Tag: Grindrod

Over the course of twenty-plus years of writing for publication, which includes a couple of biographical books and features and columns in both magazine and newspaper genres, I’ve done my share of interviewing folks, easily in the hundreds. While many have been local people — the type that country singer Miranda Lambert sang about in her 2007 release, “Famous in a Small Town” — others would be recognizable to a much larger swath of the country, especially to sports fans.

The play “Inherit the Wind”, in my opinion, is a true dramatic masterpiece. It’s the fictionalized account of the famous Scopes Monkey Trials that took place in Dayton, Tennessee. In 1925, a teacher named John T. Scopes was tried for violating the Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of any theory of evolution in Tennessee public schools that wasn’t consistent with the Bible’s version of how we as humans came to be. The high school science teacher did nothing more than introduce his students to Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.

As I’ve mentioned in a number of columns over the years, I’m certainly a huge “Seinfeld” fan. Although the final installment has been an impossible 25 years ago, the show remains so very easily accessed on both cable and streaming services to this day.

While there are many signs as I age that tell me how much time has passed, the one that seems to happen with the greatest frequency is when I hear of the passing of the sports figures that I followed as a child in the late 1950s and early ‘60s.

During my work days, I’ll periodically find myself on college campuses doing cleaning inspections in residence halls. And, while the areas I’m evaluating are limited to common spaces and not the dorm rooms themselves, often doors are open, providing me some glimpses at the young folks’ temporary quarters, the tidiness (or often the lack thereof) and the décor.

As a great lover of movies, especially as I’ve moved further away in my TV viewing habits from series and reality, I’ll often find myself planted in my man cave checking out my streaming options for a film.

With March comes spring training, a past time that traces its roots back to the New York Mutuals. Some baseball historians believe to be the first team to hold spring training somewhere other than its home field. For those that follow the top-tier teams, such as pals of mine Joe Stoll and Bill Howell who’ve pledged their allegiance to the Reds and Pirates — teams that finished last season with identical moribund records of 62-100 — hope springs eternal each spring.

Last week, I detailed some of the familiar and the different aspects of what was easily my tenth visit to Hilton Head Island and its surrounding areas. Lady Jane and I were comfortable with the familiar — like walking the beach and cycling — but we also wanted a new experience.

Certainly, there are so many different ideas about the best way to use our leisure time when it comes to packing what was called a grip in earlier times and taking to the highway or the skies. While many are comforted by the familiarity of sojourning to the same locale, there are others who steadfastly prescribe to the notion that, in a life so very short — as compared to the lifespan of the giant tortoise named Jonathan, a resident of the remote island of St. Helena, who turned 191 last month — travel experiences should vary.

Certainly shopping over the course of my lifetime has changed dramatically. When the Grindrods first arrived in Lima from my birth city of Chicago in early June of 1958, those who wanted to shop headed downtown to patronize stores like The Leader, Gregg’s, S.S. Kresge and F. W. Woolworth.