When you grow up, you make your entire house your own. Actually, your wife makes it like she wants. But when you’re a kid, your room is the only place you have where everything can be just like you like it.

The only new house my parents ever built was constructed in 1974. Prior to that, we lived in a small red brick house that was built post-World War II. Before that, my parents rented a white, framed house that was ...

If you grew up in a town with a unique name, there are likely many stories about how the name came to be. Also, you know the struggles of trying to explain them. If your town is small, few folks have heard of it and they have no idea where it is.

“What’s the name of the town, again?”

“How do you spell that?”

“Where is it located?”

I grew up in southwest Arkansas in a town called Ashdown. It’s a decent size by ...

Me: “Ever notice there aren’t any contestants our age on Wheel of Fortune?”

Wife: “No, but you’re right. Why is that?”

Me: “They fall asleep before the show is over.”

Childhood television viewing wasn’t always filled with endless choices of programming.

A kid today can watch cartoons, nature shows, or educational offerings on demand. But a few decades ago, in the dark ages of just three channels, shows for kids were limited to early weekday and Saturday mornings.

Captain Kangaroo and Cap’n Crunch ruled my ...

The number of advertisements each of us sees in a day is sizable. According to a 2019 LinkedIn article, each person in the US is exposed to over 5,000 ads every 24 hours. That’s 4,500 more each day than we saw in the 1970s.

Maybe the volume of ads we see today is why I don’t seem to remember products as well as I did 45 years ago. When Nixon, Ford, and Carter were in the White House, the ways companies ...