In my latest column that ran in the Sept. 28 edition of the St. Louis Call, I explained why I thought September was the cruelest month. My younger brother contracted polio in September 1964. He was...

In 1922 T. S. Eliot’s famous work “The Waste Land” was first published. This poem was written after the First World War when Europe was a crumbling mess. He opens the poem by stating that the cruelest...

We’re all living on borrowed time In 2019, when in my early 80s, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer has one of the worst survival rates of all cancers. Statistically only 4.5%...

It was July when I disembarked from the small ship in Russian America. The year was 1947 and the land is now called Alaska, meaning “great land” in the language of the native Aleuts. This territory...

June may be best known for the beginning of summer, school break for students, summer vacation for families – but did you know that it’s also Effective Communications Month? Every year the month...

When our youngest son was in Cub Scouts, I served as Cubmaster. On Memorial Day weekend we would join with thousands of other Scouts and leaders to place flags on the graves of the fallen at Jefferson...

Winter is gone, and spring begins to bring new life. The flowers bloom and the leaves begin to cover barren branches. The world seems renewed. Spring is a hopeful season. It brings transformation and...

During a thunderstorm in February 1911, lightning struck the Missouri Capitol dome.  The ensuing fire destroyed much of the building. When the Capitol building was reconstructed, the decorating committee...

Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, was reading the newspaper after his brother died and was shocked by the obituary: The story was mistakenly about Nobel himself and read, “The merchant of death...

December! The days grow shorter and colder. As a child I lived in a coal mining camp in Alaska where the temperatures dropped to the negative double digits and the days were very short.     It was...