Facing Out: The Week’s Most Interesting News

December 21, 2024

Who can keep a confidence better than Santa? This young fella, a high-ranker on the Nice list, shared his thoughts during Fort William Henry’s Breakfast with Santa. (Ashley Orzech)

 Dear Colleagues and Friends:

Christmas and Hannukah are upon us. We wish you peace and joy. May a spirit of gratitude fill your heart today and throughout this special season and the New Year. In the rush of daily life, may you find time to count each of your blessings twice. Remember, you are a gift to us.

Warren County, N.Y., in the southern part of New York’s Adirondack Park, is the third most forested county in New York with 80 percent of its land classified as forest. So, it’s no surprise that the county has twice provided America with a national Christmas tree. The first, in 1964, was a 72-foot spruce, perfect in every way. A four-year-old Queensbury girl, Andrea Cushman, placed the first bulb on the tree. President Johnson hit the switch, and the tree suddenly spread joy from coast to coast. The second, in 1969, was much different and famously led to a gaffe by President Nixon that local people still can’t get over.  Even the New York Daily News howled: “Nixon, You Sure Know How to Hurt a Town.” Historian Maury Thompson recounts the tale of the trees.

LIVES OF THE NUTCRACKER: When it debuted in St. Petersburg, Russia, on December 18, 1892, The Nutcracker was a flop. Intended as a tribute to the Czar, commissioned by a state-run theater and paid for by the regime, Tchaikovsky's work was dismissed by early critics as a “ballet for children.” By 1954, it had made its way to New York for a full-scale reimagining by choreographer George Balanchine of the New York City Ballet. This year, the Balanchine Nutcracker that audiences have come to know and love is playing at Lincoln Center, while in Brooklyn, Mark Morris is staging a darker, scarier version with long-nailed aggressive rats and a grotesquely disfigured princess.

ALL ABOARD: A model train encircling the tree is the Hallmark Card picture of Christmas past. Toy trains have a special way of bringing kids and adults together. Lionel may not be the oldest model train maker in the United States, but it’s the leading household name, and this year Lionel is celebrating 125 years in business. Founder Joshua Lionel Cowen revolutionized the model train industry with innovative electric toy trains. He devised a way to make steam come out of the locomotives. He launched a model train TV show with Joe DiMaggio. Today, the innovations continue: Kids can control their trains from an app on their cell phones.

HOW ‘GRANDMA’ CAME TO BE:  A snowy night in November 1978 found the members of Randy Brooks’ country band, Young Country, stranded after a gig at a hotel on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. Mr. Brooks and his bandmates went back inside the hotel to watch the next act, a bluegrass group fronted by the husband-and-wife duo of Elmo Shropshire and Patsy Trigg. Elmo and Patsy invited Mr. Brooks, then a 30-year-old aspiring songwriter from Dallas, onstage to play one of his novelty tunes.  And so debuted “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” Elmo and Patsy first released the song in 1979. In 1983, the song hit No. 1 on the Billboard Christmas Hits Singles chart, beating out Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” and Bobby Helms’s “Jingle Bell Rock.” It matched that feat again in 1984 and 1985 and charted on the Holiday 100 as recently as 2016.

HELPING CANCER PATIENTS: New York State has become the first in the nation to mandate insurance coverage for scalp cooling therapy — a treatment that can help reduce hair loss, a common side effect of chemotherapy. The bill, co-sponsored by State Sen. Toby Ann Stavisky and Assembly Member Linda B. Rosenthal, was signed into law by Gov. Kathy Hochul. The cooling system -- a cap filled with cold liquid kept at 32 degrees Fahrenheit that constricts blood vessels in the scalp -- helps reduce hair loss by reducing the amount of chemotherapy drugs that reach hair follicles.

WELCOME TO THE CLUB: The restaurant business never seems to get easier. The struggle with food prices, profitability, the variability in diner tastes and loyalty, kitchen culture and employee retention can be overwhelming. But a chef in Philadelphia tried an old approach: the supper club. Guests become club members, pay an upfront fee and enjoy an uncommonly fine meal in a common gathering. The idea was to make the restaurant like a dinner party for friends, and it’s led to a dozen new supper clubs springing up around Philly.

Adirondack Community College students stood guard in 1969 in Crandall Park in Glens Falls so that no harm would come to the National Christmas Tree before it was cut and shipped to Washington. They were joined by ACC’s founding president, Dr. Charles R. Eisenhart, and by Glens Falls Police. (Warren County Historical Association)

BACKYARD BEAST: A Hudson Valley homeowner spotted a couple of teeth poking out from his backyard garden and dug a little deeper. At first the object looked like an old baseball. What turned up was a complete mastodon jaw, the first such find in more than a decade. Archeologists also found fragments of a mastadon’s rib and toe bones. The mastadons were giant cousins of the wooly mammoth. They existed during the Ice Age and became extinct some 10,000 years ago. Dr. Robert Feranec, director of research and collections at the New York State Museum, notes that the highest concentration of mastodons in the country is in Orange County, N.Y.

