Duffy opens 2018 with a bittersweet Mummers tear-jerker

Captain Jake Kudrick and the Duffy String Band

On New Year's Day, we welcomed in 2018 with the usual pomp and celebration here in the United States and around the world.

In my hometown of Philadelphia, PA welcoming in the New Year means one thing above all others. That would be the annual Mummers Parade.

For the uninitiated, the Mummers Parade is one of the greatest spectacles of color, music, dancing, and merriment that you could ever enjoy. The vast majority of it, and the most fun, takes place right out on the streets of Philadelphia.

Mumming, a form of colorful costumed performance, is a tradition that dates at least back to England in the 13th century. In both England and Ireland in the mid-1700's, costumed Mummer's plays were put on, and this custom spread to America when we were still just a colony.

The following is from an article for the old Riverfront Mummers written by John Francis Marion back in 2007:

"Local tradition has it that as early as the 1620s the Swedes and Finns in Tinicum - now a southwestern section of the city - celebrated the New Year by shooting off guns (they were often called "the shooters"), banging pots and pans, and making a clamor as they visited neighbors after Christmas."

By the 18th century, Mummery had come to Philadelphia in the form of street parties and parading around Christmas time. These would merge with other working class celebrations over the next century or so, becoming a celebration of the arrival of the new year.

By the 19th century, city leaders were looking to organize the rowdy New Year's Day street celebrations. The city pushed for the marchers to organize into groups, each with leaders who would be held responsible for the actions of their individual group.

The first official Mummer's Parade was held on January 1, 1901. Over the next few decades the costuming and musical presentations became much more elaborate and sophisticated. For the longest time it was racially and sexually segregated, but those traditions (prejudices?) were dropped decades ago.

The parade has grown into an annual signature New Year's Day celebration on the streets of downtown and South Philly. Part of the celebration, the Fancy Brigades, have even been moved indoors. This allows more intricate and artistic presentations, and also guarantees a show for tourists on January 1, just in case poor weather postpones the rest of the day-long parading.

Many who marched in the Mummer's Parade passed down the marching tradition to their children. Those traditions have many times resulted in generations of a particular family not only taking part in the parade, but also remaining as staples within a particular organization.

Into this backdrop stepped Jake Kudrick on New Year's Day. In many ways, Jake is a typical 6th grader. Family, friends, school, video games, TV, music - you know the lifestyle.

His family story is also one that is familiar to many Philly Mummer families. Jake's dad, Teddy Kudrick, was Captain of the Duffy String Band for the last 32 years. Before that, it was Teddy's dad, Henry Kunzig, who had captained Duffy for 26 years. Jake has been marching alongside his dad since his first parade, when he was just 11 months old.

On October 19, tragedy struck Duffy and the Kudrick clan when Teddy died suddenly of a massive heart attack at home in Nether Providence Township, Delaware County. He was just 52 years old. You can imagine the emotional devastation that this brought to young Jake and his family.

No Savesies?

As I write this, the sun is glistening off the snow pack that has covered my street for the better part of the past six weeks. Temps are forecast to keep rising and, mercifully, the snow should be gone by the weekend.

But for weeks now, Philadelphia and surrounding areas have had to deal with mountains of snow in a continuous barrage, the likes of which I cannot remember seeing in my lifetime.

Sure, we've had large snowfalls in the past, but they seemed to last on the ground a few days, and then temps would rise, rain would come, and the piles of snow would be gone. This year we never seemed to get a break. It was one measurable snowfall on top of another. Again, hopefully that is all coming to an end now.

With the snow have come a number of practical issues that we have all had to deal with, from altered transportation schedules to cancelled school and work days, and, of course, physical labor. The need to continually dig out from the storms. In Philly under Code 10-720, residents have to clear a 3-foot wide path in front of their homes within six hours of the end of a storm.

But that clearing of "a path" only takes care of enabling folks to use a walkway. There is another issue, one that has become extremely heated and controversial over the years and been particularly highlighted this year due to the regularity of the situation: the saving of a parking space from which you dug out your private vehicle.

