Fred Rydholm’s name has appeared in this column on numerous occasions. Fred had a lifelong interest (or obsession) to find out more about the mystery of who removed copper from this area before Europeans arrived on these shores. Who were the ancient miners and where the copper went were the main trunks of a […]
One of my pet peeves has always been the insertion of unfamiliar terms and foriegn phrases in written works without a) context, b) the proper pronunciation, and/or c) a reason for the inclusion to be there (beyond showing readers that the author knows what they mean). The first time I read about ‘coureur de […]
Are you an optimist or a pessimist? Do you see the glass as half empty or half full? Even the most ‘pie-in-the-sky, the sun is always shining somewhere’ people (think REM’s Shiny Happy People or Katrina and The Waves I’m Walking On Sunshine) certainly have days when things don’t look so rosy. I won’t […]
My source for what “National This or That Day” it is, the Jan Tucker Show, planted the idea for this FTV when Jan mentioned that one of the things designated for April 4 is ‘National School Library Day’. With only so many days in a calendar year, there are usually multiple ‘National This or […]
In the summer of 1974, Professor Pat Farrell was both my instructor and boss at Northern Michigan University’s Field Station just south of Melstrand, Michigan. All Geography majors were required to take a class called Field Studies to give us boots on the ground experience using tools of the mapping trade. My undergraduate advisor, […]
S4SD 2021 Campaign So what exactly is S4SD? The full name of the program is Strive 4 a Safer Drive. Six years ago, the Ontonagon Area School owned FM radio station, WOAS-FM 88.5, was looking for a way to engage student DJs in some form of community service. With sponsorship by the Ford Motor Company […]
We start this month with the planets visible in the morning sky. Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn can be seen low in the ESE forty minutes before sunrise. Mercury will drop lower each day and be lost in the Sun’s glare by mid-month. The two Gas Giants will climb higher each day. Since their historic close […]
We left Part 1 of The Smothers Brothers just as they had their first album in the can. They landed in New York during the brutal winter of 1961 for their first club dates on the East Coast. It must have been quite a shock to their systems having spent the majority of their […]
In the world of entertainment, the list of stories about siblings working together is a long one. In the music end of the business, these tales often focus on the dysfunctional pairings like the Robinson brothers (The Black Crowes), The Everly Brothers (Phil and Don), and the Gallagher brothers (Oasis). Some concentrate on groups […]
Former WOAS-FM General Manager Mike ‘Zenith’ Bennett was much too young when he passed away a few years back. Mike was my radio mentor and he made it a point to stay in touch years after he had moved from Ontonagon to Bessemer and eventually to Marquette. When I was first getting involved in […]