Baseball is a very strange game in one respect. It’s the only one of the team sports in which people argue vehemently that the best players from 100 years ago were actually better than the best players of the modern era. Certainly not American football, where as recently as the mid 1960s, there was only …
I’m not sure I ever had more fun as a journalist than I did during the two years I spent as sports editor and sports columnist of the Tribune in Greeley, Colorado. It was my soft landing when the St. Louis Globe-Democrat folded, and even though it was a much smaller paper, getting to run …
“It’s not my job to pay a man what he’s worth.” Rich people have usually been able to get away with nearly anything, but never so much so as in the age of the robber barons. J.P. Morgan could make the above statement and people would agree with him. People actually believed that labor unions …
It really is time to bury the idea that the original intent of the white males we know as the framers is worth keeping. The truth is that they didn’t believe in it themselves. When someone asked Thomas Jefferson how long the Constitution would last, his response was one, maybe two generations. Jefferson, who is …
“It’s a strange new world when I am rooting for Liz Cheney.” My long-time friend Christine Worth Miller drew a rueful laugh from me with this post on Facebook this morning, but the laugh wasn’t because she was wrong. She was right. When Donald gave his Trumpanzees the message from Mar-a-Lago that from now on, …
The term “thinning the herd” used to be a serious one. Ranchers would cull out the weaker examples of whatever animal it was they were raising, and when those animals didn’t reproduce, the overall quality of the herd would improve. It doesn’t apply as well to human beings. Much of the genocide that has taken …
When I was young(er) and had a lot more energy, I covered college basketball. I traveled with the University of Missouri from 1984-86 and with the University of Nevada from 1988-90. On those beats and others in between, I visited some of the real cathedrals of the college game. Places like Pauley Pavilion at UCLA, …
“Where are your books?” In the film “Time After Time,” H.G. Wells has chased Jack the Ripper across time and space to 1979 San Francisco. Wells meets Amy Robbins, a lovely intelligent modern woman. When she takes him to her apartment, one of his first observations is that she has no books. As a brilliant, …
I was 40 years old the last time I saw my grandparents’ house, which of course is not the one pictured here. I’ve written before about March 1990, when we gathered in Crestline, Ohio, for my grandmother’s funeral. My cousin Peter Kindinger said something I have never forgotten, that for all the wonderful memories the …
Stroll — to walk in a leisurely or idle manner. Skulk — keep out of sight, typically with a sinister or cowardly motive. It has been many years since the Circle theater existed on Pennsylvania Avenue just north of George Washington University. This theater, and its companion the Inner Circle, were the two best houses …
