This week, I finally had the good fortune to hear from iconoclast Chauncey Howell, an Eastonian who has also spent decades doing TV news in the Big Bagel. I've always wanted to meet him, and now it's going to happen. Ironically, he was referred to me by Claire Sheridan, an Upper Mount Bethel resident I had just insultingly referred to as "Miss Snob."Maybe she wanted him to beat me up or something.
"Well, she did go to Miss Porter's, so I guess you pegged her," says Chauncey. He also tells me how he met that "awful Ron Angle." It was only once, and at the Easton Y.
"He popped out of the pool water like a naughty little nereid or a pudgy-PADutchy triton - I was astonished - at the gerontophile Y in Easton, and announced himself.
"'Well, you are certainly a cute little guy,' I said. I did not really know who Ron was. Do now.
"Then he launched into a panegyric about my late father and told some great stories about him. So I had to like him."
Chauncey is a "nominal Democrat but, true to our squirearchical background, a staunch rural Tory----but with strong populist leanings. I give speeches in Italian, as my father did. But I can do Yiddish too."
I hope to hook up with this American original sometime over the holidays.
