We’ve enjoyed dozens of special events and merchant discounts this month as part of the Village of Webster’s Fall in Love With Webster event, and there’s more to come this week (check the event’s Facebook page for a list), but this one is worth special mention.
This Thursday Feb. 24 is “Betty White Night” in the village, honoring the memory of our favorite Golden Girl, Betty White.
From 5 to 7 p.m., Lala of Webster, at 38 East Main, will celebrate this amazing lady with birthday treats and champagne. Betty’s special passion for animals will also play a part in the evening. Webster-based author Kate Spreter, who shares Betty’s passion for rescue animals, has donated two signed copies of her book A Home for Benny, which will be raffled off at the end of the evening. Raffle donations will benefit a local pet-assistance organization.
That same evening, Jojo Bistro and Wine Bar (next door to Lala) will host a “Golden Hour” from 4 to 8 p.m., with a Betty White-inspired cocktail menu. Stop in for a “Betty White,” a “Rose Nyland” or a non-alcoholic “Golden Girl.” There’s also live music by the very talented Amanda Ashley from 6 to 8 p.m.
Webster Hots, right across the street at 55 East Main, is also joining the fun. Since Betty also loved hot dogs, fries and Diet Coke, Webster Hots will be offering two speciality combo deals through the end of March. Click here for more information about that.
Wherever you land this Thursday evening, wear your pearls and get ready to make some Golden memories.
I love highlighting the great things our young people are doing for our community. This young man’s story is a great example.
Andrew Buttles, a sophomore at Webster Schroeder High School, has just embarked on a program called Students of the Year for Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS). It’s a “philanthropic leadership development program during which students foster professional skills such as entrepreneurship, marketing, and project management in order to raise funds for the LLS.” (www.lls.org)
The seven-week program runs from Feb. 5 through March 25, with the goal of raising money for LLS, and supporting the organization’s missions to find a cure for blood cancers and improve the quality of life for patients.
Andrew is the first Webster student to participate in this program. He’s leading a team of other Webster students, friends and family to increase awareness and raise funds for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.
The team has set an ambitious fundraising goal of $15,000, and has planned several initiatives over the next two months to achieve that goal. So far, they include:
a partnership with Schutt’s Apple Mill, which will be donating 10% of the proceeds from their Valentine’s Day Bundle to the campaign
Nickel Back Can and Bottle Return will contribute to the campaign if you mention LLS when you drop off your returns
attend the Webster Youth Hockey Association players vs. coaches hockey game on March 19; all proceeds will benefit the cause
In addition to raising money and supporting this very important cause, Andrew’s also hoping to earn the prestigious title of Student of the Year. Every dollar raised counts as one vote for his campaign. Let’s see if we can help put him — and his team — on top.
share Andrew’s message and fundraising link with your contacts
donate a silent auction itsm for the Grand Finale Celebration auction
help secure a corporate sponsorship (they start at $5,000 and come with marketing benefits)
All donations are tax-deductible.
Click here to learn more about the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, and click here to go to Andrew’s personal fundraising page. If you have any questions, contact rksbuttles@gmail.com.
We’re just a few days into the month-long Fall in Love With Webster community celebration, but I hope you’ve already been able to take advantage of some of the special deals and events happening at our local businesses.
If you haven’t heard much about it yet, click here to see my blog from earlier this week to get a run-down on what’s happening, including the events taking place this week.
The village is really looking spiffy in honor of this special event. You may have noticed, for example, all of the heart-emblazoned flags hanging from the light poles up and down Main Street. Thanks to Jake Swingley and his public works staff for doing that. There’s also a beautiful new banner hanging on the gazebo at that little pocket park at North Ave. and 104, and merchants are decorating their storefronts.
Lots more special events and merchant discounts are on store for next week, and new ones are being added pretty much every day. You can check the Fall in Love With Webster Facebook page for a complete list and details about all of them. You’ll also find there a boiled-down list of events which you can run off to put on your fridge for handy reference.
A couple of reminders as we head into week two:
❤ The trivia challenge is on! Each of the participating businesses is posting a trivia fact about their business or product in their front window. Your challenge is to collect all the trivia answers and on Wednesday Feb. 23, bring them to Barry’s Old School Irish for the weekly trivia contest. The week’s theme? WEBSTER! The questions will be based on all the trivia posted around town.
❤ Maplewood Art Project: Next time you’re at Lala of Webster gift shop (38 E. Main), check out the charming bookmarks created by the residents of Maplewood Nursing Home. Supplies were provided to the residents who lovingly crafted the bookmarks, which are now being sold for $1 each. Proceeds will be used to purchase new art supplies for the residents’ next project, embellished felt hearts.
