Super-liberal reaches the end of the road . . . or does he? (10/29/06)
Back in the 1970s, a pair of polar opposites hit the American scene. One, the super-conservative, was William F. Buckley, the owner and publisher of the National Review, the country's first conservative magazine, who had written a book, "God and Man at Yale," shortly after he'd graduated from that college. ...

Could it Happen Here in Nevada? (10/15/06)
I remember hearing about Columbine when I'd just been sprung from a Kansas City hospital for getting over one of the number of countless physical miseries that were driving me to early retirement. Late that week, I read the TIME article about the debacle and about the two high school kids who had perpetrated it. ...

September With dem Bums (Part Two) (10/01/06)
One of the main reasons my father, a naturally bookish man who hated the prospect of a TV wrecking conversation in our house, allowed his family to buy a TV set in the early1950s was so my mother and I, in the baseball season, could watch Uncle Branch Rickey's Dodgers play in Ebbets Field...

September with dem Bums (09/24/06)
"Could I please have your autograph, Mr. Impellitteri?" "Sure, kid!" the swarthy and impeccably dressed man in the seat in front of mine, turned around and croaked pleasantly, as he smilingly accepted my new, blank red-and -black autograph book and dark green Waterman fountain pen. "What's your name, kid?"...

My Annual Optimistic, Republican-Leaning Column (08/20/06)
Shortly after my nearly fatal heart attack of 1992, from which I was saved by quintuple by-pass surgery, I experienced, as part of the one-two punch, a devastating depression that nearly sank me. Oh, I had no inclination to rise up from my bed and slit my own throat, but life looked bleaker than it had any right to look, given all the blessings that had been showered on my head from birth. ...

Smaller than lifesize (04/23/06)
In her most recent letter, Helen Washburn notified Ginny and me that husband George has taken over the entire basement of their house in Columbia, Mo., and is busy with the project of modeling his sizeable miniature train layout after the environment he best remembers in Idaho. I was struck dumb by that ambition, which must include not only hills and fruit orchards and railroad stations and stores with parking lots and cars, but tiny people walking the streets...

Why I Vote as I Do (04/09/06)
As a young teenager, I once asked Dad why he voted Republican, term after term after term. A lawyer by trade, he told me he was a Republican, because that party had a philosophy of government which he said pretty much coincided with his own. His party, he said, believed the individual would help himself if he could be left alone by the government. ...

Should old acquaintance be forgot (03/26/06)
Have you ever sat straight up in bed in the early hours of the morning, or been riding your bike around a big lake, or been waiting for a bus, when, all of a sudden, you wondered, "Hey, I wonder however X is these days? I haven't seen him in a coon's age; he must be getting on in years; I hope he's feeling OK." I never used to have these questions suddenly burst upon my consciousness, but I'm now 66, and whenever I have them, and they're coming to me more frequently now than they did about thirty years ago, I take them very seriously, want to make sure my old and dear friends are still chugging along.. ...

One Hero, One Anti-Hero (03/12/06)
I take my hat off to the editor of The Fort Scott Tribune for her gumption in printing the whole of his obituary writer's essay on the death, at age 93, of world-famous photojournalist Gordon Parks, without, for the sake of Fort Scott's civic self-esteem, killing the sentence, "For many years, Parks had carried deep wounds in his heart from his childhood in Fort Scott and from the lack of respect shown to his parents and other hard-working African-Americans who lived, worked, died, and were buried here." TV newscasters said last week that Parks's most powerful work would prove to be the black movie "Shaft." I think, rather, that Parks's most enduring fame was born the moment he realized that his "choice of weapons" (the title of one of his autobiographies) had better be not a gun, but, rather, a camera, a far better and more lethal weapon in his lifelong war against evil. ...

What's a house without a mystery or two! (03/05/06)
Looking roughly 61 years back, I think I got off pretty easily as a child. I did a lot of pretty reprehensible things when I was a little kid, for which I paid absolutely zilch. In addition, I was fortunate enough to have two parents who were inordinately forgiving...

