Archive for August 2011
Edison Linked to Canadian Baseball
By Cecil Scaglione
Mature Life Features
ST. MARY’S, Ontario —- You could say the chronicles of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame are crafted in concrete. The St. Mary’s Cement Co., founded in 1912, is to Canadian cement what Louisville is to baseball bats.
The Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame was opened in 1983. It was housed in the American League Toronto Blue Jays’ original home in the Canadian National Exhibition stadium on the Lake Ontario waterfront.
It was dispossessed in 1989 because it was not included in the baseball team’s new home – the massive Skydome built in the lee of the CN Tower, the world’s tallest free-standing structure that looms over the lake.
That’s when the cement company came to the rescue by donating 32 acres of land for a museum-and-sports-field complex. We stopped by this hidden gem a couple of hours east of Toronto while on a mission to dip our toes in the three Great Lakes – Huron, Erie and Ontario — that lap the shores of Southern Ontario.
This bustling industrial town also produced Arthur Meighen, who was prime minister of Canada during the early 1920s, and Timothy Eaton, who launched a coast-to-coast department-store empire. It also was a brief stopover for Thomas Alva Edison, who worked as an itinerant junior telegrapher for Western Union in his teens.
A near-disaster vignettes his brief career in St. Mary’s first railway station, although other towns claim this bit of notoriety. As the story goes, he displayed his creative bent while serving as the local night telegraph operator. To prevent night operators from sleeping on the job, the company required them to tap out “six” every half hour. He invented a device that automatically sent out the code when a crank was turned and he slept while the night watchman turned the crank every 30 minutes.
One night a message came through to hold a train in a passing track. Edison failed to relay this message to the train crew. Fortunately, the engineers saw each other’s train in time to stop. And the young man slipped out of town before the subsequent inquiry was completed.
A new structure on the Hall of Fame site is a bleacher section erected at the recently built ball fields. The museum is a house that was built on a comfortable knoll in 1868 and rented to cement-company employees.
Among the more renowned of the mostly Canadian players memorialized here is Chicago Cub’s pitcher Ferguson Arthur Jenkins, who was born and raised in Chatham, Ontario. It’s about 50 miles east of Detroit and was a major terminal on the underground railway used by slaves fleeing the United States. He’s also inducted into the Cooperstown, N.Y., baseball Hall of Fame. His 1971 Cy Young award for National League pitcher of the year is on display here.
Also in this baseball circle is Jackie Robinson, who played for the Montreal Royals, a Brooklyn Dodgers farm club, before he broke the color barrier in the major leagues.
While hanging around to listen to the echoes dancing around the uniforms, mitts, bats, spikes, caps, and photographs was enthralling, it soon was time to return to our original mission – to dabble in the three Great Lakes.
We had left Goderich on the blue-water shores of Lake Huron a couple of hours earlier after a couple of days roaming around the rustic region along its eastern shore. We went antique gawking in such fanciful towns as Tobermory, Kincardine, and Southampton. Villages in this area boast stone-and-brick churches that look large enough to house all the remaining buildings in the community.
From St. Mary’s, we dropped down to the north shore of Lake Erie. The water there appears to reflect the tone of the earth around it. We took time in Port Stanley to sample the sweet and succulent Lake Erie perch, a lunch you’ll always remember once you’ve tried it.
Our next leg was east around the metropolitan Toronto complex to Prince Edward County, an island on the north shore of Lake Ontario. This lake serves as a weather monitor – angry black-and-white when it’s stormy, crisp and translucent blue when sailing is at its best, and steel-grey cold when the temperature plummets.
We devoted some time here to view the area picked by loyalists to the British cause during the War of 1812 as they scooted across Lake Ontario to this land of milk and honey that has become Canadian wine-and-cheese country.
Picton, about 90 minutes east of Toronto, is the major town that anchors the eastern end of the Ontario wine country, which winds westward through the Niagara peninsula and on to the junction of the Detroit River and Lake Erie about 300 miles away.
The pub in the Waring House Inn, a cozy 17-room hostel and cooking school, proclaims its heritage in the Barley Room. Barley from this little island was in demand throughout North America during the latter half of the 1800s.
