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COLUMNS: BROOKLYN: During a terrific thunder shower Tuesday night, eight cows, the property of James Mead, were struck by lightning and killed. George M. Davidson also lost one cow by lightning. ALSO, Brooklyn, on July 4, will have base ball games, band music, potato, wheel barrow, sack, three-legged and bicycle races, broad jump, shot-put, tug-of-war, etc., with appropriate prizes for the winners, and fire works. HOP BOTTOM: Mrs. W. K. Taylor, of Ottawa, Kan., and nieces, Audrey and Myrtie Taylor, of Huntington, West Virginia, are guests of Mrs. Anna Wilbur and Mrs. George Case. It has been 24 years since Mrs. Taylor has visited in Pennsylvania, where she formerly resided. PARKVALE, DIMOCK TWP.: The barns of W. W. Kinner were struck by lightning, with all the contents, and burned, June 13. Six tons of hay and straw, feed, tools, mowing machine, hay rake, five wagons, cutter and harness - everything went except the horses. He wishes to thank the neighbors for fighting the fire and saving the other buildings; for the three-day bee, tearing down and moving the old barn on the other place, so he would have a place to keep his team. SPRINGVILLE/ELK LAKE: Charlie Lee and Anna Lathrop were married at the home of the bride’s mother, Mrs. J. A. Lathrop, at Elk Lake, last Tuesday, by Rev. W.E. Lewis. After a few days spent in traveling through New Jersey, they will be at home in the Methodist parsonage here. LENOX: Fred C. McNamara, a dental student at the University of Pennsylvania, at Philadelphia, graduated from the department of dentistry a few days ago. LITTLE MEADOWS: The ever glorious Fourth will be celebrated in this place in the good old-fashioned way, with plenty of good things to eat and amusements for all, and last but not least, a lecture with stereopticon views in the evening. SOUTH ARARAT: Hartless Crockran [could it be Harless Cockran?], of New Albany, is visiting at is home in this place. LIBERTY TWP.: At Howard Hill, M. D. Reynolds is moving his barn from the upper place to the lower place. James Bunnel, of Dimock, and Lee Reynolds, of Montrose, are doing the work. ALSO, Camp Susquehannock will open for the season, Friday, June 30, and we are informed the camp will be larger than ever this year. HARFORD: Every little boy has a fish pole and line with a little can of worms these days. EAST KINGSLEY: Mrs. John Gow’s funeral was held at the Congregational church in Harford. She had been living in Nicholson for a few years past and died very suddenly. She was on the street and fell dead. News was received here of the death of her brother, James, in Thompson. His death was not unexpected. He had been sick a long time. ST. JOSEPH: John F. Heavey’s silo was struck by the electric storm of a few days ago, tearing one side in pieces. Mr. Heavey gave us a little hint as to proper etiquette during thunder showers, which we think we will always remember and which will certainly be not unwise for anyone to follow. He told of an experience that his father had many years ago, when he was sitting in a room with 15 other men during a severe electrical storm. All of the men had their feet on the floor, being seated in chairs, except Mr. Heavey, who had his feet upon one of the rungs of a chair, clear from the floor. The building was struck, and the 15 other men were severely shocked, but Mr. Heavey was uninjured. During a shower it is always advisable to be inside the house, with the windows and doors closed, to prevent a draught, and moreover, never leave the feet in contact with the floor, but have them on a rung of the chair, or in another chair. This costs nothing and may save your life. MONTROSE: Rosemont cottage has been opened again for the season under the management of Miss Mary Sayre, with the same capable housekeeper as last year, Miss Reifsneider, of Philadelphia. They will be prepared to entertain transient automobile tourist parties this year. ALSO, the opening of the Country Club, last Friday, was exceedingly enjoyable to a large number of enthusiastic devotees of the game. The grounds are said to be in splendid condition, and an exceedingly pleasurable season’s sport is presaged. FOREST CITY: The body of Blasa Hagaman was found in 7 ft. of water at the bottom of a cave hole near the Clifford breaker, Wednesday of last week. Hagaman had been missing from his home for nearly a week. A footpath passes near the edge of the cave hole and it is believed that Hagaman missed his footing and fell into the depression. The dead man’s wife and five small children are enroute to this country from their home in Poland. SUSQUEHANNA: The signing of the ”full Crew bill” by Gov. Tener, last week, brought satisfaction to the hearts of the railroad men in the state. In Hallstead, Susquehanna and vicinity, much interest was taken in the bill, which was hard fought by the railroad companies of the state. The bill provides that not less than six men shall be employed on trains of more than 30 