05/17/07 Westmore News Columnist Bart "The Bigot" Didden Contradicted By A Port Chester School Board Member And A Port Chester Trustee

The men behind an anonymous flier that was mailed out to registered voters during the Port Chester mayoral election campaign in March came to light during the past week and it was Westmore News columnist Bart Didden.

Westmore News Columnist Bart Didden, who was running on the Republican ticket for trustee until the trustee elections were postponed by a federal judge on March 2nd in connection with the voting rights lawsuit the village is currently facing, was questioned by the Department of Justice.

During that pretrial questioning, which took 3 ½ hours, Didden admitted that he co-authored the flier along with 12-year Board of Education member Dominic Bencivenga and Port Chester Trustee John Crane.

Crane and Bencivenga Say Bart Didden Is A Liar

However, John Crane and Dominic Bencivenga claimed they had nothing to do with writing the racist flier

They claim that they were merely called into Westmore News Columnist Bart Didden's office to look at the finished product.

"My involvement was he called me up and said to stop in his office," said attorney John Crane. "He handed me the flyer, I read it and said you're a sick fuck. I said it's campaign, not 'champaign.' Then we talked about the upcoming opening day and that was it."

"I don't think I even edited it," said Crane. "As I said to the attorney for the DOJ, he didn't need my contribution. I don't know why he called me to his office. I told him it was disgusting and it shouldn't see the light of day."

John Crane said he just assumed Westmore News Columnist Bart Didden wouldn't send it out.

But Bart Didden did, taking the envelopes to a mailbox in Greenwich himself.

Dominic Bencivenga said Westmore News Columnist Bart Didden gave him a call to come to his office one day, handed him the flyer and asked him to read it. "There was a whole section on the bottom regarding the City of Rye and I picked up a pen and crossed it out and asked why would he want to get into a confrontation with the City of Rye."

"I also said 'this is disgusting; you better tone this down' and flipped it back to Bart," said Dominic Bencivenga. I was only there for 10 minutes." Dominic Bencivenga said he had no idea who had actually written the piece.

Dominic Bencivenga said he didn't tell Westmore News Columnist Bart Didden not to send it out. "Bart is not the kind of individual you say that to," he said. "If Bart was going to send something like that out, it was his decision, not my decision. The next time I saw it was when I got it in the mail."

But Bart Didden Says Domminic Bencivenga And John Crane Are Liars

Bart Didden maintains it was not his idea to do the flyer but that of Dominic Bencivenga, John Crane and himself at a meeting a few weeks before the flyer was even created.

Bart Didden has been quoted in a press clip saying, "We knew we had to develop something that talked about issues, was hard hitting and that needed to start a conversation in this village about doing the right thing."

Westmore News Columnist Bart Didden has repeated said he is proudest of this section of the flier: "Don't elect carpet baggers, elect people who care about our history, heritage and what our kids will be told about us in the future. Are we to be known as racists or law abiding free Americans?"

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12/23/06 Verizon FIOS Cable Franchise Agreement May Be Ready For Public Comment On January 4th

The Village of Port Chester has been slow to approve the Verizon FIOS cable franchise.

After months and months of negotiations the village says they have a mutually agreeable cable franchise agreement that will allow Verizon to market its fiberoptic service for television programming to residents as a competitor to Cablevision.

The franchise agreement to provide cable competition in Port Chester was to have public comment on December 18th, but that hearing was cancelled at the last minute and rescheduled for January 4th

John Figliozzi from the Public Service Commission will be on hand at the hearing to answer any questions that may arise, he was not available on Dec. 18th.

Mr. Figliozzi facilitated the previous renewal agreement with Cablevision.

This will be a separate public hearing all by itself instead of including it as one segment of a full village board meeting.

Port Chester insiders say that there were still some loose threads with the public access and government access issues which had not been fully resolved.

The village offices will be moving to the former Horton School sometime in 2007, there must be temporary arrangements for equipment to broadcast the local government access channel from their current location in the Rye Town Office Building at 10 Pearl St. for future Verizon cable customers.

When the Port Chester Board of Trustees held a work session with Verizon on Dec. 4.

01/02/03 Art Show

Steve Lee Ceramics by Alfred New York artist Steve Lee were exhibited recently at the Clay Art Center in Port Chester

01/01/03 Police Blotter

The Port Chester Police Department said yesterday that they plan a sobriety checkpoint for early this month after arresting 10 drivers in four hours.

