Serving proudly since 1873 as the beautiful Nebraska Panhandle's first newspaper
Serving proudly since 1873 as the beautiful Nebraska Panhandle's first newspaper
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Steve Jobs gave the commencement address at Stanford University on June 14, 2005. In it, he told three stories. The first was how he dropped out of Reed College, in Portland, Oregon. The second was how a manager fired him from the company that he and Steve Wozniak had started in a garage. The third story was about his pending death, due to a pancreatic cancer diagnosis a year before. Then, after he finished the three stories, he said, “When I was young, there was an amazing publication called “T...
Tony Hillerman grew up in Oklahoma, and attended St. Mary’s Academy, a boarding school intended for Native American girls. One of the few boys permitted to attend, he developed a sensitivity for the various Native American cultures, mythologies, and religions. He joined the U.S. Army in 1943, was wounded in battle in 1945, during World War II, and suffered for several months with broken legs, foot, ankle; plus facial burns, and temporary blindness. A decade later, Tony was visiting Crownpoint, N...
In recent days, I have re-read David L. Lindsay’s novel, Body of Truth. In it, he describes a cruel and gruesome civil war that terrorized the people of Guatemala for 36 years, from 1960 until 1996. It was the federal government, then run by a series of generals, who attacked the poorest of its citizens. A United Nations report, dated March 1, 1999, declared that, “An estimated 200,000 Guatemalans were killed during the civil war, including at least 40,000 persons who disappeared.” David L. Li...
Maritime disasters can happen during either war or peace, but either way the loss in terms of human lives hits hard. A bomb, an explosion, a torpedo, a missile, an iceberg, no matter the cause, each translates into a statistic, the number of men and women whose lives were cut short. On February 15, 1898, the American battleship, the Maine, exploded in Havana, Cuba’s harbor, killing 260 U.S. Navy sailors. Americans blamed the Spanish, who owned and controlled Cuba then, but no one since has d...
It might be fabricated, but a story I heard years ago was that Bill Cosby warned a young Oprah Winfrey, to “always balance your own check book.” In other words, he cautioned her to trust only herself, and not any paid employee, with that simple task. Another piece of advice for the up-and-coming, who are now, after years of struggle, experiencing some success, “Do not believe your own press reports.” In other words, no matter how wonderful and great the journalists and reporters say you are, ke...
A quote I read years ago said, “The family surname of the betrothed says much about the success of the marriage.” That idea may come near to a singular truth in a general way, despite plenty of examples to contradict it. Yet, I dare to suggest something similar, but in a political sense. How a man or a woman identifies his or her citizenship — to what city he or she claims allegiance — tells much about his or her innermost thoughts, ideas, conclusions, and reasoning skills. In other words,...
The Irish have their own way of seeing the world. The American poet Marianne Moore said as much in six words. “I'm troubled. I'm dissatisfied. I'm Irish.” Frank McCourt said the same, but in more words, on the first page of his memoir, Angela's Ashes. “It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. “People everywh...
Kathrene and Robert Pinkerton married in 1911. He worked at a newspaper in a big city: long hours, deadlines, and stress. A doctor advised him him to “get out of newspaper offices and out of cities,” if he wanted to preserve his health. He decided he would write fiction — short stories — and sell them. When single, Robert had worked as a logger and fur trader in Ottawa’s woods, that vast wilderness that stretched between Lake Superior and Hudson Bay. He and Kathrene decided that they would build...
Immigration is not for the faint of heart. With high school diploma in hand, a young African from Ghana named Robert Kosi Tette came to the United States in 1998, leaving behind family, friends, and “a simple life of blissful innocence.” Ten years later, he described his decade in America, in an article that appeared in the March 1, 2008 issue of Newsweek, that he entitled “An Immigrant’s Silent Struggle.” In it, he said, “It was as though I had run ten consecutive marathons, one for each ye...
A favorite Lincoln biographer of mine is Carl Sandburg. In 1926, he published a two-volume work, Abraham Lincoln, The Prairie Years, and then in 1939, he published a four-volume work, Abraham Lincoln, The War Years. This latter work won Sandburg the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1940. Although fellow historians have pointed out that Sandburg did a poor job citing his sources, his readers find his biography “exhaustively researched, and magnificently illuminating.” One reviewer called the six...
Roots, the television miniseries, aired over eight nights, from Sunday, January 23, through Sunday, January 30, in 1977, forty-five years ago. It proved wildly successful, despite ABC executives’ fears about showing white men kidnapping, buying, selling, and whipping black men, and women. It made television history though. Some 30 million people watched it every night, although I missed the episodes, something I now regret, because I was busy studying in college. Based loosely upon Alex Haley’s...
Donald Trump lost the 2020 election on November 3, 2020. Although some 74.2 million voters voted for him, 81.2 voted for Biden, a difference of over 7.0 million. Then, Biden won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. Despite those facts, Donald Trump vowed he would never concede. Instead of acting as a gracious political contender who had lost an election, he acted otherwise. Trump claimed that the election was stolen, that ineligible voters had mailed in ballots. He rallied his supporters with, “S...