cars. There must be an engineman, a fireman, two brakemen, a flagman and a conductor. Trains composed of less than 30 cars will, under the new law, necessarily have more than five men in the crew. Passenger trains of more than three coaches and a baggage car must have a crew of five men, not including Pullman car employees. Passenger trains of four or more coaches besides the baggage car must carry a crew of six men. The fine for each violation is $100. RUSH: A habeas corpus case is on in the county courts in which Mrs. Alvira Wells, of Bradford county, is endeavoring to secure a daughter by a former marriage, Luella Race, a girl of 16 years, from Clayton Squires, of Rushville. The girl has lived with Mr. and Mrs. Squires, her grandparents, for the past six years, where she has had a pleasant home and they are anxious to retain the girl in the family. The case was continued to July 12, before Judge Little.
From the Desk of the D.A. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals was reversed again - an uncommonly and embarrassingly regular occurrence. This time the reversal dealt with a class action lawsuit brought by several women against Wal-Mart alleging sexual discrimination. The class action lawsuit was instituted by three disgruntled female employees who alleged the Wal-Mart had discriminated against them by denying them equal pay or promotions based upon their gender. The three women then sought to certify their sexual discrimination claim as a class action. The women asserted that Wal-Mart had a corporate policy of discriminating against all women in hiring, pay and promotion decisions. For obvious reasons, Wal-Mart objected to any class action status as it noted that there was no evidence that Wal-Mart had a corporate policy promoting sexual discrimination across its 3,400 stores. In fact, the litigation stakes for Wal-Mart were immense as the plaintiffs were alleging that there were 1.5 million current or former female employees that needed to be included in the litigation, i.e., every current or former female employee from 1998 to the present date. Wal-Mart stressed that managerial decisions are made on a store by store basis and that Wal-Mart had policies and procedures in place to prohibit and eliminate discriminatory practices. The Ninth Circuit accepted the plaintiffs arguments - essentially accepting the premise that 3 employees could form a legitimate basis to certify an entire class of 1.5 million employees without more evidence of individualized discriminatory practices. How does a court decide that the individual experience of 3 employees demonstrate a pattern of discriminatory behavior for a company that employees over 1 million employees in 3,400 stores? In other words, how do these discrimination actions, which are generally individual claims against a company, become class claims involving 1.5 million decisions made everyday by thousands of different managers across thousands of stores nationwide? The crux of any class action lawsuit is commonality of the claims, i.e., that all of the claims involve the same injury from the same person or entity. The Ninth Circuit decided that the allegations of the discriminatory corporate culture at Wal-Mart were a sufficient basis upon which to expand the case from three individual employees to 1.5 million female employees who may or may not have ever had a problem with Wal-Mart. The case became a legal crap shoot and a nightmare for Wal-Mart to defend. The Ninth Circuit essentially wrote the plaintiffs’ attorneys a blank check that Wal-Mart was going to have to cash. The United States Supreme Court took the appeal - and reversed the class certification. If you are wondering about how close the vote was, it was a unanimous decision. The entire Supreme Court rebuked the Ninth Circuit - at least in part. Justice Scalia, writing for the Court, indicated that there was no evidence of commonality of the employment claims that would support a class action. To the contrary, the evidence demonstrated that Wal-Mart’s corporate policies specifically prohibited discriminatory employment practices. Scalia opined that the individual decisions of isolated managers somewhere amid its 3,400 nationwide stores hardly created the type of commonality to suggest that 1.5 million female employees have been intentionally and knowingly discriminated against as a result of an unwritten corporate culture. While the Supreme Court was unanimous in its reversal, there were 4 dissenting justices (Ginsburg, Stephens, Sotomayor and Kagan), who agreed that the reversal was appropriate as the Ninth Circuit had certified the class of 1.5 million women under the wrong procedural rule, but these four justices would have left open the question as to whether a class action could have been properly certified under an alternate rule - and the dissenting justices expressed some feelings that there may have been a sufficient basis to have created a class of 1.5 million female employees if additional