May

PTSD treatment in Buffalo is readily available. Asking for a referral from a primary care physician or other health care practitioner means beginning a conversation about it. To help do that, those seeking treatment by licensed psychotherapists might check out Psychology Today’s online listing.

Fill in the zip code, click on the list of specialties, and then scroll to find “Trauma and PTSD.” That goes to a list of twenty-four local therapists who specialize in it, and a short description of their work. Then ask your own medical practitioners for recommendations.

Recently, a study has yielded information that should help PTSD sufferers understand their own reactions. It showed that they might not distinguish between a stimulus associated with disaster in the past and the same stimulus later when nothing terrible is happening. Dr. Rony Paz of the Weitzmann Institute’s Neurobiology Department says this made sense in the evolutionary past of human beings.

At BJ’s last week, I browsed through cookbooks and found that Gwyneth Paltrow’s brisket recipe isn’t all that different from mine. She and her family put their various brisket recipes side by side—from the Lipton onion soup version to the Sephardic in the process of creating one for her book.

What her recipe has in common with mine is the slow braising, a liquid that blends a bouquet garni with the natural juices of the pot roast, and the taste of home cooking. Hers uses wine and chicken broth, and mine uses a concentrated vegetable browning sauce, onions, carrots, and paprika.  Here’s the method, whichever recipe you use:

A 3-pound brisket

Two medium or one large onion, peeled and sliced in rounds

Two carrots (organic juice carrots if your supermarket carries them), in large slices

Two baking potatoes, peeled and sliced in 1-inch rounds

Boiling water

2 tbsp. Kitchen Bouquet browning sauce

2 tbsp. canola oil

Salt, pepper, paprika

In a Dutch oven or 5-quart pot, heat the oil and sauté the onion slices until transparent but not browned. Sprinkle salt and pepper onto both sides of the brisket, place it in the pot with the onions, and brown it over medium high heat on each side.

Remove from the heat and add boiling water until the water is about half-way up the side of the brisket. Add the Kitchen Bouquet and the carrots. Return the pot to the heat, cover it, and lower the heat so that the cooking liquid is at a low simmer. Check every 20 minutes or so to make sure the liquid doesn’t boil away, adding ¼ cup boiling water as necessary.

Simmer for about 1 ½ hours, until the meat is fork-tender (try a piece to check). Then place the potatoes around the brisket and sprinkle them with salt and paprika. Using baking potatoes thickens the juices slightly, and the paprika will make its way into the juices and give them additional color and flavor.

Serve with additional potatoes or broad noodles. The leftovers are even better than the first day.

Linda Chalmer Zemel, Buffalo Alternative Medicine Examiner and Buffalo Books Examiner. Originally published on Examiner.com

As a former cookie-baking, station wagon-driving soccer mom, sure, I get it when columnist John Rosemond wonders about the ratio of family time to kids’ activities. But his statement that activities that school kids need parents to take them to and watch them doing cause stress doesn’t provide an “aha moment.” In his column, Rosemond said:

“How about spending a disproportionate amount of family time taking children to and watching them in activities that will be completely irrelevant to anything they will be doing as adults?”

Parents on the sidelines laughingly compete with each other over the fact that they have already been to twenty-four soccer games and there is still most of the season left. But family life isn’t diminished by spending warm summer days on the sideline. Instead, time on the sidelines is part of family life and enhances it.

Relationships and reaching out to others are part of what kids should learn in their family life. Carpool moms and dads have opportunities to become long term friends attending each other’s life events with joy, compassion, or sorrow as needed. Parents don’t have to go looking for a manufactured way to teach their kids empathy and compassion when it is sitting right in the back seat.

In my family’s experience, soccer became an extension of our own neighborhood into the larger neighborhoods of our kids’ teams. Some of the moms and dads were chaperones when the teams went to Europe or Canada to play in travel-team tournaments. When a soccer mom died in an automobile accident when our sons were freshmen in college, virtually the entire high school team came home for the weekend from their various colleges to support their old teammate.

Not just for learning how a particular game is played, taking kids to and watching them in their activities provides models and experience for a family life of creative thinking, positive relationships with others, and fun as well as perseverance and cooperation. If family life if disproportionately insular, kids miss out on opportunities to see how other people live, think, and act in the world, essential to developing an internal compass for right and wrong. And they benefit from finding out on larger fields than their own families whether they shine at defense or are better placed as a striker.

