A Bloggish Collection of Stories
These are magazine style feature pieces I post here from time to time. Could be about anything. I put work and love into these stories and hope you find them interesting. Check the intro boxes to see if there’s anything that intrigues. Pieces generally take a few minutes to read unless otherwise warned.
Let’s call this the case of the lovelorn wild pheasant, the naked Governor, and the plight of some birds just trying to survive in Vermont.
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In this photo I took some years ago is Arnold Schwartzenegger, on the right. To his left is a young guy who worked in my office building who was dying to meet The Terminator, but had no idea he was going to. I had a hand in this little caper. In this post you’ll find that story plus other photos with commentary from my vault that have mildly interesting historic value or a special place in my memories. Some of the photos I took have never been published elsewhere.
For tagging/reference purposes, other people featured here include: former Vermont Governor Richard Snelling, former Vermont Governor Madeleine Kunin, her former aide of every sort Elizabeth Bankowski, former Vermont Governor James Douglas, former State Archivist Gregory Sanford, State Police Dive Team members Lt. Dean George, Trooper Gary Gaboury, and Trooper Warren Whitney, author, teacher and legislator Bill Mares, and former state postmaster Raymond Houghton.
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The man with the dagger grip on the pie knife in the inset photo is our friend Dave Bulow of Adamant, Vermont. One year I made this pie for him, a spin on a savory French dish called a tortiѐre, in appreciation of a skilled and generous act of tree-felling he performed for us when my family and I lived in rural East Montpelier, a few miles from Dave. He took down four enormous old spruce for us. I fight sentimentality when it comes to such things, but I hated to see those old souls meet the chain saw. At their journey’s end, they had a surprise for us.
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Medical history seems to have forgotten to note a family physician’s invention of a device, in 1926, that was first to transmit a patient’s heartbeats by telephone wire from the patient’s home across town to the doctor’s office. This is a look at the life of Jersey City (NJ) physician Dr. A. E. Jaffin, who invented this device, but was better known for his efforts to eradicate tuberculosis and had a role in providing free medical care to all in need in his city.
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This concerns a funny thing I almost never found out about my family connection to the man on the right in this photo, seen here in 1941 with Edward VIII, the Duke of Windsor — the heir to the throne of England who would not become King, and who also thought Hitler a pretty OK fellow at a very bad time in Europe’s history. The subject of our story also had a connection to FDR, Cary Grant, the Queen of Romania and other celebs of the day.
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An old silo in East Montpelier, Vermont, had leaned precipitously for decades. Then, something spectacularly strange happened.
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Here’s a rubble of thoughts (and pics) in praise of Vermont’s iconic old fieldstone walls and a few modern master stonemasons I’ve had the pleasure of talking to: Thea Alvin, Dan Snow and Jacob Miller. I showed up at Thea’s place to chat a few days before Oprah Winfrey’s film crew came to do an inspirational piece about her work. You can watch that episode, too. And you can read what happened when I attempted to learn to build a stone arch from raw fieldstone.
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