Fire Company Considers Merging

Last year the tiny Borough of Rutledge near the Philadelphia Airport in Delaware County, a borough with less than 900 residents, shuttered their local fire company and merged their equipment and resources with nearby Morton.

Why would Rutledge's fire company with 124-year-old history of emergency service close its doors.

"Money and manpower," according to the president of the new Morton - Rutledge Fire Company.

And the challenge is not unique to Rutledge.  By one estimate in the 1970's Pennsylvania had over 300,000 volunteer firefighters.  Today that number is between 50,000 and 60,000.

And what does Rutledge's decision to take up with a neighbor have to do with Parkesburg?

The Parkesburg Fire Company is in the same straights.

Volunteer membership is down and money is tighter than ever.  While state mandates on fire companies and fire fighters increase, funds from the the state to support local fire and ambulance companies shrink.

The same is true at the local level.  Monies from the boroughs and municipalities served do not keep pace with the real demands of training and fielding a competent fire and ambulance corp.

Parkesburg's Fire Company is considering all options including merger talks with neighboring boroughs and municipalities.

You can read about how Rutledge did it in an article mentioning Parkesburg on Fire Rescue 1 or you can go to Parkesburg Fire Company outstanding web page and click on the links describing their talks with Atglen, Pomeroy, Highland, Valley and West Sadsbury to consolidate into a single fire company.

Remembering Wilbert 'Toe' Conover

Of all the men and women who served in WWII from Parkesburg, five men did not come back.

Wilbert "Toe" Conover was one of them.  During Hitlers last full scale offensive in January 1945 known as the Battle of the Bulge, Staff Sargent Conover led his squad into a wooded area where they were ambushed by small gun fire and Toe went down.  Conover was taken to a field hospital where he died of his wounds in a few hours later.

Bill Wilde wrote "Toe's" story a few years ago and it is posted on the Chester County Hall of Heroes website.

De-mythifying Reagan

Sunday February 6th, is Ronald Reagan’s 100^th birthday.  

Even though I voted for Ronald Reagan, the candidate, over the President Jimmy Carter in 1980, I soured on Reagan once he became president.  It wasn’t the man I didn’t like so much as the arrogant, pompous, power-hungry people around him that drove me to become the passionate Democrat I remain today.

Over time my view of Ronald Reagan, the politician, shifted.  To be clear I have little patience for his conservative policies. Trickle-down economics, in my never-to-be-humble opinion, is one of the classic policy failures of the 20^th century. 

Rather over time I grew to appreciate, then admire and later love Ronald Reagan, the man, specifically for his indomitable spirit of hope and optimism.  Reagan’s 1984 campaign slogan, ‘Its morning in America’  remains a touchstone for the country, especially given the many economic, global and social challenges confronting the United States today.  

Much of what we remember about Ronald Reagan however, is more myth than reality.  According to the Washington Post Saturday these myths are “misconceptions resulting from the passage of time or from calculated attempts to rebuild or remake Reagan's legacy.”

Here are 5 myths about Ronald Reagan’s legacy listed in the Post that the facts of history just don’t support:

Reagan was one of our most popular presidents - Reagan's average approval rating during the eight years that he was in office was, according to Gallup, 52.8 percent.  That places Reagan not just behind Kennedy, Clinton and Eisenhower, but Johnson and Bush Sr. as well.

Reagan was a tax-cutter - President Reagan signed measures that increased federal taxes every year of his two-term presidency except the first and the last.  The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 was, at the time, the largest peacetime tax increase in U.S. history.

Reagan was a war hawk -Though Reagan expanded the U.S. military and launched new weapons programs, his real contributions to the end of the Cold War were his willingness to negotiate arms reductions with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his encouragement of Gorbachev as a domestic reformer.  

Reagan shrank the federal government - Federal spending grew by an average of 2.5 percent a year, adjusted for inflation, while Reagan was president. The national debt exploded, increasing from about $700 billion to nearly $3 trillion. The number of federal employees grew from 2.8 million to 3 million under Reagan, in large part because of his buildup at the Pentagon. 

Reagan was a conservative culture warrior - Although he published a book in 1983 about his staunch opposition to abortion (overlooking the fact that he had legalized abortion in California as governor in the late 1960s), President Reagan never sought a constitutional ban on abortion.  In 1981, Reagan unintentionally did more than any other president to prevent the Roe v. Wade abortion ruling from being overturned when he appointed Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court. O'Connor mostly upheld abortion rights during her 25 years as a justice.