When an emergency happens, like a car accident or a house fire, we’re always grateful and relieved to see our local first responders show up to take care of things. But during our day-to-day normal lives, when nothing awful like that is happening, we don’t give them much thought at all.
But rest assured, they’re always thinking about us.
The Webster Volunteer Fire Department (WVFD) and the West Webster Fire Department(WWFD) held a joint water rescue training session at the Webster Aquatic Center this morning. Several topics were covered including rescue equipment, techniques to retrieve a victim, and how to secure a victim who has been injured. The training session was capped off with some practice on the Fortuna rescue boat and it was discovered just how precarious it can be when several people try to climb on at once! … We’re here for when you need us, Webster!
The two departments are hoping to schedule joint training sessions like this at least four times this year. The next one will probably be a large area wildland search once the weather improves. In the meantime, the WVFD and WWFD hold weekly drills within their own departments. Recent ones for the WVFD have included search and rescue techniques, driver training, advancements in technology, hazmat, air consumption and many more.
Here are a few more photos from the morning’s exercise:
Thank you to Sarah Mossey for most of these photos.
The Girl Scouts are going all-in with their online sales this year, thanks in large part (I’m sure) to this never-ending pandemic. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to find it much easier to pull out a credit card for my cookie order than try to scrounge up cash. Which, of course, facilitates the purchase of more Girl Scout cookies than a normal body needs. (AND you can get them delivered right to your house in just about a week.)
I’ve had a regular cookie connection for many years, ever since we lived in North Penfield across the street from Annalise, who sold us cookies every year before we moved to the village.
But even though we weren’t neighbors anymore, I knew where she lived, so I still tracked her down when cookie time rolled around. This year it’s so much easier — all I have to do is visit her personal cookie-selling website to get my fix of Thin Mints and Shortbreads. Anna’s little sister Adelia is a Brownie now as well, so I’m going to have to split my order … or maybe just buy more.
The Scouts are being encouraged to record promotional videos this year as well. I think that’s pretty neat in that it gives these young ladies a little public speaking experience. If you’re at all interested, here’s Anna’s video, and here’s Adelia’s.
I hope you also have a regular Girl Scout cookie connection. Or perhaps you wait until you can grab some boxes in March when they’ve set up tables outside local businesses. But if you can’t wait and really need a source, feel free to visit Adelia’s or Anna’s cookie ordering sites.
And if you really DON’T like Girl Scout cookies, there’s still a way you can support the organization’s goals and the opportunities they provide for the girls. It’s a program called “Cookie Share,” where you can purchase some boxes to be donated. Usually these go to local military organizations.
Thin Mint fan or not, I encourage everyone to support the Girl Scouts. They do so many neat things with these young ladies. Adelia’s mom Jess told me the trips her daughter’s been on already include visits to the Planetarium, Ginna and the George Eastman Museum. Plus, she’s taken an engineering class at the U or R and sampled karate and yoga.
I don’t remember having anywhere near that much fun when I was a Camp Fire Girls Bluebird back in the day.
One of the Village of Webster’s newest businesses is also one of its oldest.
Woodland Silkscreen & Embroidery joined the village’s West Main St. business corridor less than a year ago, but the shop at 5 West Main (lower level) is only the newest location for a business which has been around for more than 70 years.
You might recognize the Woodland name from its many years on Rt. 104 in Ontario. Owner Laurie Read operated the business there — in three separate locations near the Ontario Animal Hospital — for 30 years. But Woodland Printing was founded well before that, when her father Arnie started the business in his home on Shoemaker Rd. more than 70 years ago.
Laurie took over part of the business when she left Kodak, and got even more involved when Arnie decided to retire. She built the business through the years, including moving it out of the house to Ontario 20 years ago.
Her most recent relocation into Webster last March wasn’t her decision (her landlord in Ontario decided he needed the space for something else), but the move has turned out to be one of the best she’s made to date. Not only did it mean coming back to her hometown, but her highly visible, smack-dab-in-the-middle-of-the-village location facing Gazebo Park has been great for business.
“I love it here,” she said. “I was mad that I was being booted from my other place. I had fears, but since I’ve been here, it’s been great. Everyone is so nice and friendly, I love being part of the BID, I’m part of the Chamber now. I love being back here.”
The spicy side of Woodland
Visitors to Woodland will also discover a surprising, spicy side to the shop. When Laurie moved to her new location, she brought her OHHH, LORDEE! Everything Sauces with her.
Laurie can also thank her father Arnie for introducing her to homemade hot sauce — it’s his original recipe, which she’s been making on her own for years. But for a while now, Laurie and her best friend Denise Jones have been bottling the sauces, following a chance phone conversation they had one day when Laurie was cooking up a batch. Denise was immediately intrigued. When she eventually had a chance to try the sauce, she fell in love.
