Two Gents' Worth
December 28, 2024
I had a really crazy fantasy recently. In this one, I was walking around downtown Fresno near Courthouse Park when The Guy I Used to Be drove up. He looked about 25 years old, maybe 150 pounds, with longish light-brown hair, a mustache and gold-rimmed glasses. He was driving the same bright blue ’71 Pinto…
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A few weeks ago, an old friend in Paso Robles emailed me a great series of cartoons dealing with aging. He does that a lot, and those cartoons are often quite amusing – even if they hit way too close to home. The best cartoon he sent in that batch showed a woman of indeterminate…
Read More about Another Birthday, on the WayA week or so ago, I wrote about why I had gone into broadcasting. I mentioned that it was because of NBC Radio’s incredible weekend-long “Monitor” program — which I fell in love with and never got over — and because of KNBR Radio in San Francisco, the great-sounding NBC owned-and-operated station that boomed its…
Read More about My Favorite TeacherThe other day, someone asked me why I had gone into broadcasting and spent most of my career there. There are two reasons: NBC Radio’s extraordinary weekend-long program “Monitor” — and KNBR Radio in San Francisco. Soon after I started listening to “Monitor” in 1963 on KMJ Radio in Fresno, I discovered KNBR (an NBC…
Read More about Broadcasting. Why?
“It’s Christmas time all over the world. It’s Christmas here at home.” Sammy Davis Jr. memorably belted that out decades ago in a marvelous musical ditty about what fellow great singer Andy Williams called “the most wonderful time of the year.” If Christmas doesn’t bring out the best in us — the smiles in us…
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Yes, the time has nearly come for us to leave this most magical of all places. I’m talking, of course, about Mr. Disney’s little retreat in Florida — the one that Walt dreamed up, magnificently, decades ago — and then, unfortunately, never got the chance to see and enjoy. Disney World in Orlando is not…
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We hit the road about a week ago — yes, once again interrupting our summer-long stay in Ames to make a side trip — this time, to the West. We rented a car and took off toward South Dakota. We’d never been there, and we knew there were a few things we needed to see…
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Fourth of July celebrations came back to Ames this weekend, and they were greeted the same way you greet a long-lost, beloved friend. Last year on the Fourth, Ames virtually was shut down. No fireworks. No parade. Yes, the coronavirus pandemic had done its nasty work all too well. Ames was a ghost town a…
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We interrupted our summer-long stay in Ames to take a whirlwind trip to Washington, DC, this week. We wanted to see Brad and Nicole after nearly two years of coronavirus-mandated distancing. We wanted to re-visit some of our favorite Smithsonians. And we wanted to see the Nats play baseball. We did all that, and we…
Read More about Our Side Trip to the Capital
We’ve been here in Ames — aka, the Heart of the Great American Heartland — for a couple of weeks now, and I’m delighted to say everything is back to normal. I could not say that last summer — when, as you’ll recall, the coronavirus had disrupted everything near and dear to all of us….
Read More about That Heartland Normalcy