(Dad posed at the wheel of his 1959 Rambler, August 2010. Photo Anook Socotra)   It was a professionally rewarding day under crappy skies, scatter showers and an unseaonal coolness that told me Fall was advancing around the corner. I got to be on a panel of old Spooks who got the opportunity to tell […]

(Apothecary, Old Colorado Springs)   Sorry, sorry. How do they say it in Latin?   Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. A few nice people who have better things to do wrote to ask if I was all right, or if something had happened. Well, it has, but it is both good and bad. […]

(Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. Photo VisitingDC.com)   I am seated at my table, peering suspiciously into the screen of the laptop. I have installed mirrored panels on rich wooden sliding doors to replace the original metal bi-fold doors on the closets.   It gives the illusion of space in the little […]

(Potemkin Village Senior Living Center, little Bay City, Michigan. Photo PV.) This Titaness of beautiful hair discovered the uses of the power of reason, and gave a designation to every object, which is of the utmost importance, since without names very little could be expressed, and mortals would not be able to hold conversations with […]

(USS South Dakota, (BB-57) in war colors as Flagship of the Pacific Fleet Commander, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz. Official Navy Photo). The bill was paid, and people were starting to drift out of the bar area and over to the restaurant side of Willow. It is Restaurant Week, after all, and the prie fixe menu […]

Gentle Readers,   This has been a wild ride through my distinguished colleague Mac’s experiences in World War Two- not as one of the millions who served, for the tens of thousands who died- but as someone very close to the central mystery of “why” and “how” the great victory was won.   Nearly everyone […]

(The remains of Rex Barber’s P-38 Miss Virginia after crash-landing at Henderson Field.)   The Air Corps had a requirement for long-range escort of the bomber force in Europe, and had produced the remarkable P-38 Lightning, a twin-boomed long-legged two engine fighter that the pilots of the Luftwaffe called “Der Gabelschwanz Teufel,” or The Forked-Tail […]

(Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, 1942, photo wiki commons via ?????) Jim filled my wineglass to the precise point in the Tulip where the air could mingle sufficiently with the ambient air to produce a delightful aroma while not encouraging the alcohol to evaporate. I was getting to the point that I did not care, pleasantly warm […]

(Kawanishi H8K Emily lifting off. Official US Navy picture). “The Japanese decided to mount a follow-on attack against the shipyard at Pearl to destroy the big Ten-Ten Dry-dock. That would delay the repairs to the battleships, and increase the paranoia on the island. They envisioned an attack by five big Kawanishi H8K “Emily” class flying […]

(JICPOA Building 1943, left. Mac says the Quonsett to the right actually held mostly blank punch cards for the IBM machines and reams of onion skin and teletype paper the command went through. Mac’s car is the four-door 1936 Ford (body) at this end of the row parked along the Quonset Hut.  He says “body” […]