TODAY TIME: Know a 10-year-old girl named Monica from Kane? She
may have been on the Today show on Tuesday.

Sandy Rhodes tells us Al Roker went up to a girl holding a sign
saying it was her 10th birthday. He asked where she was from and
she said, Kane, Pa. “I believe she said her name was Monica,” Sandy
tells us.

Anyone know her identity?

NUT NOTES: Our columns about the chestnut tree blight has
brought some interesting feedback.

Stan Townsend of Boca Raton, Fla., says our saga “immediately
brings back memories relative to the oil fields. When I worked
during my college summers for the rod-line gang for Kendall in
1947-50, we would seek the dead chestnut trees in the area of a new
power house, and cut them for rod-line posts, supporting the
rod-lines from the power house to the well.”

“They were easy to work because the trees had no bark and they
were relatively clean of limb joints and very straight. When I read
your stories about the trees I often wondered if the posts are
still there, buried 30 inches deep, with rod-lines running back and
forth on them for 60 years.”

Tom Ewell of Montgomery, N.Y., writes: “I have been following
the write-ups about the chestnut tree. Seems I recall that
sometime in the early 1960s there were either chestnut trees or elm
trees that were suddenly beginning to deteriorate on top of High
Street in the Rutherford Run area and this was attributed to
chemicals that were coming out of smoke stacks from the Corning
Electronics plant at High Street and Owens Way.”

“This was before the environmental conservation movement as we
know it today and the US EPA, and if I remember correctly, a
federal agency made Corning place some type of filters on the smoke
stacks to reduce or eliminate the chemical exhaust which cost a
substantial amount of money at the time but by then the damage was
already done.”

If you can answer any of today’s queries, please give us a call
or drop us an e-line.