Over the years we have come up with a number of colorful ways to save the spaces. Some have placed elaborate, creative, humorous artworks in the space. Others have put household objects such as old toilets out there to save a spot. For most, the tried and true method is the placing of lawn or beach chairs in the spot.

These saved parking spaces have caused problems over the years, both here in Philly and elsewhere.

The Good Old Days

Do you know that weird sensation of connection to your roots that you often feel when you see an old family member, friend, lover, teammate, or co-worker for the first time in years, maybe even decades?

Depending on the circumstances of your meet, it sometimes doesn't hit you until later. But almost always we go through that exercise in mental nostalgia which carries us back to those younger days and the experiences that we shared with this individual.

The innocent memories of childhood. The fun times of high school or college. The struggles and amusement involved in our early work years. The thrills of victory and the agonies of defeat on sporting fields.

The life, death, and love of family. Sometimes that person is linked to another person, or a group of others, and our memories will branch off towards those folks.

Well these types of memories and feelings have been happening to me more and more lately thanks to the social networking website called Facebook. I have stumbled across more family members and old friends on the internet thanks to this popular behemoth than I could ever have imagined.

People who I worked with years ago. Those who I hung out with on the corners of South Philly as a youth. Some who I played ball with as an adult. And being a police officer for the past 19 years there are cops, both old and new acquaintances. Lots of cops. The site allows you to mentally catch-up with these people.

We share small biographies of what we've been up to, photos of our family members and friends, videos of some of our life experiences, music and other media that we enjoy, and conversations with one another and each other.

These meetings of late have also driven home another point to me as well. My own memories of what is classically referred to as 'the good old days' are truly long gone.

47

Happy Birthday to me! Well, to me and everyone else celebrating today. I share this birthday with baseball's J.D. Drew, football's Mark Gastineau and Joey Galloway, comedians Richard Dawson and Dick Smothers, musician Joe Walsh, and a trio of gorgeous actresses: Bo Derek, Sean Young and Veronica Hamel. This was also Bobby Kennedy's birthday. I woke up a little over an hour ago after a pretty good night sleeping, and my 47th birthday started out about as good as I could ever hope. My wife Debbie Veasey was already awake and nearly ready to leave for work, but before she left she greeted me with a big smile, a hug and kiss, and a sincere "Happy birthday, honey!" And she had a birthday card for me too. One of those with a real nice message and signed off with her love. It really doesn't get any better than that. Now here I sit alone at my dining room table just like many other mornings. A fresh, hot cup of Wawa coffee beside me, loaded up with their irish cream, which I understand that they are discontinuing. Wawa is one of life's pleasures, the local chain store for food, cigarettes, newspapers, and other essentials of American daily living. Here at the Veasey Ranch, we buy bags of their coffee so that we enjoy the brew not just on the run, but right here at home. The irish coffee creamer product that Wawa produces at their dairy is my personal favorite add-in. It's creamy and tasty, and along with a couple of packets of Equal, helps make the perfect pick-me-up beverage in my world. I hope the rumors turn out false about the irish cream. Don't you just hate it when some store discontinues some product that you have enjoyed for a long time? So it is with me and birthday cakes. As a boy growing up in South Philly, my local corner bakery shop was a little place called Hier's Bakery at 3rd & Wolf Streets. You could live and die right there at that intersection, which was just around the corner from our little house at 2321 S. American Street. The four corners at the intersection of south 3rd Street and Wolf Street featured Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church on the southeast, the Murphy-Ruffenach funeral home on the northeast, a doctor's office on the northwest, and Hier's on the southwest. Those institutions are still on those same corners today, though the actual doctor practice has changed, the funeral home gone through a merger, and the bakery ownership has also changed a number of times. When it was Hier's back in those 'Wonder Years' days for me of the late 1960's and early 1970's, they always featured a cake that became my birthday cake every year. The cake was layered with a chocolate layer on top of a yellow cake layer. Running between the two cakes was a delicious, thin strip of white cream. Surrounding the whole creation was the most incredible, full, sweet, dark-colored chocolate icing. And then at the top was another layer of that same white icing that ran through the middle. I would always take a slice and eat the yellow layer first, making sure that my fork took the thin vanilla icing layer with it. This was only the opening act though. Then I would move on to the upper chocolatey world. There was something about the interplay between this particular chocolate cake, chocolate edge icing, and white top icing that exploded in your mouth. I can taste it still this morning, even though I have not had a piece of that cake in about 25 years. At some point during the 1980's, whomever owned the old Hier's business sold out. I did go in a couple of times and inquired about the cake, but the new owners didn't seem to know what I was talking about. I never saw my birthday cake again. My guess is that the recipe is likely laying around somewhere, maybe in some drawer at the home of a former bakery owner. Maybe the recipe has been passed along, and the cake is being made today in some bakery out there that I have no idea even exists. It is one of those little things in life that was a regular feature of my childhood that is now gone. It is something that was here, is gone seemingly forever, and that I do miss. To find it again one day would be a miracle akin to a Christian explorer locating the Holy Grail itself. Well, okay maybe that's a bit of a stretch, but you get the idea. I hope that little slice of heaven from my childhood is not repeating itself here in my middle-aged adult life with the Wawa irish cream. But one thing that I have learned over these 47 years that I celebrate the anniversary of today is that things change. But as to those things large and small that we have come to welcome and enjoy in our lives, the little things that make life just a wee bit more enjoyable, they will stay with us forever, at least in our memories. I thank God for that childhood birthday cake. I thank God for Wawa irish cream. I thank God for the woman that I woke up to this morning. And I thank God for these past 47 years. Happy birthday to me!

