Chip Lutz has done it again.

The Berks County golf legend captured his third British Senior Amateur title in thrilling fashion Friday at England’s Formby Golf Club.

The LedgeRock Golf Club member birdied the first hole of a three-way sudden death playoff to earn one of the biggest prizes in senior amateur golf.

“My game was a bit wiggly today,” Lutz said. “But I had a good stretch in the middle and the putt at the last was just perfect. I’ll definitely be back to defend next year.”

Lutz, 61, drained a 25-foot birdie on the extra hole to defeat American Brady Exber, the 2014 champion, and Scotland’s Graham Bell. Lutz shot a final-round 75 for a 4-over total of 220 over 54 holes.

Each of Lutz’s last two major victories has had a special connection to his mother, Janet. Friday was Janet’s 90th birthday.

Last fall, when Lutz won the U.S. Senior Amateur at Hidden Creek Golf Club in New Jersey after losing in the semifinals three times, Janet saw him compete for the first time.

“That was some finish,” Lutz said of Friday’s round. “It’s a great way to celebrate Mom’s birthday. I’ll be calling her straight away.”

Lutz started the final day one shot behind Scotland’s John Fraser, who dropped out of contention after an early triple bogey.

The rest of the final round featured many lead changes.

Lutz, who won the British Senior Amateur in 2011 and 2012 and also has a pair of Canadian Senior Amateur titles, will have little time to savor his victory.

He’ll travel to Columbus, Ohio, for next week’s U.S. Senior Open at Scioto Country Club.

Lutz’s U.S. Senior Amateur victory helped him earn exemptions to several big championships, including the U.S. Senior Open and U.S. Amateur.

He’ll play in the U.S. Amateur Aug. 15-21 at Oakland Hills Country Club in Bloomfield Township, Mich.

There’s a rain lily that was originally a gift to the grandmother of Dan’s wife, Gretchen, in the early 1900s that has been nurtured and passed along from generation to generation.

There’s a bluebird house that’s home to baby birds and a pond filled with koi and topped with water lilies. There are blueberry and black raspberry bushes that yield enough fruit for Gretchen to make a few pies each year.

And there’s a vegetable garden where Dan and Gretchen’s granddaughters harvest the day’s pick when they come to visit.

Dan and Gretchen and members of their family were delightful hosts during a recent visit to their garden.

You’ve got a lot going on in your yard. How do you decide what to plant and where to put it?

Dan’s gardens contain a large variety of plants, along with many feeders to attract birds. He keeps feeders and flowers close to the house and the side porch for Gretchen, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and uses a wheelchair, to enjoy.

“This is our little mecca,” Dan said. “It’s our stay-at-home happy place.”

Your gardens are well established. How long have you been working on them?

Dan, who taught German in the Wilson School District for 33 years and then served as a substitute teacher for another 10 years before retiring, started gardening in the mid-1980s. He found that he had a knack for it and enjoyed it, and has been going ever since.

So, can you tell me about this special rain lily?

Gretchen’s father had three sisters, all of whom were born in the early 1900s. All of them died within a year of one another from tuberculosis.

“The minister of the church gave a fairy lily, also called a rain lily, to my grandmother in 1920,” Gretchen explained. “We’ve kept it going ever since.”

Does the pond require a lot of upkeep?

Dan and his son dug the pond themselves and keep it stocked with colorful koi. It is home to a variety of plants, including beautiful waterlilies.

“The pond is really crowded with plants, but you should keep a pond 85 percent covered, because it helps to keep the algae down,” Dan said.

You’ve got a large variety of flowers and then the vegetable garden, as well. That’s a lot of work.

Dan grows peppers, eggplants, okra, squash and other vegetables in special growing boxes, which minimizes work once the planting is done. Over the years he has developed a system for maintaining the gardens, although he does spend many hours working in the yard. A particularly time-consuming task is maintaining the large patch of caladiums that provide bright color in a shady area behind the house.

“Those are an annual project,” he said. “I have to dig out the bulbs in the fall and replant them in the spring. But I love them for their colors.”

Can you describe your gardening philosophy?