“She immediately said, ‘Oh my god, we’re bottling it,'” Laurie remembered. “We’re doing it, nothing’s stopping us.” With that, OHHH, LORDEE! was born.
The friends currently have five sauce varieties, ranging from mild (“Cloud 9”) to killer hot (“Devil’s Ecstasy”). Laurie describes the sauces as “different from anything out there,” with flavors that complement everything from chili and scrambled eggs to macaroni and cheese and Hawaiian pizza.
The sauces are available at Woodland Silkscreen, but also can be purchased at several locations in the area, including Hegedorn’s, Costanzas, Joe’s Meat Market in Ontario, Breens in Palmyra and Williamson, and others. To see a whole list and find out more, click here.
Today, I invite all my readers once again to check out my brand new, completely separate blog which I call East Extra Afterthoughts, where I’ll be reprinting some of my favorite columns from when I was the Our Towns East Extra columnist for the Democrat and Chronicle.
Today’s entry was not actually one of my columns. Instead, it was from a blog I wrote in December 2019. But it does have a nice follow-up story — or as I’m calling it, an afterthought. And for those of you who are new to my blog, it’s kind of a nice introduction to me and why I do what I do.
The power of words
I was a junior in high school when my English teacher said four words that changed my life.
She told me, “You’re a good writer.”
I still remember exactly where I was standing after class that day, and how proud those simple words made me feel. But I didn’t realize then how powerful they were, how much they would shape my future. Because from that day forward, I knew what I wanted to do with my life: I wanted to write. …
Click here to go to Afterthoughts and read the rest of the post.
I happened to be going through some of my past blogs recently, and came across this one, which made me giggle. I thought you might like to see it again — or for the first time. I took the photos one morning last December when I was headed to the old Irondequoit Rec Center on Pinegrove Ave.
We all could use a little laugh right about now as Christmas-time stress compounds the stress we already have thanks to COVID.
So I thought I’d share these images with you, of a scene I came across in Irondequoit last weekend. All I could think was, “Arlo Guthrie told us all about the ‘Thanksgiving Day Massacree.’ How come we haven’t heard anything about this obvious Christmas Day Massacree?”
It got worse when I got to the Rec Center, where I saw clear evidence of a hit-and-run.
…that means it’s time for the first barefoot snow walk of the year.
I’m posting this today because I know a lot of people expect these photos every year. It’s a tradition handed down for generations from my paternal grandmother (Gia Gia), who originated the challenge about 75 years ago. One day in the dead of winter, she took off her shoes and socks and tromped barefoot in the snow to the far side of her yard and back. It was a distance of perhaps 100 feet each way. Pretty much every year since, my family has been holding annual barefoot snow walks whenever we get together for the holidays.
The photo below is of a Christmas-time snow walk we did in 2018. We called it the “deep freeze” walk because we were experiencing record low temperatures that day.
Even when we don’t get together — and we haven’t been gathering much lately — we still try to find any excuse to carry on the tradition. Like my Gia Gia’s birthday, or my mother’s birthday.
Or the first significant snowfall of the year.
Last year since we didn’t even come close to getting together for Christmas, we actually did an extended family barefoot snow walk via Zoom, which included my children in Cheektowaga and Gates; brothers in Pennsylvania and Connecticut; my sister in Greene (NY); my aunt and uncle in Cape Cod; nephew in Massachusettes; even my cousins in Corning and Arizona (where my cousin Laura put her feet in the pool).
Here’s the video from that craziness:
I hope you and yours can enjoy your family traditions this year. If you do anything particularly fun and crazy, let me know about it!
I’m calling it East Extra Afterthoughts, a completely separate blog page where I’m reprinting some of my favorite columns from when I was the Our Towns East Extra columnist for the Democrat and Chronicle.
In seven years, from April 2013 to March 2020, I wrote 350 columns about interesting and inspirational people, places and events from all over northeast Rochester. When the D&C discontinued the Our Towns columns, I was determined that all my hard work would not be lost. So I squirreled away several dozen of my favorites.
Recently, as I looked back through them, I started wondering about many of the people and places I featured. What are the people doing now? Are those businesses still in business? How did COVID affect that annual fundraiser?
Those questions led directly to the creation of East Extra Afterthoughts.
Once a month or so, I’ll post one of my old columns to that page, and provide an interesting (I hope) update on where that story went after its original publication.
Normally I plan to post just an introductory paragraph or two here, then invite you to click through to Afterthoughts for the rest of the story. But for this first installment, I’ll post the entire column and follow-up here. Today, as this is the holiday season, I look back at the American St. Nicholas.
In this column, originally published on Dec. 24, 2017, I interviewed Pittsford resident Richard Brookins, famous all around the country — and world — as the “American St. Nick.”
