History, Real Life, and Faith
I read Helen Keller’s biography, The Story of My Life, as a child and was inspired by her persistence in overcoming her profound handicaps. Helen was blind and deaf. Many people have enjoyed the stage play and the movie, The Miracle Worker, about Helen Keller’s meeting with Teacher Annie Sullivan and Sullivan’s determination to turn Helen from an animal into a child with dignity. Helen was…
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How do you react to a do-gooder? I spent many hours during the end of the last century, hunched in the dark before an antiquated machine with a big hand crank. An eye-glaring microfilm machine light shone through plastic strips with faded squibbles, throwing down shadows before me to make out. After reading microfilm for hours my eyes often hurt, but…
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Let’s put a story to a face. Take a look at the woman to the left. What color is her hair? What type of woman do you think she is? Tall? Agile? Efficient? Industrious? Is she wearing glasses? Is she, perhaps, some sort of ancient librarian? When you write historical fiction, you often choose your characters based on photos–or in…
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What to do with Grief?
Civil war fans often overlook Fort Delaware. It rises out of the mist of the Delaware River dividing Delaware from New Jersey. The fort is a row of granite buildings on the very slight elevation of Pea Patch Island–so named because a ship ran aground there two centuries ago and dumped a cargo of peas. The war of 1812 raised concern in…
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Like many, I grew up on sanitized versions of prisoner of war (POW) camps made famous by movies such as Stalag 17 or The Great Escape, not to mention the TV program Hogan’s Heroes. But some of the heroes of my childhood included the Vietnam POWs. I wore a metal bracelet with Lt. Thomas Sima’s name on it for several…
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