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He was quite a man and did Gloucester City and Gloucester Catholic proudly... ~Frank Batavick, Classmate and Friend William E. Cleary Sr. | CNBNewsnet GLOUCESTER CITY, NJ (CNBNewsnet)--William F. Barron, of Portland, Oregon (photo) lost his battle with kidney cancer on January 4, 2018. He was 73 years old. Bill grew up in Gloucester City, NJ and received his elementary education from St. Mary's Grammar School. He graduated from Gloucester Catholic High School in 1963. He was predeceased by his parents, Edward and Delores Barron. He is survived by his siblings, Judy, Joe, Ed, and Tim. Also many cousins, nieces,... Read more →

photos credit Larry "Gus" Danks CHERRY HILL, NJ (CNBNewsnet)—Seventeen members of Gloucester Catholic High School Class of 1963 met for dinner in early May at Il Villagio in Cherry Hill. The next dinner is scheduled for the first Thursday in October. All classmates are welcome. Related: Rams Alumni Lions Alumni Gloucester Catholic Gloucester City St Mary's Grammar/Parish Gloucester City History Author Frank Batavick Read more →

Related: Frank Batavick by Frank J. Batavick | CNBNewsnet I was in the check-out line at the supermarket doing our weekly grocery shopping. Alongside of me screamed the headlines of the “National Enquirer”: “CORRUPT” was in 72 point type and accompanied by a photo of Hillary Clinton with arms outstretched and a “what-are-you-gonna-do” look on her face. The smaller headlines around her read, “On the Take: $139 Million for Political Favors,” “Fraud and Bribes: Foundation Used as Slushfund,” “Top Aide Exposes Crooked Hillary,” and “Breaking News: New FBI Indictment.” Talk about over-kill! I then started to think about how many... Read more →

Frank J. Batavick | CNBNewsnet Given the findings of the FBI and the State Department's Inspector General, there is no doubt that Hillary Clinton willfully disregarded State protocols by using a private email server and lied about it in numerous ways. Their reports also show her to be arrogant and self-dealing. Regardless, there is no evidence that she violated the letter of the law or that her server was successfully hacked, thus putting American personnel and interests at risk. Clinton has earned her place in the sweep of history after more than 40 years in public life, and her role... Read more →

by Frank J. Batavick | CNBNewsnet Dear Donald Trump, I really like your “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan, even though you “borrowed” it from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. No big deal. I know how hard it is for some folks to come up with something original. However, I do have a number of important and honest questions for you. If you wish to “Make America Great Again,” then: Why are your Trump-branded men's suits, dress shirts, and ties made in China and Bangladesh and all of Ivanka Trump's clothing line (shoes, dresses, purses and scarves) made in China?... Read more →

Attention Trump supporters! Hop into my time machine and transport yourselves back to early June 2015. Now, what if I had told you back then that the candidate you would eventually champion for the U.S. presidency would also have the solid support of the KKK, North Korea, ISIS, a European fascist, and the Chinese Communists? What would your reaction have been? Still the simplistic “Anyone but Hillary”? I doubt it. I think you would have thought me delusional, but that’s exactly what’s happened. Last February, white nationalist and former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, David Duke told his radio audience,... Read more →

RELATED:CNBNews stat report for September 2015 RELATED:CNBNews stat report for October 2015 Returning Visits- Basked purely on a cookie, if this person is returning to our website for another visit an hour or more later First Time Visits - Based purely on a cookie, if this person has no cookie then this is considered their first time at your website. Unique Visitor - Based purely on a cookie, this is the total of the returning visits and first time visits - all your visitors. Page Load - The number of times your page has been visited. Data provided by www.... Read more →

Frank J. Batavick | CNBNewsnet When I was teaching a Mass Communications course at McDaniel, I covered many topics that should have been incendiary— Internet privacy, violent video games, media bias, censorship—but was barely able to get a rise out of the students. No incensed comments. No outrage. It wasn’t until I showed a video from the Media Education Foundation that things got tense. Titled Mickey Mouse Monopoly, the documentary tackled sexual and racial stereotyping in Disney’s animated features. Though the film had some heavy-hitter psychologists and media scholars and under-girded its arguments with supportive clips, the students weren’t buying... Read more →

