Tall Tales of a Shorter Nature
The waitress handed me a slip with a pizza order. “These people want extra sauce on their pizza. In fact, they stress that you cannot put too much on it.” I had reported to work in an uncharacteristically bad mood. Someone had not merely pissed in my cornflakes but had emptied their nostrils on my …
July 20, 2026
Cloverdale Elementary School held a carnival on Saturday evening before Halloween, 1972. My friend Bill and I attended, along with lots of parents and elementary school kids. Ninth graders at Cloverdale Junior High at the time, we felt so much more mature and thereby superior than all the elementary schoolers. At the fair, we were …
November 4, 2025
1971 10 30, 54 years ago At age 13, I first saw 2001, A Space Odyssey at the United Artists Heights theater in Little Rock, Arkansas. Televised science fiction, such as Star Trek, Lost in Space, and It’s About Time, where aliens, robots, and cavemen all spoke English better than I did, had not prepared …
November 2, 2025
In 1975, as now, Friday Nights were sacred times, when hormone-charged high school football teams took to fields across America. The McClellan High School football team entourage, aside from the coaches, cheerleaders, and the perky Pep Squad, included the Mighty McClellan Marching Band and Door-to-door Candy Sales Associates. Our football adversaries that evening were the …
October 15, 2025
Over the summer of 1968, our family’s single year of apartment dwelling ended by moving to a new house. As a result, I transferred to a different elementary school for fifth grade, Cloverdale Elementary, which was to be my fourth school to attend in five years! With the dreaded-but-familiar loss of old friends impending, I …
September 2, 2025
One perk of being in band at McClellan High School was spending free time in the band room. As well as before and after school, band kids would lunch there and hang out through the following homeroom period. School lockers were located along the outdoor hallways. Between classes, nicotine addicts in need of a hit …
July 2, 2025
Mark, Steve, Carra, Steve and Tim in more adventurous days. This is the only picture ever taken where Carra was not in the back row. September, 1969. On the first day of sixth grade at Cloverdale Elementary, I was transplanted from my 5th grade cohort, which included my best buddy Mark Cook, into an entirely …
April 15, 2025
The Honors English required reading my first semester at the University of Arkansas was a long list filled with even longer books. I’m talking lengthy, humorless tomes – the kind you only read on assignment or if you’ve a librarian to impress; “The amorality in Zola’s ‘Nana’ reflects condemnation of heredity and environment as shapers …
November 18, 2022
It was April 1976. Since sunrise on July 5, 1975, the country had been gripped by Bicentennial Madness, a fever so contagious and pervasive I nowadays think of it as COVID-1976. Everywhere you looked, things were plastered with the faces of dead white guys like George “I’m on the quarter AND the dollar bill” Washington …
November 15, 2022
January 5, 1973 It was the start of Junior Band Clinic at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. The previous weekend, hundreds of young musicians had auditioned (“tried out” in band parlance) to earn a place in the two bands representing the best of Pulaski County junior high music programs. I made First band, …
January 5, 2022