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If you have been at an ACLC meeting over the past year you have at least seen and probably talked to either Bev or Dale Newcomer.  Since moving to York, I have been able to visit the Newcomers and spend time with them at the GPASI Spring Auction and in their home and I thought you would enjoy knowing more about Bev & Dale and their "Amazon Basement".

Bev & Dale currently live in Manchester Twp just north of York Pennsylvania and are both natives of York County.  Bev graduated from Northeastern then spent a tour of duty with the U.S. Army in Heilbronn, Germany. Dale graduated from York Vo-Tech and spent the first few years after school "with his head under the hood of a car" according to Bev. They were married in 1981 and are the proud parents of 3 children and enjoy spoiling their three grandchildren Madison, Jeffrey, and Loralie.  When Dale isn't working in the basement, he is employed as the shop supervisor at Henkel's & McCoy, where he has been for 26 years, starting out as a mechanic.  Both Bev & Dale were volunteers with Liberty Ambulance & Fire Co., where Bev was the business Manager and Dale served on the Board of Trustees.  In 1993 they got involved with Paso Fino horses.  At one time they had 14 of these beautiful Spanish horses and were heavily involved in breeding, training and showing.  With the cost of caring for horses increasing faster that their income they decided to downsize and currently own just two.

Bev's interest in fish began just a few years ago at age 2 with a Black Moor.  At the age of ten she worked on a farm to earn enough money to buy her first real tank, a 10 Gallon with a box filter and an incandescent light that covered about half the tank. "I can still remember that blasted kissing fish hitting the floor every night when the lights went out" recalled Bev.  A short time after liquidating the herd of horses and starting what seemed like a semi-normal life, they were watching the fish in their 56 gallon tank when Dale said, "What we really need is a fish room"! Well the rest of the story is history and I will try and give you some idea of what happened to Dale's woodshop.

The first thing you notice when you arrive at the Newcomers is their friendly doorman Sherman.  Sherman is 165+ pounds of beautiful, lovable Great Dane who will escort you throughout the house, sit on your lap, give you a kiss that feels like a wet sponge hitting your cheek, and he will even assist you when looking at fish tanks. 

In the basement you open a door and see a nice layout that has more than 170 tanks ranging from 2.5 to 75 gallons.  On the day I visited Dale was in the process of setting up some more 5 and 10 gallon tanks on the upper tier of the rack built by Dale and are set up in three rows along the length of the room.  Dale had just installed an infrared heater to heat the room separately from the rest of the house.  The water treatment and waterchange system is quite interesting and after talking to Dale about it for a few minutes, I am still not sure I got it but I will try and explain how it works.  The system is an ion exchange system that has several processing tanks that enable the Newcomers to fill the tanks with either low ph or neutral water.  What makes it even better is that Dale has it set up so that he can clean the tanks and remove water through the same plumbing system only in reverse flow.   Dale has also set up the lids of the tanks with what can only be called a "sliding glass lid".  We will have to get Dale to hold a workshop or write an article on how to make these.  The tanks are all being filtered with sponge filters and the air is supplied by a Jehmco LPH100 linear piston pump. 
Bev started out wanting to breed a few species and sell a few wholesale to the local pet shops but, the disease struck hard and within a few months the Newcomers saw a need to start selling fish over the Internet on EBay and AquaBid and before long there was a website, designed by Bev for The Amazon Basement where other aquarist can see what they have in stock.  Since then they have expanded to become the local distributor for UltraColor premium quality fish food and just recently obtained their Import/Export license through U.S. Fish & Wildlife.  They are now bringing in fish from Calcutta, Singapore, Columbia and Brazil.  When I was at the basement there were no empty tanks and at least a dozen had fry growing out and several more tanks had eggs.  The fish are fed the proper size of UltraColor and also BBS, Blackworms by Langione, microworms and Daphnia which are they culture in 2 - 29 gallon tanks.  Bev told me that what she enjoys most about breeding fish is having something new spawn in one of their tanks.  "It is always exciting to have new fry in the house", said Bev, "I just wish there were enough hours in the day to keep everything that I would like!" Although she likes all species, her favorites right now are the Corydoras catfish and all the "L" numbers. They said that they would like to see the Aquarium club of Lancaster County continue to grow and is looking forward to the swap meet and would like to see us have a few more different field trips to new and exciting places.  They really would like to see us get enough participation in the club to have an auction and host or co-host a convention so that the rest of the world can see what a great group of hobbyists we have in Lancaster.

I would like to recommend to everyone that they contact Bev & Dale to arrange a time to see this fabulous fishroom and let them know how much we appreciate their membership.  And if you do get a chance to stop by the "basement" don't forget to give Sherman a hug!