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The Old York Historical Society will host “Wings Over Wyncote: The story of the Wyncote Bird Club and the Work to Protect Birds” by Leigh Altadonna on March 8 at 7:30pm.

About the lecture:

Founded in April 1914, the Wyncote Bird Club pursued a mission to protect birds and their habitats. The “Club” has continued to thrive due to the incredible work of many important individuals who founded and led the “Club” from its founding and through to its transition in 1967 as a chapter of the National Audubon Society. Dr. Altadonna’s program will profile several of the individuals involved with the “Club” over the years. He will share images and anecdotes that profile some of these leaders and the contributions they made to stimulate broader interest in birds and their protection. Ernest Harold Baines, Ester Heacock, Florence Griscom, Edward Hicks Parry, and others are among the personalities Leigh will profile. Some selected activities of the Wyncote Bird Club will be shared. He will also spotlight some of the ways the “Club” influenced a cadre of individuals who have influenced the national and international conservation movement.

Lectures are FREE and open to the public both In-person in The John Barnes Room at Abington Friends Meeting and on Zoom. Login details will be posted day of the event.

The lecture series is sponsored by a grant from the Jenkinstown Lyceum. For more information, please call the Old York Road Historical Society at 215-886-8590.

About the presenter:

Leigh Altadonna is the current President of the Wyncote Audubon Society that serves Audubon members in major portions of Philadelphia and Montgomery Counties in Pennsylvania. He grew up in Glenside and developed a passion for birds and birding from his early association as a child with the Wyncote Bird Club and Briar Bush Nature Center. Leigh continued his pursuit of birds and their conservation through service with many organizations. Leigh had served four terms on the Board of the National Audubon Society and two terms on the National Audubon Society Action Fund Board. He currently serves on the Board of Bird Town Pennsylvania and as President of the Pennsylvania Audubon Council. Leigh is a retired from the Abington School District after 44 years of service. He worked as a teacher and became a principal after earning his doctorate at Teachers College, Colombia University. He went on to serve as Director of Curriculum and Assistant Superintendent before he retired.

WYNCOTE, PA — Another long-standing private high school in Montgomery County is closings its doors for good due to the coronavirus pandemic's devastating economic impacts.

Wyncote's Bishop McDevitt High School is the Archdiocese of Philadelphia's latest casualty. Officials also announced the closure of Center City's Hallahan Catholic Girls High School this week.

“Today is one of great sadness,” Archbishop Nelson Pérez said in making the announcement. The closures will be effective at the end of the 2020-21 school year.

Pérez said that McDevitt was operating at 40 percent enrollment capacity, and that forecasting reports indicated that this number would continue to go down into the future. Furthermore, the number of families making tuition assistance requests were up 46 percent this year, causing a "severe strain," according to Pérez.

>>High School In Montco Forced To Permanently Close Due To Pandemic

"I have an obligation to ensure that each of our students is being provided with the best educational experience possible and that their teachers and coaches are provided with the resources to fulfill that mission," Pérez said. "Given circumstances, those resources were depleting rapidly and could not be restored."

McDevitt opened in 1958. Enrollment sat at around 450 entering the school year, with a yearly tuition of $9,170 for one child.

In recent weeks, several Montgomery County Catholic schools and institutions have been impacted by pandemic closures, including St. Basil's Academy in Jenkintown and St. Gabriel's school for troubled youth in Audubon.

>>Audubon's St. Gabriel's, School For At-Risk Youth, To Shut Down

"Today the McDevitt Family rises to a new challenge," the high school said in a statement released on social media Wednesday. "On campus we will endeavor to embrace the students, faculty, and staff who want nothing more than to learn, grow, and work on Royal Avenue. We will meet with all of them over the next two days and listen to their thoughts and emotions."

Officials said they would work with students at McDevitt to transition them into other high schools in "reasonable proximity." Teachers and staff will also be relocated where possible. It's unclear exactly how many will lose their jobs.

WYNCOTE, PA. (WPVI) -- Dealing with chronic back and neck pain can be frustrating.

Some people don't seek help, afraid they'll be told to have surgery.

