Alan Jennings Gives Taxpayer Bath

Alan Jennings may well be the most influential person in the Lehigh Valley; I don't think The Morning Call quotes anybody as often. Last week, in a panel discussion about newspapers, he acknowledged that he bends the arms of the powerful and that nobody wants to be on his wrong side. He is praised by democrats and republican, liberals and conservatives alike. If all that wasn't enough influence, the week before he received the national award from Jesse Jackson, for making capital available to the low income.

Shaking my head, I felt like Justice Alito reading that Jennings had lost only 40 thousand dollars helping over 70 startup businesses. He must mean money belonging to his organization, and not the taxpayers. This post is about a bath he gave the taxpayers, and how Abe Atiyeh came out of it smelling like a rose.

Jennings gets a thrill out taking people on welfare and making them instant business owners; I call it giving them a fish market instead of a fishing pole. In 1996 he set up Rose and Miguel Rodriquez in a paint recycling business called Angel's Touch Paints, in a rented space on N. Franklin Street.* In 1997 Lehigh County would pay them $7,000 to recycle it's paint leftovers, and then buy back rebatched paint at $5.00 a gallon. The operation only required the space of about a three car garage. Also, about this time, Abe Atiyeh purchased the sprawling, contaminated Allentown Paint Manufacturing Plant on East Allen Street. Long and behold the influence; The DEP spent $755,000 cleaning up the old paint factory and gave Angel Touch $165,000 more, for equipment and lease expense to relocate there, in a space 100 times larger than they needed. **

Angel Touch and the Rodriquez's are long gone. Abe has a clean building and the existing multiple tenants never even heard of Angel Touch. Actually, the building is so large that they could still be there, lost somewhere inside, like the $920,000 of our money.

*Dan Hartzell, The Morning Call,April 28, 1997:pg. B.04

**Dave Levinthal, The Morning Call, June 4, 1999: pg. B.12

The 6th Ward

When my grandfather first arrived in Allentown, he lived in the Ward, on 2nd. Street. It was around 1895 and the neighborhood was full of immigrants. Some groups came from the same area in the old country, most noticeably the Syrians, from the village of Amar*. They were Greek Orthodox, a minority in a Muslim country. The congregation of St. George's Church on Catasauqua Ave., largely is descended from those immigrants. Well known names in Allentown, such as Atiyeh, Haddad, Hanna, Makoul, Koury and Joseph are among their members. They were among one of the first groups to organize, and those organizations still exist. The photo above was organized by the Syrian American Organization in 1944. Note that Jewish, on the left, is treated as a nationality.

* hopefully my Syrian friends will correct any historical errors I have made.

click on photo to enlarge

The Sunday Drive

My family wasn't much for recreation. My father worked six days a week, from early morning until early evening. We did go for a long car ride on Sundays. Back then gasoline was cheap, and having no destination wasn't thought of as wasteful. Children were more content to sit in back seat and look out the window, now they want a video screen in the vehicle.

Even children's play then involved more imagination and interaction. Howdy Doody was just a puppet on strings, who spent most of his time talking to an adult, Buffalo Bob, can you imagine?

 Sitting in that back seat in the mid fifties, I might well had

my "coonskin" hat with me. Fess Parker was a genuine American hero. It mattered little if he played both Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, both were king of the wild frontier. The ride probably lasted for two hours and then we would go to a restaurant to eat dinner. Compared to now, there were very few restaurants.

My mother would cook all the other meals that week, and we probably ate out more than most. Supermarkets were the new rage in food shopping, but the butcher, baker and candle stick maker were still going strong. If my father headed west or south, chances are we ended up at Shankweiler's Hotel, famous for chicken and waffles. They were at the intersection of Old 22 and Route 100. The building still exists and currently is a bank. The family also owned another hotel on Route 309. Both locations also operated adjoining Drive-In movies.

If my father headed north or east, we would end up at Walp's, which was on the corner of Union Blvd. and Airport Road. Walp's was a much more urban place. While Shankweiler's was an old country inn, Walp's was built as a modern restaurant. I enjoyed those rides, they were a learning experience.

