Slightly condensed from an article in the March 1949 American Legion Magazine by Paul Gardner (my dad, whose folder of yellowed clippings I’ve been looking through.) In mid-summer of 1946 Bill Veeck limped into Cleveland…
Posts published in “Essays”
Alexander Cockburn, the most incisive political journalist of our time, was born on June 6, 1941 (the year of the snake). I sent him this in ‘91: Greetings to our favorite lefty, Alexander Cockburn, 50…
I began hearing about Hop Flat, the short-lived logging and millcamp west of the rocky bluff at Highway 128’s milepost 5.50, when I first moved to The Valley in 1971. The old Navarro woodsman bachelor…
There was no such thing as “semitism” when Wilhelm Marr, a German journalist/political organizer, coined the term “antisemitism” to mean prejudice against Jews. When Marr founded “The Anti-Semitic League” in 1879, why didn't he use…
There’s a fresh breeze in the air with mild gusts cleansing America of rot and decay from years of progressive ideology’s stranglehold on a civilized, well-governed republic. We shall survive. Our ill-considered lurch into DEI-land…
The suburbs are a war zone. That was how the General saw things. He was my aunt’s father-in-law. I met him only a handful of times over the years, mostly at family celebrations, like my…
(Amidst all the pugilistic politics marking Mexican-American relations of late, the Musical Patriot limbers up a column that trotted into the ring of public opinion ten years ago, in May of 2015.) Although the singing…
Now if you ask me, there isn’t a guy more loving and supportive of his dear wife than I am of the gal I call Trophy. You could ask her opinion, but at the moment…
(Writer’s note: I was born in 1957. As a result, the closest I came to the Vietnam War was as a child in the 1960s watching the nightly talking heads deliver the daily body count…