Thomas Jefferson was a brilliant man who, if he had felt free to pursue any profession he wanted, might have become the world’s leading mathematician. But he got one thing badly wrong. Toward the end of his life, he swore he remembered the Founding Fathers gathering on July 4, 1776 in Independence
by Todd DePastino Yesterday, I spent the best afternoon imaginable at The Residence in Bethel Park retirement community, where I met a wonderful 90-year-old man named Chuck Nice. I told him how apt his last name was. He said to me, “I don’t even like to argue with people, and yet
The world’s most useful tool was the brainchild of a Blue Star mother and WWII war plant worker from Illinois named Vesta Stoudt. Vesta had two sons in the Navy, and she got a job packing rifle grenades in cardboard boxes sealed with wax for waterproofing. She saw immediately how difficult the
Todd DePastino Franz-Ferdinand's Gräf & Stift at the Imperial War Museum, Vienna On June 28, 1914, a driver made a wrong turn in Sarajevo, and the world stumbled across an unseen geopolitical tripwire. A Gräf & Stift open-topped touring car stopped outside Schiller’s Delicatessen on Franz Josef Street. Inside
After the landing at Inchon, South Korea, on September 15, 1950, a patrol of ten SeaBees volunteered to go behind enemy lines and commandeer several locomotives located at the Kirin brewery. The Seabees captured eight locomotives and began racing back to American lines . . . but not before they threw aboard
Several years ago, WWII veteran George Herwig told a story at the Veterans Breakfast Club about turning out for physical training in 1943 at the Coast Guard Training Station in Brooklyn. Stepping forward to lead the men was a burly “old guy,” a lieutenant, by the name of William Harrison "Jack" Dempsey,
