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My Aunt Mary Meets Big Bertha
Big Bertha I didn’t know my Aunt Mary. She was my grandfather’s sister, and he never said a word about her. But I do know that in May of 1916 she helped out at a 10-day bazaar raising money for the...
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Watching Golf
My wife thinks I have gone around the bend because I have begun watching golf on television. I have never played golf, unless you count courses with a windmill hole. But I enjoy watching, and I have a...
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Cheese: From Sandy Creek to the White House
On occasion, one experiences a confluence of comments on the same subject that amounts to a sign, a call to action. And so it was last week when Shannon and Marcia both mentioned cheese. Shannon turned...
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Tea Island
Tea Island photographed by Seneca Ray Stoddard, circa 1880 I love Lake George, islands and tea, so it was inevitable that I write something about Tea Island. The southernmost island in the lake, it...
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Pig Sticking
I was reading about polo in India and the role played by the British military in bringing polo from India to England, and thence to the United States, when I came across another British sport in India...
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Black Heart Stout
There are people who will tell you that a Liberal Arts degree, in the possession of an English major, is one of the most worthless pieces of paper in general circulation. But as I possess one such...
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On a Painting that Might Be R.G. Shaw II
The following story is repeated, with the photo above but with no attribution, many times on the Internet: “Artist R.G. Harper Pennington in one of his paintings depicted a nude Robert Gould Shaw II...
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The Origin of Dirk Wagstaff
As a writer I’ve only used two pseudonyms: “Evan Nescent” back in the ‘70s and more recently, “Dirk Wagstaff,” which came into being after the collision of two movie memories. Fans of the Marx Brothers...
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Accidental Self Destruction
War is a dangerous pastime, and the enemy is not the only hazard. This was brought home to me recently when I was researching four young men from my village who died in the war in Vietnam. One was just...
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Patience
It was the summer of 1963. I was 15 years old, a Boy Scout, just in from a week on the trail at Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron, New Mexico. We had a day to kill in Tent City, the base camp, before...
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Maud Allan
I can’t help but think that Maud Allan would have been better off with a few cast changes in the play that was her life. Born Beulah Maude Durrant in Toronto in 1873, she spent her childhood in San...
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The Schwabl
Many, many years ago, in the early 1960s, I dated a young woman whose older brother was something of a legend. While a student at a college that shall remain nameless (RPI), a member of an anonymous...
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Left Behind
Some childhood memories just won’t go away. This is one I can’t forget: My brother had his first car at 15, and when he was old enough to drive, he had his second, a Chevy Bel Air, blue and white. He...
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Poker
Poker is in my blood, but so is losing, so I won’t be turning pro. My parents played poker every week, in spite of being Baptists. In my father’s case, the Baptist prohibition against gambling was one...
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Sharia Law
The other day when Republicans in the North Carolina House of Representatives slipped anti-abortion provisions into legislation forbidding Sharia law, I asked myself, “In the first place, why are...
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Hazel
In the wake of Colorado’s “Biblical flooding” and the typhoon that swept through Kyoto, I am reminded of my first hurricane, in October of 1954. I was seven years old. We lived in Buffalo, N.Y., not...
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The Gdańsk Post Office, 1939
On September 1, 1939, the morning the German army invaded Poland, the postal workers at the Polish post office in Gdańsk delivered more than mail. There was a lot of history behind the 1939 invasion...
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For a More Perfect Union
I am past weary with those who venerate the U.S. Constitution without reading it. Written and adopted in 1787, the document was intended, among other things, to form a more perfect union, establish...
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Guano
Few things make me happier than the arrival of Architectural Digest, and the December 2013 issue more than fulfilled my eager expectations. Savor with me this morsel from a feature on a Paris apartment...
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Polo Widows
Louise Astor Van Alen Mdivani Alexis and Serge Mdivani, two Georgian princes who fled to Paris after the Soviet invasion of their birthplace in 1921, excelled at marrying wealthy women and creating...
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