Dan is an extremely positive person who is not afraid to experiment with his gardens. He enjoys spending time with his granddaughters, Danica and Rebecca Dryka of Limerick Township, Montgomery County, and is teaching them about gardening. On the day of our visit, Dani, 7, and Becca, 5, were picking vegetables from the garden. Like most gardeners, Dan sometimes has trouble with a particular plant or flower, but he remains upbeat.

“I think the thing about having a garden is to remember that, no matter what the weather is, there’s something that will do well,” he said. “So, if you stay positive and not be afraid to try different things, it will all be OK.”

Custy Nairn didn’t waste a minute contacting Jo Ann Heller after hearing she left Golden Oaks Golf Club last year.

Heller was available for hire, and the news spread like wildfire.

“We had to do it right away,” Nairn said.

Nairn’s quick thinking helped Blackwood Golf Course land one of the most respected members of the local golf community.

Heller officially joined the Douglassville public course last month as director of golf and head golf professional. She gives lessons, runs outings and does whatever else owners Custy and Mark Nairn ask to improve customer service.

The brothers couldn’t be happier to have Heller. “She’s going to be a huge asset,” Nairn said. “You don’t find someone of her caliber everyday. She knows more people in golf than anyone else around here.

“She has the attitude and the personality for it. We’re just thrilled to have her.”

Heller is an integral thread in the fabric of Berks County golf – on and off the course. As a player, she grew up alongside Betsy King at Reading Country Club and won the first PIAA girls championship as an Exeter high schooler in 1974. Heller went on to capture countless individual and partners titles in the Women’s Berks County Golf Association and beyond, including seven WBCGA Betty Fehl-Fegely championships and three Central Penn crowns. As a golf administrator, Heller served as tournament director for King’s LPGA event at Berkleigh Country Club. After the last tournament was held in 2004, Heller joined Golden Oaks as director of golf. That’s some local knowledge. When a new management company took the reigns at Golden Oaks last year, Heller decided it was time for a lifestyle change. Heller, who recently turned 59, was working more than 70 hours a week.

“I don’t need to work, and I wanted to travel,” she said.

Heller left Golden Oaks, and it was almost as if a higher plan was in place. Her brother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer and died within two months. Her mother battled Alzheimer’s disease in Florida before passing away in December. Heller’s new schedule allowed her to spend those final months by her mom’s side. But Heller wasn’t ready to leave the golf business completely. She wanted to “scale back” to 40 hours a week with winters off.

Nairn was happy to accommodate.While the brothers have the on-course operations covered – Custy is the superintendent and Mark the mechanic – they needed someone with Heller’s savvy to handle pro shop and general managerial duties. “She’s a supreme manager,” Nairn said. “She knows everybody. Our phone was ringing before she started here.”

The Nairn family has owned the Blackwood property since Custy and Mark’s grandfather, a Scottish immigrant, bought the 200 acres for $12,000 in the 1930s and farmed for three decades. The family transformed the land into a golf course, and Blackwood opened in 1970. Nairn understands better than anyone that the golf business has been a tough one for the past 20 years. Family-run courses are struggling to survive. He believes that someone such as Heller can help push the brothers through to retirement in several years. Heller has the same plan.”I fell in love with the Blackwood people,” Heller said. “They’re the most down-to-earth guys I ever met. I’m on the five-year plan and then hope to cut back a little more. They agreed to everything I wanted. I’ve only been here a month, but it’s been great.”

Last week I spent my free time binge-watching “Ripper Street” on Netflix. Daniel A. Hemberger, a professional watcher of the skies, was continuing his research into simulating binary black hole systems to aid gravitational-wave detection and parameter estimation. It’s a mouthful, I know. Basically, Hemberger, 30, a 2003 Exeter High grad, has created a method of predicting what a sort of listening device for gravitational waves might detect when two black holes collide far out in space. When that occurs, it creates what scientists call a chirp. Not a sound, it’s an intense wave of gravitational energy that ripples out through the universe. It’s a theory for the ages that Hemberger helped prove last month.

“It’s definitely an effort that spanned many decades and involved thousands of people,” Hemberger said. “By the time it gets here, the energy of a wave is a small fraction of a proton, yet represents one of the most energetic events humans have ever detected, except the Big Bang.”

