In the movie The Big Chill, a group of old friends gather for the funeral of one of their own, and it turns into a reunion.

Recently, a group of my old friends gathered for a reunion, and it turned into a gathering for a funeral.

I got the call on the way to the reunion venue. My best friend since seventh grade was on the other end of the line.

“My wife just died,” he said.

You hear bad news, but you don’t ...

The Beatles had a song called, Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. The line, “…It was 20 years ago today…” reminded me of something that happened not 20 years ago, but 50 years ago. My father dragging me outside to put a storage building together.

It was Thanksgiving Day 1974. Dad had bought a storage building kit from Sears and had it delivered. He’d had a concrete slab poured next to our driveway on Locust Street in Ashdown, Arkansas. The spot ...

My father used to talk about radio programs a lot. The Lone Ranger. Lum and Abner. Amos and Andy. Edgar Bergen. People tend to talk about things they like. And he liked the old radio shows. He said he would have kept listening to them, but they took them away from him.

As radio gave way to television, those shows either faded away or found a new home in the visual medium.

A handful of radio programs were still on the air ...