THE COMEBACK CATS: History was made on Monday when the University of Vermont men’s soccer team won the Division I national championship. Dubbed the “Cardiac Cats” for their come-from-behind heroics, the unseeded but undeterred Catamounts trailed in both College Cup games, rallying to tie Denver in the semifinals before advancing on penalty kicks. In the championship game on ESPN2, UVM scored in the final 10 minutes of regulation to tie the game before Maximilian Kissel scored the “Golden Goal” on a breakaway midway through the first overtime. It was the school’s first national championship in a team sport (the Catamounts have won six national titles in skiing). Additionally, Vermont (16-2-6) became the first America East team to win an NCAA Division I title and was the first unseeded team to win in a full-field NCAA tournament since 2006. 

THANK YOU, SENATOR: Albany lawyer Neil Breslin saw the New York State Senate Chamber for the first time the day he was sworn in 28 years ago. Now, the dean of the New York State Senate’s Democratic Conference and a class act, Sen. Breslin is retiring. During his tenure, five legislative leaders went to jail and two Governors stepped down — evidence, Sen. Breslin observes, of the “the frailty of human nature” and the heightened scrutiny under which public officials operate. But that is not the whole story. A new generation of legislators has arrived and taken up the cause of children, families and New York State’s most urgent needs. “I did not expect that there would be so many people in the Capital committed to making the world a better place,’’ he said.

NATIONAL CRISIS: Don’t sweat the Amazon strike or late gifts. The real holiday crisis this season is pubs running out of Guinness. Demand for pints is surging, in part because of a social-media phenomenon called “splitting the G,” which requires drinking down enough Guinness in a single gulp so that the beer sits halfway across the G on a branded glass. 

WONDERFUL ACCOMPLISHMENT: Officials at the “It’s a Wonderful Life” Museum in Seneca Falls have raised $1,012,000 toward an expansion of the museum that will enable them to utilize the full space of their Seneca Falls building. Director Frank Capra is believed to have based “It’s a Wonderful Life” and Bedford Falls on Seneca Falls.

NUTS NO MORE: NYS squirrel control agents be warned: California scientists say they have evidence that some squirrels are carnivores that actively hunt and eat other mammals.

WILDLIFE GONE WILD: We wait for this all year long. The Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards have been announced and include a cheetah playing hide and seek, bears hugging, and a fish chasing an eagle across the sky.

GOOD RIDDANCE: In a landmark victory of humans over insects, the invasive murder hornets that arrived in the United States five years ago have been eradicated, according to federal and state agencies.

ON THE BORDER: Canada is proposing a joint US-Canadian police force to address illegal immigration and other criminal activity. 

DR. THOMAS FRANCIS O’BRIEN AND RUTH REARDON O’BRIEN, the parents of comedian Conan O’Brien, died within a few days of each other at their home in Brookline, Mass. Dr. O’Brien, 95, an epidemiologist, spent most of his career at what is now Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where he was the first director of the infectious diseases division, and was on faculty at Harvard Medical School. He also was a co-founder of the Collaborating Centre for Surveillance of Antimicrobial Resistance for the World Health Organization. Mrs. O’Brien, 92, was one of only four women in her law school class at Yale and, in 1978, became the second woman to be named partner at the Boston firm of Ropes & Gray. Conan O’Brien credited his father with introducing him to comedy and described him in an interview  in The Boston Globe as “the funniest guy in the room.” He added that his father had a “voracious appetite for ideas and people and the crazy variety and irony of life.”

“Be good for goodness sake.”
— "Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town" by J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie, and first recorded by Harry Reser and His Orchestra.

The Facing Out team will take a break for the holidays and return in January. Love and joy come to you, and God bless you and send you a Happy New Year.

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Principal Author: Mark Behan.

Contributors: Bill Callen, Ryan Moore, John Brodt, Maury Thompson, Kristy Miller, Gordon Woodworth, Tara Hutchins, Ashley Orzech, and Claire P. Tuttle.

FACING OUT is what we do. We help companies, organizations and individuals work effectively with their most important external audiences – their customers, their shareholders, their communities, the government and the news media.  www.behancommunications.com

Facing Out features news and other nuggets that caught our eye, and that we thought might be of value to you, our friends and business associates. Some items are good news about our clients and friends, others are stories that we hope will leave you a bit more informed or entertained than you were five minutes ago. As always, we welcome your ideas and feedback. 

Let’s make it a conversation: mark.behan@behancom.com