Sharing photos, videos, vintage images I've discovered, and -- occasionally -- commentary and thoughts from retired life and travels.
This photograph doesn t look like much at first glance: a pavilion, a ball field, and a few young trees on the north side of Russellville. But there s a lot more going on here. The photograph was taken in June 1972 and is archived with the wonderfully descriptive title, “Park at re-claimed strip coal mine, north [ ]
Several years ago — OK, it was a long, long time ago — I was attending college as a non-traditional student, finishing up my degree while working full-time. George Herbert Walker Bush was the president of the United States, and Al Gore was a United States Senator who hadn’t invented the internet yet. One of [ ]
What are you legally required to do when a traffic light turns yellow? There s a common belief that if you re still in the intersection when the light turns red, you ve run a red light. In Arkansas, that s not what the law says. Arkansas Code §27-52-107 says a steady yellow light warns that the red signal [ ]
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For most of my life, replacing a car battery meant loosening two cables, swapping batteries, and driving away. Then came start-stop systems. Many modern vehicles have a second battery—an auxiliary (start-stop) battery—that keeps the electronics alive and helps restart the engine after it shuts off at stoplights. It s surprisingly small, which makes it easy to [ ]
Arkansas Senator John Boozman found himself in a rather strange position last week. He was voting for Mitch McConnell. Literally. McConnell has been absent from the Senate for weeks while dealing with health problems. But that didn t stop Boozman, chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, from announcing that he had talked with McConnell the night [ ]
Senator Tom Cotton voted for the 2025 budget reconciliation law — the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill.” There are a lot of things buried in that enormous piece of legislation, but two deserve particular attention in Arkansas: Medicaid and SNAP. And these aren t abstract Washington programs. They pay doctors. They keep rural hospitals operating. Medicaid [ ]
The man in the picture came from Missouri. His name apparently wasn t recorded, or at least it didn t make it into the caption that followed Dorothea Lange s photograph into the archives. What we do know isn t much. He was a drought refugee from Polk, Missouri. It was November 1936. He was in Porterville, California. And [ ]
There are some injuries you read about differently after you’ve had a similar serious one yourself. While filming The Unforgiven in Mexico in 1959, 30-year-old Audrey Hepburn was thrown from a horse during rehearsal and broke her back. Accounts vary somewhat on the exact injuries, but contemporary and biographical sources describe multiple fractured vertebrae—one detailed [ ]