Photo by Robert F. Sargent, US Coast Guard It’s one of the most iconic images from WWII. Usually it’s used to highlight the impossibly courageous men shown storming Omaha Beach during D-Day, and quite appropriately so. This article, though, focuses instead on the boat, and its inventor and manufacturer, Andrew Jackson Higgins. Who’s ever heard […]

What with the popularity of the WWII history of Dunkirk thanks to the recent movie, plus my longtime obsession with the stories of that war, I figured I’d read a book about it. I happened upon Dunkirk by Lt. Colonel Ewan Butler and Major J. Selby Bradford. I’m just about to finish it, and it’s proven to […]

To those who poo-poo the notion of a manufacturing renaissance in the USA, I give you Bob Jacquart and the Stormy Kromer. Bob’s dad ran the tiny little local fabric and sewing shop in my hometown of Ironwood, Michigan. Bob took it over many years ago and steadily expanded it into a full-fledged sewing factory. […]

I was stunned to come across a very detailed, modern-looking color image in my web surfing last night – an image I both immediately recognized and knew didn’t exist. It was an interior shot of my favorite Frank Lloyd Wright creation, the Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo, New York. And I knew it didn’t exist […]

It’s been many years since I read We Were Soldiers Once… And Young by Lt. General Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway. Yet this passage has stuck with me ever since: Platoon Sergeant Fred J. Kluge of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry was moving his men into the fighting holes along the old […]

I posted a comment regarding immigration in response to a recent LinkedIn article, the meat of which is this: I’m willing to bet that most people would agree that well-integrated migrants can be a boon. Unfortunately, we now have to overcome a justifiable anger resulting from the long years of contempt our elites have shown […]

One of my heroes was buried Friday. Bernard B. Vinoski, Sr, MD, Colonel, US Air Force (Ret), was my dad’s cousin. They grew up together in little South Connellsville, Pennsylvania. His obituary is here – in it you can read all about his life of incredible accomplishment and service. To me, he was at first […]

This article gave me something of a start.  I had no idea until I read it that our son AJ, now six, had a less than 5% chance of ever coming into this world. My wife was just shy of 42 when he was born.  Our older son John had come along almost exactly three […]

Today at the barber shop my older son Johnny Shizzle-Cakes invented a football kind of game you play on a checkerboard. That got me thinking about the vibrating football game we had when I was a kid in the ’70s.  Were those things the worst or what?  You always had the linebackers who would lock […]

I was double-checking myself on the details of John Browning’s M2 machine gun, which got me thinking about the armament of the Flying Fortress (13 M2s, in case you’re wondering), which led me to the Wikipedia entry about the plane, which informed me that late Cowboys coach Tom Landry flew 30 missions piloting those birds […]