12/31/02 Births

OConnor

Melanie Claire a daughter Dec 14 to Angela and Michael O Connor at GreenwichConn Hospital

12/29/02 Port Chester Band News: Drumroll, Please! - New York Times‎

PORT CHESTER — It began almost a year ago, with a ''why not, let's try it'' attitude. Then came the letter: They had been accepted. Days, weeks, months of hard work followed, practice, practice, practice, and all the while, the suspense -- would they be able to raise the money to actually make the trip?

Now it's official: The Port Chester High School Band is marching toward the Orange Bowl. Thursday, they are slated to play during halftime at Pro Player Stadium in Miami, one of only 16 high school bands nationwide on the program, and the only one from the Northeast. Tomorrow, the plan is to meet at 4 a.m. at the high school parking lot, board buses for Kennedy International Airport, then fly to Florida. Virtually as soon as they arrive the 130 students in the band and color guard will practice for three hours, even before checking in to a hotel on the outskirts of Miami.

Tuesday and Wednesday, the band -- accompanied by Robert Vitti, its director, assorted staff members and a dozen parent/chaperones -- will participate in back-to-back competitions, parades and official Orange Bowl gatherings. By the time the University of Iowa Hawkeyes and the University of Southern California Trojans battle each other on the gridiron on Thursday evening, the band will have been going almost nonstop for 72 hours. The game will be broadcast on ABC at 8 p.m., and parents and friends will be watching at home, waiting for the halftime show, for a glimpse of their hometown band's big moment. As soon as the game and post-game party are over, it's on to the airport for a 4:45 a.m. flight home.

Rigorous? Yes. Exhausting? Probably. But no one is complaining. The band is what Len Savanella, volunteer publicity chairman and father of Elizabeth, color guard, and Victoria, mellophone, calls ''the pride of Port Chester.'' It is impossible, Mr. Savanella said, to overestimate its importance to the school's self-image.

''This is a really big thing -- I mean big,'' said Mr. Savanella, who by profession is owner of Chappaqua Stationery Store. ''We are a diverse group. There are kids whose parents commute in suits to Manhattan, and there are kids whose parents are laborers. Some of our students come from homes where no English is spoken -- Port Chester has a large population of people from everywhere in Central and South America.''

The school does well on New York State reading and math tests, he said, but lacks the image of its counterparts in the neighboring community of Rye, or other more affluent communities.

''We do a great job educating our children, but not everyone realizes that,'' Mr. Savanella said. ''They do, however, know that Port Chester has a killer band.''

The students themselves echo his sentiments. Andrew Lewensohn, freshman, tenor saxophone, said the band is something he and others start to aspire to when they are still in grade school. ''You want to be part of it,'' Andrew said.

Oscar Hernandez, sophomore, trumpet, said, ''It teaches you to work in a group -- when we do drills, everything must be precise and coordinated.''

Carlos Becerra, senior, snare drums, band president, said he wanted to make band music his life's work. ''I'm going to do this professionally,'' he said. ''I'm going to march in Drum Corps International. It's what I want to do for a living.''

Students start learning to play as early as fourth grade. They choose their instrument, often with the help of a teacher; there are three instrumental specialists in the elementary school. A large number of young people also take private lessons. Some parents hire professional teachers; others ask high school seniors to teach their fourth and fifth graders.

Instruments include woodwinds (clarinet, flute, piccolo and the various saxophones); brass (tuba, trombone, mellophone, baritone horn, trumpet and cornet); and various types of percussion, including snare and bass drums, which are harnessed to the musicians who march with them attached to their shoulders; and the more stationary percussion instruments -- xylophones, large bells -- whose players tend to stand in one spot during performances.

Practices are held twice a week, three hours each, at the school. In addition to the full band, there are offshoots -- a jazz band, a small brass ensemble, and other smaller groups that play at special events and at community centers and parties.

What Mr. Savanella calls a ''good number of kids'' go on to schools with music programs, or schools that are almost entirely devoted to music, such as the Berklee College of Music in Boston and the Manhattan School of Music. ''They take their music very seriously here,'' he said.

AT Port Chester High School, band is not an extracurricular activity. It is an elective course, for which a pupil gets full credit. The band meets every day, 8 to 8:45 a.m., first period of school. During competition season (September through November) there are competitions throughout the tristate area every weekend, sometimes as many as four in a two-day period. As Mr. Savanella writes in one of his many fund-raising letters: ''This is not a pep band or a halftime band. On this level, it is a performance of an entire unit -- musicians and color guard -- interpreting the music through movement. The program is between 8 and 10 minutes and is judged on speed of execution, precision and artistic effect. All music is memorized. The color guard uses flags, sabers, rifles and other props to bring the visual component to life. All parts of the program must flow together and complement each other.''

