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Excerpted
from Central
PA magazine, August 2005
Playing
His Hand
By
Ann E. Diviney
Inside
a Gettysburg coffeehouse, Tom
Adams
and his wife, Judy, play a game of "pitch." Tom shuffles the cards,
deals and talks about what it is like to be an award-winning banjo
player who can no longer roll with three fingers.
"It's
taken three years to accept it," Tom, 46, says of task-specific
dystonia, the neurological disorder that affects both the picking
motion of the middle finger of his right hand and his ability
to anchor his ring and little fingers on the head of the banjo.
"A neurological disorder -- I never considered I wouldn't be able
to play for that reason. I figured, I'll get old and have arthritis
or my hearing will go."
Known
in bluegrass circles for his Scruggs-style picking, Tom has been
a member of Jimmy Martin and the Sunny Mountain Boys, the Johnson
Mountain Boys, Lynn Morris, Blue Highway and Rhonda Vincent's
road band, The Rage. He has shared the stage with everyone from
David Crosby to Vince Gill to Ricky Skaggs. He has played the
Grand Ole Opry, Carnegie Hall and stages from England to China
to the former Soviet Union.
In
March 2002, on stage with Irish folk group the Chieftains at the
Kennedy Center in Washington, he shrugged off a slight -- perhaps
one-hundredth of a second -- lag in timing. Maybe he'd been at
the steering wheel too long; maybe he hadn't spent enough time
warming up.
But
the problem worsened. A neurologist finally broke the news: He
had dystonia,
sometimes called "writer's cramp" when it causes an inability
to write by hand. The malady affects about 87,000 people nationally,
including high-level musicians and others who do intricate movements
with their hands.
He
can hold playing cards or use a pen, and even play "air banjo"
when he's not actually holding the instrument in his hands. "It's
just when I go to play the banjo, it's as if somebody unplugs
that function [the use of his fingers] from my brain," Tom explains.
After
his diagnosis, Tom turned the radio to stations that carried only
talk and no music. He tried Botox treatments, to no avail. He
gained weight, grew depressed, secluded himself from the music
world. "For a long time, I didn't even want to think about music,"
Tom confides. He picks up the cards he has been dealt and grins.
The long, hard days without music have ended, he acknowledges.
Tom
recently decided to pick up the banjo again, this time in a band
called Seneca Rocks, which reunites former Johnson Mountain Boys
members Marshall Wilborn, Dudley Connell, David McLaughlin and
Tom, who will be joined by Sally Love. Although all have roots
in bluegrass music, Seneca Rocks will branch out to rock, blues,
folk and rockabilly tunes. Tom won't be doing any three-fingered
rolls, but he will be banjo picking again.
He
continues to write a monthly column for Banjo Newsletter
and to do archiving work for the National Council for Traditional
Arts. His CDs Right Hand Man (1990) and Adams County
Banjo (2001) are standards in banjo circles, as is his book
of banjo tablature, Adams County Banjo.
Even
so, he acknowledges, people around Gettysburg tend to forget he
is well-known on a national and international level; they just
remember him as Tom of The Adams Brothers, a family band that
got its start playing the local carnival and hymn-sing circuit
some three and a half decades ago.
Last
October, Tom's 2002 CD Live at the Ragged Edge -- recorded
with Mike Cleveland before dystonia and released in March 2004
-- was named Instrumental Album of the Year by the International
Bluegrass Music Association. "If I never play again like that,
and I probably won't, I'm glad people got to hear that," says
Tom.
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Making
the Cut
By Lori Myers
Todd
Klick
grew up bailing hay and milking cows on a Lebanon County farm,
but every chance he got, he would high-tail it to the Key Drive-In
-- now a Wal-Mart parking lot. "Nothing could affect me as strongly,
and emotionally, as movies," he recalls. "I read just about every
book on filmmaking I could get my hands on and sought out local
filmmakers to show me how to do it."
And
he did it. Klick has produced two shorts and a documentary titled
Rough Cut, a ripped-from-the-headlines tale about two Central
PA filmmakers convicted of committing murder to finance their
film. Klick's 90-minute movie features interviews with the head
detectives, district attorney and the victim's family and friends,
edited from 3,200 minutes of footage, to show the heart-wrenching
effect of an evil deed.
"There
were so many layers to the story that I knew it would make a great
documentary," says Klick. "I invested my own money to make the
film. I then found a crew who believed in me and the story."
Klick,
who now lives in Mt. Gretna, recently returned from his editor's
Los Angeles home after an almost sleepless two days viewing the
rough cut of Rough Cut. An L.A. screening is also planned,
but he adds, "With today's technology, filmmakers don't need to
move to L.A. or New York to make a film. They can make it happen
right in their own backyard. It just takes vision and execution."
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Red
Reading?
