Monthly Archives: December 2020

I tore off an old deck, lots of dry rot and old pieces scabbed onto the frame to keep it erect for the last 40 years, but the hot tub failed and the deck was a mess, so I bit … Continue reading →

The cover of an issue of California Fly Fisherman is a photo of Mossbrae Falls in the Upper Sacramento River near Dunsmuir.  A man is casting to the water just under the falls.  And there, behind him, is the big rock that Ronald, Paul … Continue reading →

I skippered Dick Gates’ sailboat in the Kauai channel.  It was one of the hairiest nights I can remember, but I managed to survive my watch in the small hours of the morning as waves crashed at us, and I “threaded … Continue reading →

            I am looking again at the photograph of my father and us three boys on the  eve of his departure for the tuberculosis sanitarium in New Mexico.             Now I am 85 years old, and two of those four people are dead. … Continue reading →

The Torah advises not to eat herons or egrets but in the Malay Archipelago they eat herons and egrets, macaws, parrots,  birds of paradise. The French eat songbirds, only a mouthful each.  In the south the black slaves ate blackbird pie, Eating … Continue reading →

            Pierre Teilhard the Jesuit paleontologist priest who discovered Peking Man, wrote:  “success and recognition are worth nothing.”  He was silenced by Rome for his early writings supporting the evolution of man, spent a lifetime in exile, yet continued to labor in the … Continue reading →

It was 1955 and I was a sophomore at the University  of California at Berkeley, a member of the track team, not one of the elite, a so-so hurdler.  Lonnie Spurrier, the half miler was about to set a world record in … Continue reading →

            There was no question that I would turn out badly. Nor was I expected to turn out rather well.  I just turned out.  My old brother Ronald, was a straight A student, got raves in chemistry and mathematics and went off to … Continue reading →