The band is partly financed by the school board, and partly by the nonprofit, all-volunteer Port Chester Band Association. Its annual budget for teachers, uniforms, transportation and some instruments (the larger ones, like tubas and trombones, are provided by the school) is approximately $100,000, $85,000 of which is raised by the association.

The cost for the Orange Bowl trip was $115,000. Each student had to raise $920 through door-to-door requests, selling ads in journals and selling crates of, appropriately enough, oranges. Association members solicited from personal acquaintances and businesses. The question was, would they make it.

The answer depended on whom and when you asked. In February, when the band sent tapes to the Orange Bowl committee, and in March, when they got the big yes to come on down, elation carried the day. The attitude was, ''We're going to make it happen'' -- although, as Mr. Savanella said, ''The logistics and financial responsibilities are enormous.''

There was some fund-raising and practice in spring and even in summer, but the big push began around the end of August, when band camp convened. Band camp is an annual ritual, two weeks of intense daily practice to prepare for the new season. Mr. Vitti introduced this year's music -- a medley of Stravinsky and Mussorgsky pieces he calls ''Russian Sketches'' -- and the sections -- woodwind, brass, percussion -- began familiarizing themselves with their parts. Band camp culminates with those sections coming together as a whole for the first time in the new season, spread out across the football field in strict formation, a combination of musicianship and choreography that requires excellent memory, coordination and concentration. The association newsletter warned against dehydration in the late summer heat and asked parents to bring iced drinks and cool towels -- an amusing contrast to the December issue, which requested ''comfort food -- thermoses of hot chocolate and cider'' and thermal underwear to protect against the long, cold practices beginning at dusk and ending in frigid darkness.

Things were coming together nicely aesthetically, but finances were another matter. Canisters in local shops were filling with coins, but otherwise response to the project was lagging. The honor of being accepted began to pale when the band thought it might have to turn down the invitation. ''It got pretty discouraging,'' one youngster said. ''Don't say my name or anything, but I started getting really kind of annoyed and upset that we weren't getting more money.'' Acceptance by the Orange Bowl committee was being heavily undercut by a sense of irony and bitterness: what a shame to be so near yet so far; to be good enough to play at the Bowl but not solvent enough to get there.

In October, after reviewing one particularly downbeat week, Mr. Savanella confided, ''I was ready to walk in front of a bus.'' And then, the turnaround, something out of a 1940's Hollywood movie. The Journal News, the local Gannett newspaper, ran an editorial urging residents of other communities to help make up the $25,000 still needed to avert the trip's cancellation.

12/29/02 Port Chester Band News: Drumroll, Please! - New York Times‎

PORT CHESTER — IT began almost a year ago, with a ''why not, let's try it'' attitude. Then came the letter: They had been accepted. Days, weeks, months of hard work followed, practice, practice, practice, and all the while, the suspense -- would they be able to raise the money to actually make the trip?

Now it's official: The Port Chester High School Band is marching toward the Orange Bowl. Thursday, they are slated to play during halftime at Pro Player Stadium in Miami, one of only 16 high school bands nationwide on the program, and the only one from the Northeast. Tomorrow, the plan is to meet at 4 a.m. at the high school parking lot, board buses for Kennedy International Airport, then fly to Florida. Virtually as soon as they arrive the 130 students in the band and color guard will practice for three hours, even before checking in to a hotel on the outskirts of Miami.

Tuesday and Wednesday, the band -- accompanied by Robert Vitti, its director, assorted staff members and a dozen parent/chaperones -- will participate in back-to-back competitions, parades and official Orange Bowl gatherings. By the time the University of Iowa Hawkeyes and the University of Southern California Trojans battle each other on the gridiron on Thursday evening, the band will have been going almost nonstop for 72 hours. The game will be broadcast on ABC at 8 p.m., and parents and friends will be watching at home, waiting for the halftime show, for a glimpse of their hometown band's big moment. As soon as the game and post-game party are over, it's on to the airport for a 4:45 a.m. flight home.

Rigorous? Yes. Exhausting? Probably. But no one is complaining. The band is what Len Savanella, volunteer publicity chairman and father of Elizabeth, color guard, and Victoria, mellophone, calls ''the pride of Port Chester.'' It is impossible, Mr. Savanella said, to overestimate its importance to the school's self-image.

