Engaging Life with Courage and Intelligence
A post with a historical reference
Sixty years ago, when an English professor required a class to read something like Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, what did many “busy” students do? They took a shortcut. They went to the bookstore and bought the CliffNotes for Wuthering Heights. CliffNotes were summaries of a wide array of books. CliffNotes were a lazy student’s…
By 2003, the George W. Bush regime did the following: a) lowered taxes for his ultra-wealthy benefactors, b) loosened financial regulations to allow his ultra-wealthy benefactors to snooker millions of students, retirees, and wannabe homeowners and investors, c) blamed all the problems on Democrats, and d) started a war with IRAQ. In 2025, the Donald…
Father’s Day Mannon and Whitfield Vandiver, 1916 . Miracle at Oakmont J.J. Spaun sank a 64-foot putt on the 18th hole to win the 125th US Open at the rain-drenched Oakmont Country Club. He started with an unlucky five bogeys on his first six holes. However, his many competitors fell by the wayside on the…
A Brief History of Family X The following is the final chapter in a series about the evolution of the famed family X. It is hard to put lipstick on a pig. Errol X and Maye Haldeman’s marriage dissolved after nine tumultuous years. Maye was high-spirited, physically attractive, and intelligent. Errol was her equal, but…
A Brief History of Family X The following is a chapter in a series about the evolution of the famed family X. John Elon Haldeman was an intelligent and educated man who relocated his young family from Minnesota to Saskatchewan. Although his son Joshua was drawn back to Davenport, Iowa, to attend the world’s first…
A Brief History of Family X The following is a chapter in a series about the evolution of the famed family X. Continuing from the last chapter, Maye Haldeman married into the family X in 1970 in South Africa. Maye’s roots lie in Switzerland in the Mennonite faith. Her Haldeman family was forced out of…
President Trump’s erratic “the-world-is-on-fire” executive orders, pronouncements, and tweets have left the world’s economies and markets in chaos. Perhaps that’s what he wants… or maybe he doesn’t know what he wants. Possibly, he paid someone else to attend his world economy classes at the Wharton School. There is usually a method to anyone’s madness or…
A Brief History of Family X The following is a chapter in a series about the evolution of the famed family X. Errol Graham X was born to Walter X and Cora Amelia Robinson X on May 25, 1946, in Pretoria, South Africa. His childhood was difficult due to his parents’ marital problems. His mother…
A Brief History of Family X The following is a chapter in a series about the evolution of the famed family X. Walter X never knew his biological father, Harry X, who died one year after Walter’s birth in Pretoria in 1916. Since Lucy Champion and Harry were divorced shortly before Harry’s death, we cannot…
A Brief History of Family X The following is a chapter in a series about the evolution of family X. This story begins with a young lad from a poor English background, around 15 years old. He was the son of an unwed mother in a poor agricultural area in Suffolk County at the bottom…