About These Things

Dear Black Horse Gazette Reader,

   I hope you find this website entertaining and fun, even if you don't understand a lick of what it is I think I'm trying to say here. 

 There've been a few folks lately who've sent electro-mails to ask me to please straighten this blog up some. 

First off, you might call this place a bog, or a clog, or even a dog, but I know one thing for certain -- It sure ain't a blog. 

 Regardless, these folks want to know why I stubbornly continue, on a semi-regular basis, to write down weird and mostly disconnected things here; and then just leave them lying around in plain sight where folks without a decent sense of humor might accidentally try to read them. 

 Well now, of all the things that I think it could possibly be that could cause this to happen, I think left-brain warpin' might explain it. 

 According to medical folks down at the Hardboard University Medical School this left-brain warpin' thing's a cute disease where the brain sort of loses count on itself now and then, and then bends a half-smidgeon or so to the left, when it should be just sitting there pointing straight ahead.

 The reason I figure this so strong is that my golfing pal 'Doc' Aiken told me the other week when I was down to his office having my annual physic, that he thought maybe left-brain warpin' ran in my family on both sides of the creek, and that I probably wouldn't need to run alongside it much longer now to catch up.

 It was something like that, anyway. 

  To keep things from going bad around here I've got to peck fast on the keyboard sometimes so you'll have new things to read when you come back the next time you decide you want to read things. 

 And I only have these two stumpy little fingers that work right on all the keys to write things down with. 

  So with that all pretty much said, it's probably best if you don't come back here to visit too often or there won't be any new things leftover that you haven't looked at since the last time you were here looking at things.

  Even though I can't imagine why you'd need to know or care about things like this, I'll go ahead tell you anyway: 

I take full credit for being responsible for nearly everything around here.  This includes dumb things, stupid things, and lesser things like speling and grandma.   

  If you want to use my things on your own local writing place then please go ahead and give me a holler before you just use them without saying anything at all. 

 That way I'll know you're using my things because you think they're clever or important things, and not just because you're too stink lazy to write down your own things.

  More important, if you find things here that don't look right and it really bothers you to see them sitting there just being wrong, then click here to give me a holler before you go away and don't let me know about these things.

  I'll try to fix things up some before the next time you come. 

 I'm a darn windbag, aren't I? 

  Please tell your friends and neighbors and the folks at work and the people down at the bowling alley about my things here. I am hoping they probably will all want to come over when they have some leftover free time to read things, too.

 By all means, please do encourage them to do this immediately because I get pretty tired and depressed and fully exhausted sometimes from writing things down just for me to read.  

 You know, I was just sitting here thinking about maybe starting up one of them 'piloted program' things called a reverse subscription service for this place. 

Now the way this thing would eventually work would be that I would pay folks to come here and read things instead of me just asking folks to come here and take their own leftover free time to read my things. 

 It'd be the only fair thing to do, don't you think? And the way I figure things is this. If I went ahead and did that I could get maybe three or six hundred-million folks to stop by here and read things every day, instead of there being only two or three people here reading things every other month or so.  

So what do you think about that idea?

Me, too.

It'd probably end up being a bandwidth thing. 

 Helpful Reader Notice:  For all you mostly reader people who read a lot but don't write stuff down often, this  kind of inserted writing here is called a 'segue'. That's where when you're writing things down you (the writer person) sort of try to move from one subject to another subject real smooth like so they (the reader persons) don't know a fancy change is gonna' happen. And then before you know it we're all sitting here talking about a whole another new subject like hanging drywall, or sleevin' up diesel engines. 

A sketch of the old Black Horse Hotel by H. Reinhold, created as a limited edition print for the benefit of the Reinholds (PA) Lions Club in 1984

The Black Horse Gazette: A Brief History

  An old-fashioned idea, a horse, a historic hotel and a small town are all intertwined but fading memories as I look back on four decades of "writing things down" here in the gazette. 

 At times I figure folks either haven't the time to read for fun anymore, or they've so much to read they couldn't possibly enjoy something as wildly anecdotal as this place.  But I keep writing things down, and they keep reading it.  Life's funny that way.