All this is within a two-hour drive of Gananoque, on the U.S. border at the head of the Thousand Islands leading into the St. Lawrence River; Ottawa, the country’s capital, and Toronto, often cited as the most cosmopolitan city on the continent.
Mature Life Features Copyright 2003
Havin’ Fun on California’s 101
By Tom Morrow
Mature Life Features
It’s more widely known as Pacific Coast Highway but the old U.S. 101 is as storied as it’s more renowned neighbor, Route 66.
It’s where we took Marvin the Magnificent, our 1981 Chevy motor home — some of the remaining sections are obliterated by the Los Angeles metroplex — to re-collect fond memories and gather new ones along this 1,500-mile scenic coastal route that links Canada with Mexico.
It begins in San Diego, where the first California mission was established in 1769. Over the next half century, Franciscan friars opened a string of 21 missions that formed El Camine Real (The Kind’s Highway), which outlined the original route of 101.
As we rambled north alongside the Pacific Ocean, we trundled through such towns as Dana Point and Malibu until we reached Oxnard, about 60 miles north of Hollywood, and voila, there it was: U.S. 101. Our first stop was in nearby Simi Valley, which houses the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. My mom served him breakfast every morning when he was the play-by-play voice of the Chicago Cubs on WHO radio in Des Moines and passed on her reactions, all favorable, to me through the years.
Our next stop was at Solvang, home of Mission Santa Ynez, the 19th of the Spanish missions that form California’s backbone. The Santa Ynez Valley is California’s wine country, locals will tell you. Other areas that claim otherwise are just pretenders, they say. The Hans Christian Anderson-looking Scandinavian village neighboring the mission has many attractions but we just took time for the Museum of Gasoline Pumps, since we were on automotive odyssey.
Pismo Beach was our next stop. The first motel in the world was opened to highway travelers in 1925 at nearby San Luis Obispo. It began as the milestone Mo-Tel and is currently called the Motel Inn.
A dozen miles north of San Luis Obispo is Morro Bay, called the Gibraltar of the Pacific because of Morro Rock punching out of the ocean just off the coast. It’s one of nine extinct volcanic peaks that punctuate the coastline down to ‘Obispo.
Another couple of dozen miles north, we detoured into San Simeon with its fabled twin-towered castle (see photo) built over three decades by newspaper baron, William Randolph Hearst. He couldn’t stop amassing “stuff” and his collection of artworks that he donated to the state of California now draws more than a million visitors a year. The late Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw, after being a guest at what Hearst called “the ranch,” said, “This is the way God probably would have done it if he had had the money.”
Up the road a piece is Monterey. There aren’t many cities that have played such an important role of California history. It was the capital of both Spanish and Mexican California and, for a time, the headquarters of territorial Gov. John C. Fremont during its transition to the United States. Besides being the site of the word-renowned Monterey Bay Aquarium and Maritime Museum, it’s also the home of John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row,” which once was touted as the sardine capital of the world.
About 30 minutes inland is Salinas, the Pulitzer-Prize winner’s home town in “The Salad Bowl of the World.” Housed in the National Steinbeck Center there are scenes re-created from such books as “East of Eden” and “Grapes of Wrath,” clips of movie versions of his works, and his notes and references.
Next door to Monterey is Carmel, home of Mission San Carlos Borromeo del Rio Carmel, the second mission to be established in California. Buried under its altar is the body of Junipera Serra, the founder of the first missions to open up the California coast to European settlers. Carmel garnered national attention some years ago when Clint Eastwood, the Oscar-winning movie-maker and star, was elected the town’s mayor.
From here, it was time to turn back south, saving the remaining sections of this road up through Redwood forests to the forthy Oregon coast for another time.
Copyright 2002 Mature Life Features
Ship Shape for Photos
By Igor Lobanov
Mature Life Features
So you like to take pictures of all those places you visit on a cruise. What about the ship? “Not interesting enough,” you say?
You may want to re-think that.
Life aboard a cruise vessel, which is really a floating city, presents a panoply of picture possibilities: deck areas, lounges, and hidden nooks you’ll find on any ship worth its salt. To capture these scenes effectively, you’ll want a wide-angle lens. One with a 20- to 25-millimeter focal length will do to shoot interiors, spacious open decks, and dramatic white superstructure against the blue sky. You may want to include a railing, deck chairs, portholes or other elements of the vessel to add interest to your composition.