Our Lady of Mount Carmel

I was born and raised in the Two Street section of South Philadelphia, and during the late 1960's and into the mid-1970's my parents sent my brother and I to school at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a Catholic elementary school.

The home parish church for that school was located directly across from our little South Philly rowhouse. It was a matter of feet from our front door to the side entrance of the church itself.

OLMC provided me with a tremendous education, and my experiences there were some of the most memorable and valuable of my life. I'll get to some of them in a future post.

But one thing that I can say for sure is that never during the entire eight years that I spent at what was known to us simply as 'Mount Carmel' do I recall being told just who or what was our namesake.

So it's well past time to take a little trip to the web libraries and find out just what and whom the namesake of my original and still thriving parish is all about.

Per Wikipedia, Mount Carmel is a coastal mountain range in northern Israel and the West Bank, stretching from the Mediterranean Sea towards the southeast. It is characterized by a 'richly fertile hillside', thus its name which means 'plantation of high quality trees' and its tradition of being known as 'the vineyards of God.' Israel's 3rd largest city of Haifa is located in its northern slopes.

What is regarded as 'one of the most important human fossils every found' was located in one of Mount Carmel's caves during excavations there in the early part of the 20th century, in the form of the skeleton of a female neanderthal now named Tabun I.

These excavations were able to trace human developments passage from hunter-gatherer groups to more complex agrigultural societies over what has been estimated as a span of roughly one million years of human evolution.

The One Who Died From 289

Charlie Knox was a Police Academy classmate of mine from recruit class #289 in the Philadelphia Police Academy back in 1990.

Entering the Academy and joining the Philadelphia Police Department was a huge step for me, both personally and professionally. It led directly to many big changes in my life, and signalled a complete change of direction for me and my family, both in the short and long terms.

But the changes that I would go through as a result of joining the PPD were nothing compared to those of Charlie Knox. You see, he was the one who died on-duty from our class. He sacrificed his actual life for the citizens of Philadelphia.

The experience of a recruit officer at the Academy is not an easy one in any way, but it is an incredible experience, and it was seriously fun at some points. I have often described it as sort of being back in high school, but being paid for it. Only this time you have classes that include how to fire a gun, drive a car under emergency conditions, and hand-to-hand combat, among others.

Still, the instruction takes place in classrooms and on the grounds of a campus environment, and it very much has a high school feel to it for those of any age.

Our class #289 started at the Academy on April 23rd, 1990, and was made up of about 100 recruits divided into two 'platoons' identified as 289-A and 289-B. The division came alphabetically, and Charlie fell in with the 'A' platoon while I was assigned to 'B' platoon.

Since most of your day-to-day experiences came within your own platoon, we didn't see a lot of the 'B' folks except in passing. But Charlie and I had become friendly in passing over that spring and summer.

