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Sydney Smith, Polo’s Gift to Baseball
When I hear the name Sydney Smith, my thoughts fly to the English wit and cleric (1771- 1845) whose letters are among the most delightful ever written. However, there is another Sydney Smith who, while...
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King C. Gillette
The doctor, concerned about my grandfather’s heart, ordered him to leave the room when the Friday Night Fights came on the television. Following the doctor’s instructions to the letter, Grandpa Braun...
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The Tea Party
If you find the contemporary Tea Party to be obnoxious, there’s a reason to be found in history. The Sons of Liberty, the perpetrators of the original Boston Tea Party, although enshrined in patriotic...
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Spared by a Barbarian
It was 1969. I had just finished language school in Monterey, California, and had been sent for Intelligence Training to Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas. It was a six-week course, but...
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You Can’t Compete
In February of 2014, Dr. James David Manning, pastor of the ATLAH World Missionary Church in New York City, shocked America when he revealed that the President of the United States practices...
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The Bug
Years have passed, and I think I can talk about the bug now. It was Holy Week, 2010, at St. James’ Episcopal Church. I sang in the choir. The choir sat in the front of the church, a few steps above the...
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Mom’s Bookplate
Growing up, I saw my mother’s bookplate in many of the books I picked up at home, and recently saw it again in a cookbook that had been up in the attic: But this time, I wondered where that quote came...
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Golden Slumbers
Some time in the 1970s, I was in the dark of the microform room at Bird Library, Syracuse University, looking at some early English verse, when I stumbled upon a song from the Beatles’ Abbey Road....
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A Word for the Ravens of Idaho
I’d like to put in a word for the ravens of Idaho. Starting this spring, Idaho wildlife officials will spend $100,000 to poison ravens in order to protect the sage grouse population. Ravens are known...
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Leipzig, 1945
In the closing days of World War II, with the German military collapsing on every front, U.S. forces reached the city of Leipzig. The 2nd Infantry, 69th Infantry and 9th Armored Divisions entered the...
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Homecoming
It began with a gift from a friend who was helping to clean out the house of a man who died without heirs. My friend saved an oak-framed picture from the dumpster and gave it to me. A couple of months...
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Expedience
I had a teacher in college who suggested that the political spectrum is not a line, with the extreme left at one end and extreme right at the other, but rather a circle, and when you go to either...
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“Skin in the Game” by John Milner
What follows is a piece by a friend and mentor whose writing I value. He’s not Web-oriented, so I offered to post this piece for him, and he accepted. Enjoy. A former student was in town the other day...
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Pneumatic Mail
Originally posted on Post Office Postcards: It’s not a postcard, but it is a favorite image, showing the pneumatic mail department in the basement of an American post office. The practice of loading...
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Huxinting Tea House, Shanghai
Originally posted on Read, Seen, Heard: In the Old City of Shanghai, just outside the Yu Yuan Garden, sits the Huxinting tea house, said to have been built during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) as a...
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The Bug
Time has passed, and I think I can talk about the bug now. It was Holy Week, 2010, at St. James’ Episcopal Church in Skaneateles, N.Y. I sang in the choir. The choir sat in the front of the church, a...
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Grandpa Braun
May 10, 2003 After I posted a piece about my mother’s childhood, a number of people noted what a hard man my grandfather was. True, but all my memories of him are good ones. Growing up, I knew he was a...
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Not the Empress
In 1889, Colorado lumberman James W. Clise moved to Seattle. He arrived on June 7th, one day after the Great Fire destroyed Seattle’s business district. Other men might have viewed the smoldering...
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Making a Postcard, 1888
In November of 1888, Scientific American published an article on “The Making of Postal Cards” which follows, but I thought it needed a brief introduction on how postcards themselves came about. In...
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An Amiable Uncle
When I began to read, one of the first books my mother gave me was Penrod by Booth Tarkington. I loved the book, in part because Penrod’s boyhood was preferable to my own, but also because Tarkington...
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