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Brady Is An Excellent Choice

ORCHARD PARK—Let’s pick up where we left off last week. To be sure, dismissing a nine-year, grade-A head coach because one wants to do even better has its risks. On Jan. 21, Buffalo Bills’ owner Terry Pegula acknowledged as much. The Bills’ most important task this off season is to make this decision work. The team took the first step in that direction on Jan. 27 by promoting its offensive coordinator to head coach. * * * Joe Brady, a Hollywood, Fla., native, grew up in Pembroke Pines, Fla.; spent his undergraduate years at the College of William & Mary, where he was ...

A Life In Linen

As a hobby, from time to time, I visit estate sales looking for fine linen to resell. While all the other bargain hunters are in deceased women’s closets looking for designer bags and clothes, I’m happily alone in the linen closet, looking at napkins and tablecloths. Florida is a wonderland for estate sales. The wealthy retire here, and they bring all their stuff with them. They have curio cabinets full of Lladre figurines and Baccarat crystal, closets bursting with designer clothes, and new purses stiff with intention. A long life of consumerism often ends with a line of people ...

The All-Time Best Lullaby, if Needed

As infants, when our parents tried to get us to fall asleep at naptimes, and bedtimes, we were usually serenaded with the popular Braham’s Lullaby, which has probably put more children to sleep as bad movies or Thanksgiving turkey and wine has done for adults. It was popular because it was soft, sweet, and had a nice rocking rhythm, to sway, a small child back and forth in one’s arms. Most infant wind-up mobiles attached to cribs and/or playpens play Braham’s Lullaby to soothe and calm children, eventually lulling babies to sleep, giving parents, or sitters a few minutes to take ...

Facing Challenges Of Local Government

We tend to forget that it takes dedicated people to run our local government institutions. One of my earliest memories of politics was observing my Dad’s duties as Supervisor of the Town of Kiantone. It was not a job that he really wanted—he was plenty busy running the farm—but the Republican Committee asked him to run for the position, so he did. After a couple of terms, a neighboring dairy farmer, a Democrat, Frank Bratt, decided to run for the job. My Dad’s reaction was: “Well, if he wins, he will do a good job.” Bratt did win, and I remember my father saying shortly ...

Use Natural Gas To Repower Dunkirk Plant

In early 2013, New York’s then-governor Andrew Cuomo showed up in Dunkirk on a wintry day to announce with great fanfare that the NRG power plant in Dunkirk would be converted from a clean-coal facility to natural gas-fueled power production. I was a Chautauqua County Legislator at the time and I was there that day to experience the community’s collective sigh of relief that the county’s largest property-taxpaying entity would continue to operate. However, everything changed as the governor pivoted and decided he would bow to political pressure from the advocates on the far ...

Clarity Around Minnesota Protests

“We are seeing two movies on one screen,” the late Dilbert creator Scott Adams once said. Minneapolis is exhibit one. One side calls it murder, the other, self-defense. One side says, “ICE is causing chaos.” The other side says, “ICE is there because of the rampant chaos there already.” I’m not a law enforcement expert, but you don’t have to be an expert to have common sense. Do you listen to an officer giving an order to exit the car or do you follow your lawbreaking partner saying, “Drive baby, drive?” Renee Good listened to her lawbreaking partner. Play ...