Never Mind The Ides of March...

Parade Day draws near. Be warned.

Last year I banged out a few posts on the day itself; my thoughts on it, my own Irish heritage, and other assorted and inconsequential items.

This year, how about we talk about the bishop. That, of course, would be the Roman Catholic Bishop, one Joseph F. Martino.

The bishops in this diocese have all enjoyed a very cordial and gentlemanly relationship with those who sit upon The St. Patrick's Day Parade Committee and also with The Friendly Sons of St. Patrick.

Somewhere since his taking up residence on Wyoming Avenue, there's been a strain placed upon the relationship, so much so that the bishop doesn't attend the Friendly Sons' Annual Dinner. That sounds like a rush towards enmity to me. It has a nice antagonistic feel to it.

This past week, Bishop Martino directed a fine, genteel, and seemingly very humble man, Auxiliary Bishop John Dougherty, to set out some rules for this year's parade and just who's who in that parade.

Why Bishop Dougherty is the go-to on this matter, I have no clue. That he is, I'm guessing, is a source of some discomfort to the man. Perhaps Bishop Martino was fatigued from all the finger-wagging he's been doing of late. Perhaps he needed to appoint a relief finger-wagger.

The threat, and it was a threat, make no mistake, was to to shut down St. Peter's Cathedral on parade day should the parade committee "honor" anyone who isn't 100% certifiably anti-abortion. What precisely defines "honoring" such a person via the parade I do not know. Is simply marching in the parade enough to slam shut the doors of the cathedral?

Bishop Martino is pretty darned good at slamming shut doors. His greatest legacy will in all likelihood be that of closing doors, while at the very same time, failing to open one single door across the diocese he tends to like a feudal lord, rather than the gentle shepherd he is called to be.

He'll also leave behind a history of what appears to be absentmindedness, an odd forgetting of who and what the Church is.

The Church isn't Bishop Martino.

Locking down the mother church of the diocese, I suggest, is without precedent. It is likewise unacceptable, unless there was an imminent and real danger of physical harm being done to the building itself. Denying access to the cathedral in order to make a political, moral, or ideological point is inexcusable. Of greater importance here might be that any threats against the Diocese of Scranton don't come from without, they come from within.

Bishop Martino is not a well liked man. He's sowed a few nasty rows. He now reaps.

Some would say he is simply being true to his beliefs. The flaw in that defense is that his beliefs are not in keeping with The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, thereby not in line with Vatican thinking. Remember, this is the man who crashed a meeting in Honesdale in order to spank those parishioners present for having the temerity to so much as even discuss the policies of the USCCB.

Bishop Martino is running his own show here, the curtain upon which will in time fall. My prediction, maybe worth a pint on parade day, is that Bishop Martino knows precisely when it is he'll be moving along, that his stay here was designed to be somewhat brief from the very start. Also worth a pint at some other time is my guess as to who the next bishop of this diocese will be. I have a very strong feeling as to who will succeed Joseph F. Martino.

This bishop's fans are few. It's his own doing. Other bishops in other dioceses of this country haven't seen fit to take the Church back several centuries. Not only does this bishop have a taste for yesteryear, he expects his flock to embrace making the trip back to darkness and unquestioning fealty with him.

Left with no other alternative, or so they feel, the parade committee has announced they will surely be in compliance with the bishop's directives. I tend to doubt they were planning otherwise.

Then there's that rebellious group of females who find their presence not requested by the Friendly Sons at their big annual bash. No need for them to RSVP, this group exists solely because us men just can't let go of old ways. Might not the bishop truly serve his flock by speaking out on that matter? Apparently not.

Somehow, the women got dragged into this situation, though not without speaking up, mind you.

Evie Rafalko McNulty, a founder of the Society of Irish Women, explained that her group is not even Catholic.

“We’re not a Christian organization. We’re not ‘saint’ anything. We’re just a group of Irish women,” she said.

Her group pays $500 to help defray the cost of the Mass offered at St. Peter’s Cathedral on parade day, because it was asked to help. (Am I the only one curious about the defraying of any cost of any mass? Where does that $500 go? If the girls pony up $500, how much do the boys pay?)

“If he doesn’t have the Mass, then we save $500,” she said. A practical reaction, some might say. Others might say, a brilliant reaction. I would be among those latter others.

Bishop Martino was politely told to take a hike by the Society of Irish Women.

God bless their hearts. May it become an annual tradition.

Germ City...

This is an odd post, inasmuch as it might have zero appeal for anyone.

Considering it involves a small part of an unassuming and very much common everyday block within a working class neighborhood of Scranton, it might be that no one can or will relate. Okay, I can live with that. I'm having fun. That's enough.

It is every bit possible I wrote it for myself. So for me, and maybe someone's posterity, here we go.

They called it Germ City.

We've found a few Lost Cities of The Amazon, perhaps historically footnoting Germ City may prevent it from being forgotten by the ages.

