America's most enduring political figure now lives in slow motion. Hampered by bad hips, she walks at a glacial pace, usually gripping the arms of two aides who lead the way, her legs flopping around…
Posts published in “Essays”
‘Tried to give away, turn in, that is, her wallet. Eager to surrender, ready to submit. No use, though. Why’d I ever pick the orphan bastard up? You’d’ve done the same. Pigskin peeking from dense…
Sal Maglie: Baseball’s Demon Barber by Judith Testa, Northern Illinois University Press, 2007; 463 pages. It took an art historian from a midwestern college to give Sal Maglie the biography he deserved. The subject seems…
Marie the mystery woman was so much the mystery woman it was hard to find out her last name, but it was Helmey, Marie Helmey, the older lady in the long black coat with a…
During a three hour mid-day meal at the Bewildered Pig last month Floriane and Arnaud Weyrich told me the tale of how they migrated to our Valley, raised a family, and upon retrospect found very…
Where exactly did this disrespect for authority, this all-around cheekiness, come from? Well, between prime 50s TV guys like Groucho Marx and Allen Funt, what would you expect? “You Bet Your Life” and “Candid Camera”…
Ah, spring. The season when the hills turn green, the flowers pop and, the deciduous trees gain vibrant foliage. It also is the season where many of our noses and sinuses go absolutely crazy, in…
As soon as antibiotics were discovered in the 1940s, they were shown to be about the most effective medications known so far and thus were rapidly mass-manufactured and used by doctors, curing countless illnesses and…
(AVA, August 28, 1985) A reminiscing Valley resident was once overheard to say, “When I first came here in 1960, it seemed to me there were only two places I was assured of a warm…