Camping in-style in South Jersey

The rustic cabin where I spent four nights vacationing this summer outside of my comfort zone. (Scott Beveridge photo)

By Scott Beveridge

CAPE MAY COURT HOUSE, NJ – A party of at least nine people and their yapping dog moved in next door into an identically-small wooden cabin designed to sleep four where I spent the first week of September just north of Cape May, NJ.

Thankfully, this large group arrived about the same time I would check out of the otherwise quiet Ponderosa Campground in Cape May Court House, wondering how they would all fit in that pine box smaller than your average motel room.

I couldn't help but notice the bumper sticker on their vehicle, either, which read, "Worry about your own damned family."

"They must get a lot of dirty looks," a friend replied via text message after I mentioned this discovery that Friday on my smartphone.

Yes. I stepped outside of my comfort zone for this summer vacation by choosing to bed down in a campground. I mean you're reading about a guy who prefers a clean hotel room, crisp sheets and a great view when he travels.

However, at $40 a night during the off-season along the South Jersey Shore, a cabin here with a bathroom with a shower, a small refrigerator and air-conditioning called my penny-pinching name.

And, other than it having an air-conditioner that made a racket and occasionally spit pellets of frozen condensation, the place was comfortable. It was especially quiet, too, that Monday through Friday after most tourists and beachcombers here had already headed north for the approaching winter.

This campground also was less than a 15-minute drive to my destination of Cape May, NJ, America's oldest resort town discovered by Henry Hudson in 1609, and later explored by Cornelius Jacobsen Mey for the Dutch West India Co.

Cape May is a gorgeous town boasting many rows of pretty, meticulously-restored Victorian-era houses, whose gingerbread adornments provide a great opportunity for a good house painter to never go without work.

But, this place is a tourist trap that appears to draw mostly white people with deep pockets who like to purchase over-priced merchandise in shops by the sea. 

I also found the locals in the towns up and down these beaches to be a bit snobby, similar to old-school Bostonians.

Yet, the area is worthy of a visit for the relaxation and beaches it offers, and, if, for no other reason, than to sample the Centennial India Pale Ale brewed by the 2-year-old Cape May Brewing Co.

An elegant painted lady along Stockton Avenue, one of the most-beautiful streets to be found in Cape May, NJ. (Scott Beveridge photo)

Baked ham and eggs on portobello with asiago

Baked ham and eggs on portobello with asiago (Scott Beveridge photo)

By Scott Beveridge

Baked eggs were a thing while I was growing up in the 1960s and then they disappeared from our diet.

Maybe it was because they were boring, served hot without any other sources of flavor in a baked-egg bowl after it sat in an oven for about 15 minutes. 

Flash forward and the baked egg has returned, reinvented and dripping hot with other ingredients.

There are baked eggs with spinach and bacon cooked in hollowed out russet potatoes, baked eggs in cups in ham cups and baked eggs in bread slices.

The other day I noticed a Facebook post about eggs baked in portobello mushrooms, decided to give that a try today and thought the end result made for a delicious late Sunday brunch.

The most time consuming step in this simple recipe is cleaning the mushrooms.

Ingredients

4 portobello mushrooms
4 large eggs
1/4 cup grated soft asiago cheese
4 thins slices of a good deli ham
olive oil, enough to coat mushrooms
salt and pepper to taste
2 pinches parsley flakes

Instructions

Preheat oven to 400 degrees

Remove stems from mushrooms, use a spoon to scoop out their gills and brush off as much dirt as possible from the tops. Do not run under water. Use hands to coat both sides of the mushrooms with olive oil, dust with salt and pepper and place them stem-side down on a baking sheet. Bake for about 10 minutes. Set aside to cool.

Turn mushrooms over, nestle a slice of ham into bowl, top that with raw egg trying to not break the yolk and sprinkle with more salt and pepper and some parsley. Return to the oven for about 20 minutes. Meaty mushrooms may require a longer baking time.

Sprinkle cheese on top while they are still warm and ready to eat.

A little fairy tale house

The new Storybook House in the Bookworm Glen at Pittsburgh Botanic Garden. (Photo courtesy of the garden)

OAKDALE, Pa. - A new miniature house on fieldstone at Pittsburgh Botanic Garden is rather cute.

It will house oversized laminated fairy tale books in the Oakdale, Pa., park's Bookworm Glen.