Of course when kids are young, they need the generosity of others to get to their activities and someone they love and admire to enjoy their successes. But those are the templates for the feelings of happiness and success that all parents wish for their children. And the activities themselves help kids develop their ability to create their own game plans for decades to come.

Linda Chalmer Zemel, Buffalo Alternative Medicine Examiner and Buffalo Books Examiner. Originally published on Examiner.com

John Bisognano, M.D., Ph.D, an expert when it comes to hypertension, and Kevin Woolf, M.D., a cardiology fellow at the University of Rochester Medical Center, are featured in the September issue of the Journal of Clinical Hypertension. According to URMC  materials distributed to Science Daily, they have conducted the most inclusive review of non-drug interventions for treating hypertension ever done.

Bisognano, professor of Medicine and director of Outpatient Cardiology at the URMC, said: "Right now we're seeing a cultural shift where an increasing number of people want to avoid standard pharmaceuticals….We're also seeing a growing number of patients who require a large number of drugs to control their blood pressure and are looking for something else to help manage it."

Woolf was quoted as saying: "Patients have different backgrounds and different approaches to living their lives…. "This is where the art of medicine comes in; getting to know patients and what they will and will not embrace can help physicians identify different therapies that suit their patients' habits and that will hopefully make a difference for them."

A book review:  WITCH HUNT

To my readers: This book review that follows here was written by Emily Tanner, who reviews fiction for Examiner.com/Atlanta. Witch hunts today are like the witch hunts in 1692—in more ways that you would ever want to think.

WITCH HUNT is a novel of intrigue, a psychological drama, and an investigation into a mindset we thought had been forever banished from the national dialogue.

The book begins twenty-five years from now, when three additional eight-year presidential administrations have come and gone. Lee’s story takes her grandchildren back to 2010. With some trepidation, a medical anthropologist who guests on Lee’s radio show researches the apparent intrusion of the past into the present. Together, they find a frightening way out, all the more intriguing because it is immersed in both historical fact and situations straight out of today’s headlines.

The book is fiction, but includes my bibliography of books, documents, and journals about the Salem witch trials and politics. Amazon offers a free Kindle reader download to computers and other reading devices with the purchase of the book. Go to http://www.amazon.com/Witch-Hunt-ebook/dp/B005FI4O7M for the book’s Amazon page.

Thank goodness we don’t have a caste system in the US. But we are veering toward it each time we don’t alleviate problems with individual rights to healthy, affordable food.

Here’s one way to put our difficulties with eating and affordability into perspective: a PBS television program just last evening that explored a situation that occurs in India every 48 years. At intervals, bamboo trees produce round, green, appetizing fruit that attracts rats. But the rats, which reproduce in abundance when there is a food bonus like that, also strip other plants of food sources that people depend on for their own nutrition. The result is that human parents sometimes have to walk a hundred miles to find rice or other food for their families, who are literally starving because there food sources have been depleted.

Healthy eating, including too much weight gain, is a societal issue, and so we should seek societal as well as personal answers. In Buffalo, co-ops and urban farms are in the mix. Individuals can and do speak up and raise chickens in back yards, and some grow crops on empty lots. Vegetable gardens have been planted outside a community food bank.

In 1930 and 1931, the first seven volumes of the Nancy Drew series were written by Mildred A. Wirt Benson, the first Carolyn Keene. But the series spawned more mysteries than the identities of the ghostwriters. For one, where exactly is River Heights? On a rainy day in Buffalo last month, I was at the coop building at Antiques World and bought a set of 25 vintage Nancy Drews. That was enough to start me sleuthing.

Iowa, Benson’s home state, is most often guessed by Nancy Drew aficionados on an online survey on Nancydrewsleuths.com. Some others think Ohio, Illinois, or New Jersey. Others believe that the location, like other myths, shifted to meet the requirements of each storyteller who followed the publisher’s outlines. Besides, the first 34 volumes were revised by Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, who with her sister, Edna, continued their father’s Nancy dynasty after his death.  

