The Week: What Caught Our Eye

February 4, 2023

A hidden benefit of service on the ski patrol at Gore Mountain in North Creek, N.Y., is the opportunity to lift your eyes and behold scenery like this. (Photo: Bob Heunemann, Gore Mountain Ski Patrol)

Dear Colleagues and Friends:

Feel that warm ocean breeze unknotting your weary Upstate New York muscles?

Neither do we.

So with fingers we can no longer feel, let’s get right to it.

WHAT’S IN A NAME: An entrepreneur in a small Connecticut town wanted a name for her breakfast restaurant that conveyed, “Wake up and have a coffee.” She was pleasantly surprised by the volume of customers who came to check out the restaurant, which she named “Woke.” Of course, this being 2023, where it seems almost everything is viewed through a political lens, a lot of patrons were attracted to the name; others were repulsed. The immigrant owner had no idea that she was now a foot soldier in the culture wars. “I'm a Mexican,” she told CTInsider.com. “I don't know anything about what 'woke' means to some people.”

FIRST CLASS: When the first 747 rolled out of Boeing’s factory, Richard Nixon was trying to end the war in Vietnam, the Supreme Court was wrestling with Roe v. Wade, and George Steinbrenner was buying the Yankees. The first “Queen of the Skies” was commissioned by Pan Am. Fifty years later, Boeing has just produced the final 747, number 1,574, with six million parts made all over the world, but assembled at Boeing’s facility in Everett, Wash., where it all began.

LOSING IT: A 60-year-old man in northwestern Vermont lost his life this week following a brawl among spectators at a middle school basketball game. You read that right: a brawl among spectators at a middle school basketball game. In a statement afterward, the executive director of the Vermont Principals’ Association said, “Although we cannot speak specifically about the events at this individual game, we would like to once again emphasize that middle and high school sports are educational and are for the benefit of the student-athletes.” Good luck convincing the “adults.”

ROOMS WITH VIEWS: There’s a bit of a building boom going on in the Adirondack resort town of Lake Placid, N.Y., with investors from near and far among those who, the Albany Business Review reports, collectively spent more than $125 million over the past three years buying and renovating hotels and inns throughout the village and the surrounding town of North Elba. Since the start of the pandemic, tourists have flocked to places like Lake Placid, driving 20 percent-plus gains in hotel occupancy. Room rates are rising, too, as hoteliers seek to provide guests with an experience that matches the environment. Bhavik Jariwala, the developer and operator behind a $35 million Cambria Hotel project in North Elba, told the Business Review, “Lake Placid for a long time lacked quality inventory. Now that we are seeing more people upgrading their inventory, it is only going to strengthen the entire market.”

PRETTY AMAZING: Pretty Rugged, the Upstate New York company that makes blankets, cardigans, ponchos, vests, bags, scarves and totes, has seen its volume take off since founder and CEO Tracy Slocum appeared on ABC’s “Shark Tank” in October. Slocum told the Albany Business Review she’s purchased two additional embroidery machines and hired another employee to handle order fulfillment. She said the company’s products are now in more than 1,000 stores, “and it's growing daily.”

MIXED EMOTIONS: Donna Kelce watched from Philadelphia’s Lincoln Financial Field on Sunday as the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Cincinnati Bengals to advance to Super Bowl XLVII, led by their star tight end, her son Travis. She was in Philadelphia because her son Jason’s Eagles were playing in the NFC championship game and she couldn’t be two places at once. With Travis and Jason Kelce set to become the first brothers to oppose each other as players in the Super Bowl, Donna Kelce is facing the reality that her day will be a mix of elation and heartache. She told a Cleveland TV reporter, “It’s your hopes and dreams coming true, but it’s your worst fears.”

WORLD TRAVELER: A 15-year-old Bangladeshi boy playing hide and seek fell asleep inside a shipping container shortly before it was loaded for a six-day, 1,500-mile journey south to Malaysia. He survived despite having no food or water throughout the ordeal, his cries for help in vain. Shocked dockworkers who found the boy suspected he was a victim of human trafficking and immediately alerted authorities.

With its familiar, velvety warmth, mac and cheese is the quintessential comfort food, and when it comes to a special place in American lore, Ivana Rihter writes for the literary website Catapult, Kraft Mac & Cheese stands alone.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: A lot of us love Kraft Mac & Cheese. Ivana Rihter loves Kraft Mac & Cheese. It’s not just the flavor (delicious), the convenience (pot to plate in nine minutes) and the cost (cheap, even now). It’s that Kraft Mac & Cheese nourished her family of struggling Balkan immigrants and helped her fit in, the sound of dry pasta tubes sliding down the box providing a small burst of anticipation that she carries to this day, a sound that, for 85 years, through boom and bust, has meant that a hungry family was about to be fed. “Kraft has seen the American people through economic hardship, world wars, and social movements,” she writes. “It is, without a doubt, the food of troubled times.”

CHAMPIONSHIP COACH AXED: Teri McKeever, who coached the 2012 U.S. Olympic women’s swim team and won four NCAA titles as the women’s swim team coach at the University of California, was fired this week following an investigation of alleged harassment, bullying and verbally abusive conduct. Cal detailed its findings in a 482-page report that substantiated many of the claims. McKeever vowed to sue: “During a 30-year career there are always those who take issue with my coaching style and me personally. I am a woman holding what is traditionally a man’s job and double standards come with the territory. I also know for those that struggled with my coaching, there were far more who had their lives positively changed by their experience. I greatly value the bonds I made with hundreds of young women and look forward to continuing to witness their successes.”

