Delaware Literary Connection

The Delaware Literary Connection is a writer’s group that promotes literary arts in Delaware. They meet regularly in member’s homes with published writers, agents, publishers, poets and others in mostly casual discussions on matters of interest to writers. I was the director for one year. My favorite speakers were the authors, among them were Mark Bowden who spoke to us the year "Black Hawk Down" was published, George Anastasia who told us about writing “The Summer Wind” which was an account of the Thomas Capano-Anne Marie Fahey murder case and Tom Coyne author of “A Gentleman’s Game” which was a coming of age book set in Delaware neighborhoods and Brandywine Valley country clubs.

In 2003 employees of Delaware’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, DNREC, the same cabinet department that manages the State Parks, came to a Killens Pond Friends group meeting to tell us about “Tributary Action Teams”. They told us that a “Trib Team” is a group of people with an interest in a watershed who come up with pollution control strategies and plans that will result in the areas surface water becoming suitable for use. The way the EPA and the states agreed to comply with the requirements of the Clean Water Act was to deal with the problem one watershed at a time and to have the residents of each have a hand in how pollution in their rivers, streams, lakes and bays is controlled. I was one of the few people who attended nearly every meeting for a couple of years and I did more than anyone else of the actual writing of the Pollution Control Strategy. I also produced a documentary on the subject and published an accompanying booklet.

The process tends to wear out the community members. I suspect it’s meant to do so. That way the state employees outlast the volunteers and the content of the final document is what the State would have written in the first place.

Tillamook County Oregon Deputy Sheriff

I was a member of the Tillamook County Oregon Sheriffs Department Air Posse for a few years in the early 1980s. We had two J3 Piper Cubs, but only one was airworthy. Police work was limited and when an aerial observation was needed to find marijuana plants or someone hunting or fishing illegally or an escaped prisoner members with more time in the organization would be called. For the rest of us it was a flying club. We rented the airplane which provided revenue and some of us helped maintain the airplanes and the hangar.

It was yellow, but otherwise the airplane pictured here, which is hangared on my neighbor’s property in Felton, Delaware is identical to the one I flew as a deputy sheriff.

Little League Baseball Umpire

Each Little League team has two coaches and a team mom or scorekeeper and there are typically two umpires for the games so there are eight volunteers needed for a game played by twenty-eight kids. According to Wikipedia two million six hundred thousand kids play Little League baseball so there are about three quarters of a million people who volunteer to coach, manage and referee the games.

When our son Patrick played in Felton, Delaware I was one of them. He played in the Major League which is for ten, eleven and twelve year old kids and I was a plate umpire for that division and for the Senior League for kids as old as fifteen.

Felton Little League