Recovering journalist living in California's Sierra Nevada
When my daughter Lauren was born we lived in Philadelphia and nine of our best friends were secretly working for the CIA. It was different then, in the early 60s: things were hopeful, the Vietnam war was a whisper, the government was not the enemy. Working for the government wasn’t so…. suspect, wrong. Government then was … More The CIA and Me
It is my current opinion that in all matters of faith, including religion, politics and medicine, the limit of avowal should be “it works for me.” Beyond that comes pressure, coercion, violence and war, serious over-reactions for systems that after all include large impacts of the psychological. In other words, maybe most, possibly all of … More Jesus Saves, etc.
My daughter Lauren was about six months old in March 1965 and we lived in Philadelphia. There were a lot of awful things happening then — kind of a storm of shit that battered us those years: including civil rights, Vietnam. That winter, on March 25, Viola Liuzzo, a 40-year-old housewife and voter registration worker … More Celebrate Heros
The New York paper (specifically our friend Carol Pogash) today reports that the people who run the Golden Gate Bridge will finally for heaven’s sake, install a suicide barrier. The average last year of about one successful and two foiled jumpers per week is apparently, at last, too many. So good. And about darn time. And here’s … More Jumping Off the Bridge
Today another story out there about who killed President Kennedy. Fifty years ago. Like maybe who or what did it is still alive and ready to confess. Or that finally confirming this or that version changes anything. It’s my sense that all these whodunit pieces in print and TV are created by people who weren’t … More JFK
I got an assignment back then to do a Thanksgiving piece for NPR and soldiered off by phone and car to make a little radio story about turkeys. They raise turkeys in the Central Valley down the hill from our Mariposa house and I figured the audio from a turkey ranch — twenty thousand anxious … More A Thanksgiving Tale
Tom DeVries 