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Posts published by “W.E. Reinka”

By Any Other Name

The other day at a red light, a Cadillac Escalade SUV sat in front of me, looming over the Toyota Cressida to its right. Suddenly…

Many Celebs Have Led At Least Three Lives

In early 1950s television, Richard Carlson starred in “I Led Three Lives.” Each episode started with a dramatic voiceover: “This is the fantastically true story…

Reducing Our Cancer Risk

What is the greatest risk factor for getting cancer? Tobacco? Environmental pollution? Try age. The longer we live, the more likely our chances that we’ll…

Gimme Shelter

Here we were, on the brink of nuclear destruction, and my parents couldn’t grasp the necessity of a fallout shelter. We were a typical 1950s…

Scrapers

They murdered the jockey within 48 hours. It took two weeks before a hiker found the trainer downstream from a hunting cabin in Idaho with…

Hallowed Grounds: Fenway & Wrigley

During the first half of the twentieth century, Americans could count on death, taxes and the same sixteen teams in Major League Baseball. All sixteen…

Tickled Ticker Symbols

Back in the days of stock ticker machines, stan­dardized company abbreviations or ticker symbols reduced the costs of quotations ticked across tele­graph lines. Although ticker…

Barbie Turns 50!

Guess who just turned fifty?  Barbie Millicent Roberts. Most of us know her simply as “Barbie.”  In 1959 Mattel stunned the Betsy-Wetsy toy world by…

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