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Written by Joanne Wallenstein

Published: 15 June 2011

Created: 15 June 2011

Last Updated: 15 June 2011

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It’s June in Scarsdale … a time for proms, moving up ceremonies, end of year activities and fun. For parents, it is a time for milestones in their children’s lives -- the completion of a grade, the end of elementary school and for some, high school graduation. However, the recent news about Lauren Spierer at Indiana University has cast a pall over this joyous time and a shadow across the entire community.

In a school district as small as Edgemont, with only 144 students in the graduating class, the Spierer’s are well known and their daughters have crossed paths with a wide swath of their neighbors. Everyone seems heartsick about her disappearance and after they express concern for her, they often say something like “there but for the grace of God go I.” Lauren’s disappearance has highlighted the fragility of our lives and the inability of parents to protect their children, especially when some attend college hundreds of miles away.

Edgemont mom Caroline Tzelios sent in the following on how Lauren has touched the community:

As the buses headed toward 6th grade camp departed on Monday morning, parents spoke of the search for Lauren Spierer. A concerned mother summed up her feelings, "It is difficult enough to wave good bye to your 11 year old as he leaves for just five days with his friends -- what must the Spierers be going through after not knowing where their daughter is for over a week. My heart goes out to them and I pray every night that there will be news soon." Everyone agreed that the situation is heart breaking, every parent's worst nightmare.

Wherever you go in Edgemont, parents talk about Lauren and everyone's hope is the same: that she be found alive and safe and comes home soon. In a small community where everyone knows each other, many families feel like a member of their own family has gone missing. It has been a real wake up call in Edgemont about the dangers that all the children face when out in the world.

In Scarsdale, a high school senior, who headed out to Bloomington this week for her student orientation at Indiana University reports, “The mood on campus seems a little eerie, seeing [Lauren’s] picture everywhere, police, and search parties all over.”

Here at home, parents with college-aged children have Lauren on their minds as well. One Scarsdale Dad with a daughter who just completed freshman year said, “I tell my kids that nothing good ever happens after midnight.” But what good does that do when college parties often begin at midnight?

Another Mom was perplexed about why this generation of students seems to party to excess. Among students it appears to be a badge of honor to get sick, black out or end up in the hospital. Though it was legal to drink at 18 years old when most of the parents came of age, few of us remember our peers abusing alcohol to this extent. Schools have stepped up education on substance abuse. However the message does not seem to be getting through.

I always tell my kids to travel in packs and never go out alone. But according to students at Indiana University, the blocks where Lauren was last seen were well traveled and generally thought to be safe. At some point, students need to go home to their own dorms or apartments and inevitably they do walk alone.

In sum, all of our good advice cannot protect our children from the risks of the real world. I guess we just have to accept that even when our kids do everything right, things can go wrong. Whether we knew Lauren personally or not, we all feel the Spierer’s pain and hold out hope that she will be found.

Many families are planning to attend a fundraiser for Lauren at Edgemont High School on Thursday night. June 16 to send positive thoughts to the Spierers. Here are the details:

The extended Edgemont community is invited to "Take A Stand to # Find Lauren," a fundraiser for the Find Lauren Fund, this Thursday, June 16, 7 p.m. at the EHS Football Field at Edgemont Junior Senior High School. Bring your mats, towels, $10 or $20 bills and learn or enjoy simple yoga moves while sending positive energy and thoughts to bring Lauren back to Edgemont. 100% of the donations will go to the Find Lauren fund. Even if yoga is not your thing, you are invited join the Edgemont community to show the Spierers our love and support.

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Published: 19 June 2011

Created: 19 June 2011

Last Updated: 24 June 2011

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News that the neighboring home at 140 Saxon Woods Road was soon to be demolished sent Toril Utheim Hanna of 138 Saxon Woods Road on an unusual quest. In speaking with the former resident of the small, wood frame home, Hanna learned that the woman was a descendant of runaway slave Robert Purdy, (1820-1890) who came to Scarsdale in 1840 from Louisiana, possibly on the underground railway. Settling in Saxon Woods, Purdy eventually became a landowner himself, purchasing five acres of land from George A. Willets in 1856 for $277. Since that time, four generations of Robert Purdy’s direct descendants have lived on homes on the land until February 2011 when 140 Saxon Woods Rd was sold to the Parma Construction Corporation.

