Author's Note: A shorter, editorial version of this article was published in The Gainesville Sun.
Meeting Sanibel Bear
On a muggy, buggy August day about dawn, a Florida black bear stood up on its hind legs on the trail between Trout Creek and Flatwoods Park north of Tampa and sniffed – well, me. The bear next did what is typical – it charged off in a straight line over everything in its path into the woods to get aw...
They were from the “great generation” that lived through the Depression and won World War Two, but if my parents, Franklin and Zella Ohr, had a bucket list, they kept it a guarded secret.
The only hint of something unaccomplished in their lives was when my father spoke of Europe. Being in the Army Post Office, Dad had a g...
One of the most astonishing things happened during on an early morning in November 1966. Each hour 150,000 meteors showered the earth in a meteor storm. As a newly inducted private at Fort Knox, Kentucky, I stood in formation in the dark and witnessed countless plummeting streaks of white raining from the sky, including brief flaming meteorites.
Roughly 40 years later on June 30, 2006, fate granted me a sec...