Carol and I have visited Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, many times. Sizeable yet quaint places, both of them, storied in history and full of old fortifications and photogenic magnolias (Charleston) and tidy squares filled with oak trees draped in Spanish moss (Savannah). Yet every time we go to either place or tell friends […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
What’s in a (Nick)Name?
Posted July 2nd, 2009 at 1:06 pm (UTC-4)
The College of William & Mary, America’s second-oldest college (after Harvard), whose graduates include two U.S. presidents and 16 signers of the Declaration of Independence, is one of several academically superior schools of higher education in Virginia. But William & Mary, chartered in 1693 by Britain’s King William III and Queen Mary II, is also […]
Valley of the Stun
Posted June 12th, 2009 at 2:51 pm (UTC-4)
Only one lonely, two-lane highway pierces Monument Valley, a vast natural wonder that straddles the Arizona-Utah border in the Desert Southwest. And then one unpaved, rutted, 27-kilometer [17-mile] loop trail winds through it once you get there. Stubs of sandstone jut upward like broken lower teeth on Monument Valley’s desert floor The air is clear […]