You haven’t a clue what you are getting into when you start seeing Nancy Drew books as a meta-trove of clues about River Heights. Some Nancy mysteries are solved more easily than its location. We find out pretty quickly that Ned Nickerson wasn’t in the first six Nancy Drew books because Nancy didn’t meet him until Volume seven, The Clue in the Diary, published in 1932. At first she thought he was stealing her car. But Ned was interested in solving the mystery she was involved in, and used it as a reason to drop her house. She liked him enough to ask Dad what he thought of him.

“Nice boy,” he said. Inwardly he was thinking that she seemed to be more interested in Ned than in her other dates. But as Mildred A. Wirt Benson has Nancy tell us at the Lilac Inn in 1930, “For the present, my steady partner is going to be mystery.”

And close chums Bess and George didn’t show up until Volume 5 in 1931, in The Secret at Shadow Ranch. Right in paragraph one, we find out that, although we have never heard of them before, Bess and George are her two best friends. At a time when national spirits often mimicked the Great Depression, Nancy arrived by plane in Phoenix to meet them for a dude ranch vacation far from River Heights.

Dates, chums, and economic doldrums aside, what Nancy is interested in is deductive thinking--whether or not it is because losing Mom at age three propelled her into a young adulthood of looking for her. The same deductive thinking can produce River Heights for generations of readers for whom River Heights is never definitively pinpointed.

Let’s start with “Where is Twin Elms?” More about the context for this shortly, but first clue: It is located just a couple of miles out of Cliffwood, which we can figure out was situated between River Heights and the airport. Second, we are actually told that Twin Elms was “old Colonial home” built in 1785. That’s what Helen Corning says on page 25 of The Hidden Staircase, and she has street cred: the place belongs to her great-grandmother.

The third clue that completes the triangulation: The second ghostwriter, Walter Karig, in Volume 8, Nancy’s Mysterious Letter offers a detailed narration from start to finish of a drive Nancy takes with her chums, Bess and George. They are on their way to spend a weekend with their boyfriends away at college. Karig lasted only through volumes 8, 9, and 10, and then revealed to the Library of Congress that he had written them, a no-no for Carolyn Keene ghostwriters.

We have to use deductive reasoning like Nancy’s accompanied by a little of her intuition and preparedness to find the clues. Once we have River Heights by the scruff, then we can call them “evidence.” But not before, as her criminal lawyer father might have cautioned her.

When Nancy takes Dad to the airport the morning she and her friend Helen go to Twin Elms, he says that when he returns, he will stop off at Cliffwood on his way home. He doesn’t say he will detour to get there or go out of his way to get there, or that it will be a nuisance but he will get there.

“Stopping off” has a nice, casual, unhurried, “It’s on my way, anyway” ring to it, clearly a clue that it will take place enroute to River Heights. It is entirely likely that Nancy would drive maybe three quarters of an hour from River Heights to the airport to see Dad off, and that Helen lives somewhere in between but closer the airport. Cliffwood is about three-quarters of an hour from there, in 1930 probably 20 miles going 35 miles per hour.

We know this because after Nancy sees Dad off, she drives to Helen’s house. They drive a bit while Helen tells her she had gotten engaged just the evening before. There is the obligatory stop at the curb for a hug, and then the discussion of wedding plans for the rest of the drive to Cliffwood. But they are there “before they knew it.” True, times flies when you are having fun, but “before they knew it”?  Maybe twenty minutes? A half hour?

When they get to Cliffwood, Helen tells her that Twin Oaks is about two miles out of town: “Go down Main Street and turn right at the fork.” It takes ten more minutes, the narrator says, until the girls see it from the road, with its stone wall and tall elms, oaks, and maples. So they must have had to ride down Main Street through Cliffwood for a few miles before taking the fork, at maybe 35 miles an hour on the average--no interstate with a 65-mile speed limit.

So Cliffwood might reasonably be a half-hour from the airport, on the way back to River Heights. And what is Twin Elms like? It’s an old Colonial mansion build in 1785. Out of the towns suggested on the Nancy Sleuth site, only New Jersey would satisfy the location of an old Colonial mansion built in 1785. Ohio and Iowa don’t make it for the same reason that New Jersey does: There couldn’t have been an old Colonial home in those states built in 1785.