More Notes on Boots and Harry (02/26/06)
Daughter Jessica has left town to visit friends in sunny California before heading north for Alaska to help with the Iditarod, from which she plans to fly to the Ukraine, to help monitor the parliamentary elections there. Wife Ginny has spent two days of the past week taking a course in real estate. Same old, same old...

Impaled on the Past (02/12/06)
It's shortly after midnight, and I've chosen to play the third movement of Johannes Brahms's third symphony in my study. The soaring strings and burnished brass, on this matchlessly crystal clear CD recording, once again perform their magic. None of his other four symphonies does quite the same. This third symphony, for reasons I can't quite fathom, calls up a vision I don't even will. And it has for literally close to half a century...

Topics of interest (02/05/06)
Fact: Did you know that singer Carly Simon's father Dick was one of the two founders of the publishing firm of Simon & Schuster, back in the 1920s? --- In the year 2006, I resolved to get out of my easy chair in our family room, and start exercising. ...

Two Boys … and other topics of interest (01/29/06)
Household pets tend to defy the laws of logic. Several months ago, for instance, Ginny and I adopted Harry, a homeless, black, rough-haired cat. He was a real gentleman, affectionate, grateful, and easy on the furniture. Shortly thereafter, reflecting on the success of our first adoption, we took in a second male cat, Boots, a smaller fellow, affectionate, smooth-haired, also a true gentleman, who hung around our barn door and hopped onto my lap, purring like a bandit, the moment I opened the truck door. ...

Shame, shame, shame (01/22/06)
In a moment of madness a few months ago, I signed up for a six-months subscription to Vanity Fair Magazine. During the 1920s and '30s, it had been a lavish and smart (not to say smart-alecky) periodical that monthly erupted in a surge of photos and witty stories of Hollywood glamour girls, Broadway and political notables, and inside stories of all the celebrities (before the age of huge celebrities had officially begun) those particular decades had set before the American reading public...

What's in a title? (01/15/06)
By Charles C. Nash This past Christmas, daughter Jessica gave me a copy of Frank McCourt's memoir, "Teacher Man," the third part of his history of coming to America and finding long-term work as a high school English teacher in New York City. I'd admired and enjoyed "Angela's Ashes" (Pulitzer Prize) and "Tis" the first two parts of his work, and fully expected to enjoy, as a former college English teacher myself here at Cottey College for three decades, the confessions of a man who had faced perhaps similar challenges and rewards in the classroom, and for roughly the same length of time. ...

The Model Nevada Gentleman (12/25/05)
When the young Nash family moved to Nevada, Mo., some 31 years ago, I was somehow chosen to become a member of the Nevada Public Library Board of Directors. As a new professor of English at Cottey, I was quite flattered, and proceeded to act in a way I thought was constructive, but which I now realize was diametrically opposed to the understood rules and regulations that had grown up to suit the needs of the Nevada community. ...

'Tis the Season . . . (12/18/05)
One thing about Minnesota's December weather, it was easy to remember that Christmas was just around the corner. Here in Missouri, I find it a little difficult to align the beautiful spring-like weather with the spirit of the Christmas holidays. A couple of things remind me, however. ...

Be sure to keep in touch! (12/11/05)
I attended a function last Saturday at Cottey College, then the Community Choir performance of Christmas music Sunday afternoon down at the beautifully restored Fox Playhouse downtown. At both these functions, I saw people I think I've known half my lifetime, but people whom I haven't seen recently. ...

Chimps and Spider Webb's Spidermobile (12/04/05)
Thinking back to the late 1940s and early 1950s, when my gang of same-age pre-teen youngsters and I were first introduced to the miracle of television, I tend to remember the events surrounding those shows as much as I recall the actual TV shows themselves...

Here's to you, Captain Video! (11/27/05)
Up until the time I was about 14, I had a weekly date to hustle into my house and tune in to the 15-minute-long "Lone Ranger" radio program sponsored by Cheerios breakfast cereal, each Wednesday evening at 7:30 p.m., Eastern Saving Time. It would ordinarily be, after all, a sultry summer evening, still light enough to see for another hour, and I'd have to bow out of my daily endless softball game across the street in the empty lot. ...

