In 1970, I was recruited to teach at a junior high school in Johnstown. Although the 1970s would mark the beginning of the American steel industry's decline, Johnstown was still a happening place. There were jobs, families, and lots of kids in the city schools. My bands and orchestras ...
Today, I bought a new tablet, and even though that may not seem too significant to the rest of you, it was to me. No, it wasn't a computer tablet. It was just a little tablet made of white, unlined paper with a gray cardboard back. When I was a good little kid, my dad would stop at Murphy's ...
I recently pulled my Sentinel yearbook off the shelf and lost an afternoon reminiscing. There were about 120 of us in the Dunbar Township High School Class of 1965. We came from the coal patches and railroad villages of Dunbar, Monarch, Leisenring 1 and 2, Dickerson Run, Liberty, Vanderbilt ...
I had a good friend from what many people call "flyover country" who moved to Pennsylvania from Kansas. He once told me, "I learned to drive when I was 12. It wasn't a big deal. If you went off the road in Kansas, you hit corn. But if you go off the road in Pennsylvania, you die." Years later, ...
Last night, I watched an interview with one of our hero‑villains, the man who DOGE’d members of my family and me while waving a chainsaw. The Thomas Edison of our era. The man who may become the world’s first trillionaire. Elon Musk. Elon has always struck me as someone who is either 10 ...
One of the electives I took in college was philosophy. During the late 1960s, Indiana University of Pennsylvania attracted some fascinating young professors, and one of them changed the way I looked at the world. The term paper I wrote for Professor Davis was titled "Exploring the Philosophical ...
