Is there a pivotal year in one’s four years of high school? Freshman year is always a swirl of new activities and if one keeps their head down and eyes open, one can learn a lot from those mature upperclassmen. Sophomore year is less of a mystery because at least some of the school […]
Paging through the January 3, 2018 issue of Radio World, a bunch of cartoons jump off the page and caught my eye. My first thought was, “This guy’s style reminds me a lot of Dan Rosandich’s work. A glance at the articles byline told me why: the cartoons were drawn by Rosandich and used […]
The ecological implications of the phrase ‘going paperless’ are obvious but it somehow hasn’t worked out exactly as planned. Admittedly, there are many organizations that give their members the ‘electronic delivery’ option. Off the top of my head, local groups like The Friends of the Porkies and the Ontonagon County Historical Society come to […]
What began as an innocent swamping out of our linen closet turned into an adventure when I discovered the long missing high school annuals from my days at Marquette Senior High. The summary from my freshman year was kind of fun and it was surprising how many little details popped into my head perusing […]
I idly wrote the title of this FTV one day when thinking back about hauling my drum set around over the years. Like the kid who decides to play the tuba in the school band, one does not sling a drum set under one’s arm and walk home after school. Luckily for me, the school […]
If there are tasks that breed procrastination more than cleaning closets, I can’t think of any. When one views this process as a form of exploration, however, there is a plus side. Our long neglected linen closet recently yielded a source of entertainment that had not seen the light of day for at least […]
It is the summer of 1967. Herman’s Hermits and The Who are touring the United States. Which band is the opener and which is the headliner? This is a trick question because technically, the opening band was The Blues Magoos with The Who second on the bill and Peter Noones’ lightweight pop band Herman’s […]
Have you had a family grill out lately? If you did, it was probably on a gas grill or a good old fashioned charcoal grill, which is my personal favorite. Either way, we all owe a debt of thanks to Henry Ford for kick starting this little piece of Americana tradition. When Ford’s Kingsford, Michigan […]
In the fall of 2016, we spent two editions of FTV discussing the end – as in “when a band comes to an end” and not “The End of the world” (9-28-16 and 10-5-16 if you care to backtrack a little). A couple of months ago, we spent sometime talking about the sudden end, and […]
Part one of this column began when I was ruminating about things that get passed along to graduates by various commencement speakers. Somehow things kind of swerved into a discussion of how bullying each other has changed since I was in junior high those many eons ago. Being mean to each other with pencil […]