Last week, fire gutted the Century Inn in Scenery Hill, Washington County, Pennsylvania. Built between 1788 and 1794, it was still serving great country cooking three years ago when I…
A ‘defiant requiem’ seems a contradiction. But not when a chorus of 100 Jews interned at Terezin in 1944 sang Giuseppi Verdi’s ‘Messa da Requiem’ to their Nazi captors and…
My father, Gordon T. Kinder, Jr., was born on May 13, 95 years ago. The picture accompanying this post was taken in June 1942. My father in…
Today with great reverence I wish to thank Dr. Jonas Salk and those who preceded and followed him in the struggle to control polio. For as The Writer’s…
Every evening before her sons’ bedtime, my mother read to us. She also read to us while nursing my youngest brother of the moment. Even after I was…
How Dickensian was your boarding school? That this question, hotly debated between ages 13 and 18, persists in my peers’ seventh decade says much about their schools’ capacity…
Nine months and four days after we turned our Vermont home over to our contractor, Gary Daden, we returned to our gutted-and-rehabbed house. During the renovation process, we worked closely…
My mother raised four sons (and their friends and dogs and rabbits…) in a rambling, wreck of a house in a small town with plenty of woods and fields surrounding…