I know, an ode is a lyric poem, something short and sometimes sung. I’m no poet, I don’t do “short” well, and you don’t want me to sing. But this story is an encomium to majestic train terminals between which America’s passenger trains once traveled each day by the hundreds. I should point out that […]
Cures for What Ails You
Posted February 24th, 2012 at 1:00 pm (UTC-4)
I’m old enough to remember, not fondly, mustard plasters applied to my chest during my childhood bouts with the “croup,” and Vicks Vapo-Rub spread beneath a warm humidifier to help keep my perpetually clogged sinuses clear. So I was filled with a kind of warped nostalgia when someone gave me a little booklet at the […]
Remembering 1942, Sort Of
Posted October 19th, 2011 at 2:43 pm (UTC-4)
Last month I got a modest but much-appreciated birthday gift — appreciated because the giver knows I love brief historical adventures. The gift was a booklet, entitled Remember When . . . 1942. That’s my birth year, back in the Pleistocene Epoch. The publisher, Seek Publishing, makes editions for every year from 1920 through 2001. […]
The (Concrete) French Connection
Posted October 7th, 2011 at 9:49 am (UTC-4)
About 20 years ago during a short stint in management here at the Voice of America, I sent a superb reporter named Bill Torrey on a journey that I longed to make myself. As it turns out, my photographer-wife Carol M. Highsmith and I would later retrace a good deal of his route, to our […]
Potting It Down
Posted March 10th, 2011 at 2:44 pm (UTC-4)
At the risk of agitating reader Brad, who already calls me “old and cranky,” let me tell you about a nostalgic email that I got from Dean Everette, a friend and old radio hand who laughs that he, like many in that transient profession, “was fired every couple of years or so.” (I was fired […]
