Crusading Prosecutor Tom Dewey   I have not got to the Times yet this morning, the obligatory plunge in the miasma of whatever it is New York wants us to think on this day. Before dawn it was still cool, and the brain-cooking heat had not started to rise.   I rose thinking about the […]

Picture Postcard of the Railroad Station and Downtown Bay City, circa 1900   I have been daydreaming about North Michigan lately. I don’t do that so much in the winter, but I cannot help myself when the steam rises up out of the ground on the flat banks of the wrong=2 0side of the Potomac […]

Trish from Australia. Vic at far right in white shirt. Photo by EVA RUSSO/Richmond TIMES-DISPATCH   It is impossible to forget what happened here in Richmond, particularly if you live in a city that calls itself the Capital of the Free World. This city had the same aspiratio n, to be known in the same […]

Live Fast I’m headed for Richmond this morning, capital of the Old South. There is a motorcycle dealership down there that has a training program for how to ride one. The State insists upon it, and I think it is a skill that would be useful to have in the coming world that will have […]

  I am way behind this morning- sleep is good, and this was a hell of a week for frantic activity- but now it is pushing eight o’clock and I have a road trip to accomplish this afternoon, and the pool is going to be a miss altogether if I do not get my ass […]

I had to be in the office early, since it was a question of timing, and was hasty leaving Big Pink.    I am one of the few who can unlock a safe that has a few pieces of proprietary paper in it, and a fellow from our office out in the County wanted them […]

It was cool before dawn on the first walk of the day. I was thinking about gangsters, and the story I was not going to get to this morning, and it was not until we hit the glass doors that I realized I had forgotten my glasses. There is a lot of stuff to get […]

Charles “Lucky” Luciano enjoys a beer in Italy, after the War   I got tagged with a proposal and will have to work this morning. I was going to generate a story along the lines of “Deal with the Devil,” and it may yet come about the alliance of Naval Intelligence and the mob. The next […]

 Ex-Normandie, USS Lafayette capsized at Pier 88, February 1942 They still don’t know don’t about the fire that stated on the 9th of February in 1942. It was a doozy, and it torched the Glory of France as effectively as the end-run of German panzers around the impregnable barrier of the Maginot Line.   The official […]

  Normandie It is the 4th of July, and there will be fireworks on the Mall tonight, a colorful reminder of wartime sacrifice and revolution. People who have seen the deadly fire-colored real thing sometimes don’t like the sound. It makes them a little nervous, the way all of us feel now when a jet is […]