WHEN NEW YORK BURNED: It turns out Gerald Ford (Ford to City: Drop Dead) might not have been the first president to burn New York. A new book suggests George Washington may have kindled the flame. On July 9, 1775, Washington gathered his troops in New York, “a post of utmost importance,” to rally them to repel the coming British invasion that would cut New York off from seaborne trade. Overwhelming might put the British in control of Manhattan by September. Devastated, Washington sought permission from Congress to burn New York, to deny the British their new prize. Congress refused. But burn New York did, torched, as Washington said, by God or “some good honest fellow.” 

A FINAL BOW: For more than 40 years, Lake George Youtheater was a thriving summer school of the arts in Upstate New York, staging ambitious sold-out musicals, training kids as young as 11 in every aspect of lighting, production and stage design, and even graduating a few stars to Broadway. The program was the brainchild of one-time Olympian Mickey Luce and his wife Sharon, who shared “a madness for making miracles,” and their daughters Amity and Lanni. COVID shut the program down. Mickey and Sharon Luce are in their 80s, and now they’re taking a final bow to the standing ovation of a large, appreciative community.

LEARNING TO HATE: An Ohio couple is under investigation by the Ohio Department of Education and being widely condemned for running a neo-Nazi homeschooling group on the social media channel Telegram that has 2,600 followers. The channel, called Dissident-Homeschool, features suggested content that is racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic, as well as factually inaccurate. A suggested lesson about Martin Luther King Jr. describes him as “deceitful, dishonest” and “riot-inducing,” and called him “the face of a movement which ethnically cleansed whites out of urban areas and precipitated the anti-white regime that we are now fighting to free ourselves from.”

LOST AND FOUND: An official compared it to finding a needle in a haystack, but that’s not quite accurate, unless the haystack is nearly 900 miles long and the needle is a highly radioactive capsule the size of a pea. Authorities in Western Australia spent six days searching for the capsule, which fell off a mining company truck while on its way to a depot in Perth. They found the capsule, which can cause burns, from a moving vehicle using specialized equipment that detected the capsule’s radiation.

DON’T SHOW AND TELL: Classified documents showing up in strange, unauthorized places is all the rage these days. But as far as we know, none of the documents so much in the news lately were ever in the possession of a 13-year-old school girl. That’s what happened in 1984, when Kristin Preble carried into her eighth-grade classroom a zippered briefcase that her father had found more than three years earlier in a Cleveland hotel room, the contents of which she was prepared to talk about until her teacher confiscated it.

A BOOST TO TI: Ticonderoga, N.Y., wedged between Lake George to the south and Lake Champlain to the north, is a beautiful but largely overlooked place, especially in recent decades, but that’s about to change. The town was awarded a $10 million grant from the state to put toward revitalization efforts, money the town intends to use to revive its commercial district and create a more user-friendly experience on the La Chute Trail, which follows the same-named river from the northern tip of Lake George past a series of falls that powered multiple mills through the heart of the Industrial Revolution and beyond. Also on the list for improvements are the Black Watch Library, the Ticonderoga Heritage Museum and the Ticonderoga Community Building, a colonnaded neo-Georgian town hall built in 1927. There also are plans for a working replica of a colonial-era French sawmill.

LIVES

BOBBY HULL was a farm boy from Ontario who became one of the most prolific goal scorers in NHL history, a hard-charging superstar known as “The Golden Jet” for his blazing speed and blond hair, which in those days wasn’t covered by a helmet. He possessed a fearsome slapshot that sent pucks sizzling past goaltenders, scoring 610 goals in 16 NHL seasons and another 303 in seven seasons in the defunct World Hockey Association. The brother and father of NHL players, Hull twice was named NHL MVP. He was enshrined in the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1983, the same year the Chicago Blackhawks retired his No. 9. He was 84.

CINDY WILLIAMS worked with some of the best-known directors in Hollywood for a time — George Lucas, having directed her in “American Graffiti,” considered her for the role of Princess Leia in “Star Wars” — but she became a household name on the small screen, starring opposite the late Penny Marshall in the 1970s hit “Laverne & Shirley,” a slapstick comedy about two working-class roommates who worked at a brewery. She made guest appearances on dozens of TV series after leaving the show in 1982, and last year performed a one-woman stage show full of stories from her career. She was 75.

LISA LORING was a child when she played Wednesday Addams, the young daughter on “The Addams Family,” a primetime sitcom whose popularity and cultural influence long outlasted its 64-episode run on ABC. Her character’s pets included a black widow spider and a lizard named Lucifer, and her favorite toy was a headless doll. She continued to act, including a recurring role as Cricket Montgomery on “As the World Turns” from 1980 to 1983. She died of complications from a stroke at 64.

ALMOST FINAL WORDS

“These comments are not representative of the department’s view on China.”
—    A U.S. Department of Defense official after NBC News reported that a four-star general who heads the Air Mobility Command sent a memo to his officers predicting that the U.S. would be at war with China within two years and directing them to prepare accordingly. And that was before word emerged this week that a suspected Chinese spy balloon has been spotted high above the western U.S.

THE SIGNOFF

PASSIVE (EXTREMELY) AGGRESSIVE: The San Antonio Zoo is back with an annual fund-raiser that, for $10, invites people to name a cockroach for someone before the cockroach is fed to an animal. A rodent goes for $25, a vegetable for $5. For an extra $150, you can send that un-special someone a personalized video message that includes the creature being devoured.

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THANK YOU to our contributors: Bill Callen, Ryan Moore, John Brodt, Leigh Hornbeck, Troy Burns, Lisa Fenwick, Kim and Bob Heunemann, Claire P. Tuttle and Tara Hutchins. 

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