''This is a really big thing -- I mean big,'' said Mr. Savanella, who by profession is owner of Chappaqua Stationery Store. ''We are a diverse group. There are kids whose parents commute in suits to Manhattan, and there are kids whose parents are laborers. Some of our students come from homes where no English is spoken -- Port Chester has a large population of people from everywhere in Central and South America.''

The school does well on New York State reading and math tests, he said, but lacks the image of its counterparts in the neighboring community of Rye, or other more affluent communities.

''We do a great job educating our children, but not everyone realizes that,'' Mr. Savanella said. ''They do, however, know that Port Chester has a killer band.''

The students themselves echo his sentiments. Andrew Lewensohn, freshman, tenor saxophone, said the band is something he and others start to aspire to when they are still in grade school. ''You want to be part of it,'' Andrew said.

Oscar Hernandez, sophomore, trumpet, said, ''It teaches you to work in a group -- when we do drills, everything must be precise and coordinated.''

Carlos Becerra, senior, snare drums, band president, said he wanted to make band music his life's work. ''I'm going to do this professionally,'' he said. ''I'm going to march in Drum Corps International. It's what I want to do for a living.''

Students start learning to play as early as fourth grade. They choose their instrument, often with the help of a teacher; there are three instrumental specialists in the elementary school. A large number of young people also take private lessons. Some parents hire professional teachers; others ask high school seniors to teach their fourth and fifth graders.

Instruments include woodwinds (clarinet, flute, piccolo and the various saxophones); brass (tuba, trombone, mellophone, baritone horn, trumpet and cornet); and various types of percussion, including snare and bass drums, which are harnessed to the musicians who march with them attached to their shoulders; and the more stationary percussion instruments -- xylophones, large bells -- whose players tend to stand in one spot during performances.

Practices are held twice a week, three hours each, at the school. In addition to the full band, there are offshoots -- a jazz band, a small brass ensemble, and other smaller groups that play at special events and at community centers and parties.

What Mr. Savanella calls a ''good number of kids'' go on to schools with music programs, or schools that are almost entirely devoted to music, such as the Berklee College of Music in Boston and the Manhattan School of Music. ''They take their music very seriously here,'' he said.

AT Port Chester High School, band is not an extracurricular activity. It is an elective course, for which a pupil gets full credit. The band meets every day, 8 to 8:45 a.m., first period of school. During competition season (September through November) there are competitions throughout the tristate area every weekend, sometimes as many as four in a two-day period. As Mr. Savanella writes in one of his many fund-raising letters: ''This is not a pep band or a halftime band. On this level, it is a performance of an entire unit -- musicians and color guard -- interpreting the music through movement. The program is between 8 and 10 minutes and is judged on speed of execution, precision and artistic effect. All music is memorized. The color guard uses flags, sabers, rifles and other props to bring the visual component to life. All parts of the program must flow together and complement each other.''

The band is partly financed by the school board, and partly by the nonprofit, all-volunteer Port Chester Band Association. Its annual budget for teachers, uniforms, transportation and some instruments (the larger ones, like tubas and trombones, are provided by the school) is approximately $100,000, $85,000 of which is raised by the association.

The cost for the Orange Bowl trip was $115,000. Each student had to raise $920 through door-to-door requests, selling ads in journals and selling crates of, appropriately enough, oranges. Association members solicited from personal acquaintances and businesses. The question was, would they make it.

The answer depended on whom and when you asked. In February, when the band sent tapes to the Orange Bowl committee, and in March, when they got the big yes to come on down, elation carried the day. The attitude was, ''We're going to make it happen'' -- although, as Mr. Savanella said, ''The logistics and financial responsibilities are enormous.''

There was some fund-raising and practice in spring and even in summer, but the big push began around the end of August, when band camp convened. Band camp is an annual ritual, two weeks of intense daily practice to prepare for the new season. Mr. Vitti introduced this year's music -- a medley of Stravinsky and Mussorgsky pieces he calls ''Russian Sketches'' -- and the sections -- woodwind, brass, percussion -- began familiarizing themselves with their parts. Band camp culminates with those sections coming together as a whole for the first time in the new season, spread out across the football field in strict formation, a combination of musicianship and choreography that requires excellent memory, coordination and concentration. The association newsletter warned against dehydration in the late summer heat and asked parents to bring iced drinks and cool towels -- an amusing contrast to the December issue, which requested ''comfort food -- thermoses of hot chocolate and cider'' and thermal underwear to protect against the long, cold practices beginning at dusk and ending in frigid darkness.

