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Coming home

Local Columns

A friend of mine once described coming home as “touching base.” I always took it to mean recharging. Resetting. Like unplugging the computer to get the thing to work the way you want. I thought of this when writing about the amazing Amelia Oliver, a smart performer who’s gracing the Webster City Community Theatre stage in its most recent production, “Little Shop of Horrors.” Like Amelia, I came home. The first time I came home, I had just graduated from Iowa State with a journalism degree and spent the months following working for the Daily Freeman-Journal until my computer ...

Love and marriage the second time around

Local Columns

On a quiet evening a short time before my first wife, Cindy, passed away, we engaged in a conversation about the future. We were looking ahead to retirement. Cindy had recently lost her parents. My father had died 20 years earlier. A few months earlier, I purchased larger life insurance policies for each of us. “If I go first,” I explained, “you’re free to remarry or not. I just don’t want you to have to marry someone for financial reasons.” I had seen that happen and it wasn’t pretty. Cindy explained that she wasn’t sure she would remarry if I was the first to go. ...

It all started with Pong

Local Columns

I’m going to make a safe assumption: most of the world’s population today cannot remember a time when there were no electronic games. This is based on two facts: (1) the world’s median population is approximately 30.9 years old (meaning half of the world’s population is older than 30.9); and, (2) the world’s first electronic games — Galaxy and Pong — were introduced in 1971 and 1972, respectively. This realization occurred when Julie and I watched three of her grandchildren for a week in June while their parents vacationed with friends in Minnesota. On Friday afternoon ...

Mrs. Miller was right.

Local Columns

It wasn’t smart to bet against Dorothy S. Miller, my fifth-grade teacher at Washington Grade School in Bloomington, Illinois. She said many memorable things, including one day in civics class: (sic) “It’s the duty of good citizens to read a daily newspaper.” Every day at 8.20 a.m. we ...

Eb's Spanish lessons

Local Columns

The waitress had just refilled my coffee cup when a familiar character slid into the opposite side of the coffee shop booth. It was my old buddy, Eb Griper. I’m not saying Eb has a sour personality but he can curdle a pitcher of cream just by staring at it. “Morning, Eb,” I offered. “Yep,” Eb said glumly. “Bad day?” “Is there any other kind?” “Boy,” I said, “you can make a Friday seem like a Monday. Why so glum?” “Hilda.” “And what did Hilda do to upset you today?” Eb sighed. “She decided I need more culture.” “And you believe ...

Memories go way back

Local Columns

While chatting with a high school classmate recently we discussed some childhood and school memories. He said he could remember back to his pre-kindergarten years and I said I can remember bits and pieces of when I was two years old. That’s nothing special but it is uncommon. Psychologists tell us that most people cannot remember beyond age three. Children’s memory abilities, it is understood, don’t fully mature until about age seven. They call this inability to recall memories from early childhood “infantile amnesia” and believe this is not due to a lack of memory ...