Surveyors were sent into Ohio in 1796, according to an annotated atlas, and they had to camp along the Cuyahoga River in what now is Cleveland. So a 1785 Colonial mansion didn’t welcome them. The British had warships on Lake Erie until the War of 1812. In the 1800’s, settlers from Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky moved in to establish farms near the borders of their home states, and onto land already set aside in the Western Reserve for Connecticut settlers.

Iowa housed a major trail that ‘49er’s took west through Des Moines, spawning a wagon-train station in Council Bluffs. Settled by immigrants who moved west between 1850 and 1880, Iowa was hardly the spot where an old Colonial home would have been erected in 1785.

More corroboration: In volume 8, Nancy’s Mysterious Letter, the first one written by someone else, Nancy stops by the postal inspector’s office in River Heights to have some letters X-rayed. To a Nancy reader, this is just an ordinary sleuthing errand, but nonetheless one that can be mined for clues. It doesn’t disappoint us. Immediately afterward the efficient X-ray, on page 105, she picks up Bess and George so they can all visit their boyfriends at college for the weekend, and “they rode toward Emerson.” That’s where Ned goes to school, and we already know he belongs to a fraternity there because he was wearing his pin when Nancy met him in Volume 7.

As the girls drive along, Nancy tells them what she found out at the post office. Plump but pretty Bess spots a tearoom where they can stop for lunch and says that it has been a long time since breakfast. Now, we know that Nancy had been ready to leave the house since 8, because we are told that on page 103. How long could X-raying the letters take at the post office? Nancy asks that very question of Mr. Wernick, the postal inspector. He advises her to wait, and it takes the technician just a few minutes to get the results.

Let’s say that the post office in a town in the 1930’s might have opened at 8:30 or 9. So perhaps it’s 9 or 9:15 by the time she leaves there to get Bess and George at their houses. They load their luggage, Nancy says hi to their moms, maybe there is a five or ten minute drive from one to the other, and they are off, riding toward Emerson by 9:45 or10.

There is chatter that deserves direct quotes in the text before Bess gets hungry, so maybe there is also more small talk that didn’t make it into quotation marks. It could reasonably be a little before noon when they stopped for lunch because, as Bess says, it’s a long time since breakfast. Nancy even cautions Bess and George that they “must not spend too much time” and the narrator confirms that “They ate quickly.” (105).

The plot thickens. Still riding two hours after lunch at the tearoom, the girls see the towers of Emerson College (105). As young Nancy Drew fans find out when they are old enough to start their college tours, Emerson College is in Boston, about a four-hour ride from the New York City suburbs. Of course, in the 1930’s, Nancy and her chums would have had a longer ride because cars didn’t go as fast and speed limits were different.

If they left the tearoom around 12:30 and arrived at Emerson College at say 2:30, Ned comments that they made good time make sense (106). Then a short time later, Burt, George’s date, has to go to a rehearsal for the play he will be in that evening. An afternoon rehearsal the same day as the play might go for over two hours, perhaps a run-through with notes from a previous dress rehearsal. If it started at 3:00, the cast would have dinner at 5:30 or so and be back by 7 to dress. The play would start at 8.

There are clues to New Jersey again in Volume 10, Password to Larkspur Lane, when Ned and his two buddies just happen to be hired as camp counselors at the same time that Nancy and her two chums have made arrangements to be on the same lake solving another mystery.

On page 96, “Tons of ocean sand had been transported overland to make a beach for the camp.”  Nancy would pounce on the words “ocean” and “overland” if she were reading this book.  If she were writing this article, she would say (after offering to set the table),  ‘It is unlikely that ocean beach sand would be taken overland to a camp in the Midwest during the Great Depression. We must be somewhere in the original thirteen colonies, don’t you agree, and not far from the ocean?’  Trucking all that sand to Ohio or Iowa just defies the kind of common sense, not to mention budgetary considerations, that a summer camp owner would have had in the 1930’s, or in 1966 when this volume was revised.

Intrepid explorers will latch on immediately to a shiny clue in Volume 12, The Message in the Hollow Oak, after Benson took back the reins. Nancy has an opportunity to visit her Aunt Eloise in New York City. Of course she flies there. Bess and George arrive at noon to take her to the airport and she has reached her aunt’s apartment house by mid-afternoon. Three hours could mean there was a airport maybe a three quarter of an hour from the Drew residence in River Heights. And just suppose it was at least a half-hour cab ride from a New York City airport to Aunt Eloise’s apartment. That leaves maybe one-and-a-half to two hours for checking in and getting on the plane, the flight itself, and then reclaiming baggage and getting a cab.  New Jersey leaves Iowa, Ohio, and Illinois in the dust.

