When your town makes headlines: A view of Binghamton

When you come from a small town in a part of a state most people don’t even know exists, you don’t expect to see its name splashed across every media outlet in the country.

But for the second time in a month, I got to watch local and national news anchors struggle this weekend to pronounce “Binghamton, NY” as the horribly depressed city of 45,000 found its way onto front pages – again.

The first time around, the news was good: the University of Binghamton made its first-ever NCAA means basketball tournament, earning a 15-seed and a round 1 butt-whipping at the hands of Duke.

Unfortunately Friday’s headlines were not the sort of news anyone wants to see associated with their home town.

On April 3, a gunman walked into Binghamton’s American Civic Association and killed 12 people. The American Civic Association is a place that aids immigrants and refugees, of which, like Kent, the city has in droves.

To be fair, I am not actually from the city of Binghamton. I grew up in the nearby suburb of Endicott before moving to the outlying rural community of Whitney Point during high school.

But Binghamton was always the closest thing we had to a big city. It is the county seat and easily the biggest city in the region, the one with its own TV stations and newspaper.

If Binghamton were Seattle, Endicott would be Kent and Whitney Point would be, oh, say, Enumclaw or Black Diamond.

But Binghamton is not Seattle. It is way more economically depressed and is much, much smaller all the way around. Also, believe it or not, the weather is even worse back there than it is here. Binghamton gets more rain each year than Seattle, plus a healthy snowfall total in the winter and crippling humidity in the summer.

Plus, it is the cloudiest city east of the Mississippi.

But as a teen, it was home.

We used to drive in to the city to buy CDs and bootleg music from Music City, an independent record shop located literally around the corner from where the shootings took place.

In college, we used to turn right instead of left and head down the block to where a friend was learning mortuary science. It was a little spooky, yes, but no one complained when we got a little noisy late at night.

I have never really cared much for Binghamton, to be honest with you. Moving to the area from Philadelphia, I was not impressed with it at all and then growing up in Endicott, we developed something of a rivalry with the city.

Now, whenever I go back, as I will again next week, I enjoy the city’s quaintness, but admit to looking froward to escaping back to the Pacific Northwest.

But no one wants to see their hometown splayed across the headlines like this. We don’t have much in Binghamton, but this is certainly not what those of us who call the Southern Tier home would like it to be remembered for.

We’d prefer the area to be remembered for Rod Serling, who grew up in the city before creating the Twilight Zone (a show that some of us from the area are convinced is not necessarily science fiction…) or as the home of the Endicott Johnson Shoe Factory, the “Square Deal” company that built homes for its workers and their families; or as the birthplace of IBM, the computer giant.

Or how about Rick Baker, the Oscar-winning special effects and make-up whiz who not only did the work for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video and “The Nutty Professor,” but also did Robert Downey Jr.’s make-up in “Tropic Thunder”?

During the ‘80s, the Binghamton area was home to several big-name tech companies, all working on national-defense initiatives, like Singer Link and its flight simulators or the Raymond Corporation and its electric lift trucks.

We’re also home to the “spiedie,” a local delicacy of marinated meat grilled and eaten on a hard roll and celebrated at the Spiedie Fest and Balloon Rally each year at a local park.

Binghamton is also the “Carousel Capital of the World,” known as such because of the six antique and hand-carved horse carousels placed in parks around the region. They are free and open to the public each summer. As a kid, I assumed all parks had carousels.

Shoot, even the university is a pretty good legacy and one that brought us national recognition this year when the Bearcats won the America East Conference (full disclosure: I didn’t even apply to Binghamton because I wanted out of the area…).

But unfortunately, it seems that for the near future anyway, Binghamton will be remembered as the home of the latest American Shooting Rampage. Which is too bad, because we do have more to offer.