Nostalgia

Four months after Dad’s funeral, I found myself climbing the ladder to our barn loft. I was given the task of handling the details of his estate. Household belongings, packed away after my mother’s passing, occupied the loft. Rummaging through the remnants of a lifetime often proves tedious,…

The former Shawnee Lancaster Resort site, located between Oregon Pike and Route 222 in Manheim Township, is in the news once again, with a plan to develop a portion of the tract into 256 residential units and a 145-room hotel.

In early April, I rode with two friends to Arkansas, where we saw the total solar eclipse. I have seen seven eclipses, and this one was as magnificent and awesome as any of them — Wyoming, South Africa, Bolivia, Baja in Mexico, Indonesia.

In the 1950s, the Fulton Theatre was on its last legs. Some people were ready to tear it down. I went there as a boy to see old B-movie reissues.

When my sister, Sandy, and I were little girls in the mid-1950s, our mother would make us dresses. When she made us a dress, sometimes she made our baby dolls a dress to match ours.

I taught grades one through four, for three school years, in a one-room school from September of 1961 to June of 1964. It was called Pleasant Valley, and it was a public school in the Conestoga Valley School District. Today, it is a private school in farmland along Pleasant Valley Road, sout…

 Devastation hit me when I read about the fire that leveled The Mansion on Main Organic Salon & Spa on West Main Street in Leola late last year. But even more devastating was the fact it was my childhood home, built by my grandmother 100 years ago: A unique architectural structure capped…

Place Marie - a small shopping center tucked away between Queen, Orange and Market streets in downtown Lancaster - has been in the news recently.

Following a series of health reversals, it was decided that my mother would need skilled nursing care. Her departure from the home she and my father shared for more than half a century was a rapid one, based on her medical needs. With no siblings, I began the monumental task of sorting throu…

It’s the middle of a June day in 1962 and I am sitting in a communal bathroom with wet hair and clothed in only a bathrobe. My room key has slipped between two shower stalls, and I cannot get back into my employee dorm room at Grossinger’s Resort in the Catskill Mountains of New York. Peekin…

I had just graduated from college with no plans for the future. I had played basketball in college and my dream was to go to another school, start as a freshman and play four more years of basketball. That was not an option, so, even though I had a degree in special education, I took a job w…

I had the best grandpap ever. William Cochran was a foreman at Armstrong Cork Co. off of Liberty Street in Lancaster.