Gravitational waves are something Einstein predicted as part of his theory of relativity, but which until now had never been proved. Hemberger and the research team he collaborates with at California Institute of Technology and other scientific and learning institutions around the globe already had their highly improbable “Eureka!” moment last month. LIGO, which stands for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, is a large-scale physics experiment aimed at directly detecting gravitational waves. LIGO, which consists of two observatories, one in Louisiana, the other in Washington state, recorded evidence of the first gravitational waves ever detected, on Sept. 14 at 4:50 a.m. “The waves descended on Earth from the Southern Hemisphere, passed through the Earth, and emerged at the Earth’s surface first at the LIGO interferometer in Livingston, Louisiana, and then, 7 milliseconds later, at the LIGO interferometer in Hanford, Washington,” an agency press release said.

Hemberger said his part was to help develop a simulation of what a gravitational wave might look like as it passed through the Earth and was picked up by the LIGO observatories. When the wave was detected, one of the ways to prove they had what they thought they had was to take the actual measurements and compare them with the simulation developed by Hemberger and his teammates.

Veteran Preservationists Cheryl and John Crozier like the atmospheric creaking of old houses. Their 18th century home on 8 acres in Colebrookdale Township is the second old farmhouse they restored. Before tackling their latest old-house rescue in 2012, they tried something different, building a new post-and-beam house in the Poconos.

“We only lived there a year,” John said. “We missed squeaky floors.”

Cheryl, a registered nurse and administrator for Penn State Health St. Joseph, grew up in an old farmhouse in Lower Alsace Township. John, a certified arborist and retired owner of 4 Seasons Landscaping, was reared in rural Exeter Township. Married 40 years, the beekeepers and breeders of German wirehaired pointers relish country living and enjoy hunting with their energetic pack, founded by the dam, Briska, 17, and sire, Cai, 15.

“We were longing for a Berks County farm,” John said. “We looked at other houses. Everything else was too modernized. With this house, the previous owners were cover-uppers, not ripperouters.”

Their research suggests the oldest section of the house was built about 1767, when Joseph Muthart, or Muthard, settled the farmstead. A stone wing was added in about 1820; and a summer kitchen about 1830.

“This began as a one-and-a-half-story, post-and-plank house,” John explained. “It was expanded to two stories with a log addition.”

The post-and-plank method, a traditional building technique using timber framing with heavy horizontal planks, can be found throughout Europe and was brought to America by colonists.

The only other known example in Berks County, near Bernville, was moved here from Dauphin County in the 1990s. Coincidentally, the Croziers’ home might have been moved here, too, but almost 250 years ago.

Since the post-and-plank method was widely discontinued in the region by the time the Muthard homestead was settled, some architectural historians theorize that the Muthards disassembled the home and moved it here. Sets of Roman numerals carved into the corners of the planks suggest the pieces were numbered for reassembly or were pre-fitted off-site.

Working with a team of professionals for three years, the Croziers stripped away evidence of modernity, removing any post-1830 materials and carefully hiding necessities such as plumbing and electricity.

“We wanted a modern kitchen, laundry room and baths,” John said.

They uncovered architectural clues to the original appearance of stairwells, windows and other features, finding hidden doors behind plastered walls. Remarkably, they discovered the original Dutch door stashed in the summer kitchen loft. Such divided doors were designed so the tops could be opened, allowing light and air in, while the bottoms stayed shut, keeping small children in and barnyard animals out.

“To have the original front door is unusual,” Cheryl said. “The windows are unusual, too. There was evidence of casement windows, and we had them remade.”

The oldest section of the house has a traditional Germanic three-room plan with a central fireplace and evidence of a jamb stove.

“The cooking fireplace beam is almost medieval,” John said. “The header measures 21 by 20 inches.”

The walk-in fireplace appears larger than the typical 18th century residential kitchen fireplace, indicating cooking on a commercial scale and suggesting the house might have doubled as an inn. This theory is supported by a series of faded tally marks, believed to be the tavern keeper’s tab, discovered on the cellar door beside the hearth. Corroborating evidence was found in the Pennsylvania census of 1800, where Joseph Muthard is listed as an innkeeper.

