There is a Carnegie Hall in Lewisburg, West Virginia. Back in the days when Andrew Carnegie was presiding over his empire, he occasionally travelled on his railroad into West Virginia, to look after his anthracite coal mines. The coal was baked ...

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Grandfather says he supposes you've noticed how many technical credits are listed following a movie. Amateur productions also need some of that kind of support. In productions Grandfather helped with, there were chronic technical shortcomings in ...

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Grandfather says he thinks you might be interested in the story of Dan Blakeslee and Ralph William Blakeslee. Well, Grandfather's going to tell it to you anyway. Dan Blakeslee made his way up the Chilkoot Trail into the Yukon in 1899, built a ...

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Grandfather says he is a political anarchist, more than anything else. Then he favors youths dressed in black and wearing masks and hurting people and breaking things, you ask? No, Grandfather's anarchy is not violent; it merely avoids ...

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Grandfather says nearly as far back as he can remember, he has loved to fish. He was on a footbridge over a creek at a family picnic when he was, oh, maybe 4 years old. When he saw minnows in the water, he bent a reed into an "L" and dangled one ...

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Charlie Kidd has been gone for quite awhile now -- may God rest his soul. Charlie was from what Tom Brokaw called "The Greatest Generation." Charlie was an infantryman throughout WWII, fighting through Africa into Italy and then onto the beaches ...

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Grandfather says years ago, Grandmother taught piano in the living room. She was, among other things, a model of deportment for the children. Well, one evening we were enjoying a pitcher of beer and a giant pizza at Pizza hut, when in walked a ...

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Grandfather says he supposes everyone has weird dreams from time to time. For example, last night Grandfather had a cow hitched to a plow and walked her up a ramp. She broke through the ramp and got one leg stuck. Then Grandfather woke up, ...

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Grandfather has some observations about "blessings." He sees where clergymen bless babies and the hounds in fox hunts. God's blessing is often asked for, by God-fearing families as they sit down to a meal and nations as they go to war. ...

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Grandfather says he was a soldier once, in the Army during Korean War times. Grandfather had developed a lot of stamina on his high school track team and, independent cuss that he was (and is), he stood during basic training forced march rest ...

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Grandfather says he sometimes outsmarts himself. He believes in taking the high ground and absenting himself from lowlife, so he builds his abodes on higher elevations in remote places. But when Grandfather built his cabin in Alaska, up high on ...

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Grandfather says all human institutions succumb to hubris, eventually. Grandfather says he thinks that's not all bad, although he misses some of them as they excelled in their heyday. The NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini comes to ...

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