Deductive reasoning can get you far. Especially if you can unstick your partner’s foot from a rocky crag while skindiving; win a golf tournament with a bandaged hand in the afternoon after chasing a ghost down over a rickety bridge in the morning; and live to confront counterfeiters in a hidden cave because you have tallied the time between a warning bell and rushing waters that would drown anyone else.

Before “24,” McGyver, and Charlie’s Angels, there was Nancy Drew. And because she still exists, River Heights has to have a location, like Neverland does, if only we are brave and smart enough to find it.

The Buffalo Books column writes about authors, events, and books linked to the greater Buffalo area. Linda Chalmer Zemel has been a News Book Reviewer for The Buffalo News on contemporary novels. She retired from SUNY Monroe Community College as adjunct assistant professor of English. Currently she teaches writing at Medaille College, where she has also taught Adolescent Education to prospective secondary school English teachers in the Graduate School of Education. She is also the Buffalo Alternative Medicine Examiner for Examiner.com.

http://www.examiner.com/alternative-medicine-in-buffalo/commentary-reading-and-the-need-for-belonging-turn-out-to-be-related You haven’t got a clue: Triangulating River Heights

By Linda Chalmer Zemel

In 1930 and 1931, the first seven volumes of the Nancy Drew series were written by Mildred A. Wirt Benson, the first Carolyn Keene. But the series spawned more mysteries than the identities of the ghostwriters. For one, where exactly is River Heights? On a rainy day in Buffalo last month, I was at the coop building at Antiques World and bought a set of 25 vintage Nancy Drews. That was enough to start me sleuthing.

Iowa, Benson’s home state, is most often guessed by Nancy Drew aficionados on an online survey on Nancydrewsleuths.com. Some others think Ohio, Illinois, or New Jersey. Others believe that the location, like other myths, shifted to meet the requirements of each storyteller who followed the publisher’s outlines. Besides, the first 34 volumes were revised by Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, who with her sister, Edna, continued their father’s Nancy dynasty after his death. 

You haven’t a clue what you are getting into when you start seeing Nancy Drew books as a meta-trove of clues about River Heights. Some Nancy mysteries are solved more easily than its location. We find out pretty quickly that Ned Nickerson wasn’t in the first six Nancy Drew books because Nancy didn’t meet him until Volume seven, The Clue in the Diary, published in 1932. At first she thought he was stealing her car. But Ned was interested in solving the mystery she was involved in, and used it as a reason to drop her house. She liked him enough to ask Dad what he thought of him.

“Nice boy,” he said. Inwardly he was thinking that she seemed to be more interested in Ned than in her other dates. But as Mildred A. Wirt Benson has Nancy tell us at the Lilac Inn in 1930, “For the present, my steady partner is going to be mystery.”

And close chums Bess and George didn’t show up until Volume 5 in 1931, in The Secret at Shadow Ranch. Right in paragraph one, we find out that, although we have never heard of them before, Bess and George are her two best friends. At a time when national spirits often mimicked the Great Depression, Nancy arrived by plane in Phoenix to meet them for a dude ranch vacation far from River Heights.

Dates, chums, and economic doldrums aside, what Nancy is interested in is deductive thinking--whether or not it is because losing Mom at age three propelled her into a young adulthood of looking for her. The same deductive thinking can produce River Heights for generations of readers for whom River Heights is never definitively pinpointed.

Let’s start with “Where is Twin Elms?” More about the context for this shortly, but first clue: It is located just a couple of miles out of Cliffwood, which we can figure out was situated between River Heights and the airport. Second, we are actually told that Twin Elms was “old Colonial home” built in 1785. That’s what Helen Corning says on page 25 of The Hidden Staircase, and she has street cred: the place belongs to her great-grandmother.

