Most of the Dryden activity in today's Journal is on the editorial page. Henry Kramer of Dryden writes about possible government consolidation. While I rarely agree with Kramer, there's a lot worth considering in this article. I agree completely that we need small units of government that are closer to the people they represent. (He suggests the Ithaca School District as an overlarge entity, and I suspect he's right, but I regularly hear from people that even the Town of Dryden is too large.) I'm not as convinced about eliminating county government in the cause of reducing duplication, if only because New York State feels far too large to me for a one-size-fits-all solution. There's lots to think about though, and there's a contrasting view from David Whitmore of Ithaca too.
Also on the opinion page, Murray Cohen of Dryden suggests that part of the problem affecting sports today is the emphasis on records and statistics.
Carol Kammen writes about 1816, the "year without a summer". As George Goodrich wrote in his Centennial History of the Town of Dryden:
The year 1816 was known as the "cold season," in which nearly all of the crops were destroyed by summer frosts, and great scarcity, almost a famine, resulted. It should be borne in mind that there were no such means of transportation then as now to relieve a section where the crops had failed, and no great supply of produce was carried over from year to year.
On a personal note, I was happy to see this article on the New York State School of the Media Arts, held these days at Ithaca College. I attended it back in 1986 when it was at SUNY Buffalo, and I think what I learned there is a lot of why I write this site.
Posted by simon at August 4, 2007 11:06 AM in Ithaca Journal , history , politics (local) , weather , why