hearings were conducted. In the dissent, Justice Ginsburg suggested that the managerial discretion that Wal-Mart provided to its local managers potentially created a permissive culture where discriminatory decisions may occur. In other words, she believed that the case could be made that Wal-Mart was not exercising sufficient control over its 3,400 stores by micromanaging every hiring, promotion, pay and firing decision of each local manager. In the absence of such central control, the dissent suggested that a Wal-Mart may have been opening itself up to a class action suit despite its corporate policies and trainings that prohibited discriminatory conduct. While the case involved a class action issue, the two opinions written by Scalia and Ginsburg demonstrate two entirely different views on business practices. In the one view, Scalia underscored that Wal-Mart was running a successful business that vested sound discretion to the managers on the ground - and that Wal-Mart plainly trained its managers to avoid making discriminatory decisions and trusted its management to make non-discriminatory decisions. While Wal-Mart would be on the hook for individualized bad decisions by a discriminatory manager, such individualized decisions would not form a basis for a giant class action lawsuit. On the other hand, Ginsburg suggested that the managerial discretion that Wal-Mart provided to its managers was too broad - and that more corporate control was necessary to assure not only that no discrimination was occurring, but to create a uniform framework to assure that all hiring decisions were made on non-discriminatory grounds. While the legal niceties are a little difficult to follow, the personal views toward business enterprise in general between the two justices was striking and telling. On the one hand, Scalia (and the majority) had a view that individual managerial discretion was a good thing, while Ginsburg (and the dissent) wanted a more rigid approach to managerial activities that would limit the discretion of a manager so as to avoid any potential for bias and prejudice. Please submit any questions, concerns, or comments to Susquehanna County District Attorney’s Office, P.O. Box 218, Montrose, Pennsylvania 18801 or at our website www.SusquehannaCounty-DA.org or discuss this and all articles at http://dadesk.blogspot.com/.
The Healthy Geezer Q. Do we get sadder as we get older? It seems that just the opposite is true. There's a lot of evidence that we get happier the older we get. A Gallup telephone poll of 340,000 people across the nation showed that happiness comes with age. However, the poll didn't uncover the cause of this phenomenon. Dr. Arthur A. Stone, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, was the lead author of a study based on the Gallup survey. He speculated on the causes for this happiness. “It could be that there are environmental changes, or it could be psychological changes about the way we view the world, or it could even be biological - for example brain chemistry or endocrine changes,” Dr. Stone said. The telephone survey included people between 18 and 85. The survey showed that people start out at age 18 feeling pretty good. However, they feel progressively worse until they hit 50. At that point, people begin getting happier as they age. By the time they are 85, they are even more satisfied with themselves than they were at 18. Why are older people happier? I collected some theories. Older people are happier because they have: * A deeper appreciation of the value of life. * A feeling of fulfillment. * A greater ability to understand and handle life's vicissitudes. * Fewer aspirations and expectations of themselves. * The ability to live in the present and not worry about the future. * The wisdom to know they can't please everyone all the time. * An inclination to see situations more positively. A University of Chicago study also showed that happiness increases with age. The researchers asked a cross section of Americans how happy they were. The question was administered in face-to-face interviews of population samples that ranged from about 1,500 to 3,000. The Chicago researchers theorized that older people are happier because with age comes positive psychosocial traits, such as self-integration and self-esteem; these signs of maturity could contribute to a better sense of overall well-being. "Older people are better able to recognize what will bother them, and better able to negotiate their environment," said Susan Turk Charles, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine. One study looked at people's positive and negative emotions over the course of 23 years, and compared participants by age group. Researchers found that teenagers most frequently reported negative emotions, while octogenarians seemed to feel the least negative. If you would like to read more columns, "How To Be a Healthy Geezer" is available at www.healthygeezer.com.
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