How a Blizzard Put “Blizzard” In Our Vocabulary

Train Boy, the groundhog sure got it right. He forecast six more weeks of winter. Given the relentless cold and snow we’ve had since then, six more months of winter is more like it.

In some parts of the country (especially New England and Long Island), all that snow was blown in by a blizzard. With folks still shoveling out of drifts taller than the Budweiser Clydesdales, you may be interested to learn how the word blizzard entered America’s vocabulary.

Blame it on, of all things, a blizzard. But it didn’t start that way. Continue reading →

How Great-Grandpa Powell (and some sheep) Helped a City Survive the Great Depression

This is a banner day for my family. My Great-Grandfather Elisha Powell was born exactly 150 years ago today, February 15, 1865.

I never met the gentleman; he left this life 22 years before I entered it. He was born, raised, lived and died in and around St. Joseph, Missouri. He was a farmer who did carpentry work on the side (including repairing boxcars for the Union Pacific Railroad).

But it’s what he did in retirement in the early 1930s that has always intrigued me – and which can teach an important lesson to today’s cash-strapped municipal governments. Continue reading →

The War That’s Always Nearby

So there they were at 96 Wentworth Street in downtown Charleston, South Carolina last Wednesday morning. A construction crew on the College of Charleston campus, busily preparing the site of a new vegan and vegetarian cafeteria (to each their own, I guess) due to open next year. Then something unexpectedly turned up, and everything stopped.

It seems an unexploded Civil War ordnance shell had been peacefully resting on the grounds of The Sylvia Vlosky Yaschik Jewish Studies Center for a century and half without anybody knowing it was there. Continue reading →

Sherman + New Marker = Big Headaches in Atlanta

“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.” – Maj. General William T. Sherman

That scowling, growling face is back in the news again, thanks to a highly unlikely source: a simple historical marker.

Many drivers rush by historical plaques without noticing them. Sure, dads would pull over and check them out during family vacations when you were a child, saying “It’s educational,” stranding bored kids in the broiling sun while he read each and every word. Continue reading →

Worried About Ebola? An Earlier Pandemic Was Scarier

“It is horrible. You can stand to see one, two or twenty men die, but to see these poor devils dropping like flies gets on your nerves. We have been averaging about 100 deaths per day, and it’s still going on.” -An army doctor near Boston in September, 1918

The first documented case of Ebola in the United States is being treated in Texas, and that’s bringing intense media attention to the deadly illness. It has killed 3,300 people so far this year in West Africa, with Sierra Leone alone reporting a new infection every twenty minutes.

That, in turn, is triggering new fears of some deadly pandemic marching unrestrained across the globe.

But here’s the thing: it happened once before … and it happened where you live. Continue reading →

When is a “War” a War?

“Everybody says this here thing we’re involved in ain’t a real war. Congress says it ain’t a war. The President says it ain’t a war. ‘Course the guys over there getting shot at say it’s the best damned imitation they ever saw.” -Will Rogers

America’s men and women in uniform are once again in harm’s way. Last week, the U.S. launched a series of deadly attacks on terrorist targets in Syria. Some in Washington are going out of their way to avoid calling it a war; others are almost enthusiastically using the same word. I’m not getting into that debate. But it does raise an interesting question: at what point does an armed conflict become a war? Continue reading →

Ding Dong! Seizing your :10 second window of opportunity

Let me tell you about a man you know, but whose name you’ve probably never heard. Because we can all learn an important lesson from Meinhardt Rabbe on this, the 75th anniversary of his Big Moment.

We begin with a confession: I’m a Wizard of Oz fan. Have been ever since I first saw it on TV as a child in the 60s. CBS ran the movie every spring at Easter, and I eagerly watched it year after year. (Growing up in Missouri, where tornadoes are as common as spring dandelions in the front yard, the storm scene was all too relevant. But I digress.) Continue reading →

Golf & Presidents: The Toxic Combination

“If I had my way, no man guilty of golf would be eligible to hold any office of trust or profit in these United States.” -H.L. Mencken

Chances are, someone you know will spend time this Labor Day weekend playing golf. Chances are even better that President Obama will, too.

There’s been much talk in recent weeks about the Chief Executive’s passion for the game. He likes playing golf; he really, really, really likes it. (So too, for that matter, does House Speaker John Boehner, who’s also crazy about the game.) Continue reading →

Handling a Hostage Crisis, 1904-style

We were all appalled by last week’s gruesome video showing American hostage James Foley’s barbaric murder by terrorist thugs called ISIS. Or ISIL. Or however they’re identifying themselves these days. With their hands drenched in the blood of so many innocent people, what they are screams louder than who they say they are.

Making matters worse, the thugs are still holding other Americans captive. Like it or not, we have a new hostage crisis on our hands. Which is renewing an old debate: how do you handle such a crisis? Do you respond with military force? Refuse to negotiate with hostage takers? Pay ransom and meet demands? Or sit back, do nothing and hope for the best?

Consider, for a moment, how Washington handled a major international hostage crisis way back in 1904. Continue reading →

How I Escaped a (Near) Riot: a 19 year-old survivor’s tale

This week’s horrific rioting in Ferguson, Missouri brought back memories. Believe it or not, I was swept up in a near-riot myself 34 years ago, and consider myself lucky for living to tell the tale. Here’s how it happened.

It was the summer of 1980, and I was a 19 year-old kid from Joplin, Missouri who had just finished my first year in college. Wide-eyed and eager to taste life, I secured a summer internship on Capitol Hill in Washington. In a bit of good luck, my childhood best buddy Chris also landed a job in DC that summer, so we pooled our meager resources and roomed together. Continue reading →

J. Mark Powell

Author