By Donn Nemchick The Veterans Breakfast Club is proud to congratulate our youngest VBC member, Henry Schoepke, on his graduation from high school in Wisconsin. Many VBC members have watched Henry grow up over the years through our online programs. He has been a familiar face on Zoom, participated in a VBC Scuttlebutt episode
By Todd DePastino One of the pleasures of running the Veterans Breakfast Club is discovering other people like us who have spent years building communities around veterans and their stories. Earlier this year, VBC friend and Vietnam Donut Dolly Ginny Close reached out to tell us about Vietnam veteran Keith Goudy and the remarkable
By John DeBarber Peter DeBarber recently sent us this brief memoir of his WWII Navy veteran father, John DeBarber. Like many veterans of World War II, John left behind only a modest written account of his service. The few pages capture his journey from a high school student worried about being drafted to a
By Todd DePastino Over the past nine months, many of the stories shared at the Veterans Breakfast Club have been captured by the lens of videographer and photographer Catherine Maher. A generous donor allowed Catherine to join the VBC as our Visual Media Fellow through Pittsburgh Fellows, bringing with her a photographer's eye, a
By Todd DePastino The Veterans Breakfast Club mourns the passing of Diane Carlson Evans, Army nurse, Vietnam veteran, and tireless advocate for women veterans. Diane passed away on May 20, 2026, in Helena, Montana, after a long battle with cancer at the age of 79. It's because of Diane Carlson Evans that we have
By Ken Kaszak I recently took a private tour of the Korean Demilitarized Zone, the DMZ, one of the strangest places on earth. It's tourist destination, a wildlife refuge, a frozen-in-time relic of the Cold War, and, oh, yeah, the place where the next nuclear war could break out. My hotel was in Seoul’s
