columns

This paper is dated Nov. 12 -- we’re right between the end of the World Series and the beginning of the holiday season, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Being a baseball nut, I always enjoy the World Series, but was particularly thrilled to see the Kansas City Royals win the fall...

Many Hudson High School graduates go on to have highly successful, interesting careers -- so I guess it shouldn’t have come as such a surprise to me. A couple of weeks ago, Adolph Propps called to tell me that his neighbors’ son, Phillip Baribeau, has directed an award-winning...

I’ve never made any bones (excuse the pun) about it - I HATE Halloween. First off, I have enough trouble looking good in clothes when I try. There is nothing appealing about dressng up to look bad or stupid. I don’t think I could ever pull off the sexy pumpkin look popular...

We sit at our desks and beat our heads against our laptop keyboards, powerless to create something good. Over and over. Over and over. Day in, day out. Come hell or high water. Please insert more clichés here. Sometimes, the magic happens – the right phrases, the perfect...

The news out of Roseburg, Ore., on Oct. 1 couldn’t have been any more horrible. A hate-filled young man entered a building at Umpqua Community College with pistols and a semiautomatic rifle and shot to death nine people -- students and a professor. Ten others were wounded,...

Stop me if you have heard this all before. That’s the problem with learning new things -- they tend to crowd out other things -- like what I said last week. And I apologize if this sounds like yet another rant about aging but heck, if you are too young to understand what I’m...

There it sits, both a trophy and an albatross, conspicuously prominent in an empty corner of the deluded man’s sprawling desk. There it sits, forever to gather dust until he brushes it away from time to time, freshening the profound message the book sends. It’s a book he...

The youngster on a local TV news broadcast Sunday morning said Labor Day isn’t just about celebrating the last day of summer, it offers some of the best shopping deals of the year. If I stayed tuned through five minutes of commercials I could hear all about them. I turned off...

It has been a rough summer in and around Hudson. We have lost good people -- too young, very old, not old enough. Whatever their age, they are missed. My dad, Mick Schultz, died on July 3, just one month short of his 99th birthday. He was sharp and living on his own, very much...

When the sumac starts turning red, the evening light subtly changes and the first fall chills blow in from the northwest, I always think of one of the coolest things my dad ever did for me. He got me out of third grade for a week so just the two of us could go fishing at a perfect...

I’ve heard a lot of comments in recent months and years how local politics have become very partisan. To be honest, I believe it is much more openly partisan than it was years ago. Maybe in the past, it was there, but just hidden behind the scenes. Today we have political parties...

You may not have felt the earth move over the weekend but I assure you there were tremors. It is just what happens every 25 years or so when the Heatons buy a new car. “New” of course is relative but for the first time in our 44-year marriage, we are actually getting a model...

Everybody knows the “boil a frog in cold water” story, right -– the one where the heat gets turned up so gradually that all of a sudden it’s too late to escape? I’m wondering whether it’s getting to that point with my profession. My latest wake-up call came when...