I picked up this column idea from a notice I saw on the Webster Museum website about a presentation Brookins was giving there on Dec. 9. I got some contact information from the folks at the museum and arranged to meet with him at his Pittsford home.
We sat at his kitchen table and he almost immediately made it clear that he didn’t trust reporters much. He had been interviewed hundreds of times about his experience, and too often found the subsequent articles were filled with inaccuracies.
As it was, every time a column of mine was published, I would worry that I had gotten something wrong or the subject wouldn’t like it. So his warnings made me that much more nervous.
Fortunately, he liked the article very much.
Pittsford WWII veteran brought joy to European village as American St. Nick
Here’s a charming holiday story, about a Christmas gift delivered to the children of war-torn Luxembourg. It’s been told many times, but its simple message of holiday joy deserves recounting.
The story stars Richard Brookins, a 95-year old World War II veteran currently living in Pittsford. Brookins has gained international fame thanks to one day almost 75 years ago, when he forever became known as the “American St. Nick.”
The story begins in December 1944. Private Brookins, then just 22 years old, and his buddies with the 28th Infantry Division had regrouped in Wiltz, Luxembourg, after helping drive out the German army. It was a fairy-tale-beautiful village, but the residents had suffered under the German occupation.
“The Germans just took over their life,” Brookins remembered. “They threw them out of their homes, took their possessions and the houses … They took away all their cultural things.”
The Germans also refused to allow the people to celebrate one of their most treasured holidays: St. Nicholas Day.
After hearing some of these stories from a local resident, Brookins’ friend Harry Stutz came up with the idea of hosting a St. Nicholas Day party for the children of the village. For gifts, the GIs pooled some of candy and gum they regularly received from the government. The cooks made cookies, and the nuns made a cake.
Still, one thing was missing: St. Nicholas himself. Stutz asked Brookins to do the honors.
“All you have to do is walk around, pat the kids on the head, chuck them under the chin, smile at ‘em, that’s all,” Stutz said. So Brookins agreed.
The nuns provided Brookins with a priest’s surplice (which had to be returned by 4 p.m. for Mass), a bishop’s miter, a broken and taped-up shepherd’s crook and a rope beard.
As St. Nicholas made his rounds, the children sang and performed skits. Not knowing the language, he couldn’t say much, so he just patted them on the head and chucked them under the chin. But that was plenty.
“They just really thought this was St. Nicholas,” Brookins said. “They were speechless.”
That day came and went, and the GIs and townspeople went back to their normal lives. Brookins eventually went home, mostly forgetting about the whole event.
Then in 1977, he received a letter from an official in Wiltz.
“He wanted to have a special activity, and wondered if I could come back and be St. Nicholas.” So that December, he and his family all made the trip back to Luxembourg.
“You couldn’t believe it,” Brookins remembered. “People were standing in line to see this goofy old guy, 55 years old.” To them, “I was America.”
This time, Brookins wore a professionally-made cloak, carried a steel shepherd’s crook painted gold, and sported a much more realistic beard.
“It was really an upgrade,” Brookins said. “I really looked like royalty.”
Brookins has returned to Wiltz to reprise his role seven times since then. Many residents, now in their 80s and 90s, remember when the American St. Nick gave them candy back in 1944.
Wiltz continues to celebrate St. Nicholas Day every year, and is already planning the 75th anniversary of that first visit. Brookins doesn’t bet on being around for that celebration, but several of his family members are already saving up to make the trip.
As often as he’s shared this story, Brookins makes sure to pass off most of the credit.
“I do this in honor of the guys who did all the work, for all of my buddies who aren’t here. They earned it. I didn’t have to do anything but chuck ‘em under the chin and pat ‘em on the head.”
But he added, “I just can’t tell you, as much as I try to, what meaning it has.”
In this image from Dec. 5, 1944, Richard Brookins rides a jeep through Wiltz, Luxembourg in his first of many appearances as St. Nicholas Photo Courtesy the WWII Foundation
Richard Brookins, the “American St. Nick,” is now 95 years old and lives in Pittsford.
As it turned out, Brookins wasn’t, in fact, around for the 75th anniversary. He passed away on Oct. 11, 2018, less than a year after my column. He was 96 years old.
The people of Wiltz, Luxembourg still celebrate the story of the American St. Nick every year, and did host a 75th anniversary celebration in 2019. Click here to read more about that, and see a few more photos from the time when some American GIs brought a Christmas miracle to war-torn Luxenbourg.
The anniversary was also commemorated in October of 2019 by the Luxembourg American Cultural Society, located in Belgium, Wisconsin. You can read more about that here.
Finally, click here to check out my new East Extra Afterthoughts page. There’s also a link in the right-hand column on this page. Then watch for more features to come.
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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