Williston Observer

Observer staff report

Williston Observer Editor Ben Moger-Williams and former editor Greg Elias won headline writing awards Sunday at the annual Vermont Press Association awards banquet.

Moger-Williams placed first for headlines that included “School district faces trailer hitch: Board disapproves making temporary classrooms permanent” and “Fa-la-la brouhaha: Local chorus’ lyrics reflect national debate.” Elias took third place for headlines that included “Singer-songwriter still glowing after supernova start.”

Awards recognized work published in 2005.

The annual contest is open to the 10 daily and four dozen non-daily newspapers circulating in Vermont, according to Mike Donoghue, executive director of the Vermont Press Association. Donoghue said independent judges were secured through the New Hampshire Press Association and the St. Michael’s College Journalism Department.

Judge Edward Cashman was awarded the second annual Matthew Lyon Award. The Award recognized Cashman’s professional commitment over his career to ensure journalists had access to the public records and events about which the public has a right to know.

Williston resident Traci Griffith, a journalism professor at St. Michael’s College, was voted onto the Executive Board during the association’s business meeting Sunday.

A complete list of the Vermont Press Association awards for 2005 follows:

General Excellence (daily newspapers): 1. The Burlington Free Press; 2. (tie) Rutland Herald and Times Argus (Barre); 3. Brattleboro Reformer;

General Excellence (non-daily newspapers): 1. Seven Days ( Burlington); 2. Stowe Reporter; 3. Addison County Independent (Middlebury);

The Mavis Doyle Award (daily and non-daily combined): 1. Ken Picard, Seven Days ( Burlington);

John D. Donoghue Award for Arts Criticism (daily and non-daily): 1. (tie) Margot Harrison, Seven Days and Casey Rea, Seven Days; 3. Brent Hallenbeck, The Burlington Free Press;

Editorial (daily and non-daily): 1. Jeffrey Good, Valley News ( West Lebanon, N.H.); 2. Randy Holhut, Brattleboro Reformer; 3. Ross Connelly, Hardwick Gazette;

Rookie of the Year (daily and non-daily): 1. Victoria Welch, The Burlington Free Press;

Sports writing (daily) 1: John A. Fantino, The Burlington Free Press; 2. James Biggam, Times Argus (Barre); Honorable mention. Jonathan Howard, Brattleboro Reformer;

Sports writing (non-daily): 1. Andy Kirkaldy, Addison Independent (Middlebury); 2. Dave Morse, Hardwick Gazette;

Best state story (daily and non-daily): 1. Kevin O’Connor and Darren Allen, Rutland Herald/Times Argus (Barre); 2. Ken Picard, Seven Days ( Burlington); 3. Nathan Meunier, Hardwick Gazette;

Best local story (daily): 1. News Staff, Times Argus (Barre); 2. John Briggs, The Burlington Free Press; 3. Sky Barsch, Rutland Herald/Times Argus (Barre) Sunday Magazine;

Best local story (non-daily): 1. Amy Kolb Noyes and Alicia Morissette, News and Citizen ( Morristown); 2. John Flowers, Addison County Independent (Middlebury); 3. Cathy Resmer, Seven Days ( Burlington);

Feature writing (daily): 1. Sally Pollak, The Burlington Free Press; 2. Kevin O’Connor, Rutland Herald; 3. Candace Page, The Burlington Free Press;

Feature writing (non-daily): 1. Paula Routly, Seven Days; 2. Margaret Michniewicz, Vermont Woman ( South Burlington); 3. John Flowers, Addison Independent;

Headline writing (daily): 1.Ernie Kohlsaat, Valley News ( West Lebanon, N.H.); 2. Tom Brown, The Burlington Free Press; 3. Anne Adams, Valley News;

Headline writing (non-daily): 1. Ben Moger-Williams, Williston Observer; 2. Margaret Michniewicz, Vermont Woman; 3. Greg Elias, Williston Observer;

Photo – sports (daily): 1. Stefan Hard, Times Argus; 2. James Patterson, Valley News ( West Lebanon, N.H.); 3. David Barreda, Valley News ( West Lebanon, N.H.);

Photo – sports (non-daily): 1. Robert Eddy, The Herald of Randolph; 2. Vanessa Fournier, Hardwick Gazette; 3. Trent Campbell, Addison Independent;

Photo – general news (daily): 1. Jeb Wallace-Brodeur, Times Argus (Barre); 2. David Barreda, Valley News; 3. Geoff Hansen, Valley News;

Photo – general news (non-daily): 1. Tim Calabro, The Herald of Randolph; 2. Trent Campbell, Addison Independent (Middlebury); 3. Robert Eddy, The Herald of Randolph

Photo – feature (daily): 1. Glenn Russell, The Burlington Free Press; 2. James Patterson, Valley News ( West Lebanon, N.H.); 3. James Patterson, Valley News ( West Lebanon, N.H.);

Photo – feature (non daily): 1. Robert Eddy, The Herald of Randolph; 2. Jay Erickson, Seven Days ( Burlington) ; 3. Trent Campbell, Addison Independent (Middlebury).

