Columns

I Left With A Smile

Well it’s the weekend after Thanksgiving, are the leftovers gone? Did you partake in Black Friday deals on and offline? Is your Christmas tree now up and glowing in your family room? The days leading up to Thanksgiving seemed to go at warp speed. I swore I was not going to have to go to the grocery store on the day before the holiday. However, I wanted the freshest dinner rolls for the meal so I found myself jockeying for a parking space at Riesbeck’s in Elm Grove on Wednesday morning. The parking lot was full of cars bearing license plates from near and far. I braced for impact ...

I Can See Clearly Now

I will be the first to admit that I have been stuck in the past. It’s what I know better than what lies ahead. I’ve been accused of a lack of forward thinking because I tend to reminisce a bit too much in this space. Many of you, my readers, often let me know that you, too, enjoy looking back at the way things used to be. Whether it was the stores we could shop in along Main and Market streets or the crowded sidewalks before the advent of shopping malls. I get it. Things were so different then, but so was the world we knew. As things changed, some of us got angry or sad or felt ...

Long Live The Letter Carriers

Sometimes I ran. Other times, I skipped. More often than not, I had to walk slowly as I pushed a younger sibling in a stroller. Where was I headed you ask? It was just a short walk down the block to complete an errand for our mom. She was a big believer in the written word and was diligent about writing letters to family and friends. Mom also taught us the importance of taking time to write letters or thank-you notes. So my short walk was to the neighborhood mailbox. Remember those? The one on our tree-lined street was at the corner of Hamilton and Homestead avenues, in front of the ...

You Can Handle This

There was a period of my newspaper career that I covered Wheeling city government. Every morning, I would leave the news building, step out into the alley known as 15th Street Place, and walk east toward the City-County Building on Chapline Street. Once I reached the building, I would begin making my way through the various offices to search out the day’s news stories. During the years of this routine, I saw a serious number of elected council members come and go. I called more than a half dozen officials by their title as mayor. I knocked on the office doors of at least four ...

Scared Beyond Words

Horrific. Mind-Numbing. Bloody. With Halloween right around the corner, you might think I am describing the latest scary costumes or those over-sized, life-like monsters gracing the front yards of homes near and wide. How I wish that were the case. But it’s not. Last Saturday morning, as we were driving north toward Cranberry, Pa., we had the most awful misfortune of seeing the results of a devastating, tragic vehicle crash. We were traveling in the lane parallel to the parkway where the road splits toward Pittsburgh or Erie, when we noticed traffic had slammed to a halt on that ...

Standing Tall In The Face Of Hate

He’s a big man with an even broader smile. His voice, while strong, often carries quiet but resounding messages. Rabbi Joshua Lief leads the congregation at Temple Shalom in Wheeling. This small, tight-knit Jewish community has been a part of the Northern Panhandle for 175 years. Growing up in Wheeling, Lief returned years later with his family to re-invigorate the Jewish faithful with some wonderful programs that invite people of all faiths or no faith to share with his congregation. To date, it’s been a most welcoming part of the greater Wheeling community. Locally, Christians ...