I gets weary from that ol' man candy

By Scott Beveridge

My story about old-man candy began with a somewhat-spoiled 20-something female who once sat beside me in the newsroom.

It was Halloween season. I noticed bags of Goetze’s Caramel Creams in a convenience store and they reminded me of treats people tossed me along the Halloween parade route when I was a kid in Charleroi, Pa. With sweet memories of childhood innocence floating in my head, I decided to buy a bag of the confections and share it with my coworkers at the Observer-Reporter newspaper in Washington, Pa.

“Don’t be bringing us old-man candy,” my young podmate said about five years ago as I placed the bag in the lazy Susan snack tray that had become the centerpiece of our gathering of four desks.

I remember saying something like, “How can you not like this stuff? I love them, but only when they’re fresh. And what the hell is old-man candy?”

Basically, it’s anything people might find in the candy dish at their grandparents’ house, she replied.

“You know,” she said. “It’s like when gramps says, ‘You better get in on this stuff before it’s gone,’ and when you look, it’s chocolate-covered raisins.”

I had just crossed into my 50s and had to admit the caramel creams dating to 1895 were over the hill. I was surrounded by much-younger colleagues, who have been accustomed to many, many junk food choices, items including the magnificant Sour Patch EXTREME Soft & Chewy Candy.

This guy grew up on Pixie Dust, red licorice and those gross papery flying saucers filled with colored sugar pellets.

However, for the record, the photos I have been posting of old-fart candy on Facebook have generated many comments from people who either love or hate the stuff. Those posts seem to have touched a nerve.

“Really??? Old lady candy??? I have those in my pantry right now. My kids and I LOVE those things,” commented a mother in her 30s under a photo of pastel pink and green mints produced Gene & Boots Candies.

Sorry Facebook, but I thought I smelled Jasmine perfume as I put that candy on the counter at work where we typically place free edibles. Some of that same candy was still there the next day, a rare occurrence when there is free office food.

I will leave you with one of the funniets posts, one offered by Jason Togyer

under a photo of Necco wafers.

It’s sung to the song, “Ol’ Man River,” by Jerome Kern, from the musical Showboat.

Old man candy

That old man candy

It must be somethin'

But I don't taste anythin'

It just keeps hangin'

It keeps on hangin' around

Younger folks want chocolate bars

Made by Hershey's and by Mars

They don't want peppermint twirls

Butterscotch wheels or root beer barrels

I gets weary

And sick of chewin'

That hard, tough candy

My teeth it's ruinin'

But old man candy

It just keeps hangin' around

A public memorial to aquatic life

A new art exhibit could be likened to a traveling fish funeral.


The show features the works of 90 artists from the Pittsburgh and Morgantown, W.Va., regions who each painted one species of aquatic life killed in a widespread 2009 fish kill along a stream that straddles the Pennsylvania and West Virginia border.


And the exhibit, "Reflections: Homage to Dunkard Creek" is arriving next week at California University of Pennsylvania.


The portraits also feature crayfish, mussels and insects that were placed on the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources list of populations that dropped significantly during the pollution.


I'm not going to get into the debate here over to which environmental catastrophe caused the fish kill.


Cal U. is among nine sites that will exhibit the show sponsored by the Mountain Institute's Appalachia Program.


The university's office of academic affairs will host an opening reception from 5-8 p.m. Nov. 10 in Frich Hall. It will begin with a gallery talk by Ann Payne, of Morgantown, a member of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators and the artist who conceived and organized the project.

Curator for the exhibition on campus is Maggy Aston, assistant professor of art and design at Cal U. A work by Jordan Wong, a student of Aston’s, is included in the exhibition. His piece depicts the johnny darter, Etheostoma nigrum, a bottom-feeding freshwater fish.

Through a collaboration with the university’s departments of art and design, biological and environmental sciences, and music, the paintings will be viewed in an aquarium-like environment that includes glass display cases holding specimens with a sound track of bird, frog and cricket calls. A large, collaborative mural depicts water, nature and industry in the Mon Valley.

The opening reception is free to the public. The exhibit will be on view from 8 a.m.-9 p.m., Mondays through Fridays through Dec. 8 in the lobby of Frich Hall.

A cat in a pumpkin

Happy Halloween

As you can see I know someone who is talented with a pumpkin carver. And the Internet always needs more cats.

The so-called witch's tomb

This video promotes a story to appear Monday, on Halloween, in the Observer-Reporter about the tomb of Josephine Colvin at Monongahela Cemetery

The ghost of Dolley Madison ranks No. 1 in D.C.

