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Four dead in Ohio

The year I was a junior in high school, four college students were shot on a campus in Ohio. The setting was Kent State, a public university. On May 4, 1970, a rally protesting the expansion of the United States’ involvement of the Vietnam War into Cambodia went sideways; 28 National Guard soldiers fired about 67 rounds over 13 seconds, killing four students. Kent State wasn’t the only site of pushback then. College protests were escalating. There was a real desire on the part of many students to resist any kind of escalation of war because, well, they didn’t want to be a part ...

Leadership is listening. Listening is empathy.

As I have stepped into this role of leadership, I have come to realize that I quite literally had no idea what I was getting myself into. What I thought the position was when I declared my candidacy to now is a complete 180 turn. No one really knows what goes into a respective position until they sit in the chair of those that came before you. I have also learned extremely quickly that the people that make up your given organization are what makes the wheels turn; they are the ones that the public sees and the ones that the public form an opinion of, and they impact how your department ...

Words we no longer use

“Jeepers Creepers, where’d ya get those peepers?” Now there’s a phrase you probably haven’t heard for a while. Perhaps you’ve never heard it. The line is from a song recorded by Louis Armstrong in the late 1930s. At the time of the recording, the word jeepers was quite common but I haven’t heard it used for years. I recall hearing jeepers as an exclamation back when I was a kid. For example, “Jeepers, that’s a swell bicycle!” Peepers, of course, referred to the eyes. And swell was an adjective; nowadays it is a verb. There are many other 20th century words that ...

The value of remembering

Reflections on the 9/11 tragedies are vivid in most of my friends' and families' memories. It might be hard to understand if you did not live through it, but it haunts most of us. My parents compared it to the way they felt when Pearl Harbor was bombed during World War II. It was shattering. Twenty-four years later, it’s still vivid. We can’t forget, and we shouldn’t forget. We need to help our younger generations understand the immense terror felt all across America. The planes stopped flying. The cell phones were flooded, and family members were saying goodbye, trapped in ...

Joining The Army

Very few experiences have impacted my life as strongly as the Army. The Salvation Army, that is. Uncle Sam didn’t want me for the U.S. Army. It was 18 years ago about right now that I interviewed for the position of development and communications director for The Salvation Army of Des Moines. The job began a few weeks later. Subsequently, I was assigned to also assist several other Iowa Salvation Army Corps with their development and communications efforts. My hiring followed a four-month period of unemployment. I had walked away from a job and a career that was making me ill. This ...

Who knows what changes next?

The world is changing so quickly we hardly notice anymore when some changes take place. For those of us over 70, many things have quietly faded from our lives. For example, when is the last time you saw … ? — Clothespin bags. Sure, you still might see clotheslines in backyards. However, you seldom see the clothespin bags which used to hang from nearly every set of clotheslines. Some of those bags were plain; others were made from colorful fabrics to resemble little dresses. And they all held the wooden clothespins that held the laundry to the clothesline. — Sprinkler bottles. ...