Sunday dinner was over, and Brad Stuart was outside. He had rounded up enough kids for a 4-on-a-side baseball game. But I couldn’t play. Yet. I had to do dishes. Mom had used every pot and pan in the kitchen to fry her chicken, bake her homemade yeast rolls, boil and mash potatoes, fix two bowls of vegetables and cook a chocolate cake. It was a great Sunday dinner (we called a fancy lunch … [Read more...]

Summer is fast approaching, meaning modern children will be busier than ever with activities galore. It’s mind boggling to try and appreciate all the things in store for today’s kids. It wasn’t always like that. Boomers look back and remember that when school let out, if you didn’t play Little League baseball, you were sentenced to a summer of Scrabble, Clue and Monopoly games. Unless, … [Read more...]

Last Sunday, the preacher and I were the only men in Church with a coat and a tie. Others wore sport shirts, knit shirts and maybe their best jeans. I am old school. I believe in dressing for respect of the occasion. I don’t wear a baseball cap to a nice restaurant, and I consider blue jeans to be work clothes, I don’t care how much they cost. I had moved to Charlottesville on the first day … [Read more...]

Boomer kids divided everything into months. January was noted for New Year’s Day and celebrations before heading back to school. February was cold, which meant snow, which meant school closings, which meant tearing down hillsides in a genuine Flexible Flyer sled and hoping for the best. April had Easter egg hunts. May meant school picnics and Little League tryouts. June was vacation time, then the … [Read more...]

I heard recently that some of the schools were adding sensitivity training to mathematics. “Five plus five is usually ten. How do you feel about that?” When Boomers were in school, there was nothing sensitive about the three R’s - Reading, ‘Riting and ‘Rithmetic. We also read lots of American history, and in our books, Americans were the good guys. Nathan Hale, Paul Revere, George … [Read more...]

It was our anniversary and we wanted to get away for a few days. We wanted someplace warm and inviting, maybe some place we had never been. How about Jamaica? Why not? We drove to Richmond on a Wednesday night as our flight to Miami left the next morning at 6-ish and we were supposed to be at the airport for international flights three hours early. We landed in Miami in less than three … [Read more...]

  George Washington was born on February 22, not the entire fourth week of February. His birthday was also not clustered among the birthdays of other presidents. His birthday was unique and once a special event. I moved to Charlottesville on Feb. 1, 1967. I had accepted a position as Men’s Buyer at Leggett Barracks Road. The new store was trying to get a foothold in selling better … [Read more...]