Every Good Morning

Seven men I have known whom I admire the most are all of humble birth. Only 3 of them have more than a high school education. My father lost his father when he was 15, months before the onset of the Great Depression. He had to drop out of ninth grade to go to work. He scrambled for jobs until he was 24 when he became a Trooper in the Pennsylvania State […]

I am the son of a Pennsylvania State Police Officer who served for 35 years. I volunteer with the PSP in a project that records the oral histories of retired troopers. State Police Officers were often guests in our home while I was growing up. Every retired officer we have interviewed has spoken of his disgust with members of the force who have become corrupt or brutal and therefore have […]

Like you, I am watching the world burn. I was 15 when MLK and Robert Kennedy were murdered, when the cities burned, when Vietnam was killing 319 American soldiers a week and who knows how many Vietnamese men, women and children — thousands? — when George Wallace was giving a full throated roar to racial hatred, when the American government systematically lied to its people about the war, when Nixon […]

Books are everything to me, not Kindle, not e-books, but the physical manifestation itself, the weight in my hand, pages turning, the perfect order of its arrangement, its narrative going forward while the pages turn over and diminish. Simplify. Here is the book. Open the book.  Here are the words. The words go inside. They make pictures. They summon emotions and memories and scenes we concoct we have never lived. […]