Nostalgia

I taught grades one through four, for three school years, in a one-room school from September of 1961 to June of 1964. It was called Pleasant Valley, and it was a public school in the Conestoga Valley School District. Today, it is a private school in farmland along Pleasant Valley Road, sout…

 Devastation hit me when I read about the fire that leveled The Mansion on Main Organic Salon & Spa on West Main Street in Leola late last year. But even more devastating was the fact it was my childhood home, built by my grandmother 100 years ago: A unique architectural structure capped…

Place Marie - a small shopping center that tucked away between Queen, Orange and Market streets in downtown Lancaster - has been in the news recently.

Following a series of health reversals, it was decided that my mother would need skilled nursing care. Her departure from the home she and my father shared for more than half a century was a rapid one, based on her medical needs. With no siblings, I began the monumental task of sorting throu…

It’s the middle of a June day in 1962 and I am sitting in a communal bathroom with wet hair and clothed in only a bathrobe. My room key has slipped between two shower stalls, and I cannot get back into my employee dorm room at Grossinger’s Resort in the Catskill Mountains of New York. Peekin…

I had just graduated from college with no plans for the future. I had played basketball in college and my dream was to go to another school, start as a freshman and play four more years of basketball. That was not an option, so, even though I had a degree in special education, I took a job w…

I had the best grandpap ever. William Cochran was a foreman at Armstrong Cork Co. off of Liberty Street in Lancaster.

I enlisted in the Navy at age 17, and it was known as a minority enlistment. When I finished boot camp at the Bainbridge Naval Training Center in Maryland, I was assigned to my next duty station. I, and about 10 others, were ordered to report to the USS Wasp, an aircraft carrier in Brooklyn,…

Get out your 20-sided dice and graph-paper maps - Dungeons & Dragons, the tabletop role-playing game of fantasy adventure, is 50 years old.

Longtime Ephrata Borough businessman C. William "Bill" Donecker died Friday at 93 years of age.

Here’s a favorite childhood memory, and other memorable downtown Lancaster thoughts from the mid-1950s.

Timeline: The mid-1980s. The Philadelphia 76ers are holding preseason practices at Mayser Gymnasium at Franklin & Marshall College — no charge to see them. They would open the bleachers on the left side of gym, and on the end closest to entrance. I went a number of times. I was there one…