We were the same age, were both married, and both had young kids. His son was 7-years old, and my two daughters were 10 and 8 years. And he had that same kind of mischievous, smart-alick, attitude and sense of humor that I had, and we always said 'hi' to one another and asked how we were doing with the Academy process.

85 Shots and 'One Less Nigga With a Gun'

A year ago at this time, in July 2007, Steven 'Butter' Miller (left) was shot at 85 times by Philadelphia police officers. I have sources that say it was actually 81 times. In any event, about two dozen of those shots found their mark, and Miller was dead.

In it's July 24th-31st, 2008 issues the extremely liberal 'Citypaper' here in Philadelphia, one of those free tabloid style publications distributed throughout the downtown area by placement in stores, business lobbies, and curbside boxes, published a cover story titled '85 Shots' about the incident.

As could be expected if you understand the source, the Citypaper writers, Doron Taussig and Tom Nammako, told the story in a way that was, in both tone and tenor, completely sympathetic to the alleged victim and extremely critical of the Philadelphia police officers involved in the shooting, as well as their hierarchy in its response.

That's a shame, because the real problem right here in Philadelphia and in many big American cities today is not unwarranted shootings by rogue groups of police officers.

Actually, one of the biggest problems facing American big cities today is men just like Steven Miller.

Fact is that Miller exited his house that night as a stark-raving mad lunatic waving a gun around in the air, alternately pointing it at officers as well as towards neighbors homes as he waved it.

The officers gave him plenty of warnings to drop the weapon, perhaps even more than they actually needed to give. At a certain point, one officer felt that the circumstances had gotten too dangerous and felt that he needed to discharge his weapon in order to save his own life, the life of a fellow officer, or that of a community member.

It was a hot summer night in South Philly, so it was dark, and when this officers' shots rang out other officers who had also responded did not know from where these shots were coming. They fired at the man who they saw waving around the gun, Miller, just as they were trained, and they took him down.

One of Miller's best friends, Daniel Williams, was quoted as saying "...they probably look at it like, that's one less nigga with a gun."

A Third Story on American Street?

I grew up in a traditional, small South Philly rowhouse in the 2300 block of south American Street. Our block was one of the few in our working-class rowhouse neighborhood that had houses on only one side of the street.

Our houses were situated on the east side of the block, between Wolf and Ritner Streets. On the west side was Our Lady of Mount Carmel church and school.

The neighborhood eventually became known to some as 'Whitman' and it led into the next neighborhood north known as 'Pennsport', but nobody from down there used those names. To us, and to those in the other South Philly neighborhoods, we were 'Second Streeters' (some call us "Two Street") the name owing to 2nd Street which ran through the neighborhood and was home to many of the Mummer's Parade clubs who maintained their headquarters facilities along the street.

For those neanderthals not familiar, the Mummers are the thousands who parade each year on New Year's Day through the streets of Philadelphia in what is a cultural phenomenon of our town. But that topic for another day.

Down on 2nd Street, the families were mostly white. Many were of Irish ancestry, with some Germans and Polish mixed in as well. South Philly is largely known for it's Italian community, but they were further west from us. There weren't too many Italians down on 2nd Street.

So back to the topic of this blog post: A third story on American Street. Our block was, and still is for the most part, a long block of two-story homes with peaked roofs in front. It is a kind of signature to the block and a couple of others around that area.

But some one has committed a travesty, and they have done it right in my old house! They put a third story on American Street (see picture), and man does it look out of place.

Great Americans: Joey Vento

You gotta love Joey Vento of Geno's Steaks, 9th & Passyunk in South Philly.

Here is a successful businessman who owns a legendary, iconic eatery and he has the guts to publicly stand up for what is right.

One of the greatest problems that has plagued our country in the past few decades is the slow erosion of our national identity, sacrificed to the misguided cause of multi-culturalism.

Removing prayer from our schools, attempts to remove the Pledge of Allegiance as well. Spanish, Russian and other languages as options in telephone menus and at ATM machines.

Vento's grandparents struggled after getting off the boat from Sicily almost a century ago, and he never forgot that lesson.