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 […]
Robert Weston Smith. Does the name ring any bells? No? How about Big Smith and the Records? Daddy Jules? I will give you a couple of hints: If you have seen the movie American Graffiti or reruns of the TV show The Midnight Special or heard Bob Smith’s, “Have Mercy!” catch phrase, then you might […]
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, […]
Warning: I like Styx. I have always liked Styx. What happened to make them fragment, reassemble, and separate again into two distinct ‘camps’ the way they did was never quite clear to me. The memory of where and when I first heard Lady on the radio, however, pops into my head everytime I hear […]
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 […]
At the time the first part of FTV: Wood Stories (published 3-11-20) was being written, we were in the process of having a large Silver Poplar tree removed from our side yard. When our house was originally built, the owner had planted three of these trees along with a couple of Spruce trees in […]
The Christmas Cards sent out this year included the usual ‘Season’s Greetings’ but an added sentiment there are no emojis for: ‘Here is to a brighter 2021.’ Peggy James seems to have an uncanny knack for writing music to fit my feelings – think ‘musical emoji on demand’. Gary Tanin at Daystorm Music sent […]