I suppose that most of you are too young to know about Dogpatch. Dogpatch was a fictional community dreamed up by comic strip illustrator and writer Al Capp. He described Dogpatch “as being the most miserable and unnecessary place on earth.” He said it was located...
Pat O’Dea, “Wisconsin’s Kangaroo,” played at a time when the kicker was considered the most important player on a football team. O’Dea is thought by many to be the greatest kicker of all time. Pat played for the University of Wisconsin from 1896 to 1899, at a time...
Johnny Mercer, Academy Award-winning writer of more than 1,500 songs—including “Days of Wine and Roses” and “Moon River”—estimated that Emma Kelly knew 6,000 songs from memory. Although Emma Kelly achieved local prominence before appearing in the book and movie,...
With only a high school education, he put his children through school to doctorate degrees. Now, in the latter years of his life, he decided to take his turn. I first met Jake when in 1970 I entered Utah State’s doctorate program. Jake was in his sixties, partway...
You’ll see in the picture above, Cousin Wayne at the wheel, and my friend Bob Nash and me manning the rear seat in Wayne’s Mule, getting ready to visit, for one last time, my favorite place on this earth—the Sherwood Forest of my youth. I spent dozens of happy hours...
Uncle Sam, in his late seventies, challenged my three children to a race. He’d always loved and been attentive to children. He taught me to play checkers when I was a youth, and he didn’t give any quarter. He’d explain what I should have done when I made a weak move,...
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If you like this you'll love the O'Shaughnessy Chronicles!
When a sibling unexpectedly inherits his grandfather’s dairy farm, Will O’Shaughnessy turns to selling Fords in rural, pre-World War I southwestern Wisconsin.
A richly wistful epic tale of a bygone era....Readers will yearn for more. ~ Midwest Book Review