Mr. Bush's last gasp -- er, lap (11/20/05)
Last week (Nov. 7, 2005), the traditionally Republican Time magazine had a lead article, by Nancy Gibbs and Mike Allen, that noted of American history, "Second terms have a way of veering into wild and menacing terrain, spiked with indictments and scandals and betrayal and grief. ...

Reading and writing (11/13/05)
Leonard Ernsbarger's well-researched column, "Reading in the Classrooms," in Wednesday's Nevada Daily Mail, was extremely interesting to me. For one thing, I've recently retired from Cottey College, where I spent 31 years "teaching writing," by which I mean not the explicit meanings of the English words on the page, which college students that age have pretty well mastered, but the implicit meanings or suggestions of those words -- which can make all the difference between negative and positive, harsh and easy-going, hostile and friendly. ...

The Strange Tale of Harry and Boots (11/06/05)
I'm not accustomed to living in a house without a pet. It doesn't necessarily have to be a large pet, although I draw the line at such toy-like curmudgeons as hamsters, tropical fish even my favorite, black mollies, and white mice. But it needs to be large enough to pet, and tame enough to lay off the rough stuff, like shredding the upstairs couch and leaving claw marks all across the downstairs end tables...

Recruiters 'making mission' (08/28/05)
Now that the number of body bags containing the corpses of U..S. kids killed in George Bush's war in Iraq and Afghanistan has exceeded 1,864, and the war's once modest popularity here at home has shrunk to an all-time low, it's pretty clear that the U.S. military is currently having one devil of a time "making mission."...

Sex education (08/14/05)
One topic I don't hear much about anymore is sex education for young people. Maybe that means the school system has got all the wrinkles ironed out. Yesterday, I viewed a program on cable that contained images and information I didn't know about until I was just about married at age 24. Today, there's a sex education in every uncut episode of "Sex and the Single Girl."...

Time marches on (08/07/05)
Somewhere during the last 30 years or so, time got away from me. While I was growing up in Larchmont, N.Y., I had a friend, Neddy Bellamy, living in the house next to mine. He had a little brother, Mikey -- young enough to invite teasing and abusing, as younger siblings are wont to do. And Neddy, if I recall correctly, obliged him royally...

Beechmont Avenue, then and now (07/24/05)
Recently, shortly before my father's death, I came across a very old photograph of a hotel in Cherry Grove, the tiny northern suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, where he had grown up. Since I remember the same suburb as it appeared, first, in its post-World War II simplicity, and, later, in its Vietnam era-growth spurt, this photograph must have been taken by my father himself (he was an early amateur photographer) in the late 1920's or early 1930's...

Your car as a Swiss Army Knife (07/17/05)
On the afternoon of July 9, 2005, driving home from Somewhere, I was listening to a story, "Turning Cars into Havens of Entertainment, Comfort," by Celeste Headlee, on KRPS (National Public Radio), that caught my attention and prompted some flights of fancy. ...

A Half Century Ago (07/10/05)
One of the tendencies of the elderly is to savage the new, which they either can't understand or staunchly refuse to understand. In my gloomy days, I tend to oscillate between the two. I often wish I could be planted as a young adult in a particular year: 1925, when Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby (which at first sold so poorly that I fancy I could go to Scribner's offices on Fifth Avenue, congratulate Scott on a fabulous novel, and buy a hundred copies or so, then save them all until the reversal of critical opinion began to see it as the masterpiece it is until each first edition was worth a semi-fortune); 1941, so I could call up Franklin Roosevelt and warn him of the up-coming Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and thus be a national hero; 1945, so I could gather in Times Square, together with half a million or so other iron-lunged Americans and kiss every pretty young girl in celebration of VJ Day. ...

The Sins of the Fathers? (07/03/05)
In case you missed it, an article in the Friday, June 17, Daily Mail, entitled "Pierce City apologizes for dark past, refuses to pay for moving remains," was not, it turns out, just a lousy pun, but referred to a brief story about the racial past of the local town of Pierce City, which was driven to its knees by a series of tornadoes recently...