Curious to learn more, Hanna located Donna Lockley, a fourth generation direct descendant of Robert Purdy who provided invaluable information and copies of documents pertaining to Robert Purdy and his descendants, enabling the discovery of historic information about the Scarsdale Saxon Woods Road "Robert Purdy Community." In addition, Hanna met with Hazel Gill, a great-grandaughter of Robert Purdy who grew up on Saxon Woods Road. According to Hanna, “One piece of information led to another. Research continued and the pieces of the puzzle were, and are still, coming together! It is indeed a very interesting and colorful landscape/masterpiece of a picture/painting in progress.”

According to an 1860 census, Robert Purdy had two cows, a horse and chickens and grew Indian corn on the property. The land was still used as a farm in the 1920’s and William E. Peterson Purdy's great grandson told Hanna that “we were hardworking people – there were no parties in those times -- we would work on our farm, then go off to our day jobs and then return to the farm at night.” Women did domestic work in Scarsdale homes and they were apparently treated well. Esther Purdy, on of Purdy's four daughters, ran a laundry service at the home. Hazel Gill told Hanna that when she was a girl there was a curfew at night for blacks who were ordered to return home after dark.

Hanna, a Norwegian native, said that she sees similarities between the tale of the Purdy’s and others who have been disenfranchised. She has lived all over the world and worked for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Married to an American, who currently works for the United Nations, at one point Hanna lived in Jordan and worked with Iraqi refugees. During that time she gained insight into what it means to flee with your personal belongings on your back and lose your identity. When Hanna moved to the United States with her husband she did not have a green card – and therefore could not work, travel or even have her own credit card.  Her work to uncover the story of the Purdy family is partially motivated by her own quest to establish a national identity with roots and origins.

Hanna’s discovery dovetailed with an ongoing research project on Scarsdale’s African American Heritage led by Scarsdale Middle

1907 Map of Scarsdale Showing Purdy Estate

Waltzman and Hanna are researching original documents such as the land deed, ownership maps, farming records and census documents. They have already learned that Robert Purdy registered for the Civil War Draft in June, 1863 and that he began an African Methodist Episcopal Zion congregation in his home. In 1902, this congregation built the Barry Avenue AME Zion Church in Mamaroneck, and Purdy’s descendents still attend the services held there to this day.

According to a letter Hanna and Waltzman have drafted for the Committee on Historic Preservation, “It appears that Robert Purdy was an influential and important representative and leader of the local free black men and women, commanding great respect and faith. When he died in 1890, an impressive tombstone was erected at his grave in the Greenwood Union Cemetery in Rye.”

Though Hanna is not taking a position on whether or not the home at 140 Saxon Woods Road should be preserved, she does hope to document the interesting history of the land and the homes and preserve the story for future generations. She will present the facts and original documents to the committee on Historic Preservation on Tuesday night June 21 at 8 pm at Scarsdale Village Hall.

Update: June 23: Toril Hanna, Elizabeth Waltzman, a group of descendants of Robert Purdy and concerned neighbors attended the meeting of the Historic Preservation Committee Meeting June 21, 2011. In an eloquent presentation, Hanna presented a wealth of information to the committee on the Robert Purdy Community on Saxon Woods Road.

Each of the committee members was given a folder that included copies of historic maps, deeds, census data, a civil war draft registration and information that verified the presence of the community and the historic relevance of the property. Hanna told the committee that Purdy must have been an “extraordinary man” as after only seven years in Scarsdale this runaway slave was able to purchase 5 acres of land from George Willets. Waltzman, the Scarsdale Middle School librarian, explained, “140 Saxon Woods Road has a rich history and the property stayed in the family for 155 years until February of 2011 when it was sold to the developer.” She told the committee that they are bumping into new information about the community every day and called it a “part of Scarsdale’s visual and oral history.”

Helen Parnell Daniels, an African American woman who grew up on Saxon Woods Road, told the group that during her youth she “was one of the only blacks who lived here at the time.” She urged the committee to give the information “consideration – not just to the family, but because of what it means to the Village of Scarsdale.”

She ended by saying, “Do not negate the historical perspective of blacks and slaves in the Village of Scarsdale.”

Caroline Gibson, a neighbor at 146 Saxon Woods Road, bought her house in 1985 from the Peterson family who are also descendents of the Purdys. She said she spoke to an historian at the time who said that the property once sheltered runaway slaves en route to emancipation in Canada.