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By Kim Howard
Observer staff

A new animal control officer means police can redirect their energies toward other issues, according to Williston’s police chief.

Chief Jim Dimmick said Williston resident Sue Powers has volunteered to respond to animal concerns in town starting this week.

Every town handles animal control differently, Dimmick said: Some towns have a paid animal control officer, while other towns require the town constable to do the job. In Williston, the responsibility had fallen to police officers. Dimmick said that seemed strange to him.

“They’re not trained in any specialized way to deal with the animals,” Dimmick said, nor do they have the right equipment.

Responding to animal concerns takes time. In the last 22 months, Williston police officers have responded to 177 animal control calls, from dog bites to wandering animals. Last week, for example, Dimmick said a blind dog was wandering in the middle of North Williston Road.

“I just thought that (police) expertise is better served other places,” Dimmick said.

Residents still should call the police department with their concerns or complaints; the police in turn will page Powers.

Powers is a long-time animal rescuer, she said, and has taken seminars on cruelty investigations and wildlife rehabilitation. Her expertise is responding to domestic animals, but she also has some experience with farm animals.

“Because I’ve been involved in this field for over 25 years, I have a really large network,” Powers said by phone. A cat meowed and birds chirped in the background as Powers explained that even if she doesn’t have the expertise needed for a specific situation, she knows others who do.

Powers’ passion for rescue has ebbed into her home. All of the birds chatting in the background were rescued, she said, and include parakeets, finches, a dove, a cockatiel, and a lory parrot. She and her husband also foster a number of dogs and cats at any given time while searching for an adoptive family.

“Her heart is just totally into not only how do we take care of this issue in town, but also humanely,” Dimmick said.

Police will still respond to ordinance violations, Dimmick said, as well as any issues that arise when Powers is not available. Dimmick said he hopes the town will find a way to compensate Powers for her time.

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By Kim Howard
Observer staff

Stephanie Fraser had been a social worker for cancer patients for seven years when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer last fall.

“Just dealing with the cancer diagnosis and going through the treatment takes everything out of you,” said Fraser, who works in the Fletcher Allen Health Care Hematology/ Oncology Clinic.

Last October, doctors found the ovarian mass; mid-November Fraser, 44, was in surgery to have it removed. The cancer, doctors determined, was in the earliest stage. Fraser began chemotherapy Dec. 1, and continued every three weeks through March.

Fraser was accustomed to life-threatening medical situations; for more than 26 years, she has lived with a kidney transplant. Such transplants, on average, are expected to last 13 years. The cancer diagnosis was a new challenge, but not just for Fraser.

“It’s harder on the family watching you, I think, than being a patient and going through it yourself,” Fraser said. Her greatest concern was her daughter Abby, age seven at the time of the diagnosis. “You never want to see your kids see you sick.”

Her husband, Kent, and their dogs – a cockapoo named Sophie, and Blake, a black lab and golden retriever mix – were an enormous support as she recovered.

“These guys,” she said, pointing to Sophie and Blake, “they got walks. We went into the woods every day.”

By September, she was strong enough to ride her bicycle 100 miles for a Lance Armstrong Foundation fundraiser.

“It was tough training this summer, but I did it,” said Fraser, whose monthly blood draws are now normal.

She raised $5,000 for the foundation. But for Fraser, there was more she wanted to give.

Action begot action: Last month she found herself as one of 700 people chosen to attend the inaugural LiveStrong Lance Armstrong Foundation Summit. The goal of the Austin, Texas event was to broaden the awareness of unmet physical, emotional and practical needs of those living with cancer.

“I was fortunate enough to have what I needed,” Fraser said, noting she had good disability insurance, a supportive family and an accommodating workplace. “I have a stronger desire to make sure that cancer patients get what they need.”

Over three days, Fraser and other cancer survivors and caregivers from 49 states developed personal action plans to bring back to their towns and states.

