EAST MONTPELIER – Syracuse, N.Y. in the mid-1950s; a steamy Friday mid-afternoon in July. I had just climbed up for a water break from the manhole I was digging beneath the pavement when a little brown man approached: brown suit, brown shirt and tie, tobacco-brown teeth and fingers. “Hey, Whitey!”[Read More…]

EAST MONTPELIER – Reading and listening to the news as I do, and remembering my classes in American History (the best of which was taught by a delightful Englishman who still wore his Oxford varsity crew sweater), I can’t help but wonder if the United States is a nation of[Read More…]

EAST MONTPELIER – I once had a friend (now long gone to his reward) who seemed to take offense at the tag line I used in my radio commentaries. When I started out in radio, I was searching for a consistent way to end my weekly few minutes. “Why don’t[Read More…]

EAST HARDWICK – With only about 12 weeks left in the current presidential campaign, we’ve entered what I call the nyah-nyah phase: the fourth-grade-level taunting about personal characteristics, idiosyncrasies, and each candidate’s past missteps. Almost none of these attacks has any relevance to the great matters at hand, but they[Read More…]

EAST HARDWICK – During the epic Southwestern drought of the 1950s (my boss, a retired Presbyterian minister turned rancher, declared it Biblical), I spent a few months in the central Texas Permian Basin as a ranch hand. It was a whole new world to me. Everything, it seemed, had a[Read More…]

EAST MONTPELIER – The claim by CNN that the presidential debate of June 27 would be “historic” turned out to be right on the money, but hardly for the reason they expected. As the curtain mercifully dropped on the scene, my friend Bea turned toward me and said, well, I[Read More…]

EAST MONTPELIER – So foul and fair a week I have not seen. It seems appropriate to paraphrase Macbeth talking about the weather and current events as he welcomes King Duncan (soon to be the late King Duncan) to his castle. He’d just had that kind of day, and was[Read More…]

EAST MONTPELIER – For some decades I’ve tried to do something new each week: something I’ve never done before; something I haven’t done for a long time; or something I never thought I’d do again. I’m not always successful; and the something, whatever it is, isn’t always something I’d want[Read More…]

EAST MONTPELIER – I talk back to the television quite a bit. I get away with it; there’s nobody here but Kiki to comment on either my behavior or my performance. My wife used to point out, sometimes none too gently if I was commenting upon an especially egregious line[Read More…]

EAST MONTPELIER – I’ve been listening to sermons for over eight decades. At first, of course, it was because I had to. Next, because it was the thing to do. Now, occasionally, because I want to. And I must say that over those more than 80 years I’ve heard a[Read More…]

EAST MONTPELIER – The great state of Louisiana, not content with labeling mifeprestone a dangerous controlled substance, has, in a move stunning for its chutzpah just launched an attempt to vault its government backward between 1300 and 3000 years, depending upon different versions of the history of Western religion. Either[Read More…]