Frank J. Batavick | CNBNewsnet The term "failed social experiment" has taken on the character of an epithet in our fractured political climate. Republicans have used it to decry everything from the "Common Core" curriculum to Affirmative Action policies in higher ed. There is no doubt that some progressive attempts at social engineering have less than spectacular results. President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty can’t be considered a success, though a host of unexpected events exacerbated the problem, from the hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs to off-shore sites to the drug epidemic and its misguided sentencing guidelines. These factors decimated families... Read more →

Frank J. Batavick | CNBNewsnet We should all be familiar with the iconic World Trade Center at Baltimore's inner harbor. At 32 stories, it has towered over Harbor Place for almost 40 years. Now I'd like you to picture eight such buildings, cheek to jowl, and perhaps a few storeys higher. Next conjure up another grouping of similar buildings a few blocks away, different in style, but just as densely packed together. Then, think of riding for 50 minutes in bumper-to-bumper traffic on an expressway with the view almost never changing—repetitive clusters of 20 to 30 storey buildings, most of... Read more →

It was the first day of our eagerly-awaited trip to China, and I wanted to check my email and catch up on the news back home by reading the on-line versions of this paper and the "Washington Post.” I tried to connect to the Internet, using the password given us by the pleasant young man at the reception desk, but was having no luck. Once I reached the desired websites, I couldn't get them to build any content. I finally went back to the desk and told the clerk of my problem. Without hesitation, he gave me a broad smile... Read more →

Frank J. Batavick | CNBNewsnet We are all on the same arc—birth, life, death. Of course, we don’t have any control over the first stage, and sometimes the last can come unexpectedly, like a clap of thunder. But we can all be rulers of our own domain during the middle stage, especially if we subscribe to humorist Leo Rosten’s belief that “The purpose of life is not to be happy—but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you have lived at all.” It turns out that this philosophy is also essential to... Read more →

PHOTO CREDIT CNBNews photo journalist Amanda Stevenson PHILADELPHIA PA July 27, 2016--A hodgepodge of photos taken at the Democratic National Conventions held July 25-28 at the Philadelphia's Wells Fargo Center to officially name former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as its presidential nominee with Sen. Tim Kaine as her running mate. The convention comes the week after Republicans held their gathering in Cleveland to nominate Donald Trump and running mate Mike Pence. More than 4,700 delegates are attending the Democratic convention. Link to Democratic Convention Album http://www.amandastevensonphoto.com RELATED: Philadelphia Auto Show Album Read more →

Frank J. Batavick | CNBNewsnet If you had a choice of superpowers, would you rather be invisible or able to fly? In 2001 actor and comedian John Hodgman conducted an unscientific poll on this topic for National Public Radio’s This American Life. Responders had to pick just one of these superpowers and they’d be the only person in the world to have it. The answers were very telling about a person’s moral bent. Those who chose invisibility more often than not did so to spy on exes, peak into showers, sneak into movie theaters, or shoplift. The fliers just wanted... Read more →

Frank J. Batavick | CNBNewsnet Earlier this year I attended an exhibit at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore. Titled “From Pen to Press: Experimentation and Innovation in the Age of Print,” the display focused on how the old world of hand-written manuscripts coped with the radical changes wrought by Guttenberg’s printing press. As with many innovations, mechanically printed books were considered a passing fancy. A German Benedictine abbot, Johannes Trithemius, wrote a treatise in 1492, “De laude Scriptorum Manualium” or “In Praise of Scribes,” in which he opined that, “Printed books are a fad.” To gain acceptance, some of... Read more →

The tranquil Sea Isle Beach, Sea Isle N.J. (photo credit Sea Isle City) Frank J. Batavick | CNBNewsnet The placid ocean shimmered in the evening sun. Undulating ribbons of foam-kissed waves gently petted the shore. Long fingers of color — moss green, marine gray, midnight blue — softly vibrated across the surface like rippling beach chair fabric. As a laughing gull soared silently above, a 40-something, bikini-clad woman — tall and tan and middle-aged and lovely — came ambling by ... texting … tap, tap, tapping … staring at her iPhone. And nature gently wept. Forgive my tortured prose, but... Read more →