Lance Armstrong, Fraser said, is “a big advocate for wanting people to share their stories and experiences and learn from one another, to do something about it rather than sitting there. He wants you to take it and go that step beyond and make a difference.”

Fraser said Armstrong’s books about his struggle with cancer – which started well before he won the Tour de France seven consecutive times – had been an inspiration to many of her patients. Armstrong not only started a foundation to raise money and provide information, but lobbies Congress on cancer policies.

The LiveStrong Summit provided many examples of people taking their experiences with cancer – or their grief at having lost someone to cancer – to make change right around them, Fraser said. One father from California lost his five-year-old son to leukemia; when he learned there were children near him who did not have the transportation they needed to get to their chemotherapy treatments, Fraser said, he began a transportation service.

Fraser’s personal action plan will stay on paper. Flipping through a big binder in the kitchen of her house in North Williston, Fraser said her focus is the creation of a comprehensive handbook for cancer patients that can be used statewide.

The handbook, she hopes, will help make the journey more positive by putting in one place the information necessary to understand how to navigate insurance and other bureaucratic processes, as well as knowing basic things like which Web sites are best for reliable information and connecting with other patients.

Fraser looks forward to using her personal and professional experiences to continue helping others. There is one overarching question she wants to answer: “What can we be doing to make a cancer survivor’s journey the most positive one it can be?”

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Leaky steeple threatens mechanical marvel

By Greg Elias
Observer staff

The stairs creak as Bill White ascends the clock tower at Williston Federated Church. A nostalgic old-attic scent pervades the interior. The wind whistles outside.

On the first landing, White, who maintains the clock, points to a long chute containing the cables and weights that drive the movement and ring the bell. A pyramid-shaped wooden enclosure houses the pendulum.

Up another set of stairs is the clock movement, a century-old work of industrial art. The shiny gold gears are encased in a green cast-iron housing. Its rhythmic ticking is both surprisingly loud and strangely soothing – an amplified pocket watch.

The uppermost level contains the 2,000-pound bell, which is suspended beneath the church’s spire. White strikes it with a hammer, producing a loud but not quite ear-splitting bong.

The church’s four-faced clock tower and bell have marked the passage of time in Williston for more than a 100 years. They are considered municipal and church treasures, and so have been maintained at considerable expense over the years.

“The town is distinguished by its steeple and clock,” White says. “Whether you are Catholic, Jewish or Protestant, this is a landmark. It’s the town’s alarm clock.”

The church owns and maintains the building, but the town of Williston owns the clock. The structure and its mechanical components were restored less than a decade ago. But now a new problem has emerged.

White discovered a leak during a driving rainstorm last month. Apparently originating in the steeple, it poses at least a small threat to the lovingly restored timepiece. The clock’s mechanism is flecked with bits of surface rust.

“I don’t know how to describe the problem other than to call it very serious,” White wrote in a memo to trustees at Williston Federated Church. But White emphasizes in an interview that the church is doing its best to keep up a high-maintenance structure.

Brian Goodwin, chairman of the church’s trustees, says the clock is not the only worry because leaking water can flow down walls and affect other parts of the building. Trustees talked about repainting and repairing the steeple even before the recent leak, he said, but instead decided to fix windows in the church.

“Unfortunately, the church, like any homeowner, has to pick and choose what projects to do,” Goodwin says. “In hindsight, I wish we had done the (steeple) work this year.”

The leak comes less than a decade after a major renovation to the structure. Hundreds of individual donations helped fund the $140,000 project, which included repainting the steeple and bell tower, replacing rotting beams inside the tower and restoring the clock.

The structure was removed with a crane and placed on the ground next to the church for the repairs, which were completed in 1998.

“It gets a lot of weather,” Goodwin explains. “It’s up there in the wind, rain and snow. It takes a beating.”

The tip of the steeple is more than 100 feet high. White figures temperatures up there exceed 100 degrees in the summer and plummet to 40 below zero in the winter. Not to mention the wind, which was apparent on a walk to the top of the tower on a recent morning, despite just a light breeze on the ground.

The innards of the tower are a marvel of mechanical engineering. One must climb 64 steps and wriggle under thick beams to see it all.

A relatively new bicycle sits on the first landing. It seems a strangely modern touch, but it’s really a concession to human frailty.

White installed the bike to save his back from the strain of winding the mechanism. The bike pulls a 1,500-pound weight attached to a cable-and-pulley rig, which drives the mechanism that rings the bell each hour. A similar rigging with a lighter weight drives the clock movement, which is wound with a crank and regulated by a pendulum.

