The O-town Scene - Oneonta, NY
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/27737
R.o.B.S. The judge dismissed Gruber's court-appointed attorney Monday because Gruber refused to cooperate with him. A phone number listed for Gruber was disconnected. It’s hard to tell what’s true these days. Take a gander below, and guess if A. and B. are Real or B.S. (Answers at the bottom of the page.) Judge tells accused: A. No beer here in court MONTICELLO _ Authorities say a New York man appearing before a judge on a felony drunken driving charge arrived at court an hour and a half late, drunk and carry- ing an open can of Busch beer. Sullivan County Undersheriff Eric Chaboty said Keith Gruber of Swan Lake had four unopened beer cans in his bag Monday when he tried to walk through the metal detector at the county courthouse. The Middletown Times Herald-Record reports that Judge Frank LaBuda asked the 49-year-old Gruber if he enjoyed his “liquid lunch.” Gruber said he did, then said he was sorry. The judge revoked his bail and sent him to jail, where he remained Tuesday. Gruber was arrested Dec. 27 in the town of Liberty and was out on $30,000 cash bail. He has prior DWI convictions. B. Birth certificate solves mystery of woman’s past A long-lost birth certificate was recently reunited with its owner 90 years later, solving a decades-long mystery for a Florida woman. The yellowed document de- clares that a baby girl was born May 1, 1921, to Augustus and Wanda Steiner (nee Pliszka) in Harrisburg, Pa. Elizabeth Steiner weighed a mere 5 pounds, 10 ounces, when she greeted the world as a blue-eyed baby with a wisp of blonde hair. Today, Bess Parks still has a sparkle in her blue eyes, and sets her now-white hair in curls just as she did decades ago. Parks doesn’t remember her parents or her four brothers. The baby of her family, Parks was still an infant when her family was killed in a train accident just miles from their home. With no surviving relatives to claim her, Parks spent her childhood as a ward of the state. “The folks at the orphanage were very good to me,” Parks said Friday from her Naples, Fla., home. “But I always won- dered about my real family.” Because of a paperwork mixup of some kind, no records on Parks’ birth or family were transferred to the orphanage. “I knew I was from Harrisburg, Pa., and that was about all anyone could tell me,” Parks recalled. When she turned 18 and was released from the orphanage, Parks enrolled in a secretarial college and took a job in the offices of the U.S. Department of Labor, where she met and married her husband, Theodore Parks. “I didn’t think much about my parents after that, and it wasn’t as easy as it is now to just look that sort of thing up,” Parks 20 O-Town Scene March 24, 2011 explained. The couple had three children, and now have five grandchildren, one of whom accidentally dis- covered a digital image of Parks’ birth certificate on a website dedicated to ephemera, or found paper items. “He said, ‘Grandma, this paper says ‘Elizabeth’ and ‘Harrisburg’ on it,” Parks said with a smile. “I used to tell him stories about the cold winters we had back in Pennsylvania, so he remembered that.” Ten-year-old Aaron Parks sent an e-mail to the website’s author, Ron Clark of Fort Collins, Colo., who mailed the document to Parks. Bess Parks said she cried a little bit when she saw it. “To hold that paper in my hands _ it brought back a lot of memories. If I could go back and tell that lonely little girl in the orphanage that one day she would know her parents’ names ...” Parks said she and her grandson are working on a family tree with the help of online genealogy resources. A. is real by The Associated Press; B. is B.S., by Emily Popek