The upper decks are built-in vantage points for photographs of the shorelines, harbor activity, and other watercraft. You might look for a zoom lense to zero on these scenes. The general range of zoom lenses you should consider are 24 to 85 mm, 70 to 200 mm, and 200 to 400 mm. Many current cameras have built-in wide-angle and zoom lenses.
For shots of the ship taken from shore, put a person in the scene — your companion, a new-found friend, a crew member, or even a dockside vendor or local resident — to provide a sense of scale.
If you’re in the tropics, where the sun is unusually bright, you may want to use a polarizing or neutral-density filter to darken a blue sky and reduce the sun’s reflection off the water. The polarizing filter is fitted with a ring that lets you rotate it to see if you’re getting the sky too dark or eliminating all the reflections on the water.
At mid-day, when the sun in directly overhead, scenes will seem to be flat, with colors mostly washed out. Colors are more vibrant and shadows more dramatic before 10 a.m. and after 4 p.m.
To photograph friends and family on board, try to catch them in some activity, such as around the pool, or sunning themselves on the upper deck.
Keep in mind that salt water can harm cameras and video equipment by eating away at the electronic circuits and metallic gears. You’re pretty safe using the camera high up on the ship’s decks during calm seas. But remember that winds carry bits of salt that leave an oily film on equipment. When you go ashore in one of the ship’s tenders, where salt spray is almost inevitable, protect your camera in a water-repellent plastic bag. Clean all the exposed metal surfaces with denatured alcohol at regular intervals during the cruise. Use lens cleaner and lens tissues to clean glass surfaces.
If you want to take long-exposure photos, use a tripod because a ship is always in some sort of motion, even when docked. You can cut down on movement by setting your camera on a pillow. Of course, the longer the cruise, the more photo opportunities there are bound to be.
Mature Life Features, Copyright 2002
Sci-Fi Suburb in Austria
By James Gaffney
Mature Life Features
VIENNA – Facing the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, I raised the baton and with breezy optimism began conducting one of the world’s premiere music ensembles in Johann Strauss’ “Blue Danube Waltz.”
The moment was magic — until I butchered the tempo. The orchestra played too fast, then too slow. Finally the musicians ceased playing all together. A tuxedo-clad violinist stood up and shouted something in German to this wannabe maestro. The orchestra chuckled. An Austrian boy standing nearby with his giggling classmates translated: “The man said, ‘Have you even heard this piece before?'”
It all started with a retired Australian couple I met on the four-hour train trip from Prague to Vienna. They unfolded a map and “palace, palace, palace … cathedral, cathedral … palace, cathedral ” the man rattled off amicably before rolling his eyes.
In all fairness, Vienna is still regarded as the embodiment of a grand European capital. Just stand in the shadows of the 1,441-room Schonbrunn Palace or any of the baroque or neoclassical refuges left by the Hapsburg dynasty that ruled half of Europe from 1278 to 1918. And don’t forget the Vienna Boys Choir and Spanish Riding School’s prancing Lippizaners, cultural icons reflecting this city’s unabashed devotion to artistic precision.
But even locals admit the city has rested for too long on its cultural laurels. “A lot of people think of Vienna as only this,” said resident Christiane Haustein as she played an invisible violin to make her point. An exclamation point to her statement can be seen in the hip MuseumsQuartier, a tour de force of 10 art museums housed ironically enough in the Hapsburgs’ royal riding stables.
The several hundred exhibits gallop the gamut from modern art and experimental architecture to avant-garde multimedia demonstrations amidst an interactive children’s museum, theater, cafes, restaurants, and library. The icing on this cultural cake is the Leopold Museum, home of the world’s largest heretofore private collection of Expressionist masterworks by Austria’s Egon Schiele. Adjacent rooms feature the highly stylized works of Schiele’s mentor Gustav Klimt. He was the turn-of-the-century Viennese artist behind those arte nouveau paintings of femme fatales casting their Victorian cares to the Freudian wind.
