elba

Check out WBTA for these and other stories:

• Dan Fischer writes:

"Personnel problems continue to plague Batavia City Hall. The city council held a hasty secret meeting this morning to deal with, "a personnel matter," City Manager Jason Molino said today. He declined further comment.

The executive session was called for last night and took place at 7 this morning. Just barely within the required time frame. The meeting lasted a little less than an hour.

In the last six months, three key city hall department heads have either quit or retired."

• School budgets in every Genesee County district were approved yesterday. Elba had the closest vote (144 to 109).

• Investigation into the Byron blaze that claimed the lives of four family members continues. The apartment building where the fire broke out has been demolished, and a "makeshift memorial" has been erected by the roadside.

Area author Bill Kauffman gets a favorable review of his new book, Look Homeward, America, in Reason Magazine.

Writer John McClaughry compares him to East Aurora's writer, thinker and quote machine, Elbert Hubbard.

In many respects—not including the creation of a 300-employee publishing house—Bill Kauffman of tiny Elba, New York, has become today’s Elbert Hubbard. But unlike Hubbard, whose essays glorified the lives and works of famous people, Kauffman’s literary journey seeks out “the America of holy fools and backyard radicals, the America whose eccentric voice is seldom heard anymore…the [voice of] third parties, of Greenbackers and Libertarians and village atheists and the ‘conservative Christian anarchist’ party whose founder and only member was Henry Adams.”

Kauffman’s earlier books mined interesting veins of localism and hostility to modernity. America First! celebrated America’s forgotten isolationist activists, from Hamlin Garland to Alice Roosevelt, plus other assorted individualists, including Edward Abbey, Gore Vidal, Sinclair Lewis, and this writer, included because he considered me, not altogether inaccurately, the last lonely true-believing Jeffersonian. His Dispatches From the Muckdog Gazette celebrated the lives of the common people of Kauffman’s Genesee County, home of the minor league Batavia Muckdogs baseball team.