The garden in development completed the building in time for 500 children due to visit in late July and early August to hear retired schoolteachers read such stories, said Kitty Vagley, its executive director.

"I could not resist sharing this photo of our latest addition to the Eastern European Woodlands," Vagley said.

Pittsburgh is lucky to finally have its first open-air public gardent.

In 1998 it signed a 99-year lease with Allegheny County for this property along Pinkerton Road near Settler’s Cabin Park to transform 460 acres into the nation’s first public garden on an abandoned mine site. A year later, the group invested $200,000 in the plan and would eventually earn a $5 million state grant to redevelop the site.

It's home to a rare meadow where hundreds of dogwood trees grow, and no one is quite sure how they got there.

Not only have these trees survived coal mining and natural gas drilling, but they also warded off a fungus that has killed many of their like in Southwestern Pennsylvania, said Jerry Andres, a volunteer who cares from them.

“Our dogwoods seem to be perfectly healthy,” Vagley told the Observer-Reporter this summer. “That is what Mother Nature did for us. What was not unusual 30, 40 years ago is very rare today.”

The garden is open at this time only for special events and periodic “peek and preview tours” led by guides along the Woodland Garden trails. For more information, call 412-444-4464.

Family WWII history declassified, discovered in an email from France

The same plane in which my uncle would survive a crash during World War II lands next to a Flying Tiger during one of his Flying the Hump missions to China.

By Scott Beveridge

The wind was calm with clear visibility when a C-46 U.S. Army Air Forces plane left Mohanbari Airport in India Aug. 4, 1944, destined to deliver gasoline to China to assist in its defenses against Japanese invaders during World War II.

Air command immediately lost radio contact with the pilot after giving takeoff clearance to the cargo plane also carrying Pfc. Thomas L. Beveridge of Charleroi, Pa., and two other crew members en route to yet another dangerous mission to fly 500 miles over the Himalayan Mountains and on to Chenyi.

Thomas L. Beveridge

It would take four days for the pilot, John D. Akers of Webster Grove, Mo., to carve his way out of the jungle to safety after parachuting from the aircraft to reveal the plane had caught fire and crashed.

And, it took yet another 24 hours for Beveridge, who served on the plane as a radioman, and the crew chief, Edward R. Cronk of East Orange, N.J., to return to civilization and report their copilot had lost his life, according to the official military report on the crash marked “secret” and declassified in 1973.

Thomas Beveridge was the younger brother of my father, James, who had many unanswered questions about this plane crash before he died in 2007 at age 84.

His kid brother would need to be coaxed to talk about the plane crash, and he revealed only some glossed-over details to relatives before he died in 1989 at age 64 in La Mirada, Calif., where he made his home and raised two children after being discharged from the military.

My father even went as far as to place a Freedom of Information request to the Army a few years before he died seeking the crash report, only to be informed it was destroyed in a fire at a military records warehouse.

Eventually, Brewenn Chausset, an avid collector of War II memorabilia in France, located the crash report at the U.S. National Archives after finding the name of 2nd Lt. Frederick E. Brownewell Jr. on a laundry stamp inside a service hat he acquired that once belonged to the officer killed in the incident.

Chausset, after finding photos I had posted on the Web of my uncle, sent me an email in January seeking help in searching for additional information about Brownewell to add to his collection. He also passed along the report and photos of the plane taken before it crashed.

His inquiry, though, did more to solve some mysteries of my childhood hero and uncle about his service in the China-Burma-India Theater, which was considered among the most dangerous places to be in the war.

Thomas Beveridge, who grew up with a fascination for airplanes and had many models of them hand-built and strung from the ceiling of his bedroom, lied about his age to enlist in the Army before his 18th birthday to follow my father into the war.

Standing 5 feet 9 1/2 inches tall and weighing just 138 pounds, the younger Beveridge was a perfect fit for “flying the Hump.” His small frame would have allowed a plane to carry more supplies President Franklin D. Roosevelt promised Chinese ruler Chiang Kai-shek after Japanese forces overran Burma in 1942, closing the ground supply line to Western China and leaving air travel as the only option.

In summer 1943, thousands of planes crossed from India to China, delivering nearly 3,000 tons of supplies to Chiang Kai-shek. By the time this service ended in 1945, there were more than 1,000 Hump fliers listed as dead from crashes or missing in action, according to the 2003 book, “The Burma Road,” by Donovan Webster. These flights in thin air over the mountain ranges, Webster wrote, were met with freak winds of up to 248 mph, turbulence that would flip over planes and sometimes cause them to suddenly drop thousands of feet within a minute.

