Urgent: Send more celery

Sister City Pushkin dumps Worcester for Kalamazoo

by Walter Crockett

Oh, the shame.

Oh, the humiliation.

Worcester has been jilted by a two-bit Russian rubbleyard whose mayor loves rubles more than Rachmaninoff.

Pushkin has kissed us off. Our Sister City has stabbed us in the back, publicly affronted us, dumped us unceremoniously for, of all places, Kalamazoo, Michigan.

After all we've done for them. We've invited them into our homes. We've given them music. We've shown them culture. We've gone all touchy-feely over them. We never mentioned the vodka on their breath, the Levis and Nikes stuffed into their suitcases. And for this, what do we get?

Dumped.

And what's worse, there's no recourse. We could bomb them back into the Stone Age, but they still haven't recovered from World War II, so nobody would notice.

If you didn't read the July 5 Sunday Telegram closely, you might not have noticed. The story was too embarrassing to run on the front page. It was too excruciating to run with an appropriate headline, like "Russian ingrates show their true colors!"

Instead it ran with a one-column head on the first page of the local section -- so that Auburn, Leicester, Millbury, and the other surrounding towns couldn't see us blush.

"Worcester, Pushkin celebrate," read the headline. "City chorus helps to observe anniversary," read the subhead. The Sunday Telegram's copy desk was a model of decorum and restraint under the most extreme provocation.

For buried nine paragraphs down in a story reported by Michelee and Hal Cabot (he's the guy who used to run WCIS) came the real story: Pushkin doesn't want us anymore.

The Worcester Chorus had gone to Pushkin to observe the 10th anniversary of our sister-cityhood on June 26 during Russia's White Nights festival -- sort of a midsummer First Night with lots more alcohol. The chorus sang Dvorak and Rachmaninoff and got two encores. That was the good news.

But the bad news is that the chorus, despite having reservations confirmed in writing, got bumped out of "a superior downtown Pushkin hotel" because too many other important people were in town. The Pushkin stab-in-the-backskis exiled them to a "grimly dilapidated Communist-era workers sanitarium converted to rudimentary inn" way out of town. Their Pushkin-appointed travel agent screwed up right and left. The mayor made a pro-forma showing at the performance and canceled an after-concert reception for the chorus.

"The mayor said what they need is business, not culture, and urged us to go home and send back business-people," wrote the Cabots. "It became painfully obvious that at the end of the 10-year collaboration between Worcester and Pushkin, the Pushkin officials no longer felt that Worcester could do them much good. Kalamazoo, Michigan, is their new Sister City."

Kalamazoo indeed.

Kalamazoo's Internet site doesn't even mention Pushkin. Neither does Worcester's, but that's not the point. The point is that Worcester was founded and is ruled to this day by good, upstanding Yankees who had a lot in common with George Washington, the father of our country, who refused to lie about chopping down a cherry tree. Kalamazoo was founded by a guy named Titus Bronson, who two years later was accused, tried, and convicted of stealing a cherry tree. There's just no comparison.

Worcester used to be known as "the largest manufacturing city not on a navigable waterway." Kalamazoo has recently become known as the "Bedding Plant Capital of the World." There's just no comparison.

Worcester has been called "the utility closet of New England" by a snooty reporter for the New York Times. Kalamazoo has been called "the Paper City," for its many smelly paper mills and "the Celery City" for (and this is a direct quotation from the Web site of the Kalamazoo County Convention and Visitors Bureau) "the crop once grown in the muck fields north, south, and east of town." Muck fields indeed. There's just no comparison.

Worcester was hit by a tornado in 1953. Kalamazoo was hit by a tornado in 1980. Not even close.

They first named the city after Titus Bronson, but when he shamed them with the cherry tree scandal they changed the name to Kalamazoo, from the Potawatomi Indian expression, "Kikalamazoo," which means "the rapids at the river crossing," or "boiling water," and, more recently, "watch out, I'll steal your sister city."

As far as I'm concerned, Pushkin can keep Kalamazoo, lock, stock, and celery. The Ruskies can run amuck in the Kalamazoo muck fields north, south, and east of town. If they want business instead of culture, they've found a perfect partner in Kalamazoo. Kalamazoo knows all about exporting business. The Celery City used to be home to Checker cabs, Gibson guitars, Kalamazoo stoves, and Shakespeare fishing rods and reels. No more, they've all fled for less treacherous climes.

Now, it's not impossible that cooler heads will prevail in the Pushkin affair. It's not impossible that they will roll out the Red carpet again, that their ardor for Kalamazoo will fade once they get a whiff of the paper mills. It's not impossible that the Russians will come crawling back to us, fur hats in hand, begging to re-establish the relationship they so rudely snatched away after we had put our hearts, souls, and the better part of our utility closets into it.

In that case, I think we should be big enough to meet them halfway. They want business, we should give them the business.

We can start by shipping them the McDonald's/gas station combo that was proposed for Main and Madison streets. They'll have more use for it than we will.

Then we can send them Main Street's most prosperous merchants -- the prostitutes.

The PIP Shelter is looking for a place to relocate -- what better place than Pushkin? In both dress and drinking habits the residents will fit right in.

It's too late to relocate the Youth Center there, more the pity. But how about the senior center? City council has yet to authorize the $3.1 million bond for it. You could build it for one-tenth of that in Russia, even when you include the cost of transporting several hundred whining seniors. And, to tell the truth, it would do the city as much good in Pushkin as it will way up on Vernon Hill.

Pushkin has so many ruined buildings that Union Station would fit right in, too. But far be it from me to suggest that.

They need towing? We'll send Pat Santa Maria. They need talking at? Jordan Levy and Upton Bell. They need a mayor who doesn't go around humiliating other cities half a globe away? Take Ray Mariano. They need family values? Send Sheriff John "Mike" Flynn and his uniformed offspring.

We'll give till it hurts.

Because we ain't no Celery City, we ain't no Paper City, we ain't no Bedding Plant Capital of the World.

We're Wormtown and proud of it.

MY FRIEND DIANE WILLIAMSON, arguably the city's best columnist (and you'll get no argument from me), got my goat just before she went on vacation with a column in which she all but called for the old-growth forest on Wachusett Mountain to be pulled up by its roots, so that skiers can have more room to do their thing. In humorous Di style she snidely referred to WEST (Watchdogs for a Safe Environment) as CAVE (Citizens Against Virtually Everything).

Regardless of whether you agree with Donna Brownell, the outspoken leader of WEST, it's clear that her organization has long been an ardent and effective defender of the environment in the North County. A columnist who actually spoke to Brownell, instead of quoting her from clips, might have noted that.

And why didn't Williamson disclose her own conflicting affiliations with groups like CARELESS (Columnists Avoiding Research and Effort Looking for Easy Summer Stories) and RUSHJOB (Reporters Under Stress Heaving Journalism OverBoard). As a member in good standing of both those associations, I think we deserved acknowledgement.