The cobblestone boulevards of this city of 1.6 million people are still swept clean, making it still a delight to sip espresso at the Black Kameel. This 385-year-old sidewalk café is where a peckish Beethoven often sent his manservant for take-out schnitzel and beer.
Nearby, the sweeping central bay of the Hofburg Winter Palace is where Hitler made his conciliatory speech to the Austrians in 1938. That was shortly before the German army rolled into town, destroying nearly a third of the city, during World War II.
Gentler times are reflected in the eye-catching art-nouveau facades that flatter the pleasant, upscale shopping corridors of Kohlmart, Graben, and Rotentum. The same curvaceous style also left its signature inside the city’s legendary, turn-of-the-century coffeehouses. One evening we tumbled into the oldest — the smoke-filled, bohemian Hewelka. There we drank in the cross-section of Viennese society over a late-night Turkischer, or Turkish coffee.
It was clear no one was going to mistake this buzzing, theatrical java den for an American Starbucks. First of all, the waiters all wore tuxedos — a tradition requiring three years’ formal training as prescribed by Austrian law. Second, nobody at Hewelka sat quietly alone with noses buried in a laptop computer.
“A coffeehouse is Vienna – it’s life,” said Diane Naar, an English-born writer who has called this city home for some three decades. “It’s where Viennese come for dinner, meet friends, have intellectual conversations. Look around. People are actually talking to one another, people who have only just met while sharing a table.”
Next morning it became clear why the Gasometer, or G-town, has been turning the heads of urban planners and architects since it opened early this century. It’s worth the 15-minute U-Bahn, or subway, ride from Stephansplatz downtown for anyone who wants a glimpse into the weird and wonderful future of suburbs as science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury might have designed them.
Envision a quartet of round natural-gas storage structures, or gasometers, from the turn of the 20th century sitting side by side. Each is about half the size of a domed stadium. They’re connected by glass walkways. The lower levels comprise the uber-mall of four brick mega-structures complete with florists, cinemas, nightclubs, banks, grocery stores, rental car agencies, you name it. Rising above the glass-domed ceilings of the uber-mall are residential communities of apartments and condos. A second glass dome tops each gasometer’s residential section allowing for year-round, weather-proof outdoor living.
But even the futuristic G-town seems almost plain compared to the hallucinogenic vision called Hundertwasser Haus. Designed in the 1980s by Vienna’s late artist-turned-architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, this Gaudi-meets-Crayolas apartment building dominates nearly a city block with sinuous multicolored walls, leaning columns of colorful broken tiles, and multi-tiered roof forests.
The man standing at the curb snapping photographs shook his head. “Have you ever seen anything so ridiculous?” he asked. Actually, yes. Me conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.
But that’s not the fault of the software-driven “Virtual Conductor,” the popular interactive exhibit at the House of Music. Opened in 2000, the high-tech $55 million complex is a six-story showcase of enjoyable cutting-edge multimedia exhibits celebrating Vienna’s A-team of composers — Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, the Strausses, and Mahler. With “Virtual Conductor,” an infrared beam from a baton aimed at a super-sized screen “conducts” an interactive Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra that responds to the maestro’s tempo and rhythm.
Raising the baton for a second try, I led the orchestra through Strauss’ most famous waltz, successfully this time. And this time the orchestra applauded.
Mature Life Features Copyright 2002
Health Linked to Oral Bacteria
By James Gaffney
Mature Life Features
Dentists can tell a lot more about a patient’s health than merely whether they need a cavity filled. Researchers have found that oral bacteria in some instances have been associated with heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and the birth of pre-term babies, according to Connie Hastings Drisko at Kentucky’s University of Louisville School of Dentistry.
The presence of antibodies to certain oral bacteria identified in the amniotic fluid and fetal-cord blood suggests that mothers with periodontal disease may be six to seven times more likely to have a pre-term, low-birth-weight baby.
Other associations between oral and overall health include:
— Heart Disease and Stroke: Data are emerging to support an associaotn with gum disease.
— Diabetes: Diabetics are at significantly higher risk for severe gum disease. When exposed to the same type of bacteria as non-diabetics, the gum tissue of diabetics becomes much more inflamed. Drisko said there are two potential pathways for severe gum disease and diabetes mellitus to co-exist. It is known that the treatment of diabetes will slow down the progression of gum disease and that diabetes is more easily controlled if the periodontal disease is treated.