 In 1957 my first money paying work was the job of town newsboy. Each afternoon after school I would pedal my heavy old Roadmaster Flyer through the streets of my small Pennsylvania hometown to deliver the daily newspapers - the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal and Reading Eagle - to a population of 235 eager subscribers.

  The townspeople would greet my late afternoon arrival with either a tapping foot, or a tenuous remark.

 "You're late again, Jocko!" 

"Kid. You gotta' put this paper between the doors, not here in the bushes!"

 From the beginning, I was taught to treat my job as a critical and important one that should not be taken lightly. In the 1950s, after all, the daily newspaper was still the major way in which most people received the news. You didn't want to mess with the news. 

 One of the many stops on my meandering route through town was the aromatic barroom of the old Black Horse Hotel, where local hangers-on would congregate along the shiny mahogany bar to talk politics and settle matters of varying importance.

  The proprietor, a rotund and snow white-haired lady named Martha Schannauer, was also the head barkeeper, cook, waitress and bouncer. Martha, a taskmaster, always made sure she received her newspaper without appreciable rips or tears. 

  Each time I entered the hotel one or more of the tavern regulars would chide in mock praise, "A real newspaperman we have here", and then urge me to start my own village rag (as if our flyspeck town needed its own newspaper). I was also to be sure to call my newspaper the Black Horse Gazette in honor of the various intellectuals then seated at the bar. 

 This would invariably be followed by an uproar of drunken laughter that tailed away as I closed the heavy wooden door behind me and continued on my route.

 As a naive kid, I took it all to heart. In a brave effort to fill a need I thought the town had for local news they weren't getting, I went home and actually tried to start a town newspaper. So my first and only real newspaper job was that of Editor-in-Chief. 

Not bad.

From the start, the gazette was a successful failure. With no general direction (and the attention span of a 12-year-old being what it is) the idea never amounted to more than page one of the first afternoon edition. 

However, the experience provided me with the indelible kick start I needed to begin thinking about a career, and doing things on my own.  

That experience also changed my life forever. To this day I believe everyone should at least have the town drunk as a friend, if not a mentor.  

 From its inauspicious beginnings, the Black Horse Gazette has been published now more or less continuously for 46 years.

 As my occupations and avocations have changed, the gazette, too, has metamorphosed into various forms; a town gossip rag, a U.S. Navy ship's newspaper, a computer magazine's bulletin board service (BBS), and finally in 1996 into an Internet website manned by a young retiree with way too much free time on his hands. 

All told, the gazette has gone to press in twenty-seven states, and thirteen countries. It has been handwritten in half-decent hotel rooms, dingy motel rooms, remote mountain campgrounds, wholly within the Arctic Circle, smack dab on the equator, and while transiting the Suez Canal. 

If you can think of time as money, then I've probably invested several millions of dollars into the gazette over the years. Total net profit so far: $0. 

The Namesake 

The Black Horse Hotel pictured above (circa 1751-1760) was the first hotel built in rural Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. In 1751 a Swedish immigrant named John R. Cones traded his favorite black horse to a local farmer for a wagon load of building stones, which were used to erect the hotel's sandstone walls.

 The hostelry, completed in late 1760, was named the Black Horse Hotel in honor of the horse that had made it possible. Throughout the years the hotel served as a place for travelers to obtain food, shelter and spirits along the Old Reading Road; an early coach road that connected the bustling colonial cities of Lancaster and Reading. 

 During the Revolutionary War wounded soldiers fresh from battles at Valley Forge, Brandywine and Germantown stopped at the hotel on their way to the Ephrata Cloisters (a secular convent turned hospital) for medical treatment. Lancaster County Historical records also show that a few of the soldiers died at or near the hotel, and were buried in a nearby cemetery.

  In the Fall of 1786, General George Washington, (originally a surveyor by trade) set up a business office at the hostelry for a few weeks, with a total expenditure of 50-cents for his room and board.

  After 219 years of serving up food, drink and hospitality, the grand old stone structure was sent tumbling to the ground on September 18, 1978 to make way for a modern convenience store.

 Nothing remains of the hotel today, save a small stone plaque.

Note: Some of the historical information above was originally researched and presented by H. Reinhold and members of the Reinholds, PA) Lions Club in a historical abstract that accompanied Reinhold's limited edition painting entitled: Black Horse Hotel '84.

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