Hello, it’s me, mid-80s style

Sometimes your photo roll travels back all by itself and up pops an image that screams … What was I thinking? That was almost 40 years ago! How much can I remember about that picture? Time for a Throwback Thursday. I know these folks flanking me also worked at the big Syracuse daily, in 1984…

There’s a reason I like elephants

My dear wife Karen and I appreciated a Netflix movie by the title of Holiday in the Wild. OK, that’s a bit of a tease to my upcoming Monday Movie Review. But while watching, it also brought me back a decade, to the day when my music writer’s job at the big daily brought me…

One heck of a newspaper staff

My Facebook friend Pat Myers put a photo on my page last week that begged for a Throwback Thursday slot here. We were the student staff of the University of Maryland daily, The Diamondack. It was one hell of a college newspaper those 40 years ago. This black-and-white was captured for the yearbook in 1978.…

My first time at Woodstock

My former colleague at the big daily Bill LaRue dug up a golden oldie from his files the other day and sent me into flurry of memories. That’s me, arms covered with muck, working hard on the old-fashioned laptop at Woodstock ’94 in Saugerties, N.Y. LaRue and I were the two reporters from the Syracuse…

Happy 35th anniversary, KP

I’ve written about my friend KP often here. In tales about our golfing rounds. In stories about my newspaper past. When I think about my life now and then, KP plays an important part in it. Of course my dear wife Karen knows this. And so when she saw the image above flash on the…

A Facebook tag takes me back to a newspaper office in 1979

I recognized the face immediately when it popped up on my Facebook page, a mom smiling between her two daughters. We’ve been friends on social media for … well, since the advent of people telling journalists that social media just might be a good way to prop up the work life. Oh, say, a decade…

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…

Throwback Thursday: Pop Pop, Nana and me

When my mind brings up memories of my Pop Pop and Nana, grandparents on my mother’s side, George is always smiling. The old guy — yes, no matter the age I am in these flashbacks that still warm me today, Pop Pop is remembered as old — is happy when he had I are walking…