The third clue that completes the triangulation: The second ghostwriter, Walter Karig, in Volume 8, Nancy’s Mysterious Letter offers a detailed narration from start to finish of a drive Nancy takes with her chums, Bess and George. They are on their way to spend a weekend with their boyfriends away at college. Karig lasted only through volumes 8, 9, and 10, and then revealed to the Library of Congress that he had written them, a no-no for Carolyn Keene ghostwriters.

We have to use deductive reasoning like Nancy’s accompanied by a little of her intuition and preparedness to find the clues. Once we have River Heights by the scruff, then we can call them “evidence.” But not before, as her criminal lawyer father might have cautioned her.

When Nancy takes Dad to the airport the morning she and her friend Helen go to Twin Elms, he says that when he returns, he will stop off at Cliffwood on his way home. He doesn’t say he will detour to get there or go out of his way to get there, or that it will be a nuisance but he will get there.

“Stopping off” has a nice, casual, unhurried, “It’s on my way, anyway” ring to it, clearly a clue that it will take place enroute to River Heights. It is entirely likely that Nancy would drive maybe three quarters of an hour from River Heights to the airport to see Dad off, and that Helen lives somewhere in between but closer the airport. Cliffwood is about three-quarters of an hour from there, in 1930 probably 20 miles going 35 miles per hour.

We know this because after Nancy sees Dad off, she drives to Helen’s house. They drive a bit while Helen tells her she had gotten engaged just the evening before. There is the obligatory stop at the curb for a hug, and then the discussion of wedding plans for the rest of the drive to Cliffwood. But they are there “before they knew it.” True, times flies when you are having fun, but “before they knew it”?  Maybe twenty minutes? A half hour?

When they get to Cliffwood, Helen tells her that Twin Oaks is about two miles out of town: “Go down Main Street and turn right at the fork.” It takes ten more minutes, the narrator says, until the girls see it from the road, with its stone wall and tall elms, oaks, and maples. So they must have had to ride down Main Street through Cliffwood for a few miles before taking the fork, at maybe 35 miles an hour on the average--no interstate with a 65-mile speed limit.

So Cliffwood might reasonably be a half-hour from the airport, on the way back to River Heights. And what is Twin Elms like? It’s an old Colonial mansion build in 1785. Out of the towns suggested on the Nancy Sleuth site, only New Jersey would satisfy the location of an old Colonial mansion built in 1785. Ohio and Iowa don’t make it for the same reason that New Jersey does: There couldn’t have been an old Colonial home in those states built in 1785.

Surveyors were sent into Ohio in 1796, according to an annotated atlas, and they had to camp along the Cuyahoga River in what now is Cleveland. So a 1785 Colonial mansion didn’t welcome them. The British had warships on Lake Erie until the War of 1812. In the 1800’s, settlers from Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky moved in to establish farms near the borders of their home states, and onto land already set aside in the Western Reserve for Connecticut settlers.

Iowa housed a major trail that ‘49er’s took west through Des Moines, spawning a wagon-train station in Council Bluffs. Settled by immigrants who moved west between 1850 and 1880, Iowa was hardly the spot where an old Colonial home would have been erected in 1785.

More corroboration: In volume 8, Nancy’s Mysterious Letter, the first one written by someone else, Nancy stops by the postal inspector’s office in River Heights to have some letters X-rayed. To a Nancy reader, this is just an ordinary sleuthing errand, but nonetheless one that can be mined for clues. It doesn’t disappoint us. Immediately afterward the efficient X-ray, on page 105, she picks up Bess and George so they can all visit their boyfriends at college for the weekend, and “they rode toward Emerson.” That’s where Ned goes to school, and we already know he belongs to a fraternity there because he was wearing his pin when Nancy met him in Volume 7.

As the girls drive along, Nancy tells them what she found out at the post office. Plump but pretty Bess spots a tearoom where they can stop for lunch and says that it has been a long time since breakfast. Now, we know that Nancy had been ready to leave the house since 8, because we are told that on page 103. How long could X-raying the letters take at the post office? Nancy asks that very question of Mr. Wernick, the postal inspector. He advises her to wait, and it takes the technician just a few minutes to get the results.

Let’s say that the post office in a town in the 1930’s might have opened at 8:30 or 9. So perhaps it’s 9 or 9:15 by the time she leaves there to get Bess and George at their houses. They load their luggage, Nancy says hi to their moms, maybe there is a five or ten minute drive from one to the other, and they are off, riding toward Emerson by 9:45 or10.

