My friend Taz Katzman asked me a question about the American flag the other day that I could not immediately answer.

Smoke curled in front of the camera lens as Ken Billups Jr. snapped shots of the Blue Springs Chamber of Commerce’s October business card exchange at the Dillingham-Lewis House Museum.

In the years that followed the Louisiana Purchase, the tiny outpost of Independence became the most important town of any consequence on the extreme Western Frontier.

Ken Mattheis had a flat tire. He and his cousin Jim had ridden their bicycles into Leasburg, a rural Southeast Missouri town, and now couldn’t get home – so they called Grandpa.

I grew up watching the cowboys such as Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Hop-a-long Cassidy, and the Cisco Kid on our little RCA, black and white, table model television set.

The thing in 5-year-old Dan Mitchell’s bedroom in southeastern Wisconsin only came at night.

The young man lived in a rental house a few doors from the home where H.W.* grew up in southern Brazil. A few years later, the young man moved out, a husband and wife moved in.

I can easily remember taking my Saturday night bath in a wash tub in front of the kitchen stove when I was a young lad out on the farm. That was well before we had indoor plumbing.

The children looked out of place in the night. Craig Besand walked down the street toward his flat in Norwich, England, when two figures approached him.

We were doing some house cleaning and moving things around in The Examiner press room the other night. Something we have to do occasionally, because if we don’t, things get pretty grimy around the edges.