Experts at Temple Health say in fact, there are many non-surgical options for managing pain and getting back to life. However, many sufferers may not be told about all their options.

Pamela Daskus of Wyncote vividly recalls when pain set in one day before work.

"I was just getting ready for, getting dressed. And I had this sharp pain in my neck that went down my arm," recalls Daskus.

When oral medications didn't help, Daskus was referred to Dr. Gary Trehan, an interventional pain specialist with Temple Health.

Dr. Trehan, the section chief for acute and chronic pain, says the first step is finding the cause, to separate acute from chronic pain.

"50 to 60% of the acute back pain, which tends to be mainly muscle spasms, muscle and tendon strains, they resolve within a week or so. Most of it, 90% of it gets better in about 6 to 8 weeks," says Dr. Trehan.

Dr. Trehan says a conservative approach - anti-inflammatory medications, muscle relaxants, heat, massage, and physical therapy - usually help those.

If the pain continues toward the three-month chronic stage, some other medications can help.

"Such as anti-epileptics, as we call them, such as Lyrica, gabapentin, or antidepressants," Dr. Trehan notes.

But the herniated disks in Daskus' neck needed the next step in intervention.

"He treated those with a steroid injection, which helped. And then we started doing that about twice a year," she says.

Dr. Trehan says misinformation and fears about injections keep some patients from exploring this option, which he says is especially good for those unable to take anti-inflammatories or muscle relaxants.

"2 to 7 days when they start kicking in. And then we expect them to last 3 months or so," he says.

The medication can also be tailored to the exact problem. He doesn't use the same for all injections.

Daskus is now also receiving injections in her back for spinal arthritis.

The alternating treatments enable her to do daily exercise such as yoga and pilates, which really keep her on top of the pain.

"I'll move my body in ways that I couldn't before and it feels better," she says, adding, "Even with the injections and everything, you need to keep moving."

In addition to injections, Dr. Trehan says acupuncture, radiofrequency ablation, and medical marijuana are also good options to get for less pain and better function.

It was an overcast March day in 2014, and Dana and Matthew Walker had just finished a walk-through of a house for sale in the historic area of Wyncote.

There was no hesitation in their decision.

The floor plan wasn’t open enough, and the house would require too large an investment. “It’s a wonderful house,” Dana Walker told Realtor Scott Laughlin. “But it’s not for our family.”

Then, glancing across the street at a large three-story house, she said, half-jokingly, “But what about that one?”

Laughlin, it turned out, had the answer right in his electronic file. He had sold the house some years earlier to its present owner, and a quick call revealed the owner had started thinking about downsizing.

“Two months later,” Matthew Walker said, ”we had a deal on the table.”

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The deal was for a historic 13-room, 4,500-square-foot home designed by the architect William Lightfoot Price, whose buildings — mostly in his native Delaware County — were a key part of the Arts and Crafts Movement of the late 19th century.

The Walkers hadn’t necessarily been looking for a historic home, but “this had the ‘wow’ factor,” said Matthew, who works in wealth management for a local bank.

The couple loved the spacious back yard, the intricate woodwork, and the open floor plan, which was not that common in homes of the period. The house was completed in 1896.

And Dana, who works in communications for the Cheltenham School District, loved the large front porch. She had admired porches on many of the homes in the North Jersey community where she grew up but had never lived in a house with one. Now she had a showpiece suitable for prom pictures.

The couple, who had been living nearby in Glenside, wanted their two school-age children to remain in the district and liked the idea that the house was a short walk from the Jenkintown regional rail station. Matthew was drawn to the garage with puttering space.

And the house was in move-in condition, including central air conditioning, which allowed them to concentrate their attention and checkbook on furnishings in keeping with the period.

Dana combed through catalogs and stores to find the right touch and the right vendor, but always with an eye toward history.

Bright cushions accent the traditional built-in inglenook seating areas in the large living room, which is anchored by a huge fireplace with a family crest that is repeated on some of the house’s original stained-glass windows.

The dining room wallpaper was an original William Morris design that Dana says she wouldn’t have chosen, but she kept it and grew to like it. The dining room table was built by an Amish craftsman but blends with the décor.