How's George, Jr., doing? (06/19/05)
It used to be that our country was strong enough--and, thanks to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, distant enough from the rest of the world -- to wait out the four-year administration of a dangerously incompetent president, like Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding. But times have changed, and ever-more-sophisticated technology has brought all us nations to each others' doorsteps. A day's inadvertence on the part of an inept president can bring an end to us all -- in a heartbeat...

Wishing Cottey students luck, online and elsewhere (06/12/05)
I'm surprised it didn't happen earlier. I woke up last night having a mild nightmare: no bloody monster behind me; no car going over a cliff; not even a plane crashing into our house. It was a teacher's nightmare: I was in front of a class of Cottey students and hadn't the faintest idea what I was supposed to tell them. ...

Stumble and Bumble update (06/05/05)
Readers familiar with Dr. Nash's Sunday newspaper column will recall that he and his wife Ginny began to restore decrepit and unsightly old houses in the Nevada area in the late 1970's, at first with the expert help of Mr. Robert Palmer, more recently with the expert help of Mr. ...

Tribute: For Memorial Day (05/29/05)
I grew up with a real fondness for America's armed forces. In the years immediately following World War II, I met, for example, my parents' Pelham Manor neighbors, Captain and Mrs. James MacLean and their son Little Jimmy. When our family moved to Larchmont, they came to visit frequently, once bringing with them as a gift for me a new canvas Indian tee-pee, which little Jimmy and I set up in our backyard and then, dressed as Indians, slept in that night (without either of us in the dark having to creep with fright up the back stairs to sleep in regular beds) This was still wartime, and every time the Navy launched a new U.S. ...

Odds and ends (05/22/05)
Last Sunday, the Nevada Herald censored my column, "How Do You Define 'Travel?'" Writing of the cantankerous 19th-century American naturalist-philosopher Henry David Thoreau, I'd written that I personally wouldn't want to bark sharply at my readers, as Henry did, on a regular basis, at his. ...

How do you define 'travel'? (05/15/05)
"I've traveled widely in Concord," Henry Thoreau quipped one day to a group of his fellow-townsmen. I wonder how many of his listeners tittered at his remark. You can bet not one of them guffawed. What he meant was that as a mere mortal afflicted with tuberculosis, from which he sensed he'd die early (he'd be 44), he wanted to know intimately the physical nature of his own environment as no other human had known it until that time. ...

'Head west, young man, head west!' (05/08/05)
Our trip to New Orleans on the stern wheeler was meant, for one thing, to see how well I could manoeuver my aluminum walker in and out of doors; along narrow corridors; over pebbly surfaces; on rainy, slippery sidewalks; up and down extensive walks on grass and concrete. I passed with flying colors, surprising myself. That was a 3-day journey...

"You intoxicate my soul with your eyes . . ." (04/24/05)
They'd moved in, I always imagined, long before we arrived in Normandy Lane, in the Larchmont Woods section of the suburb New Rochelle, New York. The first Coots I encountered was the son Clayton, who knocked on our front screen door one afternoon in Spring, 1945...

Making your end-of-life wishes known (04/21/05)
When I was in the hospital about five years ago, wondering if I would ever emerge and be able to come home again, a hospital aide entered my room one morning, smiled broadly, and asked me, "Do you have a living will or an advance directive?" Fairly groggy from all the medications I'd been given, I panicked at the directness of her question. ...

A new leaf (04/17/05)
Last weekend, Ginny and I attended many of the festivities surrounding the Saturday inauguration of Dr. Judy Robinson Rogers as Cottey College's eleventh president. From time to time, when one of the College's old-timers told me, "We're glad you came today," I felt like saying, "Did you think you could keep me away?"...

The Prince exits (04/10/05)
This past week has been, among other things, a week of loss. First the Pope. Then Saul Bellow, the Nobel-prize-winning American novelist (Just this December, for the Arkansas Philological Association convention in Fayetteville, I wrote a scholarly paper on his novel The Adventures of Augie March). And, finally, Prince Rainier of Monaco. He's the one who brings back memories...

