I don’t know if there’s anything in the world that quite compares to a high school football game in the smaller towns of America. I went to Macomb, Illinois the other day and the first thing I noticed when we drove into town were signs saluting the local high school foot ball team, the […]
Raining and Straining
Posted October 2nd, 2009 at 3:29 pm (UTC-4)
Last time, while enjoying my way across South Dakota, I mentioned that my ultimate destination was Seattle, Washington. Just as life is (hopefully) a marathon, not a sprint, my goal was to amble around all three of the Pacific Northwest states a bit in order to refresh my impressions of them. Seattle was the finish […]
South Dakodak
Posted September 24th, 2009 at 4:41 pm (UTC-4)
If you’re like me, you sometimes look back at an earlier period in your nation’s history and think, “Those were the days!” We romanticize the slower pace and what today seems like their relative innocence — even if reality was something else again. I’ve already told you that I sometimes linger over old photographs — […]
WisSCONsin
Posted September 9th, 2009 at 3:02 pm (UTC-4)
On a just-completed cross-country trip, Carol and I drove, languidly and admiringly, through a tidy place full of cheery people, picture-postcard farms with bright-red barns, and white-fence towns with names like Oconomowoc and Ashwaubenon — Indian words that locals articulate as fluidly as they order a beer and a brat. That’s brat as in bratwurst […]
Formidable Footpath
Posted August 27th, 2009 at 1:15 pm (UTC-4)
I want to tell you all about the Appalachian Trail from experience, for I have hiked it. Layers of fog greet A.T. hikers in the Appalachian Mountains. Well, not all 3,400 kilometers, or 2,100 miles, of it. More like 10 miles, some of it in my street shoes, thereby learning the first lesson of traversing […]
The Plain People
Posted August 13th, 2009 at 7:27 pm (UTC-4)
Carol and I recently visited the land of the Plain People in Holmes County, Ohio, just down the road from the ordinary, middle-sized cities of Akron and Canton. These neatly tied shocks of barley epitomize the look of the countryside in Ohio’s Amish country This is “Amish country,” the largest, if not richest, concentration of […]
Our Temple of Radio
Posted July 30th, 2009 at 6:53 pm (UTC-4)
Let’s say you’re a longtime, enthusiastic Voice of America listener who has the opportunity to visit the United States, and someone like me, right now, informs you that there’s one place in America where you can find: There’s even an interstate highway sign pointing drivers to an amazing VOA complex • the site where VOA […]
Cause Celebrity
Posted July 10th, 2009 at 1:28 pm (UTC-4)
What’s the difference between a prehistoric dinosaur and a journalist dinosaur? A prehistoric dinosaur didn’t know it was a dinosaur. The “bullpen” at the New York Times in September 1942, my birth month. For the benefit of our young readers, the instrument in the foreground is a “rotary” telephone, and those things spread across the […]