The ancient Greeks pointed to as many as 88 constellations spread across a night sky, and then they pinned names to them that they took from their religion of stories and myths. They wanted to see order in a night sky, because it seemed chaotic, a jumble, pinpoints of light splashed helter-skelter. The ancient Greeks gave mythological names to the zodiac’s twelve signs. They include: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpius, Sagittarius, Capricornus, Aquarius and Pisces. The a...
In 1905, the USDA published a bulletin: Nomenclature of the Apple: A Catalog, that listed 17,000 names. After removing the duplicate names, it still listed 14,000 different varieties of the apple. Between Captain John Smith in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, and the beginning of the 20th century, American settlers planted thousands of fruit trees, and produced thousands of varieties. Horticulturists now consider those three centuries the Golden Age of pomology, the science of fruit-bearing trees....
Senators and Representatives first met in Congress, under the U.S. Constitution, on March 4, 1789, in the Federal Building in New York City. Six months later, on September 25, James Madison, a Virginia Representative then, submitted to the House twelve amendments to the new Constitution. His first—called the Congressional Apportionment Amendment — specified that each member of the House shall represent no more than 30,000 people. It fell one state short of adoption, and no state since has ratifi...
Last time in these pages I began a review of a recent book, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City. Its author, Andrea Elliott, focused on a middle school girl named Dasani, who grew up in a series of New York City housing projects, a step away from homelessness. After Elliott published an expose in the New York Times on Dasani’s plight, the girl was awarded a scholarship to attend Milton Hershey’s middle school, in Hershey, Pennsylvania. She arrived at the private sch...
Michael Greenberg, reporter for the New York Review, examined California in two recent articles, the first in December on agriculture, and the second in January on housing’s high cost. In the first, he paints a stunning picture of agriculture in California’s San Joaquin Valley, a stretch of land “234 miles long and 130 miles wide,” with Stockton to the north and Bakersfield to the south. Greenberg writes, “Measured by yearly production, the San Joaquin Valley is one of the highest-value stretche...
Economic and political ruin strikes one country after another. Yes, it seems that, on occasion, the world’s nearly two hundred countries will suffer a disaster, a disintegration of the country’s stabilizing political and economic forces that pushes its citizens into the very center of chaos. For example, the civil war in Syria drags on. An estimated 500,000 people have lost their lives since 2011, and another 13 million have found themselves displaced and forced to flee the country. Once the...
Two Viet Cong terrorists—Hynh Phi Long and Le Van Ray—parked their bicycles on the riverbank across from My Canh, the Mekong Floating Restaurant, in Saigon, and left behind bags strapped to their bikes’ handlebars that contained bombs aimed at the restaurant. The first bomb detonated at 8:15 p.m., on Friday, June 26, 1965, and the second, just minutes later. In Vietnamese, My Canh means “beautiful view.” It was a vessel, or a barge, that floated in the Mekong River, in downtown Saigon, c...
In December of 1773, near the time of the Boston Tea Party, Benjamin Franklin admitted that he had passed on to the Boston Gazette twenty letters that the Massachusetts governor, Thomas Hutchison had written, calling for an “abridgment of the colonists’ rights.” In so doing, Franklin acted as a whistleblower, before the word was a word, or our country was a country. In 1777, during the American Revolutionary War, ten naval officers, including Samuel Shaw and Richard Marven, signed a petit...
On January 11, President Trump met with Senators in the Oval Office to discuss immigration. At one point a Senator mentioned that the U.S. should also “admit people from Haiti, El Salvador, and certain African nations,” a suggestion that enraged the President. “Why,” he asked, in caustic and unprintable terms, “are we having all these people from those countries come here? It would be better to get immigrants from places like Norway.” Norway? In a vindictive act aimed at the President,...
People on the West Coast endure droughts and forest fires. People on the Northeast Coast endure minus degree temperatures and a foot of snow. People in the Southeast endure the ferocious winds, rain, and flooding that hurricanes bring. People who live in Tornado Alley—Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri—suffer from those spinning cyclones’ destruction. Here on the Great Plains, in fly-over country, we suffer from droughts, prairie fires, hailstorms, grasshoppers, and winter blizzards. The d...
The news out of Korea is a mix of bad and good, but perhaps more lopsided on the side of bad. President Donald Trump continues to accelerate his war of words with North Korea, by calling the rogue nation’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, “Little Rocket Man,” and promising him “fire and fury.” Late in November, Trump re-designated North Korea as “a state sponsor of terrorism,” an action that unleashed a slew of additional U. S. financial sanctions that will hit hard the already starved and desperate Nor...
About fifty years ago, my dad lost his wallet while driving his tractor in a field. From a neighbor named Sam, he borrowed a metal detector, because he had some dimes and quarters in the coin purse in the wallet, but the field was too big. Twenty five years ago, on November 16, 1992, in Hoxne, England, Suffolk county, a tenant farmer named Peter Whatling lost his hammer. He called his neighbor Eric Lawes, and he brought over his metal detector. Instead of Whatling’s hammer though, Eric found b...
The NCAA basketball games are upon us, and March Madness has arrived. The team to watch in recent years has been the University of Connecticut, where basketball is king. The men won their last national championship, their fourth, in 2014, but the women point with pride to their ten national championships, the most recent one last year, in 2015. In first round play this year, the Uconn women decimated the Robert Morris Colonials 101 to 49, and played Duquesne on Sunday, March 21. Uconn’s men d...
