273 articles
June 3, 2025
I watched my eldest granddaughter march across the football field in front of a makeshift stage and receive her high school diploma with 610 emotions flooding through my bones. They ranged from robust pride to a tad bit of trepidation.
June 3, 2025
On a recent camping trip to Arkansas, a horrific windstorm buffeted our camper the night we arrived.
May 27, 2025
Singing is part of my DNA. My paternal grandmother sang alto and played the piano by ear. My paternal grandfather played the fiddle and guitar and sang lead. My maternal grandfather was a fine tenor. My mother sang alto, and daddy sang bass. My sister sings alto and both my brothers sing bass.
May 27, 2025
One component of President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is the construction of a golden dome. Let’s take a close look at this proposal.
May 20, 2025
Wingo Circle resident Bertha Taylor phoned The Banner to issue a complaint about the CSX train blocking both entrances to the neighborhood of Wingo Circle one day last week.
May 20, 2025
There is a proposed Bill in the US Congress known as the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’.
May 20, 2025
Squatting beside me in the shade of the plum tree in our back yard, my then ten-year-old daughter, Rebekah, watched as I scrubbed my soaked and soaped hunting dog, Susie.
May 13, 2025
PEOPLE WITH AN ADDICTION ARE some of the kindest, meanest, most truthful, most deceitful, gentlest, cruelest, quietest, loudest, hardest working, laziest, most giving, most selfish, most loving, most heartless, most caring, most uncaring, most humble, most prideful people on the planet, which simply means they are the extreme versions of ourselves because we all can have any and all of those traits at any given time.
May 13, 2025
I try my darndest to write a graduation story every May. For a myriad of reasons. Most all of them revolve around the high school seniors who are marching into the auditorium, gym, football stadium, etc. one last time to the stick-in-your-head-forever-if-you-are-not-careful sounds of “Pomp and Circumstance.”
May 6, 2025
Where I live, one of the first questions you’re going to ask a person you’ve just met is, “Where are you from?” sometimes shortened to, “Where you from?”
May 6, 2025
I don’t know about you, but there are great universal mysteries that keep me up at night. It can be baffling for sure. And the loss of sleep can wreak havoc on your charming disposition as the sun welcomes the following day.
April 29, 2025
Recently, while camping, Brenda and I hiked a trail we'd never been on before, but we'd heard about it and seen some beautiful pictures of it.
April 29, 2025
As you are well aware, I quit writing these newspaper articles a year ago. At about the same time, I stopped repairing old clocks. Loss of memory, out of ideas, and Leon (my best story source) passing away got me out of the former, and bad eyesight forced me to give up the latter.
April 29, 2025
Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) was a Lutheran Pastor who lived in Nazi Germany. He opposed the Nazi regime during the late 1930s, and was sent to a concentration camp for his affiliation with the Confessing Church. In 1946 after his release from the concentration camp he published the following statement.
April 29, 2025
I may be the worst yardman in the world. It is not delightful work for me. I’d rather be running a half-marathon. Or playing golf. Or reading a book on General Custer’s last stand. Or teaching grandchildren how to play hopscotch in the driveway.
April 15, 2025
The plot was planned carefully and carried out perfectly.
April 15, 2025
Contrary to popular belief, I never attended a one room log cabin school house. As a matter of fact, my first school was huge. It was a two-story building with a gymnasium, music room, principal’s office, and bathrooms on both floors.
April 8, 2025
Recently, a friend asked me how I deal with people who are angry at God for allowing bad things to happen to them.
April 1, 2025
I was in the baseball locker room before daylight, trying on gloves. My hand went instinctively to the Rawlings XPG6. It was endorsed, with his name embossed on the palm, by Mickey Mantle. It evens says “Personal Model.” It had the beautiful “Spiral Top” with the “TRIPLE ACTION” web. And the faded, worn red Rawlings tag on the back strap still proudly proclaims that it was “Made in America.”
April 1, 2025
Recently, as I was getting dressed, I complained to my wife, “I can’t find my belt buckle.”
