out of the PlanCon swamp.

Peace.