Fabled, spoken of with respect and amusement throughout the actual City of Scranton, Germ City was one of those many neighborhoods within city limits that have given names. Origins notwithstanding, Germ City, at least for a generation, was a very real place, a place about which those born and raised there were prone to brag, to boast.

"Where's he live?
"He's from Germ City."
"Yeah, no shit!"

To those of us who grew up in or near Germ City, we took it in stride, part of life, not worth much deliberation. By contrast, to the multitude who only heard this place spoken of by their elders, parents, older siblings, cousins, etc., it began to take on a thin layer of magic, a patina of mystery, deserved or otherwise.

The peril, as I see it, lies in offending or insulting someone, anyone, who may live within the confines of what was once known as Germ City. A question begging for an answer might be: Does this part of Scranton still carry the name Germ City, or has the designation tumbled completely into disuse, only to be spoken of in the past tense, or maybe in hushed tones over beers at Benginia's or Andy Gavin's. I don't have an answer.

What I do have is a friend, a boyhood friend literally, who grew up near but not in Germ City. To those who ask, he tells them while he didn't meet the eligibility requirements for residency, his family lived close enough for him to have been a member of Germ City's Border Patrol. The same would hold true for me.

From our second floor back porch, I could have tossed a rock inside the easterly perimeter of Germ City.

So it is, with all due respects to those who may take offense, although I've never heard of anyone doing so, let's first define the boundaries of said Germ City.

The 1300 of Penn Avenue is defined on the north by New York Street, on the south by Larch Street. A bit off center of mid-block, Penn is intersected on the perpendicular from the east by a small alleyway. In Scranton, we always called these alleys "Courts" and sometimes "Places." This particular alley was a dedicated city street named Just Right Place. So help me, that is the God's honest truth, it was Just Right Place. A scant two blocks away there was Plum Place. That same neighborhood was also home to Krugerman Court.

To make this even goofier, if you lived in Just Right Place, most would refer to you as someone who lived "down the court." You're right, it makes no sense, but to those of us who called this part of town home, you had it figured out by maybe third grade or so. The headache came when you moved your life elsewhere and discovered other towns didn't have Courts and Places, and that no one lived down the court. And, of course, there was no other Germ City.

Now that you know where Germ City is, or was, we need to have a look at that name itself. Where did it come from?

For starters, you could probably trace the actual term itself to Madison Avenue, as in NYC's Madison Avenue, the once advertising capital of the USA. Some national soap maker had used an ad firm to hype and sell its new product, a sink cleanser that attacked all those bacterium lurking around your drain just waiting to somehow jump up and bite you on the face, thereby causing your ultimate demise.

Drains, if America didn't yet know, are dirty, dirty places. They must be, this television commercial said they were. Why, they were so dirty, so full of nasty microscopic disease carrying thingies that this ad firm declared that your drain, all of your drains, were, in fact, Germ City. And so, the term Germ City had been born. From there forward, the time had come, it was war on Germ City. Luckily for us, this company had the very product that would detour us around Germ City and save the lot of us.

To give the world a better handle on the danger, this ad firm created an animated commercial that took you inside Germ City, right down to where you could see these dirty-faced bedevilers just running around by the thousands in each and every drain in your house. Good God, man, it was a national emergency, I say!

If I could find that commercial, it might help illustrate. I cannot. I also can't find the product for which the concept of Germ City was created. This was the mid-60s, a long, long time ago.

The story holds that a frequent visitor to this piece of Penn Avenue one day pronounced it Germ City. This visitor had a good friend who lived there. So, why Germ City?

I'm going to try this. Be patient and see if if doesn't somehow make sense.

For whatever reason, the 1300 of Penn had a traffic flow sparse enough that it allowed, maybe even encouraged, kids to play in the street. In more than a few Scranton neighborhoods, this was not uncommon. In the 1300 of Penn, especially around mid-block, it was an everyday occurrence. Baseball, kickball, stickball, just hacking around in the middle of the street, it was pretty much accepted practice. Driving end to end through that block without stopping, honking, and repeating the honk and stop, was a rarity.

Also for whatever reason, there seemed to be an inordinately high number of young kids in that piece of Penn, dozens of kids in the five to eight year old range (boomers?), and it always looked like darned near everyone of them was on the street playing, and that most of them had picked up that dirt only a kid playing outside for a length of time could accumulate.

After seeing this firsthand on a regular basis, the visitor was heard to say:

"Fercrissakes, this place looks like Germ City."

The name stuck.

Is the story true? From all I ever heard, saw, and heard again directly from the originator, yes, I do believe it to be true.

So, now you know, you know of Germ City and how it came to be called such.

As a closing thought, one with a touch of relevance, the Vice President of the United States likely visited Germ City at some point in his young life. Mr. Biden had a pack of first cousins who lived right in the middle of Germ City.

Maybe some sort of plaque would be in order.