Frankford Community Blog | Local News, Events, Community Resources
October is “Parent Appreciation Month” throughout the School District. We are sharing with you a calendar of activities that will inspire you to get involved in your (our) schools and lend your voice to educating the children of our neighborhood and city.
The Friends of Overington Park met last night to plan for the Overington Park Fall Festival to be held on Saturday October 30 from 10AM till 1PM. Plans are for refreshments for the kids with a costume parade, pumpkin patch, games and a scavenger hunt. Sounds like one of those old fashioned community get togethers, bring your kids. More information will be coming out as the time approaches.
Coming up on November 13th, from 10 to 1, is the Love Your Park event which will be a clean up and mulch day to get ready for the winter. Rakes and gloves will be supplied to volunteers, so feel free to come out.
So who are the Friends of Overington Park. Pictured below are the folks who have taken the park as their project. The community owes them a great debt of gratitude.
Lisa, Diane, Janet, John, Mary Ellen, Kim and Lorraine
I am lucky to get an occasional email from Joe Menkevich. His radar is on duty at all times of the day and night for any news that might be interesting. I was reading one of his this morning thinking how much he reminds me of Shelby Foote the historian from the Civil War PBS series. (When he talks about history, it’s as if the people are still alive.) With that thought in mind, I opened another message from him this morning and found this information. No its not directly related to Frankford but it is about the era that many of our ancestors came to Philadelphia and eventually Frankford.
The link is to a piece in the Inquirer about the documentary planned by Sam Katz, politician and business man. The web site is here and below is a teaser from the web site. The quality is outstanding.
The Volunteer Firefighters from The Great Experiment on Vimeo.
St. Joachim’s is having a pasta dinner this Sunday. There are a lot of church socials and dinners and such all through out the year. If you think about it, the churches in Frankford are one of the few organizations that get people together on a regular basis. There was a time when every neighborhood had its clubs and groups and you would be hard pressed to find someone who was not involved in one or another. Now its different, people join Facebook instead. When you get a chance to help out one of our local organizations, you are also helping out your community.
So how did this all come about? A while ago the Frankford CDC and the Frankford Business and Professional Association both decided to work on the litter issue in Frankford. The time had come to take a shot at improving the situation here. By a stroke of serendipity, the city of Philadelphia awoke from its slumber and decided it was time to do the same thing citywide. So UnLitter Us Frankford is the first in a citywide effort to work on this problem.
It took a lot to drag me out of the house and down to Frankford and Pratt today for the UnLitter Us rally. I support the idea but the rain was still dripping and the sun wasn’t out and I didn’t feel like taking the video equipment down there etc. But I decided to go because I knew I would live to regret it if I didn’t. I was pleasantly surprised by a congenial crowd milling about chowing down on Mark Gilbert’s Thriftway hot dogs. It was a stroke of genius to schedule this event on the first of the month thereby ensuring a large crowd of happy shoppers passing by.
The mural arts people had a decorated trash truck down there and I can relate to that. Its beauty rivaled the trucks I saw traveling through the Khyber pass back in 1968 during the vacation that Lyndon Johnson sent me on. No surface is left undecorated as if it would be an insult to the gods of art to see a patch of plain unadorned paint. It was a site to behold.
SEPTA had a big green bus which was a big green diesel electric hybrid bus. Neat idea combining the two technologies.
The speechifying commenced with introductions by Tracy O’Drain of the CDC. Tony Payton spoke and Jason Dawkins spoke on behalf of Councilwoman Sanchez who was downtown on official business. Denise McVeigh of the recycle bank, Diane Richardson and Mark Gilbert of the Frankford Business and Professional Association also addressed the crowd.
Now I admit that I am ignorant of this spoken word art idea. My experience with it has been those idiots who are always riding around in their little cars playing their radios so loud that it shakes your bones a car length away. I was expecting that experience today and much to my delight it turned out otherwise.
Greg Corbin performed “The City Has a Heartbeat“. Carlo Campbell did his “Reconsider” and Whitney Peyton presented “Broken Bottles“. I get it now. Thanks.
The event is to be followed up by a Frankford wide cleanup on Saturday October 2nd.
