In 1949, my father received a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Cooper Union. Seventy years later, we found his lab reports and tests in the boxes of papers, photos, and ephemera that we had put in storage in 2013. To be clear: this meant that my parents had taken those papers with them on six …
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"Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat," was the opening line of "ABC's Wide World of Sports, which illustrated the agony with ski jumper falling off the side of the ski jump hill. I watched the show regularly in the late 60s and …
If, as I've done many times, you walk up the wide paved path from the Park Street MBTA station to the Massachusetts State House, you will pass a great work of art: "The Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment," a bronze relief sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. And if you are like me, …
Is there anything interesting to say about a stamp honoring the 150th anniversary of Ohio becoming a state and a stamp honoring the 100th anniversary of when the Washington Territory was created? That's the question I've been pondering this evening as I've been getting ready to write about the two stamps, which, since they were both …
The third wave of the great 1918-1919 influenza pandemic peaked early in March of 1919. Although the third wave wasn't as deadly as the apocalyptic second wave in mid 1918, it was much deadlier than the first wave, and hit particularly hard in several major cities, including Los Angeles, New York, Memphis, Nashville, San Francisco …
Before there were Google Maps, before there was MapQuest, there was something my daughters called "GrannieQuest." GrannieQuest was a remarkable, personalized navigation service. If you were driving somewhere, you would call my mother and ask for directions. You would quickly get accurate, detailed directions (told from memory) even if it had been years since my mother …
"In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost," is one of many lines that Dante Alighieri wrote in the 14th century that seem totally appropriate for March 2021. It's appropriate for me today, because I spent the day on Zoom doing exactly …
What, exactly, are we remembering when we "Remember the Alamo." I used to know the answer to that seemingly simple question. We remembered a heroic stand by a vastly outnumbered group of men, all of them white, who fought for freedom against Mexican oppressors. The men who died in that fight were a "Hall of Fame" …
As the great gospel song says, I "woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom." I didn't realize that was the case until late in the day but looking back at the day, it's clear it was there all day long. Freedom was a clear theme when, over my morning coffee, I read "This Day …