Photograph of Princeton Battlefield State Park, Princeton, New Jersey, USA. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Author Frank J. Batavick | CNBNewsnet On each patriotic holiday my wife gets up early to put out the flags. Back on July 4, 2007 we were living in a town just outside Princeton, N.J., and she retrieved the bundle of 30-inch tall American flags that we stored in the hall closet. Some were freebies from past parades and others used to belong to her dad. These are a bit faded and frayed and at least two have only 48 stars, but they represented a way for... Read more →

Frank J. Batavick | CNBNewsnet It was a little over 150 years ago on April 7 that Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia, marking the end of the Civil War. We have just about closed the book on our nation’s Civil War sesquicentennial. But has the war ever really ended? It is not difficult to answer this somewhat rhetorical question. There are too many symbolic and actual instances of the South’s refusal to concede defeat, from Confederate flags in yards and on license plates to objections to the Affordable Health Care Act on the basis of... Read more →

Frank J. Batavick | CNBNewsnet You can call it misinformation, spin control or propaganda. Regardless, there are things that some people insist on believing that collide with the inconvenient truths of history. The assertion that this nation was founded on Christian principles flies in the face of the fact that many of our founders were Deists and not pure-bred Christians. Thomas Paine, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen, and James Monroe may have been baptized into the Anglican Church, but as contemporaries during the Age of Enlightenment, they adopted a belief in the primacy of human reason. For... Read more →

by Frank J. Batavick | CNBNewsnet Imagine laughing at death that's delivered from the air. In 1939, the renowned radio dramatist Arch Obler wrote a short and startling play for the NBC network. He centered the plot of "The Laughing Man" on a book that had been discovered in the ruins of a civilization some 20,000 years old. Those who studied the book found its narrative totally incredible. It described warfare between races and abetted by amazing flying machines that dropped "horrible tearing things" on the beings below. The play's narrator found the idea so absurd that all he could... Read more →

Orson Welles, March 1, 1937 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Author Frank J. Batavick CNBNewsnet The Germans always have a word for it. In this case it is wunderkind or wonder child, and it applies to any youth who has skills and accomplishments far beyond his or her age. There are many prodigies in human history, but few as fascinating as Orson Welles. On my 50th birthday I was living in Bloomington, Indiana, the home of Indiana University and the Lilly Library. Among its many treasures are the papers and effects of Orson Welles. I decided to treat myself on my big... Read more →

Author Frank J. Batavick CNBNewsnet I am the grandson of a one-time illegal alien. The Batavicks (née Batović) have been in the U.S. since 1910 when my grandfather and his brother jumped ship in Yonkers, New York and made their way to Philadelphia. Like many immigrants, they were escaping the poverty and endless wars in a homeland that considered them nothing more than cannon fodder. Nicholas and his brother George hailed from Croatia, a region of Yugoslavia and then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The country’s unfortunate geography had made it a welcome mat for the conqueror of the moment... Read more →

Author Frank J. Batavick | CNBNews Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, is a big fan of Ayn Rand and Objectivism, and his approach to creating a national budget reflects his beliefs. But what exactly does this mean? Imagine this: The legions of heaven gathered for the big debate. The topic- Social Justice vs. Objectivism, or more precisely, the belief that everyone should have equal economic, political and social rights and opportunities vs. the belief that we are only entitled to what we’ve earned and need not care about the welfare of others. A Higher Authority had chosen his only... Read more →

Author Frank J. Batavick | CNBNewsnet On March 2 I planted my garden. Or to be exact, I started an array of seeds that would comprise my garden once sprouted and grown into strong seedlings. I sowed bell peppers, eggplant, basil, parsley, four varieties of tomato, and a selection of annual flowers, like Zinnias and Marigolds. I have two large planters in the basement that I bought at an auction over 20 years ago. They have built-in fluorescent lights with industrial quality timers and I’ve rigged each planter with electric heat tape. In them, I sit Styrofoam trays, each with... Read more →

Frank J. Batavick | Columnist CNBNewsnet Sometimes it feels as if our nation is lost hopelessly in the mirror maze of a fun house. Even when easy and logical courses of action lie before us, we illogically take wrong turns and end up where we started. Déjà vu meets déjà vu on a regular basis here. On December 2, two radicalized Muslims committed a horrific act of terror in San Bernadino, California, claiming the lives of 14 people and wounding 21. The perps were a Chicago-born, Pakistani-American male, Syed Rizwan Farook, who traveled freely to the birthplace of radical Islam,... Read more →