Over The Top

I don't think blogger Rolf Oeler would argue with me describing him as over the top.      His blog,

LV Ironpigs, pulls no punches; I like that. It certainly has gotten Rolf in some trouble with the local blogging Pope, Bernie O'Hare. Rolf is barred from LV Ramblings. Truth is, I also reject some of Rolf's comments, he can be brutally frank and relentless. In this local blogosphere, dominated by both left leaning and puff blogs, there should be a place for his viewpoint.

Babblesphere RoundUp

This week, as often is the case, the real meat of the blogosphere is found in the comments. Too often my speed reading friends miss these morsels, so, for their benefit;

I made the following comments on Andrew Kleiner's Remember Post about planting a rain garden.

andrew, i support you on the rain garden project, and there is no reason why weitzel won't either.(rain garden is the planting of absorbing plants in storm water basins and outlets) but i also advocate more response to the current event. although i agree perhaps nothing can be done about cedar park at this point, there is a lesson to be learned. cedar park demonstrates that constructing paths in an environmentally friendly way is not a criterion of this park administration. the trail network plan is nothing more than allowing more path makeovers and new paths in our parks and between them. despite the hopes of council to have more oversight on this plan than the previous approval, i would rather urge them to vote NO. only a no vote will provide the time and resources to address your concerns about invasive species, jordan pond stagnation, and other pressing needs that you have illustrated on this blog. A no vote will not stop the trail network plan. the vote is mostly symbolic, because currently the only grant deals with signs and outside of park street markings. that grant could be approved independent of the trail network plan.

The Villa's highjacked the Chen Arts Group Blog and prevented my comment in tribute to Barba-Del Campbell. He then proceeds to delete my protests on their post about group shows.

angie villa prevented my comment in memory to the passing of barba-del campbell from appearing on the chen art blog...
moderation is now off at that site, and i have submitted another comment. we will see how long it remains. not allowing a friend of barba-del's to express his sympathy is but another example of their disregard for anyone other than themselves. i condemn the members of the chen art group for passively endorsing this hatred by turning a blind eye; art should be more than two or three dimensions.

Bill Villa babbles about Bernie O'Hare, admitting that he deleted my comments.

Molovinsky: your original comment on Barba-Del was published (and you know that) but just barely. It drew a warning from a blog administrator because it came clearly looking for trouble, considering that you have a history at your blog of allowing comments from O'Hare that bash the Chen Arts Group, Joe Skrapits, and the Villa family. Your Barba-Del comment at the Chen Arts Group blog was deleted, along with your 2 additional comments, because you kept "upping the ante" of your provocations against the Villas in your subsequent comments which you were warned about after your first comment. In closing, you are wrong about "having no doubt" that your comments were deleted by Angie Villa. They weren't deleted by Angie Villa. I deleted them.

My original comment on Barba-Del was not published, and Villa knows that. More important, so do members of the Chen Arts Group. How they feel about Villa using both the group and it's blog for his personal compulsions, remains to be seen.

Flash From Past

Occasionally, some of the older boys in Lehigh Parkway would get saddled with taking me along to a Saturday matinee in downtown Allentown. We would get the trolley, in later years a bus, from in front of the basement church on Jefferson Street. It would take that congregation many years to afford completing the church building there today. The trolley or bus would go across the 8th Street Bridge, which was built to accommodate the trolleys operated by Lehigh Valley Transit Company. Downtown then sported no less than five movie theaters at any one time. Particularly matinee friendly was the Midway, in the 600 Block of Hamilton. Three cartoons and episode or two of Flash Gordon entertained our entourage, which ranged in age from five to eleven years old. We younger kids, although delighted by the likes of Bugs Bunny, were confused how the Clay People would emerge from the walls in the caves on Mars to capture Captain Gordon, but our chaperones couldn't wait till the next week to learn Flash's fate. Next on the itinerary was usually a banana split at Woolworth's. Hamilton Street had three 5 and 10's, with a million things for boys to marvel at. The price of the sundae was a game of chance, with the customer picking a balloon. Inside the balloon was your price, anywhere from a penny to the full price of fifty cents. The store had a full selection of Allentown souvenirs. Pictures of West Park on a plate, the Center Square Monument on a glass, pennants to hang on your wall, and picture postcards of all the attractions. Hamilton Street was mobbed, and even the side streets were crowded with busy stores. Taking younger kids along was a responsibility for the older brothers, the streets and stores were crowded, but predators were limited to the Clay People on the silver screen.

reprinted from April 13, 2009