One of the Croziers’ strangest discoveries was an early 19th century shoe sealed behind an attic wall. Concealed shoes have been discovered in the fabric of buildings in European countries and their colonies, with the oldest reported example dating to the 14th century. While some attribute the practice to ancient superstitions for warding off evil, there are numerous theories, including some related to luck and fertility.

“I prefer to use the term ‘folk belief,’ ” said Patrick Donmoyer, site manager of the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center at Kutztown University. “It doesn’t surprise me that a shoe was found,” he added, noting that the tradition was widespread in the 19th century.

Soon after the shoe was removed, the Croziers noticed strange occurrences. Footsteps were heard overhead when no one was there. Doors opened by themselves. The whirlpool tub repeatedly turned on by itself.

It was easy to shrug these things off, but when Cheryl was pushed into the wall by an unseen force, she told John, “We better put that shoe back.”

“As soon as we did, the odd activity ended,” he said.

Though they still like their squeaky floors, they don’t miss the other noises and commotions.

Jacksonwald native Joel K. Harding and wife, Denise Portugues Harding, on a visit to Red Square in Moscow. Joel Harding has been invited by NATO to speak on information warfare, propaganda and strategic uses of disinformation in the digital age.

Call it schadenfreude.

The term describes enjoyment that comes from seeing or hearing about the troubles of others.In my case, I’ve recently had the sensation after reading stories about Russian misadventures and ineptitudes in their prosecution of the war against Islamic State.

I get a lot of my information from this newspaper and others, but other interesting stuff I’ve been reading lately is either authored or aggregated by my buddy Joel K. Harding.

I’ve written here a couple times before about Joel. He’s the guy who went from being a Reading Eagle newspaper carrier in his Jacksonwald neighborhood to an Army Special Forces warrior to an intelligence officer working with the Defense Department, CIA, NSA and others. Now he is a consultant on information operations, strategic communication and cyberwarfare.

Last week, Joel was notified that his blog, To Inform is to Influence, had been blocked by the Russians. The embargo coincided with a few of Joel’s more insightful and incisive posts about Russian propaganda.

Russian information warfare is a serious problem, I’ve been flat in their face for most of the past 20 months,” Joel said Friday.

”The head of Russian propaganda (Dr. Igor Panarin) hates me,” he added. “Therefore, I consider myself a success.”

Joel apologized for missing an earlier phone call.

“I was on the phone with NATO,” he said. “They’ve invited me to speak on Tuesday about how NATO can best combat Russian propaganda and disinformation.”

In a recent blog post, Joel wrote that he ascribes the theory that, based on its Internet activity, Russia has become a “Troll State.”

A troll’s purpose in Internet chat rooms is to suppress and overwhelm opposition and distract and disrupt a conversation. Russian trolls do the same thing through anti-American propaganda. The key is to not allow honest argument of the topic at hand, Joel wrote.

But there is now blowback from all of Russia’s propaganda. In recent blog posts, Joel has listed stories about:

Russians from mostly Muslim Chechnya organizing classes to stave off Islamic State recruitment. Thousands of Russian Muslims have joined ISIS in Syria, and some have taken senior positions. More conservative estimates from Chechnya said last month that less than 500 Chechens are believed to have joined ISIS and that about 200 of them have already been killed.

Last week, a person ISIS alleged was a Russian spy trying to infiltrate the terrorist group was beheaded on camera. ISIS then threatened to kill Russian civilians in their homes.

A Russian bomber was shot down when it allegedly invaded Turkish air space and then came a report that Russia had bombed grain silos in Syria in clear violation of international laws of armed conflict.

Joel agreed with my assessment that in this rare instance where Russians and Americans are fighting in the same Middle East conflict, it’s not just the Americans who are being portrayed in the media as inept or doing more harm than good.

And from his perspective, it was nice to see the Russian propaganda machine taking a few hits. He pointed to one of his favorite examples.

“Dr. Igor Panarin, the head of Russian propaganda, predicted the U.S. would be split into six separate countries by 2010,” he said. “It is such a popular theory in Russia that nobody cares that it isn’t true.”

Joel said one thing that stops U.S. officials from hitting back in Russia’s propaganda war against us is that Congress isn’t convinced we’re losing the war, or that it matters sufficiently.

That’s why Joel and like-minded strategists are working to convince Congress it’s worth the cost.