All articles filed in General

It’s tough being a record album collector. Eventually the 20 LP’s you have become 200 LP’s, and you can’t part with any of them. Eventually those 200 LP’s blossom – or multiply – into thousands of pressings. Your wooden shelves strain from the weight of all that vinyl. You start purchasing Discwashers and polypropylene sleeves…

and had a wonderful time.  Most times, the interaction between bloggers and readers is limited to a nickname commenting on the text written from someone with a photo headshot (or in my case, a photo with a camera in it). So it’s great to meet my fellow bloggers and blog readers at Times Union mixers…

Let’s put it this way.  Ed Dague is one of the most dedicated, principled reporters the Capital District has ever had.  For years as Ernie Tetreault’s assistant anchor on WRGB’s 6pm newscast in the 1970’s, to his long tenure as the lead anchor on WNYT, Dague has been a strong and reliable institution when it…

It began as a five-day-long cartoon miniseries on Fox.  One year later, it underwent a slight name change, and  became a 13-episode Saturday morning TV show on ABC.  One year after that, a few more episodes were manufactured for the syndication market.  After that, the show disappeared into the mists of cable television, airing on…

It’s tough enough for families around this time of year.  Kids need new school supplies.  They need new schoolbooks.  And most importantly, they need new school clothes. Now, for some schools in the Capital Region, the “school clothes” does not mean you have to outfit the kid in the latest Ed Hardy or North Face…

The C.W. McCall “Convoy” article for RoadKing was a major success. The publication received dozens of letters from truck drivers and motorists, all of whom remembered the song and were thankful that someone had written an article on the long-forgotten piece of trucking history. So it’s March 2004, and I’m currently working on maybe six…

The song itself was a mixture of “talking blues” and trucker slang.  In the mid-1970’s, truck drivers stayed in communication with each other while on the road, by using personal communication devices called citizen’s band radios.  A truck driver at mile marker 200 could alert a fellow teamster at mile marker 190 that a state…

In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, there was an independent basketball team from Utica, N.Y. that was sponsored by Champlin Tire Wreckers.  The Utica Wreckers were one of the top independent squads in New York, playing against teams like the Schenectady Schaefer Brewers.  Among the recognizable names that suited up for the Wreckers was…