A very special celebration was held last Saturday when St. Stanislaus Kostka Church in Rochester held a grand 100th birthday party for two of their parishioners, Sister Mary Dismas and Webster resident Ludwika Kardela.
Ludwika was born on March 8, 1923 and raised in Poland where she married and began her family near the city of Nysa in southern Poland. She and her family emigrated to the United States in 1963 and settled in Rochester. Ludwika has volunteered and cooked for events at the St. Teresa’s and St. Stanislaus Kostka parishes, and has been a fixture at parish events for decades. If you’ve ever been to the St. Stanislaus Polish Festival, you’ve enjoyed her delicious pierogies and cabbage rolls, and definitely got one of her wonderful smiles. Ludwika still cooks for some events to this day. Family from all over the country and Poland came to town to help celebrate her milestone birthday.
Sister Dismas was born on March 11, 1923 and in 2021 marked 80 years of service with the Sisters of Mercy. Sister Dismas spent her school years at St. John the Evangelist and Our Lady of Mercy, where she graduated in 1941. The influence of the Sisters of Mercy led her to enter the order and led her to becoming a teacher for 41 years. Sister Dismas also volunteered with a number of organizations throughout her years and she still resides at the St. Stanislaus convent.
Along with celebrating Sister Dismas and Ludwika’s birthdays, the parish also celebrated the birthday of Father Roman Caly with a buffet lunch gathering for friends, family and fellow parishioners.
Many thanks to Ursula Zamora for this great report and photos.
If you’re a big fan of Girl Scout cookies like I am, you know that the cookies have arrived and the troops are hard at work delivering them. But if you missed out on ordering this year, or you REALLY need more Thin Mints to toss in the freezer, have no fear. I know of at least one troop which will be selling them at local businesses in the coming weeks.
Webster Girl Scout Troop 60344 will have a table set up this Sunday March 12 at Lowe’s Webster from 1 to 4 p.m., and on Saturday March 25 and April 1 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Walmart Home entrance. They’ll not only be selling cookies to all of us, they’ll also be taking orders for cookies which will be included in care packages being put together by the Blue Star Mothers for our locally deployed troops.
So, not only can you get your own personal cookie fix, you can also help send a little taste of home to our troops.
By the way, this particular Girl Scout troop is the one I wrote about a few weeks ago when one of its members, Julia Meyers, lost her cookie money envelope in the high winds we had in early February. A very kind neighbor found it and most of the missing cash, and it was all returned to Julia. I posted the whole touching story in this blog.
I know for a fact that Julia herself will be at the March 12 cookie-selling table, so if you’d like to meet her in person, this is a great chance to do so!
Small people can do some really pretty big things.
Case in point: Skylar Jones, a fourth-grader at Webster’s Plank Rd. North Elementary School, who last Thursday morning was presented a Do the Right Thing Award from the Rochester Police Department.
As described in the program from the ceremony,
Skylar was nominated by his grandmother, Judy Nolan, for his calm and brave actions during a family medical emergency that occurred last October. When Skylar got home from school that day, he saw that his grandfather wasn’t feeling well and called his grandmother at work to tell her. After Mrs. Nolan spoke with her husband and realized how sick he sounded, she left work immediately to come home. While enroute, Skyler tried calling his grandmother several times to tell her that Papa fell. When he was unable to reach his grandmother, he called his mother and told her what had happened. One of the women contacted 911, and both were headed to the house. Skylar handled multiple phone calls between the two, and was told that the ambulance was coming. During their conversations, he kept both family members informed of how Papa was doing, assuring them that was conscious and breathing, and encouraging him to talk. He secured the dog, and went to meet the ambulance when it arrived and guided the first responders into the home.
Skylar handled a chaotic emergency at nine years old better than some adults would have. He stayed calm and kept his grandmother and mother informed until medical help arrived. When asked afterward what he would have done if he had been unable to contact either of them, he confidently said that he would have called 911 himself.
Among the half dozen or so relatives and friends who were on hand to watch Skylar receive his award were his grandparents, of course, and Sarah Mossey, one of the EMTs who responded to the house that day, who also happens to be Skylar’s music teacher at Plank North.
Skylar was one of eight students presented with the award at Thursday morning’s ceremony at the City Public Safety Building. They ranged from a Greece Central School District kindergartner who’s doing great things for his community, to a junior at Churchville-Chili High School who called 911 when his two-year old sister was having a seizure. Their individual stories are all very different and all very inspiring.
