I can’t help but think that Maud Allan would have been better off with a few cast changes in the play that was her life. Born Beulah Maude Durrant in Toronto in 1873, she spent her childhood in San Francisco before traveling to Germany at age 22 to study piano. While she was away, her […]
It was the summer of 1963. I was 15 years old, a Boy Scout, just in from a week on the trail at Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron, New Mexico. We had a day to kill in Tent City, the base camp, before the bus took us back to Buffalo, N.Y. I was drinking a […]
War is a dangerous pastime, and the enemy is not the only hazard. This was brought home to me recently when I was researching four young men from my village who died in the war in Vietnam. One was just 19 years old, and the news reports said he was killed in action while on […]
As a writer I’ve only used two pseudonyms: “Evan Nescent” back in the ‘70s and more recently, “Dirk Wagstaff,” which came into being after the collision of two movie memories. Fans of the Marx Brothers will recall that Professor Wagstaff was Groucho’s character in Horse Feathers. Groucho had many wonderful names: Wolf J. Flywheel in […]
The following story is repeated, with the photo above but with no attribution, many times on the Internet: “Artist R.G. Harper Pennington in one of his paintings depicted a nude Robert Gould Shaw II as the character ‘Little Billee’ from the bohemian novel Trilby by George du Maurier. This painting hung in the bedroom of […]
There are people who will tell you that a Liberal Arts degree, in the possession of an English major, is one of the most worthless pieces of paper in general circulation. But as I possess one such scrap of parchment, I am not one of those who will speak disparagingly of it. And this is […]
I was reading about polo in India and the role played by the British military in bringing polo from India to England, and thence to the United States, when I came across another British sport in India that involved a spear rather than a mallet, and an enraged boar rather than a ball. Pig sticking […]
