Early Sunday afternoon, several hours before the start of Super Bowl LIII, my wife and I were running a few errands after church. As we crossed the Parker Avenue / Greenland Road intersection on the way to downtown Ontonagon, an object moving on the side street to our right caught our eye. To me, […]
How could anyone sing on more than 20,000 songs and yet not be recognized? Such was the hand that fate dealt to a trio of young singers from Detroit called The Andantes. Unless you have jumped into a time machine and escaped to the distant past before radio was invented, I am willing to bet […]
A Born Loser cartoon from some time ago showed Brutus Thornapple (aka: The Born Loser) walking waist deep along a snowlined sidewalk. He was recounting how the snow had been deeper and the snow banks higher when he was a kid. Trailing behind is his son Wilberforce, but of course, all you can see of […]
Another new year begins. Does anybody really want another reminder that time marches on? The Friday before last Thanksgiving, my phone rang early in the morning with the kind of news that reminds us all that we aren’t getting any younger. My old guitar playing buddy from Sledgehammer, Barry Seymour, called from L.A. to […]
For some reason, years ending in ‘0’ or ‘00’ carry some aura that make them more memorable than those bearing other year ending the digits like 1 – 9. With that said, looking back at 1974 through a 45 year historical perspective allows us to note how different things were before and after that […]
Having spent close to three years playing gigs at K.I.Sawyer Air Force Base, it only felt like I had done a tour of duty in the military. Perhaps that is why Pastor Jay’s sermons illustrated with anecdotes about his time wearing Air Force blues always conjure up memories of my college days. Back in […]
The year 2019 marks the 40th anniversary of the release of The Fabulous Thunderbirds’ first album. The self-title record has become a cult classic and as cofounder Kim Wilson recalls, “Things were wide open back then. There were hundreds of stages where bands could show what they had.” If one remembers the days when […]
Twenty years ago, WOAS-FM was actively hunting for some sort of public service project to join. The old adage ‘seek and ye shall find’ truly came into play because less than a month after the search began, the paperwork for a recycling project from an organization called The Funding Factory landed in the mailbox. The […]
When former Boston Red Sox star Bill Buckner passed away in May of 2019, every news report I read or heard said something along the lines of, “Bill Buckher’s career should be remembered for a lot more things than the ground ball that rolled through his legs and lost the World Series for the […]
My sister had one of those cloth covered boxes with a hinged lid (the lid was red and the bottom was off white) that served as her record player. It had a lever so you could switch between 33 ? and 45 RPM records. The tone arm and needle weighed enough that it probably […]