The back yard features a fire pit and art deco fixtures that were part of the original design and a hot tub that obviously wasn’t. Other touches not found in McMansions are a game room and an open sleeping porch from the pre-air conditioning era.

Near the front door is a small wooden box that clearly evokes the world of the 19th and early 20th centuries: It held calling cards from folks who dropped by. “If at home we should not be,” reads its faint inscription, “leave a note that we may see.”

“You can’t pick that up at Home Depot,” Matthew said.

Not that getting replaceable items is easy or inexpensive for a house of that vintage. “Lightbulb shopping is a chore,” Dana said.

“We owe it to the house to do it the original way,” Matthew said. “Not the cheapest way.”

Is your house a Haven? Nominate your home by email (and send some digital photographs) at [email protected]

Lisa Gratz, a Cheltenham native, founded the Glenside & Wyncote PA Community Facebook group in April of 2020, and began Marketing Mondays in early 2021.

For those unacquainted, the idea behind Marketing Mondays is to provide a public space for residents and small business owners to locate one another for goods and services.

“At the beginning of the pandemic when precautions and lockdowns had many of us feeling separated and isolated, I wanted to find a way to bring the local community together,” Lisa said. “Since there was no Facebook group page for Glenside, it made sense to start one. I could not be prouder of what it has become.”

Today the group is 7,000 members strong, and the key, Lisa says, has been “keeping the feed clear” by limiting ads to a single day.

“Facebook groups can get flooded with spammers and ads to the point where neighbor-to-neighbor communication gets impeded, and I was determined to avoid that while still finding a way to support local businesses,” Lisa said.

Rhonda Genzick Isser agreed to join Lisa as a co-administrator in September 2020.

“Rhonda was instrumental in setting up Marketing Mondays, and Tom Hendel has been wonderful in continuing it. We also had generous help from community member Merle Rosenberg Slyhoff,” Lisa said.

“We sometimes make exceptions and leave posts from hyper-local family-run businesses, especially those that are just getting off the ground, because it just makes sense to help in that way, but limiting almost all advertising to one day guarantees a space where neighbors can speak with their neighbors,” she said.

Tom Hendel, a local Realtor, has been helping to maintain Marketing Mondays since July. A Glenside native and Bishop McDevitt graduate, Tom came on as a moderator for the group after Rhonda gradually stepped out of the role.

“Lisa cares deeply about the community,” Tom said. “I saw how important Marketing Mondays was to these local businesses and the residents around town, so I took it over and told them that it’d be run properly. Rhonda was amazing, so now it’s just Lisa and I.”

“The businesses love it and they thank us for helping them out. A lot of local pages don’t allow advertising,” he said. “Everyone steps up to help each other. We think that doing it one day a week helps support local businesses.”

Tom noted that the page is routinely helpful in other ways. Residents find housing, jobs, and lost pets. Mondays, however, are wide open for business promotion.

“That way, the rest of the days of the week can be about everything else,” he said. “Everyone treats each other with respect. We’re just trying to keep the page running, and the group members make it easy for us.”

The son of two realtors, Tom is in his third year with Keller Williams Real Estate, and loving the family business.

“It was a great fit for me. I chose Keller Williams because my parents were Realtors for over 35 years, and the second half of their careers were with KW. They’re part owners of three of the KW offices, and I followed in their footsteps,” he said.

“Keller Williams does a great job training new Realtors and also has the best technology. I love Real Estate because I’m a big people person, and every day I get to meet new people. Buying and selling can be complicated, so I try to take the stress out of it. Nothing makes me happier than seeing my clients achieve their Real Estate goals.”

Tom notes that Real Estate markets are very local.

“With rates going up, the market has eased some for buyers, but mostly in areas that have a lot of inventory. As for sellers, if inventory is low in their area, they can still expect a considerable amount of interest and multiple offers, if you price your home correctly,” he said.

For more on Tom and Keller Williams, you can click here. For more on Marketing Mondays, you can check out Glenside & Wyncote PA Community’s Facebook page here.