There is chatter that deserves direct quotes in the text before Bess gets hungry, so maybe there is also more small talk that didn’t make it into quotation marks. It could reasonably be a little before noon when they stopped for lunch because, as Bess says, it’s a long time since breakfast. Nancy even cautions Bess and George that they “must not spend too much time” and the narrator confirms that “They ate quickly.” (105).

The plot thickens. Still riding two hours after lunch at the tearoom, the girls see the towers of Emerson College (105). As young Nancy Drew fans find out when they are old enough to start their college tours, Emerson College is in Boston, about a four-hour ride from the New York City suburbs. Of course, in the 1930’s, Nancy and her chums would have had a longer ride because cars didn’t go as fast and speed limits were different.

If they left the tearoom around 12:30 and arrived at Emerson College at say 2:30, Ned comments that they made good time make sense (106). Then a short time later, Burt, George’s date, has to go to a rehearsal for the play he will be in that evening. An afternoon rehearsal the same day as the play might go for over two hours, perhaps a run-through with notes from a previous dress rehearsal. If it started at 3:00, the cast would have dinner at 5:30 or so and be back by 7 to dress. The play would start at 8.

There are clues to New Jersey again in Volume 10, Password to Larkspur Lane, when Ned and his two buddies just happen to be hired as camp counselors at the same time that Nancy and her two chums have made arrangements to be on the same lake solving another mystery.

On page 96, “Tons of ocean sand had been transported overland to make a beach for the camp.”  Nancy would pounce on the words “ocean” and “overland” if she were reading this book.  If she were writing this article, she would say (after offering to set the table),  ‘It is unlikely that ocean beach sand would be taken overland to a camp in the Midwest during the Great Depression. We must be somewhere in the original thirteen colonies, don’t you agree, and not far from the ocean?’  Trucking all that sand to Ohio or Iowa just defies the kind of common sense, not to mention budgetary considerations, that a summer camp owner would have had in the 1930’s, or in 1966 when this volume was revised.

Intrepid explorers will latch on immediately to a shiny clue in Volume 12, The Message in the Hollow Oak, after Benson took back the reins. Nancy has an opportunity to visit her Aunt Eloise in New York City. Of course she flies there. Bess and George arrive at noon to take her to the airport and she has reached her aunt’s apartment house by mid-afternoon. Three hours could mean there was a airport maybe a three quarter of an hour from the Drew residence in River Heights. And just suppose it was at least a half-hour cab ride from a New York City airport to Aunt Eloise’s apartment. That leaves maybe one-and-a-half to two hours for checking in and getting on the plane, the flight itself, and then reclaiming baggage and getting a cab.  New Jersey leaves Iowa, Ohio, and Illinois in the dust.

Deductive reasoning can get you far. Especially if you can unstick your partner’s foot from a rocky crag while skindiving; win a golf tournament with a bandaged hand in the afternoon after chasing a ghost down over a rickety bridge in the morning; and live to confront counterfeiters in a hidden cave because you have tallied the time between a warning bell and rushing waters that would drown anyone else.

Before “24,” McGyver, and Charlie’s Angels, there was Nancy Drew. And because she still exists, River Heights has to have a location, like Neverland does, if only we are brave and smart enough to find it.

Linda Chalmer Zemel, Buffalo Alternative Medicine Examiner and Buffalo Books Examiner. Originally published on Examiner.com

Westminster Presbyterian Church, the Islamic Society of the Niagara Frontier, and Temple Beth Zion are working together on Sunday, May 22, 2011 in their annual project called Mitzvah Day. Congregants will go out together in teams of from five to twenty people to twenty-six social service sites, some of which are perfect for families working together.

Captains for each site come from all three congregations, and have worked together to create opportunities for service and benefits that will last all year. They will be gardening at several locations, including the Martin Luther King Park, Benedict House, Conner’s Children’s Center, Compass House, Gilda’s Club, Tifft Nature Preserve; learning to build with Habitat for Humanity; cleaning and cooking at Friends of the Night People and Ronald McDonald House; sewing and knitting to benefit Haven House and The Community Afghan Project; building playground sandboxes at the Jewish Community Center, hosting a party for chronically ill children at Women and Children’s Hospital, just to name a few.