Though Hanna had not originally come to the committee to save the house, her persuasive presentation, coupled with the input from others in the room, convinced the Committee Chair to hold over the application for demolition. He told Hanna that “it behooves us to go through this material,” and that she had provided the committee with a wealth of information to consider. He indicated that he would share it with Village Historian Eric Rothschild and discuss it with the committee. So until the committee can make a determination of its historical significance the house will stand.

In other news from the meeting, the committee ruled that a 1925 home on Fairview Road did not have historical significance and thus could be demolished. Since no one appeared at the meeting on behalf of the application for 4 Windmill Circle, that item was held over on the agenda.

14 Fairview Road - 1925

4 Windmill Circle - 1925

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Published: 07 June 2011

Created: 07 June 2011

Last Updated: 07 June 2011

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Scarsdale resident, PR executive and media watcher Drew Kerr was very surprised when he received the May issue of Westchester Magazine in the mail. The cover story featured “Beautiful People, 21 Best Looking Residents” and Kerr says his “eyes popped” when he saw it. In his view, “we have enough shallowness in our towns, much less the world... do we really need this when adults and children are battered with self-image issues from the media and peers?”

Apparently he wasn’t alone. When the June issue of the magazine came out, he noted that many also found the piece offensive and he was even more surprised by the Editor’s response.

He wrote about the issue in his blog post, Drew Kerr’s PR Rock and Roll as a case study on how to handle the backlash when something goes wrong.

Read his advice here and click on the link below to read more from Kerr:

Sometimes companies gamble on a product or idea, whether they aware of it or not, and the results can possibly backfire. At those times, you have to suck it up and admit you may have been wrong, and here's how you will fix it for the immediate future. It's crisis communications 101.

Here is a story of a publisher who rolled the dice on a very sensitive topic, felt the backlash, but bungled the response.

Westchester Magazine, a beautiful, slick suburban publication which I regularly read, did the equivalent of waving a red flag in front of an angry bull last month: it published a cover story on the "21 Best Looking Residents."

Before I even cracked the first page, I thought to myself, "Uh oh."

My gut reaction was: we have enough shallowness in our towns, much less the world... do we really need this when adults and children are battered with self-image issues from the media and peers... middle school kids go through the anxiety ringer with cliques and cyberbullying -- is this something they should see... how the heck can you pick 21 people out of a county of 955,000 and say they are the "best looking?

According to the article, here's how they picked those 21 best-looking people: "We asked dozens of beauty pros, put out a call for nominations, queried our neighbors, friends and family to come up with this bevy of beauties of all ages, from all walks of life. Yes, we know that true beauty comes from within, yada, yada, yada -- but sometimes you just have to take these things at face value. Enjoy the scenery."

Who are these beauty pros, how many nominations were sent in, were they of themselves, who are the friends and family -- nobody knows. Thankfully, the youngest person profiled was 25 and not in school. While I'm not expecting Pulitzer-nominated investigative stories in my county magazine, you could see from 100 miles away that this was not going to go down well.

The next month's letters section of Westchester magazine bore that out. Here are excerpts:

* My jaw dropped when I saw your May cover. Are these 21 people really worthy of being singled out from the nearly one million Westchester residents, or is this simply an exercise in flattering a few connected individuals? Have we in Westchester become so shallow that we are actually interested in who your editorial staff deems to be beautiful? I’ve thrown the issue in the trash so that my children don’t get the wrong impression that who is or who isn’t “beautiful” is worthy of this sort of attention!

* Given Westchester’s great diversity (one of our most valued strengths), I was eager to see how your team would celebrate this great attribute. Now, I am stunned, having just thumbed through the feature’s 16 pages and seen not a single African American woman! Not one! Depending on your source, African Americans represent between 13.3 percent and 14.4 percent of the county’s population... I have a 14-year-old daughter who is beautiful by any standard. Unfortunately, I cannot let her see this issue because, by the standards of the editors of Westchester Magazine, which comes into our home each month, she isn’t beautiful at all. Or at least no one who looks like her is beautiful enough to be so recognized. And that’s a shame.

* Your May issue is why the suburbs are considered soulless, vapid, and uninspiring. Westchester County is rich in history and natural beauty, although anyone who reads your magazine would be hard pressed to find little more than articles dedicated to shopping and advertisements for cosmetic surgery. I’m canceling my subscription.

* Your magazine has reached an all-time low. What’s with your feature story about “21 Best Looking Residents?” Who cares?!!!

There was not one letter published in favor of the cover story.

Here is your classic scenario of a company gambling on something a bit edgy with distinct possible pitfalls, and getting whipped by some of its customers for it.

