Ten years ago, my wife and son got me one of those birth year cards entitled, “1953 – Remember When . . . A Nostalgic Look Back in Time”.  I rediscovered it in the summer of 2018 while rifling through miscellaneous files of cards and things that had been waiting for me to sort out […]

       If you are of a certain age, you have seen it.  The ubiquitous album cover for his groundbreaking double live album Frampton Comes Alive!  The cover is festooned with an impossibly young looking Peter Frampton, signature black Gibson Les Paul in his hands, his curly halo of hair and gleaming smile beaming out over […]

     Who is Burton Guibord and why haven’t we heard more about him?  It turns out that he is a Native American musician with roots in northern Wisconsin.  When our good friend Gary Tanin at Daystorm Records in Milwaukee sent us a preview of Guibord’s record, Are We Free?, I was eager to learn more about […]

       My first two wheeler bike was a small green hand me down with training wheels.  After a very short time watching me wobble along on the gravel street in front of our house, my dad pulled the old, “Let’s take off the training wheels and I will hold on to the seat until you […]

       Elvin Bishop and Kenny Wayne Shepherd both play guitar, but they took wildly different paths to forge a career in music.  Both were recently profiled in Blues Music Magazine (Issue 21, April 2019) and it struck me that becoming a professional musician doesn’t happen overnight, nor is there a simple A+ B = C […]

       It was great to see the Ontonagon/ETC football cooperative claw their way to a spot in the 8-man football playoffs in 2017.  The 2018 season was a little rockier, but Coach Ben Mayer’s charges still played some good football. Scoring in 8-man football can come in bunches, but there were enough golden moments to […]

       Here is the abbreviated description of Duane Lee “Dog” Chapman’s life before he became a reality TV star known as Dog the Bounty Hunter:   Street rat, Devil’s Disciple motorcycle gang member, vacuum cleaner salesman, manual laborer, convict, ex-con, truck driver, vacuum salesman (part two),  successful business owner (bail bondsman and bounty hunter), a […]

       Having recently read You Can Run But You Can’t Hide (by Duane “Dog” Chapman with Laura Morton – 2007 Hyperion), I couldn’t help but notice the things that Dog Chapman and I have in common.  We are both male and were born in 1953. That is it. When his Dog the Bounty Hunter show […]

       On the eve of the 50th Anniversary of the first manned Moon landing, last week’s FTV looked at some of the political wranglings that were taking place leading up to President Kennedy’s deadline to land men on the Moon and return them by the end of the 1960s.  The United States had only fifteen […]

  On Sunday July 13, 1969, the Russian space program launched a robotic craft toward the Moon called Luna 15.  It was not a coincidence that this craft would be in orbit two days ahead of NASA’s first attempt at a manned lunar landing with the Apollo 11 mission.  Clearly, the Russians were going to attempt […]