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 ...

I was too young to remember the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, or the assassination of President Kennedy.

I’ve often wondered what my young parents were thinking as the United States teetered on the brink of thermonuclear war, and then watched as our nation’s leader was killed just a little over a year later.

I’ve pondered if they considered whether bringing me into the world had been a good idea. Pictures taken at the time in my grandparents’ front yard show my mom, ...

At 11:25 a.m. with the ring of a bell, the entire high school student body divided itself into three distinct groups. Those who brought their lunch, those who left campus, and those who ate in the cafeteria.

At least, this was the information I received as a junior high student.

The most intriguing group to me was the pack of young adults I’d heard about who allegedly roamed the town freely, grazing at every restaurant in town.

I’d also heard that the kids ...

There wasn’t much else that was worse than being assigned to sort the bottle room in back of the Piggly Wiggly. If someone could fit an object in an empty Coke bottle, they’d put it in there.

I called them all Coke bottles, whether they were a Coke product or not. Pepsi, 7up, Dr. Pepper, Grapette – they were all Coke bottles to me and they were all worth money. When I left my career in the grocery business Coke bottles ...

I can still smell the aroma of the freshly opened box of crayons and two sharpened Husky pencils. The distinctive scent of Crayola Crayons and shaved wood just smelled like the beginning of education.

Noisily rifling through the rest of my school supplies, my mother’s voice rounded the corner from the kitchen and into my ears.

“Johnny, school doesn’t begin for another week. Don’t use your crayons and pencils up before you even start,” she said.

I was so ready to go to ...

In the summer of 1977, I was finally old enough to get my first job. My first real job, that is.

I mean the kind of job where you get a paycheck, instead of a wadded up fistful of $1 bills, like Mrs. Bone always handed me after I mowed her yard. (A yard that seemed endless and was filled with magnolia trees and plants I didn’t recognize.)

The kind of job where your pay came after withholdings, which awakened me to ...

The brains of men and women couldn’t be more different. I’m sure that by pairing the two, the Good Lord above has had lots of laughs.

It really makes you wonder how the thought patterns of husbands and wives ever find common ground.

Men primarily think of red meat, Three Stooges marathons, and cars.

Women think of everything else. All the time.

I believe this is why husbands can go to sleep seconds after their heads hit the pillow, and wives lie awake for ...

As I drove to work, the first thing I noticed was the flashing yellow lights in the school zones weren’t blinking.

Official notification that summer is here.

As a kid in Ashdown, Arkansas, we didn’t have flashing yellow lights. We had one flashing light. It was red.

Located at the main intersection at Highways 71 and 32, that flashing red light was a symbol of who we were. Not every town qualified for a flashing red light, so when we stopped there, we ...