The end of an era for the little program that could

Brian McDowell took the podium at his final year-end Journalism Convocation at the State University of New York at Morrisville last week. The professor looked somewhat happy to be able to pack away his books and belongings and go back home to spend more time with his wife. And he looked somewhat sad in the…

A beautiful Friday in May this second

The weather guy is calling for a record high on this Friday, May 8, predicting that it will reach 89º F here in Syracuse, N.Y. On “Today,” the stories from Al Roker and crew are of early tropical storms coming toward Myrtle Beach — first of the season, in particular, by the name of Anna…

I plead the Cinco

I sent the text to my dear wife Karen at mid-afternoon, figuring she’d warm to my suggestion when she’d find a moment to peek at her iPhone 6 at her job at SMG. How about keeping the meat loaf cooling an extra day in the fridge and taking a run out to celebrate Cinco de…

An open and closed case from the mind of Jack Nicklaus

Tater topped KP and I again as we got the second of our three Syracuse Golf Show coupon rounds in last week, utilizing another sunny, warm blue-skied day to its maximum. The 18 holes that golf legend Jack Nicklaus designed for Timber Banks in Radisson, on the western outskirts some 20 miles from Syracuse, surely…

Blue skies, red shells fill downtown for first fest of season

Life was good for thousands of reasons Saturday afternoon as the crowds spilled into Syracuse’s Clinton Square. The sun was shining, and the temperature one the AXA/Equitable Tower peeking through the nearer buildings read an oh-so-pleasant 64º F. Crawfish Festival pulsed with people of all sizes and ages and colors, this first of a series…

Student reporter’s paradise

“What happens when you fly over Los Angeles?” the stewardess asked me. Yeah, me, I thought, attempting to come up with a winning reply. “You land, I hope,” I said, lamely, not being quite that slick yet and never to see her smiling face again as I was getting ready in 1978 to begin another…

California, there we came

In May 2005, I jumped on a plane in Syracuse, got off in San Diego, and jumped into a powder blue Ford Mustang convertible. My dear wife Karen knows how to plan a vacation. We’d been together in our Little Bitty in the Syracuse city neighborhood of Eastwood for less than a year, she was…

Throwback: Fake cover for imaginary album by faux band. Really!

Back in the late 1970s, our two bedroom, one-bath apartment in Adelphi, Md., was always rocking. Yes, Twenty, Aggo and I were eyebrows deep into two years of hard university time within those walls in the cockroach-inhabitated complex we used to lovingly call Residential Plaza, dropping their officious P from the first name because that…