Blog
On the trail of Mark Twain and ‘our friends the Bermudians’
Mark Twain visited Bermuda on the wooden steamer SS Quaker City in 1867 with 73 other travelers. It was at the end of a five-month cruise to Europe and the Holy Land. A San Francisco newspaper furnished his ticket in return for a regular series of travel stories about...
Hmmm. . . maybe there really WERE Michigan spies watching OSU practice from Fawcett Center
I used to think that Woody Hayes was delusional when he saw Michigan spies in the windows of the Fawcett Center, which has a nice view across Olentangy River Road of the Ohio State football practice fields. Spies? Really? I know OSU had the fences surrounding the...
An evening on Isle of Bute: Ohio State fans aren’t really all that bad
For today’s discourse on Ohio State football perspective, I take you to the little Isle of Bute, a choppy, 30-minute ferry ride west from Scotland’s mainland in the Firth of Clyde. First, let's take on the obvious questions: What was I doing on Bute, which doesn't...
When Knight visited Woody
A lot has been written about Bob Knight since his death and it’s not surprising that many of them seem so widely different. Where you stood on him and with him mostly depends on whether you were a friend, a former teammate, one of his former players, a fan (of Indiana...
From rock star to obscurity, Franklinton’s massive boulder has had quite a life
When I was a boy, a large rock enjoyed a prominent place in my grandparents’ front yard. It lay next to the sidewalk that led to their farm house, a few feet from Hunter Road. Someone had painted it white, as if it needed it to stand out. It didn’t. It wasn’t huge,...
Big Bottom Massacre site: pretty, serene and a little unnerving
On my third trip to the site of the Big Bottom Massacre, I again saw no park visitors. To put this in baseball terms, I’m 0 for 3. It doesn't seem as much a slump as status quo. A guy did show up to cut the grass at one point, but he went about his task like a man who...