Boy Scout Bankruptcy Back in 1962 I was living in Madison, Wisconsin. At that time it was all about ice fishing, ice boat sailing and other middle-American pastimes. For vacations we would go north up to the Wisconsin Dells (sort of version of Lake George or Franconia Notch with lots of kid amusement areas) or even further north to Lake Superior for a cold, refreshing dip in the icy waters of the greatest of the…
The Rincon Mystery Whenever I ride my motorcycle to the mountains or the desert, I go through the town of Valley Center, which sits between where I live and the country I find so beautiful to drive through. The ride through Valley Center isn’t a bad ride either, with enough nice twisty roads and little enough traffic to make it a perfectly pleasant ride even though its not the wide open spaces up on Palomar…
An Invasion of an Unusual Hut I have just discovered a treasure trove of handwritten stories done by my mother when she was transitioning from high school to College. These are stories on lined paper, written in ink in very neat cursive writing and in this first story’s case, written on Thursday, October 26, 1933 by Millie (Ludmilla) A. Uher. Given that she wrote this when she was just seventeen, presumably a Freshman at…
Remembrances This week Kirk Douglas died at the very ripe age of 103 years. He was born in December, 1916 in upstate New York. My mother, who always liked Kirk, was born in September, 1916 also in upstate New York. They grew up about 150 miles apart. She lived 100 years and died three years ago last week. In the same way that Kirk Douglas, a.k.a. Issur Danielovitch, was the child of immigrants from Belarus,…
Sweeping the Garage I have used the analogy of sweeping the garage for many years. It is my way of saying that every life needs to include some trivial tasks, not because they cannot always be avoided, but because doing basic tasks is good for the soul. This is somewhat about reminding ourselves that being of service and not vending every aspect of our lives, even when we have the means to do so, is…
Footballing It’s Super Bowl Sunday and in nine hours the LIV (54th) game will be played between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs. The 49ers have won five Super Bowls, the latest being twenty-six years ago in the days of Joe Montana.and Steve Young. By contrast, the Chiefs were last in the Super Bowl fifty years ago for game IV. That was actually the first year the game was formally called the…
Empty Spaces Today I am sitting in my office overlooking New York Harbor for the last time. Next we will all crowd into a space one-third this size on the darker, less impressive side of our floor. This is space we had previously relegated to storage and spare offices and the occasional outcast who needed temporary office space. Now it will be home to our little venture. Truth be told, it is more like…
Riding on the City of New Ordeals I can’t help myself. I am a child of the sixties and Arlo Guthrie is never far from my consciousness. Consider yourself lucky that I am not ready to give you my rendition of the Alice’s Restaurant Massacree in four part harmony as Arlo would say. My pal Arthur “Living Legend” Einstein, a founding member of my motorcycle gang knows Arlo well enough to have sold him his…
Word As I have mentioned in previous posts, I am working on and have now mostly finished a book on the twenty-five years of motorcycling I have done with my group, called American Flyers Motorcycle Club (AFMC). It is quite the magnum opus with 374 pages, 104,000 words 183 photographs or images and one long chart of our 60 rides over those years. I am writing this for my fellow members and me as a…
Kublai Khan and Citizen Kane I’ve had quite a weekend. One day was totally dedicated to my kids and grandkids. They wanted to check out the American Dream, which is the newest metro-area attraction brought to you by the people who brought the Mall of America to Minnesota. That’s a family called the Ghermezian’s, and they bought the old Xanadu project that got mothballed in the 90’s. Xanadu was intended to parlay a location near…