No place for politicians (03/27/05)
In Tucson, earlier this week, regarding the Terri Schiavo case, President George W. Bush said, "This is a complex case with serious issues, but in extraordinary circumstances like this, it is wise to always err on the side of life." Gosh, too bad he didn't feel this way when he sent 15,000 young Americans to their death in a meaningless and indecisive war in Iraq...

Travels on Ole Man River … and thereabout (03/13/05)
Recently, I spent my 65th birthday (Feb. 28) with Ginny and the ghost of Huck Finn on the Mississippi River. In our 40 years of married life, the two of us have seldom taken a trip of more than two days' duration, so when we chose, as our first post-retirement trip, with daughter Jessica back in Nevada busily seeking employment in Europe, we decided against the seven and 18-day trips down the Mississippi, and settled for the three-day cruise, which was to depart from New Orleans...

Death of a Teacher (02/20/05)
The other day, I heard from Dr. Marjorie Goss, who has retired from teaching at Cottey College to Oregon, that Mr. Bob Lawrence has died of cancer. When I came to Cottey College in 1972 to teach in the English Department, Bob Lawrence was a member of its Art Department and had been for several years. ...

'Ou sont les neiges . . .?' (02/13/05)
Many years ago, during Spring Break, accompanying my daughter Jessica to the East Coast to visit some colleges she was interested in attending, I thought that while she was interviewing I might hop a local train from New York City to Larchmont, the little suburban town where I'd lived from age 5 to age 25, when I got married...

Hey, Buddy, can you spare a Zantac? (01/23/05)
While I was working at Cottey and had a generous Blue Cross/ Blue Shield medical coverage, I didn't pay an awful lot of attention to what exactly it covered and what exactly it didn't. All I knew was that it didn't leave me much to pay out of my own pocket, and that was fine with me...

'&%$@#&^!,$%^,' he explained (01/16/05)
"Our language," it's been said, "is who we are." I hope there are exceptions to that rule! When I was about 10, my mother called me inside from a game of softball we neighborhood kids were playing across the street, and sat me down in a living room chair...

Life in a small town (12/05/04)
Up until recently, the voice of the Kansas City Star columnist and KRPS-TV personality Charles Guswelle spoke to me of life in a midwestern small town the way Kansas City was before World War II. Maybe others would refer to KC back then as a "city," but it's been my experience that as a young person you yearn for the excitement of the city, but as you get older the small town begins to exert its own draw. ...

At Random (11/21/04)
Giving Thanks … at Last Oh, when I was a little kid, how I dreaded Thanksgiving! Not the Thanksgiving Day I was told about, when my 6' 3" father took me to the Thanksgiving Day parade and put me on his shoulders so I could see the huge balloons float by. I must say I don't recall it; I was only told it occurred...

At Random (10/03/04)
Whatever happened to air-pockets? A few days ago, coming out of the local Burger King, I noticed a twenty-something young man wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap. "How long you been a Yankee fan?" I asked. "Oh, my dad was a Yankee fan before me. I go back to Ricky Henderson."...

At Random (09/26/04)
Back in 1950 More than half a century ago? Wow! I was 10 years old back then, and living with my parents and new baby sister Beverly in the outskirts of New York City. The Second World War was over, and I think I can still remember neighbors honking their auto horns to celebrate VJ Day. For the next five years, a practically palpable feeling of self-congratulation and contentment (neither of which I could then put into words) settled over the land like a warm bath,...

At Random (09/20/04)
George W. Bush: a Brag Sheet About a month ago, I received the following resume of George W. Bush; yes, the other son of the former U.S. President George Bush, over the Internet from a friend. After reading the following document, I would say this: If a baboon were the only alternative to George W. Bush, come November, I would cast my vote for the baboon...

At Random (09/08/04)
Diabetes: It won't go away (part two) Reading Leonard Ernsbarger's very fine article, in this past Wednesday's Daily Mail, on the scourge of diabetes, I wondered if any readers might profit from my 35-year tussle with it. (diabetes, not Leonard's article)...