For about two decades, maybe longer, we've ended our Passover Seder by singing "Amazing Grace." It's always late and we're full - of food, spirit, love, and hope, and other …
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
"A History of Ranching," Buck Winn's largest painting, is a 280-foot-long mural commissioned in 1950 that hung for decades in the "Corral Room," at Pearl Beer's brewery in San Antonio. …
A bear so famous that he needed his own Zip Code to handle all his fan mail lurks behind the scenes of today' #stampoftheday, a 4-cent stamp honoring Forest Conservation …
In the 1970s, when people travelled and airlines served something resembling real food, my mother decided that the silverware used by Braniff Airlines looked almost exactly like her silverware at …
In 1993, when it grappled with fundamental questions the state's educational finance system, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court used language from the state's more than 200-year old constitution as the …
Growing up, Shea Stadium was almost a religious shrine for me. Little did I know, that the really important - and still quite timey—shrine was less than two miles away. My …