Columns

Born on Christmas: 3 baseball hall of famers

Of the 42 Major League baseball players born on December 25th, three are enshrined in Cooperstown’s Hall of Fame. First on the list is fan-favorite Chicago White Sox’ second baseman and defensive specialist Nellie Fox, who played in every game from 1953 to 1959.

An old time (circa 2019) Christmas in Baton Rouge

Pastor Tony Spell is a man who takes his texts seriously. He believes in the plain truth of the Bible and the First Amendment. And that’s why Life Tabernacle Church in Baton Rouge, will be having Christmas services as usual this year. In person. In the presence of God.

A New Year’s retrospective

Over the half-century-plus that I have been writing about Acadiana, I’ve driven down practically every road in south Louisiana, visited (or at least passed through) every named community, and met and been befriended by some of the most extraordinary “ordinary” people on the globe.

Eugenics has no place in a civilized society

I have always thought that Planned Parenthood got a pass on its origins. While most people know that Margaret Sanger was an avid eugenicist, defenders of the organization she founded have tried to downplay her philosophy for decades. Fast forward to the pandemic.

Three things that kept me sane in 2020

The end of this sad, strange, historic and transformative year is almost upon us. And like a lot of you, I found myself burrowing into ritual, structure, and obligatory loaves of sourdough to fill up those hours of social isolation thrust upon us by the COVID-19 pandemic.

All I want for Christmas is the new vaccine!

Now that we are well into the month of December, my three teenage daughters have provided me with their extensive Christmas lists — both electronic and hard copies — in triplicate.

A Collier’s Christmas

I don’t know why I kept it in the first place, or even how it fell into my hands, but one of the things that I haul out every Christmas season, along with the tree lights and decorations, wreaths for the door, and an old nativity set, is the December 23, 1950, edition of Collier’s magazine.

Can we please have the right Christmas sounds?

“Hello. I’m Grandpa.” Christmas 50 years ago, my parents splurged and bought me a compact reel-to-reel tape recorder. My father had whetted my appetite with remarks that one could build a primitive voice recorder along the lines of Thomas Edison’s prototype, but this was the real store-bought deal.

At Christmastime, let children be children

We are approaching the anniversary of the most horrific gun massacre in the history of the United States.

Viruses and responses differ. Human nature doesn’t.

The way my siblings and I responded to my family’s chicken-pox outbreak in 1973 may shed light on Americans’ responses to COVID-19 in 2020. I was about 10 and remember how differently my five sisters responded to that highly contagious bug.