He was a West Virginia coal miner’s son who lost his legs below the knees in a deadly ambush in Vietnam at age 18. What happened next sounds like a movie script. Dave Evans went on to work across the planet, building and fitting prosthetic legs, hands, and arm for thousands of adults and children in conflict zones worldwide. A…
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The email arrived one day recently in my in-box from Glasgow, Scotland: Did you know, it said, that a letter your friend Sister Mary Pellicane sent to Charles de Gaulle is on sale on eBay in London? Um ... no. What?
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Sister Mary Pellicane has been at the business of being a nun—and being alive—a long while. On the occasion of her 98th birthday, meet this still feisty, still questing nun's life story.
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There's a wheelchair and a guy in it at the end of the sidewalk. It's an old chair, not those fancy Millenium Falcon chairs you see. An old guy, with skin weathered like an ancient saddle...
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The 10-year-old Joe Turner watched, dumbstruck, as the jet fighter raced up the Kanawha River and then UNDER a bridge. Now, that was a job to have.
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The back-to-the-land movement brought hosts of wannabe farmers and dreamers to West Virginia. It also brought a dancer who brought big dreams into the deep hills.
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In this 1995 profile, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti forecasts "the revenge of the white man" taking place in contemporary politics in 2018 while reflecting on an epochal career as a poet, artist and essential figure in the rise and spread of the Beat movement.
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Fathers can be mysterious guys, especially if they were members of the Greatest Generation who didn't talk about things like their ships being torpedoed in the Atlantic and whose go-to form of anger was volcanic utterance. But in the bits and pieces of a father's life, I find the man he was.
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