I took a lot of cues from my late mother, Esther Knezovich, who was only too happy to provide them. For example, she’d lived in California in 1950 when Richard M. Nixon ran for the U.S. Senate against a woman named Helen Gahagan Douglas. Nixon smeared his opponent as a communist and won. My mom […]

We interrupt this presidential election with a reminder: The presidential election, as important as it is, is just one race. Don’t let the spectacle distract you from state and local contests. I say this because I’ve been blindsided when I didn’t take a peek at the sample ballot in advance. That is, there were races I […]

Pretty much everyone knows the “dog years” thing—you know, that a dog’s age in years is seven times a human’s. So, for example, a dog that is seven years old is roughly at the same point as a 49 year-old human. (Unless the human watched the debate last night, in which case the human aged […]

When Beth and I lived in Urbana, our couch backed up to a bay window that faced our neighbors’ window—which was maybe all of 10 or 15 feet away. Our son Gus liked to lie on his back on the couch, with his feet sticking straight up over the couch back. This never failed to delight […]

When Beth and I moved to Chicago in 2003, she was hard at the business of promoting her first book, the memoir “Long Time, No See,” published by the University of Illinois Press. She was on the airwaves with the likes of Rick Kogan and, back then, The Kathy & Judy Show. The Chicago Tribune […]