Easter Week

A month ago, things looked pretty bad for Pennsbury after it was drubbed by Neshaminy, 6-0, a loss that dropped its record to 2-5. The Falcons played that game without two starters: Tiff Carr, the school's career goal-scoring leader with 41, and sophomore sweeper Jessica Rader. Both were on Easter Week family trips. But even in the season's darkest days, coach George Eastburn believed his team had the makings of a competitive club. And since then he has happily overseen his club's turnaround.

The Lower Merion school board vowed to reopen its discussion of spring vacation next year after teachers complained Monday night that the new vacation schedule would disrupt their family lives. Charles McGeehan, president of the Lower Merion Education Association, asked the board to reconsider its decision to move spring break from Easter week to an earlier week in March. "This represents a real loss to many of our members," McGeehan said. The teachers will not be able to spend time with their own children, who will be on spring break from other schools, he said, and they will need to find day care for them.

Looking back, I realize now it was a mixed blessing to be as young as I was when I broke into this business. As a rookie music critic, I got to swap shop talk with the Bulletin's Max de Schauensee, the most incisive observer of grand opera this country has ever seen, and Irving Kolodin, a man who could walk backstage with his own copy of a complex orchestral score and tell a conductor like Leopold Stokowski where he'd deviated from the composer's markings....