I remember a conversation I had with my grandmother in the last year or so before she died. She was born in 1895 and lived until 1990, and amazing changes took place during her life. When she was born, the telephone and the electric light were still relatively new; most folks in small towns didn’t …
I have been to a lot of wonderful places and done a lot of wonderful things in my life. I’ve walked on the Great Wall of China, I swam on the beaches of French Polynesia and I stood on the sidelines of Mile High Stadium after dark on a November Sunday afternoon. I’ve spent hundreds …
My rental car was stuck in a snowdrift. It was the middle of the afternoon on January 15th, 1989, and I had skidded on a patch of ice on SR-195 on my way to Spokane, Washington. I had covered a basketball game at the University of Idaho the night before and was on my way …
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” JOSEPH GOEBBELS It’s fascinating that Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda officer, understood Donald Trump so well. After all, Trump hadn’t even been born during the 12 years of the Thousand Year Reich. But Trump makes Goebbels look like …
I had two grandfathers whose role in my life could not have been more different. One died at age 52, before I was born, and the other was an important person to me till he died at age 89, when I was 35 years old. The first was married twice, and both my grandmother and …
You may have heard that we’re a little more than three months away from Republicans taking back control of Congress from the Democrats. Apparently voters have realized they made a horrible mistake in voting out Donald Trump and taking control of Congress away from the GOP. Huh? They’d rather have great Americans like Josh Hawley, …
I was 11 years old the first time I had the feeling. I don’t remember much about the newspaper, other than to tell you it was a local weekly in Huber Heights, Ohio. I opened up the sports page, looked at the bottom of the broadsheet and saw my name and picture with a column …
THERE ARE FEW BETTER FEELINGS THAN BEING IN PRINT Read More »
The summer of 1976 was my first as an adult living without air conditioning. That summer and the one that followed were the only two in my life that I lived outside the United States. I don’t remember them being particularly hot summers, which is good because not only didn’t we have air conditioning, we …
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. William Butler Yeats’ classic poem “The Second Coming” is better known for its closing lines than the opening ones, but it says so much about all that’s wrong with our country these days. If you …
Very few people get to go everywhere and see everything. People travel more than they once did, but there are still people who never go anywhere. Five years ago, I was in upstate New York at a nearly empty Pizza Hut. My waiter was 18 years old and he had never been farther than a …
