Hey universe at large — 2019: what was that all about?

Is it just me, or did 2019 seem like a strange year? I was curious, so I Googled it. And found some weirdness that made the news across the nation. In January, a woman in Wichita Falls was banned from Walmart after drinking wine from a Pringles can while riding an electric cart. For 2.5 hours. In October, a bull had a nice, three-hour visit in downtown Baltimore. He jumped out of a trailer at a red light and trotted around town for a bit before being tranquilized and returned to his trailer.

In August, hundreds of bulky green packages were discovered in a shipment of jalapeno peppers. It was nearly four tons of marijuana. Perhaps the smugglers hoped the spicy scent would mask the smell of $2.3 million worth of pot, but the U.S. Customs and Border Protection dogs were not fooled.

While the national news was memorable in many ways, there were several local things that reporters dealt with that we want to share. Here at the newspaper, we talk to a lot of people in the course of our jobs, and some are so memorable that we make a note to share it when the year is over.

We had a phone call several months back from a very distraught woman. She had read her name as a survivor in an obituary for a person she didn’t know. Granted, the woman’s name wasn’t common, and she was quite adamant that someone at The Era had added her name to a stranger’s obituary as some sort of dark and puzzling attempt at a joke.

I spoke to her myself, and assured her that is not something that anyone here would ever do, and had she considered the possibility that someone else may have the same name as she did? Why that simply wasn’t possible, she assured me. And she had never lived in Kansas, where the survivor resided. We spoke at length, and she wasn’t convinced. I ended up providing the name of the funeral home, and she called and spoke to the funeral director.

It turns out there really was a survivor with the same name. Huh.

I’m certainly not making fun of the woman’s dismay. I covered a hearing in McKean County Court once where an expert witness called to testify had the last name Schellhammer. The attorney asked the witness if he and I were related; not to his knowledge, nor mine. Turns out, he was from Johnstown, where my in-laws and their extended family had lived. So he may have been related, but neither of us had any knowledge of it.

Another complaint we often hear is abbreviations in headlines, particularly on the sports pages. Coudersport becomes Coudy, basketball becomes hoops, and Cameron County may become Cam Co. One irate gentleman would leave a message for our sports folks every time that last abbreviation appeared. I will assure you, readers, we aren’t attempting to slight anyone; we’re merely trying to to get the point across in the limited space we have.

Sometimes, a police report will have such an interesting coincidence that we set it aside in hopes of remembering to share the news at the end of the year.

This year was no exception. There was a car accident where a vehicle hit a deer. The passenger in the vehicle was also named Deer. The police said the deer did not survive the crash, but Deer wasn’t injured. Not at all confusing.

We’ve had police reports for a burglary where someone entered a home and drank a can of beer, a report of a stolen Sasquatch cut-out and even a report by someone who was nearly struck by a motorist making a lawful turn while he was illegally passing.

Also this year, we in the newsroom have taken some steps to bridge that perceived gap between the folks who write the news and the folks who make it. We have taken on a few projects in the newsroom that we hope you enjoy as much as we have.

The first one, Checking In, is our effort to bring as much news from local counties as possible to our readers. We don’t have the staffing available to make it to every public meeting, as much as we would like to do so. Instead, we have been checking in with area municipalities to ask what’s happening in their neck of the woods. We’re finding out a lot of positive things have been going on throughout the region.

The second, First Response, is our effort to laud the work done by our region’s first responders every day. These often unsung heroes put themselves in harm’s way to protect fellow man. We have been enjoying getting to know these men and women, and we hope you have been, too.