By Steve Kennedy
Berks
County has come up red on the last two presidential election maps,
having supported George W. Bush by greater margins than the country
as a whole. But in the first half of the 20th century, the color
had a different significance in Reading.
From
1910 until the 1940s, the Socialist Party was a powerful political
force in the city. The only Reading mayor to be elected three
times, J.
Henry Stump
was for a while one of only three Socialist mayors of significant
cities nationwide. Stump was so formidable an opponent that the
two major parties united behind one candidate to defeat him in
1931. Upon his re-election in 1935, the Reading Eagle reported
that 8,000 supporters paraded down Penn Street, along with the
Socialist mayor of Milwaukee and national party head Norman Thomas.
The
Reading area also elected James H. Maurer to the Pennsylvania
legislature from 1910 to 1918 -- the first Socialist to serve
in the General Assembly. Maurer not only served as a Reading city
council member in the 1920s but also ran for U.S. vice president
on a ticket headed by Thomas in 1928 and 1932.
For
all their power, Reading Socialists were more of a trade unionist
than radical revolutionary stripe. In the Historical Review
of Berks County, Edwin B. Yeich lists among Stump's accomplishments
a new city hall, new firehouses, a band shell, a new branch library,
the William Penn Memorial fire tower, municipal garbage collection
and the acquisition of two-way radios for the police department.
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Notebook:
Adventure
By Steve Kennedy
 Dans
les rêves de l'enfance, dans l'élève que le
maître a puni ... "In the dreams of childhood, in the
pupil that the teacher has punished ..." So begins the song with
which Anne-Marie David, representing Luxembourg, won the 1973
Eurovision
song contest. And then comes the line that grabbed my attention:
Dans la gare où commence la première aventure
de la vie...: "In the train station where the first adventure
of life begins...."
The
song, called "Tu
te reconnaîtras"
goes on to mention "the dreams of the artist who has never been
crowned with glory"; "those who are afraid, those who are cold";
"the one who doubts, the one who believes"; and others, in all
of whom, as the title says, "you will recognize yourself." It
ends, "in that love that I have for you," as if the writer has
suddenly realized it's a French-language pop song and has to mention
romance.
Otherwise,
it has something of a Zen quality, although I would not have recognized
that at the time. What I did notice was its youthful, open-to-the-world,
adventurous feel, which fit well with my life 30+ years ago. On
my almost first, and certainly biggest, adventure thus far, I
had left home at age 19 for nine months in France.
My
daughter, who will turn 18 next month, is working most of the
summer as an assistant counselor at the church camp she's been
attending since she was 10 with her neighbor and best friend.
Her friend is working there, too, as a lifeguard. On a Sunday
in June, our driveway was like the train station in that song,
my daughter's Saturn packed with cases, sleeping bags, storage
crates and who knows what else. As the girls hurried around almost
giddily, making final adjustments for the drive to Centre County,
I realized that my daughter was no longer the child of 10 who
first went to camp. I asked her to call me just before she crossed
Nittany Mountain and lost cell phone reception, so I'd know the
girls had made it that far.
When
a friend and I drove to Canada on a short camping trip when I
was 18, I didn't think about how my parents might experience those
five days. We were in another country, with no cell phones, no
e-mail, an inherited aversion to long-distance calls and not enough
time even to send a post card. Our families would see us when
we got back. Perhaps they would recognize us as the world travelers
we had become, but if they did, I don't remember them mentioning
it.
After
her training, my daughter is home for a couple of days. She gives
me a tour of her new "camper" look and equipment: "sun block;
tropical-scented bug spray; Ocean Potion burn relief; gum; a camp
staff manual; a notebook and all the information for my taxes
that I have to pay this year. You have to have a Nalgene -- it's
a water bottle. All hair pulled back; bandana; minimal makeup
and jewelry, if any; eye liner only, and it might be from three
days ago; T-shirt, light long-sleeved shirt, sneakers." She pokes
at the sneakers. "There's dirt in there -- trust me, it's there;
muddy-bottom jeans." She points to her knees. "Grass stains --
'cause I tripped over a log." Her shins. "See my bruises? ...
And last but not least, you have to have Chap Stick with SPF15
in it -- that's sunblock. And in the back pocket we have a list
of what I have to get from home.... You notice I'm living out
of Ziploc plastic bags."
She
heads off to the bathroom, still talking. "A real shower -- now
that's something I haven't had since Sunday.... It's gonna be
weird not having to walk five minutes to pee. I won't know what
to do with myself." A few days of camp, and she is clearly into
the experience. The adventure has begun.
That
first Sunday, as the girls pulled out and got about 100 feet down
the lane, I thought I heard a loud whoop arise through the sunroof.
They may have indeed cheered, I don't know. But then again, it
could have been just me, recognizing myself.
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