“Dentists are well-versed in handling oral-health conditions, and currently help screen patients with diabetes,” said Drisko. “In the future, dentists may have an even more important role in screening for other conditions, such as heart disease and stroke, as the link is strengthened between oral and overall health.”
Mature Life Features Copyright 2002
Sojourn in Southampton
Forever Young News clip
The Naples Nobody Knows
Story and Photos
By Cecil Scaglione, Mature Life Features
Puzzuoli and Naples in background
But we did stroll around 2,800-year-old Cuma, the first Greek colony established on the Italian peninsula some 350 years before the founding of Naples.
It’s the images of these fortress-like ruins and nearby Pozzuoli, Sofia Loren’s birthplace, that appear when we think of Naples. As do memories of Simone, Dario, Maria and Tulia, who whisked us through the crammed and crowded cobblestone streets of this cosmopolitan complex built at the base of Mount Vesuvius. The volcano on the southeastern edge of Naples is responsible for a couple of the world’s better-known ruins – Pompeii and Herculaneum.
However, about 30 kilometres on the west of Naples is Cuma, a sight that can satisfy both the avid and amateur archeologist. With a 4 euro entry fee, they can amble over and around the remains of temples to Apollo and Jove on the acropolis that overlooks one of the most enthralling expanses of beach along the Mediterranean shore.
It was these soft waves rolling up against the softly curved shoreline and the natural hot springs that drew the Greeks here. It’s also the land of myth and magic that Virgil etched into legend. Both avid and amateur will get a kick out of walking through the 145-yard trapezoid tunnel hollowed out of the massive rock to the grotto of the Sybil, Apollo’s prophetic priestess who foretold Aeneas’s future.
On the drive to Cuma, you can stop at a roadside overlook to peer down into Lake Avernus, which contemporaries of Homer and Virgil believed to be the entrance to Hades.
Before embarking on any of these jaunts, you have to sample the original modern pizza – the margherita. It’s available everywhere in Naples. While this type of flatbread dates back several centuries, it was in June 1889 that Neapolitan chef Raffaele Esposito created the Pizza Margherita in honour Italy’s Queen consort, Margherita of Savoy, who was visiting the city. He garnished it with tomatoes, mozzarella and basil, to represent the red, white and green Italian flag. He was the first to add cheese.
After washing down this palate-pleaser with wine and beer, it was time to dive into side dishes of fresh seafood, also available everywhere in this seaside city. Then it’s chased down with a toddy of the local favorite – the citrus-flavored liqueur limoncello, which is sipped as widely here as Starbucks coffee is in Seattle.
There are sites aplenty to see between snacks in this, the third-largest city in Italy.
We stopped at the il Vero Bar del Professore on the edge of the massive Piazza Plebescito, the largest square in Naples. It was given that name after the plebescite of 1870 that made Naples part of the Kingdom of Italy under the House of Savoy. On one flank are the municipal palace and Real Teatro San Carlo, the opera house that has been operating continuously since 1737. Behind it is the Norman Castel Nuovo, where you can board a hop-on-hop-off bus to tour the town.
After sampling two specialties of il Vero Bar – a coffee with nut cream and a sfogliatelle (roll) – Simone led us to San Severo Chapel to view The Veiled Christ, completed in 1753 by Giuseppe Sanmartino, reposed among more than two dozen other intriguing works of art.
Then we headed for the central metro station, dodging anything on wheels as we danced through the Piazza de Gesu, one of the city’s prettiest piazzas decorated with churches and statues. The station is tucked firmly in a section locals call Calcutta because of the constant commotion created by vendors and vagrants, booths and bicycles, walkers and watchers. Our train took us to a stop within minutes of our bed-and-breakfast in Pozzuoli, a commune on Naples’s western border that was once the busiest seaport on this section of the Italian peninsula. It was here that St. Paul landed about 60 A.D. to establish a Christian community.
A recently built waterfront park and walkway makes this one of the more pleasant promenades alongside the Mediterranean.
For more information visit italiantourism.com.
Mature Life Features 