At the end of WWII, it was generally recognized that the Soviet Union and saved Europe. Russians killed 80% of all German soldiers. The Nazi invasion of Russia, biggest military onslaught in history, happened 3…
Posts published in “Essays”
This high school wood shop, built in 1954, will not qualify for modernization funding until the district brings an outside entranceway added in the 1970s up to code – an additional expense that Anderson Valley…
No work of music has a greater lock on a single ritual than Edward Elgar’s Pomp & Circumstance March no. 1 does on American graduations. Cock an ear in the direction of high school and…
The Dreyfus Affair. Alfred Dreyfus was a French military officer convicted of treason in 1894 for allegedly passing military secrets to the German embassy in Paris. Dreyfus was sentenced to life imprisonment and transported to…
I was walking down the long hall at my mother’s nursing home when I heard a bright cheery “Hi!” behind me. I turned around and saw a woman in her nineties rolling toward me in…
There is no shortage of cool places to walk on the Mendocino Coast, so when you need a break from the heat in the Ukiah Valley, just about any spot you pick on the western…
Siena is one of my favorite places that we visited on our trip this spring. I first learned about Siena as a child reading Marguerite Henry’s Gaudenzia, Pride of the Palio, about a boy and…
Journalism, once a noble calling, is now an embarrassment; reporters have reputations worse than used car salesmen. I did newspaper work 35 years, then morphed into a private investigator. Asked about my former career I…
The last time the name Anna Magdalena appeared in fiction it was attached not to a human character but to an assassin’s rifle. The perpetrators of this crime were themselves a pair of highly paid…