A college education can be a great thing, but the reality of it is that all too often when you graduate, you end up with a diploma and, more often than not, a huge student loan debt that will take years to pay off, but not much else. Nothing I learned in a college classroom […]
41 years ago last month one of the largest natural disasters in my lifetime happened, and it also my first big news story. I was running my small town newspaper on the Washington coast, and for weeks there had been news reports that Mount Saint Helens could erupt at any time. It finally did on […]
When Terry and I first got together, she was shocked by the way I treated the employees at my small town newspaper. No, I wasn’t Simon Legree expecting them to work their fingers to the bone for nothing. If anything, I went to the other extreme. I paid them well, gave them time off when […]
Apparently, the latest complaint by the politically correct crowd is their objection to someone saying Amen at the end of a prayer. They want something more PC, something gender-neutral. Or is that gender neutered? I guess some have asked why they can’t say Awoman instead of Amen. An old junior high school teacher of mine […]
I do believe that there are people who have certain gifts that the rest of us don’t have, or at least don’t recognize. I had a friend I worked with at one time who, several times, said he believed something was going to happen to somebody else in our circle, and it did. Two occasions […]
I have written before about an area in northern Arizona called East of Snowflake that attracts all kinds of weird people. If you’re a burned-out hippie, a survivalist, a conspiracy theorist, or any other flavor of eccentric, you can buy land east of the small town of Snowflake for very little money and live happily […]
If you run a small town newspaper, you’re going to make some people mad. There’s no way around it. And sometimes the things that make people mad are amazing. For example, I once ran a story about a man who got drunk and was speeding through town on a motorcycle, with the police in hot […]
Writing and storytelling have always come naturally to me, so while I know authors who complain about writer’s block, it’s not something I’ve ever experienced myself. That may be because of my years in the small town newspaper business, where you had to get an edition out on the street, and you couldn’t fill it […]
In last week’s Newspaper Days column I told you the story of a woman who called me because her teenage sons were playing with an unstable World War II-era hand grenade. I said that once I determined it was a live grenade, I called my buddy Rusty, who was a lieutenant with the police department. […]
When you publish a small-town newspaper, everybody knows you. It’s kind of like being a celebrity, or at least a big fish in a small pond. Sometimes that was nice. I won’t lie, occasionally we got some special seating in restaurants and free movie or concert tickets, things like that. Other times it was a […]
In one of my earlier posts about my small town newspaper days, I mentioned a fellow named Ed, who lived in the infamous East of Snowflake area in northern Arizona. Ed was the man who wanted me to send an undercover reporter out to his property because a UFO had landed and little aliens were […]
I am no kind of hero, and though people who know me might disagree, for the most part I’m relatively sane and mentally stable. But there have been times and places in my life when things happened that that gave me the heebie-jeebies and made my skin crawl. Let me tell you about one of […]
Today is a very special day for myself and Miss Terry. It’s our 21st wedding anniversary, and we still feel (and often act) like newlyweds. This was not the first marriage for either of us, and believe me, it was not something that either one of us was looking for, or even expected to happen. […]
We all know that’s a recipe for disaster, don’t we? The majority of car salesmen and RV salesmen have one thing in common – if their lips are moving, you can pretty much assume they are lying. And before you start jumping on me telling me that you know a good car salesman, note that […]
Can you believe this beautiful lady has been putting up with me for two decades? That’s right, today is our 20th wedding anniversary. And what a wonderful 20 years it has been! This was not the first marriage for either of us, and believe me, it was not something that either one of us was […]
Yesterday was a déjà vu kind of day. I spent most of it writing, and Terry spent it doing some chores she wanted to get out of the way and doing some research on weaving. We had a mellow music channel on TV for background noise. Some authors say they can’t work with any noise […]
I have managed to get a lot done on the new issue of the Gypsy Journal in the last couple of days, and I only have eight pages left to go. Barring any unexpected problems, I’ll easily make my deadline by the end of the week. I’m looking forward to getting it done so I […]
I spend a lot of hours every day working at my computer, and a lot of that time is spent online, either answering e-mails from our readers, updating my blogs and websites, or researching new places we want to visit to see what kinds of stories I can find there for the Gypsy Journal. But […]