What would you expect as a response from the editor? An apology of some sort, right? We all make mistakes, and even if you didn't think this was one, you want to make some kind of amends with the offended customers. A little humbleness, perhaps?

But this was not the road taken in the editor's response (which I have to reproduce entirely here because of its breathtaking scope):

To think we were worried about engaged readership…Okay, you got us, Westchester: we’re suckers for a symmetrical face and expressive eyes.

We feel good admitting that, though, because we know we’re in good company. After all, the nominations for the article came from you and local experts in the beauty biz. That’s right. We may not be able to promise that these 21 lovely people are the absolute best-looking Westchester residents, but you certainly seemed to think so.

Frankly, we would have gone crazy if we’d had to make the list ourselves. We think you’re all so darn hot and wouldn’t imply for a second that anyone who wasn’t chosen is anything less. Of course, beauty isn’t everything. So, like a lot of the beautiful residents profiled in our pages, we urge you to “look under the surface,” i.e., our Table of Contents. In just the last two months, you’d find stories on the history of Westchester’s bridges, profiles of barrier-breakers like Dr. Yvonne Thornton (the first African American woman to be board certified in maternal-fetal medicine), a feature package on our LGBT community, not to mention a nod toward the natural beauty of our county’s common fish. You’ll see references to Malcolm X, Stravinsky, Yves Tanguy, Nabokov, and Shakespeare, who certainly never turned up his Elizabethan nose at “beauty too rich for use.”

Yes, Westchester is rich in history and natural beauty. It’s also rich in creative designers, restaurants on the cusp of environmental movements, and, yes, a gaggle of people fairer than a summer’s day. We love it all; we want to celebrate it all! And that brings us to diversity.

Our 21 beautiful residents (who run the gamut, Leo, of five different decades in age) and included one Puerto Rican, one Pakistani, one Irishman, one Siberian, one Chinese-Jamaican, one Dominican, one Indian, one African American man, and, yes, and one African American/West Indian woman. In striving for broad diversity without adhering to strict quotas (which don’t always capture the realities of our increasingly mixed heritage), we do hope that—unlike so much contemporary media—we communicated our firm belief that beauty flourishes in each of our communities.

So take a look at yourself in the mirror, Westchester: you’re lookin’ good.

I don't know how this editor's response is going over with the readers, but to me, this is what's known as a textbook excuse, not an apology. In the editor's mind, this seems to resolve the controversy, but perhaps in the minds of the readers, I'm not sure it did, and it could have possible made it worse.

There is no resolution, no "peace pipe," and no humbling.

I sent an e-mail to Westchester magazine Esther Davidowitz, asking her why there was no apology in her response, how many nominations were received as part of the voting process, who were the local beauty experts who voted, what kind of feedback did she expect from the story, and would she do the story differently the next time around? She did not reply.

Companies face irate customers all the time, sometimes more than others. Take a good look at that editor's reply because this is exactly what not to do.

1) PUTTING THE BLAME ON THE CUSTOMERS: Let me get this straight -- you're blaming us, the readers, for voting these 21 people in? Again, who did the voting? Who are the beauty experts? How many votes did you get out of the 955,000 residents of Westchester County? How many times did your friends and neighbors vote?

2) DIVERSION FROM THE CORE ISSUE: We admire you published articles about many different ethnicities and gender preferences in the past. You name dropped Shakespeare, Malcolm X and Stravinsky. OK, so you went to college and can refer to those people in the magazine. But what does that have to do with a dubious vote for the 21 best-looking people in the county? Those people and your other articles have nothing to do with this article.

3) TREATING THE TOPIC TOO LIGHTLY: "Take a look in the mirror, Westchester, you're lookin' good?" Put the pom-poms away. I don't know if anybody is laughing. If we're all "lookin' good," why are you singling out 21 of us? This kind of cheerleader talk is as plastic as the notion that there are 21 people who look better than the other 955,000 in Westchester. Good way to add fuel to the fire.

4) NO APOLOGY: Customers are ticked. There are some unhappy people and they've written in to tell you how they feel. As a matter of fact, there is not one positive letter published. Even if you think you are right, you owe an apology to those angry readers. You don't have to make a big deal about it. At least say "if you felt our story offended you, we are sorry. It was not our intention." You save face, you don't seem above it all, and perhaps you don't lose customers.

Read more from Drew Kerr's PR Rock and Roll here: