Kevin Ward Junior and Community Spirit in My Hometown

PHOTO CREDIT: NEWVINE PERSONAL COLLECTION

Growing up in a small town, I used to get a kick out of seeing my village’s name mentioned somewhere in the media. Most of the time, I’d see the village of Port Leyden, New York associated with heavy snowfall. The neighboring villages in this Adirondack foothills region included Lyons Falls and Boonville.

I got my diploma from the South Lewis Central School District in Turin. These villages are within a few miles of one another. Recently, all of the four communities mentioned above were in the national news, but there were very few smiles as we read and watched the news reports this time.

Hometown of Port Leyden

Port Leyden, my hometown, is also the hometown of race car driver Kevin Ward Junior. By now, you probably have heard Kevin was struck after he got out of his racecar at a western New York dirt track on August 9. Lyons Falls was where Kevin worked on his racecars.

The funeral home calling hours were held in Boonville. On Thursday August 14, his memorial service was held at South Lewis High School in Turin where there was enough room for the hundreds upon hundreds of friends, family, and supporters who came to express condolences.

Port Leyden, NY photograph from USA Today

You may also be familiar with the video shown hundreds of times in the days following the tragedy. Kevin’s car was bumped out of contention by driver Tony Stewart.

The video shows Kevin getting out of his car. Stewart’s car appears to slow down, and then speed up in a fishtail that pulled Kevin under the rear wheel.

As the week passed, we saw fewer replays of the incident, and more stories about Kevin, his family, and his hometown. I read how Kevin and his friends would work on cars every Sunday following a Saturday night racing event. Among the photographs from the memorial service, I recognized his dad and a couple of his uncles that I knew when growing up. Their sadness is our sadness. And that’s why at first it was hard to see the names of those villages mentioned. I still go back to Port Leyden every year to visit family and friends. Seeing the names of these communities in the context of this horrible tragedy was hard to take at first.

Many magazines and newspapers chronicled the tragedy.

Writing for The Marbles, a sports blog from the Yahoo.com website, columnist Jay Busbee described the pathways a young person has in a small town “You've got two choices: you decide you're going to settle in where you are, or you race as hard and fast as you can to achieve escape velocity. And you don't have long to make the choice.”

In USA Today, writer Kevin Oklobzija described the upstate spirit this way: “Here, in these tiny towns at the southern end of New York's Adirondack Region, there are no strangers.” Writing for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, reporter Jeff Gluck quoted a teenager who summed up her feelings about community, “Port Leyden and Lyons Falls are so small that everyone not only knows each other but everyone feels like family. We're all really close, When something happens, everyone around here is there for each other.”

Article on Port Leyden from USA Today

As I started to reread some of those articles I saw those communities described with phrases such as: close-knit, everyone is treated like family, and everybody knows everybody.

Community pride

My sense of community pride was awakened. That’s what I remember most about my hometown and the many communities surrounding it. Even if you didn’t know everyone, you felt as though you were part of the family that defines a community. A lot has changed in my hometown since I left it over thirty years ago. Large manufacturers abandoned the villages of Lyons Falls and Boonville in the past decade. Dairy farms are so prominent some have said there are more cows than people living in the area.

Population has declined over the years. In a way, the makeup of the community I knew no longer exists. But some things never change. Reading about my hometown and surrounding villages coming together to pay respects and offer comfort to a family that is looking for answers says a lot about what I remember about community spirit.

Spirit of Upstate New York

Community spirit is alive and well in the village of Port Leyden as well as the surrounding communities in Lewis and Oneida Counties in upstate New York. It may have taken the tragedy of racing star Kevin Ward Junior for the rest of the nation to see this community spirit, but it’s been part of the fabric of rural upstate New York for a long time.

Steve Newvine lives in Merced.

He wrote about his home town in the books Growing Up, Upstate and Grown Up, Going Home.

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Seeing Sinatra

PHOTO CREDIT: NEWVINE PERSONAL COLLECTION

Frank Sinatra

Among the experiences I have appreciated in my life are the two times I saw Frank Sinatra in concert.

I became a fan of Sinatra in 1980 when he released New York, New York. That was the year I got married. My wife and I honeymooned in New York City so I must have heard that song a hundred times leading up to our wedding. I know I heard it a few times while walking the streets of the Big Apple during the week of our honeymoon.

Fifty dollar tickets

Two years later, I was in Las Vegas for a convention. I stayed at Caesars Palace and as luck would have it, Frank was playing in the big room. Tickets were fifty dollars, so I stayed away from the casino and plopped down my money for what I thought would be a once-in-lifetime concert.

Lucky seats

No one I knew from the convention had any interest in attending the concert, so I entered the big room without them. Again, luck was with me as the usher escorted me to the front and center of the theater to a seat that filled out a table of eight. I had one of the best seats in the house simply because I was there alone and there had been room for only one more at that table. I made friends with the other people at the table and we settled in for the show.

“Welcome to my daddy’s show”

First up was Nancy Sinatra. While the lobby posters billed the show as Frank and Nancy, the daughter did not sing with her dad. I remember a few things about her performance that seemed strange. The first words out of her mouth when the applause from her introduction ended were “Welcome to my daddy’s show”. I found it odd was that her only hit record These Boots Were Made for Walking was not included in her half-hour show.

Other than being Frank’s daughter, the only reason most people would want to see Nancy sing would be for her to sign that hit record from the mid-1960s. I guess if your father is Frank Sinatra, it doesn’t matter what you sing on stage.

There was no duet with her father, even though the pair scored a top ten record in the early 1970s called Something Stupid.

Comedian Charlie Callas

Following Nancy, comedian Charlie Callas performed for a half-hour. Callas had a rubbery kind of comic face that actually reminds me of actor Jim Carrey. He kept us laughing as we patiently awaited the arrival of the real star of the show. As Callas left the stage from one end, Frank Sinatra walked out from the other end. There was no introduction, just applause from a grateful audience. Frank thanked the audience and asked Charlie Callas to come back out for a final bow.

Chairman of the Board

After Charlie took his final bow, Frank signaled to the orchestra leader and started his show with I’ve Got the World by the String. Then, for the next hour-and-a-half, we saw the man known as the Chairman of the Board take command of the stage. He finished with Chicago, and then returned for a curtain call where he sang New York, New York. He was sixty-seven in 1982, probably a few years past his prime, but still a very entertaining performer. Eleven years later in 1993, a seventy-eight year old Sinatra was still performing and I once again got a chance to see him live on stage.

Show in New York

This time it was in Rochester, New York. By then, everyone knew the Sinatra we would see on stage was not the same Rat-packer we witnessed in 1982. As one local critic described the event prior to the concert, “You’re not going to the show to see the Sinatra of thirty, twenty, or even ten years ago. You’re going to the concert to witness one of the world’s greatest performers as he winds down his public life.”

Comedian Tom Driesen did the warm up act at this Sinatra concert. Son Frank Junior conducted the orchestra. Frank sang the lyrics that appeared on a teleprompter at each of the four corners of the boxing ring type stage.

It wasn’t the same as I had experienced eleven years earlier, but I knew that going in. My wife and I enjoyed the show.

Sinatra parking space at the Cal-Neva Resort at Lake Tahoe, photo by Steve Newvine

Shortly after that performance, Sinatra stopped performing altogether. He passed away a few years later at the age of eighty-three.

The closest I would come to the Sinatra legacy again would be a parking spot marked with his name at the former Cal-Neva casino at Lake Tahoe on the California and Nevada line shortly after moving to California in 2004.

I have fond memories of the two Sinatra concerts I saw from a few decades back. Frank is gone, but the music lives.

No matter what you thought of Sinatra’s personal life, and there was certainly enough to pick apart if that is your pleasure, no one could argue about his contributions to popular music and the classic tunes commonly referred to the Great American Songbook.

To paraphrase the lyrics of one of his hit records, those were very good years.

Steve Newvine lives in Merced

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