Memorial Day Memory

It is Memorial Day weekend, again. As usual, my thoughts turn to those I have loved with all my heart, who served our country with bravery and devotion, and are no longer with us. It is more challenging, and a bit more painful every year, because we Baby Boomers are, sadly, winding down. And so […]

Her Ghost: Heaven On The Beach

She was a bright, shiny star in the 1930s and 1940s. In those days, Ginny Sims sang her way into everyone’s heart via radio, singing with the Kay Kyser Orchestra. In time, she developed her own radio shows, and hit the silver screen, becoming a huge star in “B” movies. Sims made her last movie […]

Words To The Wise

I am so shocked, I can hardly believe what I now know. It started when I was in high school. In those days, I read Seventeen Magazine, faithfully. It was my source for all things pertaining to teen life, body awareness, and boys. Every month the best part, which I savored, was an article, or […]

Not My Favorite Author, You Don’t

I freely admit I am a news junkie. The very first things I read as a little kid were newspapers my parents had finished reading and cast aside. I did not fully understand the stories, and what they meant; but I did know what I was reading was important to someone, somewhere, or it would […]

Robert Frost And His Gift Outright

There are moments in time which never, never leave us. We look back, and view crystalline images, clear, sharp, perfectly defined. For those of us who witnessed the inauguration of John F Kennedy in January, 1961, there was much to remember; but nothing and no one was so stirring as Robert Frost. The upper grades […]

R E S P E C T, Find Out What It Means To Me

January 23, 1986 saw the first ceremony for its Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees. Held in the Waldorf Astoria’s Grand Ballroom in New York City, those whose music had been rooted and grounded in gospel, country, R&B, blues, and rockabilly, merging into rock and roll, gathered to be acknowledged and honored. They, and […]

Life In The Time Of Cruising

December days in California’s San Joaquin Valley are cold, overcast, and often foggy. Tule fog, foggy. That is the fog where visibility can go from 600 feet to zero feet with little or no warning; there just is no way of knowing where it is going to be at its worst, and danger is the […]

Later On We’ll Perspire, As We Sit By The Fire…No That’s Not Right

There is a Taco Bell commercial on TV that causes me to chuckle every time it plays. The commercial is pretty lame as it advertises a new rolled chicken taco. Lame aside, as many times as it has run, I laugh, because I hear them say, “Road chicken taco.” And thanks to Taco Bell, we […]

His Profile Of Courage

“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans-born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage…” and so it was, the cafeteria at my new school […]

Forty-five Years And Counting, Where The Air Is Sweet

On November 10, 1969, the TV show which forever would change children’s television debuted on public broadcasting stations around the country, courtesy of the Children’s Television Workshop. I believe it is one of the best things that ever happened to television, and forty-five years later, it still is going strong. We Baby Boomers were mostly […]