The mechanism as a whole is akin to an oversize cuckoo clock, with the bell taking the place of the cuckoo.

The clock movement was manufactured by the E. Howard Clock Co. of Boston. White faithfully winds the clock, keeping it accurate to within 20 seconds a week.

White took on the job of the town’s clock winder – he calls the position clock custodian – in 1997. Before that, Howard Carpenter and his family shared the task for about three decades. Both men have an engineering background: White as a retired computer engineer at IBM and Carpenter as a former professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Vermont.

Carpenter still feels an attachment to the clock after all these years. “If I hear the bell, I want to know how fast or slow the clock is running,” he says.

There was apparently one major mishap involving the mechanism a long time ago. Timbers in the chute that guides the weights are charred. White theorizes that lightning struck a cable, severing it and sending the weight crashing through the church’s floors and into the basement.

White discovered the leak on Oct. 26 when he was installing a new drain to cure another problem, this one involving rain blowing in through the tower’s louvers. As he finished the job during a wind-blown storm that day, he noticed water dripping through the ceiling of the clock room. The water was coming from the steeple and splashing on the clock movement.

Williston Federated Church was formed in 1899 when the Methodist and Congregationalist denominations joined to boost declining membership that threatened to close both churches. The building itself, which was originally the Methodist church, was completed in 1869. The clock was installed in 1900.

Goodwin says church trustees will talk about the leaking steeple at their December meeting. He thinks the repairs will include repainting the bell tower and plugging the leak.

“It’s a beautiful structure,” Goodwin says. “We want to do everything we can to make it look good.”

During his tour of the structure, White shows the logbook where he records maintenance of the clock. It is located near the shiny clock movement in a cozy space with walls lined with pine planks.

There is a feeling of peaceful solitude in this room, amid the ticking timepiece and the whistling wind high above Williston Village.

“Sometimes I feel like … ,” White trails off, trying to recall the historic reference, “like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

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By Ben Moger-Williams
Observer staff

Williston drivers are nearly three times as likely to hit a deer this year compared to last year, according to state statistics.

Maj. David LeCours, assistant director of the state Fish and Wildlife Department’s law enforcement division said 12 deer were hit by cars in Williston last year between Jan. 1 and Nov. 20. This year, in the same period, 28 car vs. deer accidents were logged, an increase of 133 percent.

“Williston is an aberration as far as the state average,” LeCours said. According to state records, car accidents involving deer are up about 16 percent over last year.

“It’s primarily the size of the herd more than anything else,” LeCours said.

Hunting restrictions implemented last year along with a mild winter have led to a greater number of deer in this part of the state, he said. Last year the department enacted regulations restricting the number of young bucks and antlerless deer that could be killed, and the Fish and Wildlife Department now estimates the deer population to be between 110,000 and 140,000.

LeCours said this time of year is traditionally when more deer are killed by vehicle hits.

“It really spikes once we get the time change in late October and the commuting hour coincides with dusk,” he said. Dusk and dawn are when many deer become active, and are more likely to stray into the road.

When a deer is struck by a car, if the animal is not killed immediately, a police officer or game warden will go to the scene and shoot the deer, LeCours said. Injured deer generally have broken legs and would not survive long after the accident anyway, he said. Deer are also highly stressed after an accident and often die from the stress alone, he said. If the person involved in the accident wants to keep the deer for food, they must seek permission from the Fish and Wildlife Department. Deer killed in this way do not count towards a person’s allotted deer ration, LeCours said. Under state law, hunters are allowed to take two deer per hunter per year.

“That’s an expensive way to get one,” LeCours said, referring to the costly vehicle damage that usually results from hitting a deer.

If the person doesn’t want the carcass and it is not too badly damaged, the department will often donate the meat to church groups or other organizations for “game suppers.”

“We’d just as soon have people eat them as let them go to waste,” LeCours said.

If the body is not salvageable for food, LeCours said, it is put into a landfill or buried in a pit.

Carol Winfield, president of the Vermont Wildlife Rescue Association said that she has had many calls from drivers who have struck deer but there is little she can do.

“I think it’s a shame but there really isn’t anyone I know of that has the resources to take on a full-grown animal,” Winfield said.

Winfield, whose organization helps wounded animals recover from their injuries, said people can take simple measures to prevent the accidents.

“A lot of those collisions could be avoided if people would take their foot off the gas and lean on their horn,” she said.

If you are involved in an accident with an animal, call the state police at 878-7111.

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