In the 11 months Beveridge “flew the Hump” in 1944, ending in November of that year, he completed 97 round-trip flights, according to a brief mention of him in the 1998 book, “China Burma India, Where I Came In, Vol. II,” by Robert James Kadel.

Once on the ground following the crash, he met up with Cronk and they returned to the crash site to discover their dead comrade.---- They found themselves in steep terrain with leech-infested swamps and seemingly endless bamboo thicket, Webster noted in his book, and with nothing more than one ant-covered chocolate bar to eat. Beveridge dropped 18 pounds, his war records show, while he and Cronk used their machetes to carve a path to a stream and followed its direction to a friendly air command base.

An Army air jungle rescue unit consisting of one officer and three enlisted men who volunteered for the mission set out three months after the crash in search of the missing plane and copilot, along with eight natives to assist them in the journey. It took them five days to cut their way through the jungle and reach the crash site, the military report shows.

They found the plane on its side, missing a wing and engine that likely “burned on contact with gasoline drums exploding,” Intelligence officer and 2nd Lt. of the Air Corps Donald B. Kelly noted in the report.

The bones of one man were found near the rear door of the inside cabin, along with melted silver believed to have once been his flight wings. They buried the remains with military honors Nov. 17, 1944, with a cross marked “unknown soldier,” while also destroying confidential matter and using .45-caliber slugs to destroy the plane’s transponder. The Army would use his false teeth to eventually positively identify the remains as those of Brownewell.

Meanwhile, Beveridge went home, saving the ripcord to his parachute that helped to save his life.

Monongahela Cemetery turns 150 with music

MONONGAHELA, Pa. – You don't often get a chance see a band performing in a graveyard.

And not every city has one as beautiful as historic Monongahela Cemetery, which celebrated it's 150th anniversary today with a performance by Too Many Tubas.

The band based in Finleyville and made up of musicians from across Southwestern Pennsylvania performs "Gettysburg" under the direction of Rich Pantaleo, a former music teacher in the Ringgold School District.

Oddly enough, the cemetery is holding a picnic tomorrow to honor the past when families actually packed lunches and spent the day in the cemetery off Route 88 in Monongahela.

This photo sparks a memory of a great family physician

             (Photo from the Kenneth Weight collection at Charleroi AREA Historical Society, Inc.)

By Scott Beveridge

CHARLEROI, Pa. – It wasn't the cool 1964 Mercury Comet that leaped from this old photograph taken decades ago in the town where I was born, but, rather, the top name on the door of the building in the background.

This address at 520 McKean Ave. in Charleroi, Pa., was the practice of our beloved family physician, Dr. Eugene E. Costa, the guy who welcomed me into this world at the local hospital's deliver room in 1956.

I remember him fondly, though, for his blunt bedside manner.

A typical office visit would begin with my complaining about pain in my joints.

He usually replied with the question, "How much coffee are you drinking?"

"Probably too much," I'd reply.

He'd tell me to cut back on the caffeine before asking if I was still smoking cigarettes.

"No, I gave them up in 1980."

Then he'd inform me that I was eating too much rich food.

"Really?"

"Well," I remember his saying next. "You are fatter than you were the last time you were here. You have the hives again."

He was right. He always was right. He gave me an injection of something and a prescription and in a few days I was myself again.

The last time I visited Dr. Costa was in the mid 1990s, when the health-care industry really began its so-called "revolution" long before Obamacare would become a dirty word among this president's advisaries.

He told me back then my health-care provider no longer accepted him as a participant in my plan and I'd have to seek out an insurance "approved" physician. Maybe it was something about his age. I'm not sure.

"So you are retiring?" I asked, disappointed at his announcement.

"You retire from a job. You don't retire from a profession," he said.

He kept his office open for several more years before hanging up his white coat.

And, for the next decade, it seemed as if everyone I knew was complaining about rude, overworked staffs at their doctors' offices and being treated there as if they were part of a cattle call hurried through the necessary steps to get a diagnosis or a prescription refill.

Dr. Costa was the kind of physician who knew and seemed to care about his patients, and they didn't have to first show proof of medical insurance before reaching his exam room. His fee was affordable.

 I miss him.