Things were coming together nicely aesthetically, but finances were another matter. Canisters in local shops were filling with coins, but otherwise response to the project was lagging. The honor of being accepted began to pale when the band thought it might have to turn down the invitation. ''It got pretty discouraging,'' one youngster said. ''Don't say my name or anything, but I started getting really kind of annoyed and upset that we weren't getting more money.'' Acceptance by the Orange Bowl committee was being heavily undercut by a sense of irony and bitterness: what a shame to be so near yet so far; to be good enough to play at the Bowl but not solvent enough to get there.

In October, after reviewing one particularly downbeat week, Mr. Savanella confided, ''I was ready to walk in front of a bus.'' And then, the turnaround, something out of a 1940's Hollywood movie. The Journal News, the local Gannett newspaper, ran an editorial urging residents of other communities to help make up the $25,000 still needed to avert the trip's cancellation.

It worked. Maybe it was the injunction to ''dust off your halo,'' or the request to please ''welcome a chance to help a group of hardworking young people reap the reward they have earned.'' Whatever, money began pouring in. Within weeks, it was a fait accompli that the band was going -- and not just by bus as originally planned, but by plane.

The program, replete with rousing upbeat and slow, melodious passages, was perfected. The uniforms were cleaned and ready: dress blue with red sashes, white gloves, black patent-leather shoes, and helmets with ''pickelhauben mit spitzen'' -- literally translated as pickle stabbers with spikes, structures that stick up from the helmets. The sound and look that Mr. Vitti calls ''collegian and traditional'' were polished.

Now the nuts and bolts of overseeing 115 teenagers on a big air and bus trip are all that is left. Chaperone meetings are being held to review protocol. Among the advice: search the young people's bags for any contraband cans of beer or flasks of liquor well beforehand, because airport officials will do it anyway. Make sure that everyone knows that curfews will be imposed -- midnight on New Year's Eve, for example -- and that free time will be limited and meals and beach parties will be attended en masse. Team up people who know and like each other for four-in-a-room sleeping arrangements.

12/28/02 Two Thumbs Up To The School Of The Holy Child

The School of the Holy Child in Rye, an independent Catholic school for girls in grades 5 through 12, a campus ministry coordinator helps students perform community service projects. For example, once a month, seventh and eighth graders go to a Port Chester Head Start program to read to pre-school students.

''Community service is living our mission,'' said Dorothy Harris, the middle school dean of students as well as the campus ministry coordinator. ''It sets the stage for how they'll think in the future. I'm laying the groundwork so they will continue to think of others, and understand it's important to take care of others.''

02/17/01 Arnold Bread's History in Port Chester

From Arnold's website, here is the history of this wonderful bread...

In March 1940, Dean and Betty Arnold baked the first two-dozen loaves of Arnold bread in a brick oven at the rear of a small house in Stamford, Connecticut. Placing their trust in superior ingredients, like unbleached spring wheat flour, honey, butter and eggs, they developed the golden rich bread that would soon become a leading premium brand with an international reputation.

Mr. Arnold established a baking business of his own because of a serious allergy to flour. After graduating from Columbia University, he worked for a large baking company until his allergies grew too severe to continue. In January 1940, with only $600 in severance pay, he and his wife, Betty, moved in with his uncle on a farm in Armonk, New York, and began baking.

Always believing there was a need for a better loaf of bread, Dean and Betty took their unique recipe and stoked up their first brick oven. Soon, the whole family was involved as relatives helped to slice, wrap and hand deliver the bread from house to house. By 1941, business was booming and the bakery needed to expand. Though he didn’t have a financial statement, Dean was granted a bank loan on the taste of his bread alone and moved the bakery to Port Chester, New York.

The growth continued. While vacationing in Florida in the 1950s, Dean and Betty heard complaints from relocated New Yorkers that they were not able to get quality premium bread like Arnold. So in 1959, the Arnolds took over a 24,000 square foot plant in Riviera Beach, Florida, and brought their bread to the sunshine state.

In the sixties, they built the largest bakery under one roof in the world, including the largest brick oven anywhere, in Greenwich, Connecticut. In 1971, Dean Arnold retired, but his famous recipes and techniques live on.

UPDATE:

Today, Arnold is a part of Bimbo Bakeries USA and the love of baking continues.