The Do the Right Thing Program was created in 1990 by the Miami Police Department. Rochester joined the program in 1996, one of 60 chapters in the United States, England and Germany. Its purpose is to foster positive relationships between law enforcement and our community youth by recognizing young people for helping officers and other first responders, performing acts of heroism, displaying leadership, role model behavior, and volunteering in their community. The award distinguishes students who strive to make good choices, do well in school, give back to their communities, or demonstrate a “turn-around” or improved behavior. Any student enrolled in K-12 in Monroe County is eligible, including those home-schooled.
Each award winner receives a trophy, a prize package, a trip to Seabreeze Amusement Park, an invitation to the Camp Good Days Leadership Camp, and the opportunity to apply for a college scholarship when they become high school seniors.
Hey friends, need to do something nice for somebody today? How about taking a quick moment to help a young Webster athlete become this week’s Bill Gray’s Athlete of the Week?
Webster Schroeder senior Colin Smith is the standout goalie for the Webster Schroeder hockey team. He recently helped the team win the Section V Class B hockey championship with two stellar performances, the first in a semifinal win against No. 2 Aquinas, where he made 40 saves. Then he made another 45 saves against No. 1 seed Churchville-Chili in Sunday’s championship game.
Colin is also an outstanding supporter of the Webster community — he serves as an Explorer in the Webster Volunteer Fire Department and is about to become a full member of the WFD.
Yesterday, WROC-TV named Colin their Athlete of the Week (click here to see the story and video). How about we also help him earn the title of Bill Gray’s Athlete of the Week?
It’s easy to vote. Just click here, scroll to the bottom and check the circle next to the name Colin Smith. And guess what? You can vote more than once!
This is the kind of thing I love to write about, because we don’t hear stories like these often enough.
It comes to me from one of my most faithful readers, Linda Meyers. She and her daughter Julia had gone over to her sister’s house on one of those very windy days a few weeks ago, so that Julia could present her Girl Scout Cookie sales pitch to her aunt in person. When they arrived home, however, they noticed that Julia’s cookie money envelope was gone. Sometime during the visit, perhaps when they were walking back to the car, the wind must have stripped the envelope from the clipboard they were carrying.
Linda returned to her sister’s house and scoured the yard. She was able to find $4 caught in a tree in the backyard, but no more. And no envelope at all. She knew she needed some help. She wrote,
Since I didn’t find the envelope or the rest of the money, I posted about the missing envelope on Facebook … and texted a few friends who live close to see if they could look in their yards, which they very kindly did! A few of my sister’s neighbors also went out to look even though it was dark, cold, and windy! One friend/neighbor even said her neighbor and his grandson turned it into an (unsuccessful) scavenger hunt.
Unfortunately, these valiant efforts turned up nothing and it looked like the money was gone forever.
But then, just a few days later, Lena Budd, an official from the Girl Scouts of Western NY, called to report that a Webster man had found Julia’s envelope, complete with Julia’s name and troop number. Lena had gotten a call from Karla Nichols, a Girl Scout Leader in Hilton who works at Mayer’s Lake Ontario Winery. SHE had been contacted by Fran and Rich Grizzanto, who found the envelope, thinking that Julia Meyers might be related.
Linda got Fran’s phone number and called her right away. “We had a lovely chat,” she wrote. “Turns out (Fran) lives diagonally behind my sister. She said they had found $21 floating around their yard and in their bushes. The envelope itself had gotten stuck in a prickly bush along their front walk.”
Later that evening, Linda and Julia stopped by the Grizzantos’ home to pick up the envelope. They were “lovely,” she said, adding that “Rich said he wished he’d gotten a video of his wife scrambling to grab money in the backyard! Fran gave us a jar of her homemade grape jelly, which is delicious, and noted that it is her 21st batch of jam. Coincidence that she recovered $21?”
In the end, Julia was only able to recover $25 of the $50 she had in the envelope, but since no one was really expecting to get any of it back, that was a big relief. Linda says that they’ll be returning to Fran and Rich’s house in March with some free cookies to thank them for their efforts.
So that’s the story of the missing cookie money envelope. A lot of people had to show a lot of kindness to get that envelope and the money back to a hard-working Girl Scout. Many thanks to all who helped make it a happy ending.
If you like this story and perhaps want to meet little Julia for yourself, she and her Troop 60344 will be selling cookies on:
Saturday March 4, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Hegedorns
Sunday March 12, 1 to 4 p.m. at Lowe’s
Saturday March 25, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Walmart’s Home entrance
Saturday April 1, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Walmart’s Home entrance
(Julia herself may not be at all of these dates, but will definitely be at Lowe’s on the 12th!)
This Saturday, Dec. 24, 2022, marks ten years since the tragic events on Christmas Eve 2012 when a crazed gunman took the lives of two West Webster firefighters, Tomasz Kaczowka and Lt. Mike Chiapperini, and injured three others as they were responding to a house fire on Lake Rd.
Despite the passage of many years, the details are still fresh in our minds. The story has been told and retold countless times, especially as we’ve commemorated the anniversaries of that terrible morning. This Christmas Eve, on the tenth anniversary, everywhere we look, we’ll all be reminded once again of what happened.
But another, equally important story hasn’t been told as often: how, following the shootings, the Webster community immediately stepped up and came together as one, offering emotional and monetary support to the firefighters’ families and to the West Webster Fire Department as a whole.
For five straight days, I wrote about nothing but the tragedy in my blog. I passed along information about memorial events, took photos, made videos. It was my way of contributing and helping the community work through its grief.
As it turned out, the blogs also helped chronicle exactly HOW our community stepped up, and how the people of Webster became more than just a community; we became a family.
I’ve pulled together a handful of those blogs, and with some other supporting materials (and lots of design help from my husband Jack), have created the publication pictured above, which you may enjoy reading as we commemorate this solemn anniversary.
Click here to see the online .pdf, and feel free to print the entire publication if you’d rather.
For the last few years, Covid has done a really good job of keeping families and friends apart. But here’s a nice story about how the pandemic actually brought a group of neighbors TOGETHER, and helped forge new friendships.
The story begins more than two and a half years ago, in March 2020, at the height of the pandemic. The country had just entered shut-down mode. The kids weren’t going to school, many of us couldn’t go to work, we couldn’t eat out with friends or even go grocery shopping without fear of getting sick.
Basically, we were all forced into our own personal, anti-social bubbles, and it was awful.
Jack Turan decided to do something about it. He heard on the news one morning how, in small towns all across Italy, residents were opening their shutters, sitting in their windows with their glasses of wine, and singing. The story gave him an idea. When he got home after work, he saw his neighbor Jamie, and told him to grab a beverage and meet him at the end of his driveway later that night. Then he went over to tell another neighbor, and a third.
That was the evening of March 22, 2020, and the beginning of a nightly tradition in one north Webster neighborhood that has continued every day since.
Last Saturday, Dec. 17, the gathering, fondly known as “Yack With Jack,” marked a very special achievement: 1000 straight days on which at least two neighbors have met at the end of Jack Turan’s driveway every night at 5 p.m. to share a beverage, and just hang around and chat.
Donna Fonda, who first told me about this happy group, said that the daily meetings have been a way to “check in” with the neighbors and get some actual real-person-not-Zoom time with other human beings, something we all craved especially during the height of the pandemic.
“During this 1000 days we’ve really gotten to know each other,” Donna wrote, “and enjoyed each family’s joys like births, engagements, anniversaries and retirements.” The friends have also been able to “hold each other up through health issues, deaths of loved ones and of course the isolation that Covid brought,” she added.
The meetings might be as short as 25 or 30 minutes, or as long as an hour and a half, depending on what’s going in peoples’ lives that night. There might be two people, there might be four, there might be 14. Most of the participants are Turan’s immediate neighbors, but a few come from farther down the street, and even a street over.
The neighbors marked both the first and second anniversaries with parties. The 1000-day celebration, however, was something else. More than 20 people were there, including their young children and dogs. There were snacks and crock pots filled with soup. There was a fire pit. There was a trivia contest complete with musical clues. And Deb Ford even made up some custom-designed drink cups, reading “Yack Anniversary, 1000 Days — 12/17/22.”
For this group of Webster neighbors, the “Yack With Jack” gatherings have taken the idea of “neighborhood” to an entirely new level.
Sure, we all wave to the neighbors before and after work, or when we’re out mowing the lawn. More often than not, though, we don’t have the time to do much more. Drive down this street any night of the week, however, and you’ll see a bunch of folks standing at the end of a driveway, beverages in hand, who’ve discovered the awesome result of making that time.
According to Jack Turan, that is: “We got to know each other, and we got to be friends, actually friends.”
Afterthoughts is a completely separate blog, where I’m reposting some of my favorite columns from when I was the Our Towns East Extra columnist for the Democrat and Chronicle.
This particular column was published two days before Christmas. Earlier that month I was struggling to come up with an appropriate holiday-themed piece. Then I remembered that I had met Santa himself, and immediately knew I’d hit on the perfect idea.
It was originally published on Dec. 23, 2014.
A Q&A with Santa Claus
I have pretty much the best job in the world. I mean, how many people actually get to interview Santa?
Fittingly, it was a cold, wintry day when I met Santa at his home. No, not his workshop at the North Pole, but on Lake Road in North Webster.
Outside, the home is trimmed with colorful lights and decorations, and four Santas adorn the front yard. Inside, the atmosphere is equally jolly, positively glowing with Christmas cheer. It’s the perfect setting from which a 71-year old Kodak retiree spreads holiday joy.
Click hereto go to Afterthoughts and read the rest of the post.
For starters, they give out free pizza (always a bonus) and you can make your own Christmas cookie (topped with more frosting than anyone should eat in one sitting). I love how the Scouts from Troop 110 always help out with the children’s games. And of course it’s a great place to meet with Santa, because the lines are super short and the photos are free.
But as I stood back last night and watched the activity all around me, I realized that the thing I like best about the event is the way it brings the community together. There were probably about 75 or 80 adults and children wandering around the church’s community room when I was there, and I asked one of the organizers how many people she recognized. I assumed that most of them were parishioners.
But she told me she only recognized a handful. The rest were neighbors or other community members unaffiliated with the church who had come to join in the festivities. That is exactly what the organizers wanted to accomplish when they put out an all-community invitation. Congratulations, St. Martin, for another successful event.
Here are a few photos from the evening (thank you to my firend Rebecca for providing a few of these):
Me with my friends Nicole (center), Rebecca and SantaSanta reading “Night Before Christmas”Pastor Korey Finstad reading the Christmas Story Made my cookie!Coloring pages at the craft tableThank you Troop 110 for running the games!
I was surprised by some sad news the other day. I read in the Webster Herald that Lee Burgess has passed away.
Lee attended college at Miami University, where he was immediately drawn to the media, spending time as a sports announcer and writer. After graduation he spent his early career in advertising, but eventually found his true passion: teaching. For 30 years he taught multimedia and journalism at R.L. Thomas High School.
But many Webster residents know Lee Burgess best through his work with the Webster Herald, which he started writing for in 1969.
I didn’t know Lee very well. However, I did meet him for coffee at the Atlantic Restaurant one morning years ago. We chatted about the projects he was working on, the class he was teaching at the Webster Recreation Center, and journalism in general. Many times in the following years I told myself I’d try to reconnect with him and continue that conversation. But I never got around to doing that. So on the occasion of his passing, I decided to get to know Lee Burgess a little better. I realized a good way to do that was to examine his long career with the Herald, using the terrific NY Historic Newspapers database as my guide.
Lee’s name started appearing in the Webster Herald back in 1967, even before he began writing for the paper. At the time, he was yearbook advisor for the R.L. Thomas Reveille, and his name would pop up regularly in the “Thomas Tales” column written by Marsha Kuhn and Cheryl Koopmans. In September 1968 he was introduced as the school’s new journalism teacher and advisor to the Courier, the school’s brand new newspaper.
Lee’s first bylined article seems to be one published on May 21, 1969 about the Monroe County Harvest Queen Contest (pictured below). That summer he also started to help out behind the scenes at the Herald. In his regular “Ridge Runner” column, Webster Herald editor Curt Gerling called Lee “our summer ‘swing man,’ a fellow who fills in on the editorial side for vacationing members of the regular staff.” Gerling also talked Lee into covering school board meetings.
For the next several years, Lee would occasionally write about other topics as well, including politics, new businesses, even auto accidents. But when he added sports stories to his beat, he really found his niche.
In September 1976, Lee Burgess became a regular Webster Herald columnist. His “Sports Shorts” column was a pithy, informational, opinionated look at local and national sports. But it was when he took over the weekly “Ridge Runner” column from Gerling on Feb. 1, 1989, that Lee Burgess really hit his stride. He would write that column for the next six years.
In his first column (pictured below), Lee wrote,
And what’ll the column be? A lot of opinion, the kind of argument that folks loading up on groceries at Nesbitt’s or Seitz’s in Webster or at Linken Ridge in Ontario Center can chew about. A few thought provokers that’ll make “tippling talk” at The Old Ridge Inn or Sodus Hotel. Humor to pass along while you’re waiting for ice cream at Friendly’s in Webster or Russet’s in Ontario. And some names now and then, perhaps neighbors along Eddy Ridge Road or Klem Road or kids from schools in Webster or Wayne or Williamson or Sodus.
Little bits and pieces that put the “home” and “town” into where you live.
“Ridge Runner” may very well be what Lee Burgess is best remembered for, and for good reason. He wrote the kind of small-town-weekly-newspaper column that celebrates the ordinary people, places and events that often go unnoticed but make up the fabric of a small town. Through his words, Lee Burgess brought our community together.
As his family wrote in his obituary, Lee Burgess was a “larger than life figure in Webster.” He will be missed.
I feature the people and places and events that make Webster the wonderful community it is — and throw in some totally-not-Webster-related personal ramblings every once in a while as well.
I love it when readers send me news about the great things happening in their schools or the community, so please email me anytime at missyblog@gmail.com
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