Binnie the unconventional ghost tour guide leads a group of tourists in July around spooky LayFayette Square in Washington, D.C. (Scott Beveridge photo)


WASHINGTON, D.C. – Former U.S. First Lady Dolley Madison is spotted more around the nation's capital than many of Washington, D.C.'s, elites, even though her body has been interred in Congressional Cemetery since her 1849 death.


"The city of Washington is just in love with Dolley," said a tour guide named Binnie, who leads paying visitors around supposed haunted sites near the White House. "She's one of the most prolific ghosts in D.C."


The nation first became enamored with Dolley when she served as First Lady under Thomas Jefferson. Her first husband had died three years into their marriage, leaving her alone to raise a son until she became the famous bride of James Madison, the nation's fourth president who authored the Constitution.


Binnie wears a long red period dress as she discusses Dolley in Layfette Square, where Mrs. Madison spent her remaining years after that son squandered their money and left her to charity. But, Binnie has an unconventional style, chattering away sometimes in ghetto lingo, while sporting a tattoo on her right forearm and a modern blue paisley cotton tote bag off a shoulder.


She admits her style is her own. She insists the history behind her stories actually happened.


While destitute, men delivered free baskets of food to Dolley, probably the same guys she helped to educate when they were children under her platform of improving the schools in poor, local neighborhoods. Her educational charity work defined the roll of the First Lady, Binnie explains while working for Washington, D.C. Ghost Tours.

Today visitors to Lafayette Square claim to see the ghost of Dolley Madison rocking on a porch at the pale-yellow Cutts-Madison House at 721 Madison Place NW, where she spent her final years. Others claim to see her headless ghost in town, staring from a window. Her ghost apparently also has been spotted roaming the White House gardens, becoming angry at the sight of a gardener merely plucking a rose.


People have reported witnessing so many ghosts in this part of town that it has become known as "Tragedy Square."

Bigfoot sightings have strange marriage

Stan Gordon of Greensburg, Pa., discusses a spate of reported 1973 Bigfoot sightings in Westmoreland County while speaking at the Pittsburgh Bigfoot & UFO Conference. (Scott Beveridge photo)

By Scott Beveridge

YOUNGWOOD, Pa. – There is infighting in two paranormal groups that have a strange marriage.

Bigfoot followers don’t like it when that creature is associated with UFO sightings.

“And visa versa,” Bigfoot expert Stan Gordon said today at the Pittsburgh Bigfoot & UFO Conference at Westmoreland County Community College in Youngwood, Pa.

“The UFO people don’t want to connect a zoological creature with extraterrestrials,” Gordon said after speaking to a large auditorium packed with those with a fascination for the unexplained.

His lecture focused on a string of 1973 Bigfoot sightings and other mysterious events here in Westmoreland County, including some just down the road from this college.

The first took place near Greengate Mall in early August, when a man claimed to have had an unreal experience while shaving in his bathroom. It began with his smelling rotten cucumbers. He turned around to gaze at a window, eight feet off the ground, Gordon said.

“He saw two large glowing red eyes staring at him,” Gordon said. “His dogs didn’t bark.”

Gordon later went to investigate this scene, and, he said, he found the “strangest three-toed footprint” in weeds behind the mall, which since has been demolished.

Such sightings went on for months, perplexing even the Pennsylvania State Police.

The most-convincing evidence came from animals – cats, livestock and especially dogs – by how they reacted to the sense and smell of things associated with this elusive, fur-covered animal with fangs, Gordon said.

“The dogs were like paralyzed in fear,” he said.

Some family dogs hid in fear under porches, he said, while others refused to eat for up to three days after those stories emerged and soon would make local and national news.

“State police even said you couldn’t fabricate that.”

Derry Township was a hot bed that year for those odd events, which included repeated Bigfoot sightings at two farms.

“For whatever reason this thing kept coming back at night,” Gordon said, adding that witnesses there also noticed strange lights and UFOs between hearing weird animal screams.

Elsewhere in Derry residents of a mobile home claimed to have seen a Bigfoot staring at them at their front door after opening it at the sound of a baby crying and scratching, Gordon said. The electric lights began to flicker inside that home. Later, investigators discovered the electrical supply line ripped out to the mobile home, Gordon said.

He moved on tell an equally strange story from near Kecksburg in Westmoreland about a nut-shaped metal object that crashed into a hillside. The U.S. Army showed up, along with a tractor-trailer, which sped off with the thing and supposedly took it to a military base under strict secrecy in December 1965.

“There is more to this mystery than meets the eye,” Gordon said.

Assorted Bigfoot sketches on David Dragosin's booth at the Pittsburgh Bigfoot & UFO Conference at Westmoreland County Community College. (Scott Beveridge photo)