Seeing a fair number of American flags, several Trump/Pence signs (but no Susan Collins signs) and an occasional Black Live Matter placard as we meandered home from mid-coast Maine today, …
Be well. Stay safe. Fight for justice.
Work for peace.
In April of 2020, not long after the COVID-19 pandemic began, I had an inexplicable urge to dig into my late father’s stamp collection, which had been sitting unexamined on my shelves since about 2012. I created a challenge for myself: each day find a stamp that was somehow connected to that day, write a short blurb about it, and post it on Facebook with a picture of the stamp. I thought I’d do that for a few weeks. But the pandemic continued and what started as short blurbs became a year of daily essays that not only discussed historic events, famous people, and obscure Americana but also recounted personal and family stories and examined how these decades-old stamps shed light on a host contemporary challenges. Thanks to my daughter Rebecca, every one of those 365 essays – from the early succinct ones to the later rambling ones – are collected on this website, where you can view them by date, by broad category, or by whether they were my “personal favorites.” I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.
Historical Figures & Events
Delving into the people and events that shaped history
Culture & Society
Exploring Americana artifacts and other obscure areas of US history
Contemporary Issues
Discussing the pandemic, 2020 politics, and other recent happenings
Personal & Family Lore
Recounting stories from my childhood, “adulthood,” and family’s history
Featured Essays
Author favorites
Today, on the 19th anniversary of four coordinated terrorist attacks that killed almost 3,000 airplane terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center (WTC), the #stampoftheday, is reminder that the …
What do Robert Louis Stevenson, Sally Rand's Nude Ranch, monkeys racing tiny automobiles, Diego Rivera, and Indiana Jones, all have in common? The answer is that they are all connected to …
Six years ago today, I got on an airplane in Boston to head to Los Angeles. Later that day, the National Weather Service officially reported that the winter 2014-2015 was …
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story ," is a saying falsely attributed to Mark Twain that I've often jokingly quoted in my work as …
Today, August 6, 2020 is the 75th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It's also the 55th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, which …