Thursday, 25 August 2022

Gloy Modesta Born in 1900 was my paternal grandmother, Gloy Modesta. Of course, she always will be ‘grandma’ to me. My remembrances of her are not really the focus of this blog, but rather how I got to know her early life in a photo album that she put together and added decorations, comments, and

Wednesday, 17 August 2022

Banana Splits and Civil Rights at Woolworths A few blogs ago, I blogged* about being a paper boy and going downtown Missoula to pay for the papers. What I didn’t mention was that this trek also usually included a stop at the F. W. Woolworth store. Many people will remember these kinds of stores that

Monday, 15 August 2022

A three-fold celebration…of sorts Today was a big day in Panama City, if not all of Panama for one of three reasons. Today is the Feast of the Assumption of Mary (I’ll explain later), the 503rd anniversary of the founding of the City of Panama City (as it is known today) and the 108th anniversary

Wednesday, 10 August 2022

Paperboys Once upon a time, city newspaper deliverers were called paperboys. It was a common job for junior high and high school kids who were looking for their own spending money. My brother and I had our own route that extended eight blocks up one street and another eight down on a parallel street. We

Tuesday, 9 August 2022

My image of a tree My image of a tree is probably like that of yours. Trees are tall and green. They have roots and trunks and leaves or needles. Leaves vary in size and shape and most of the time in the Autumn, leaves turn red, yellow, and orange and then fall to the

Monday, 8 August 2022

It’s time for a trim When I was a young boy, something that always fascinated me was returning home from a vacation and seeing how high the grass had grown. The photo above might be misleading because this was not my childhood home or lawn. Instead, our family lawn was a typical urban lawn comprised

Friday, 5 August 2022

Hats off to Panama City! Panama City celebrates its 503rd foundation anniversary this month. Festivities will spread out over several days, but the official anniversary day is the 15th of August. The year, of course, was 1519. If you were to be driven from the Tocumen Airport on the southside freeway to the city, you

The Pintao Hat of Panama – The Story of a Dying Cultural Heritage

Originally posted on Heritagepedia:
You’ve undoubtedly seen the Panama hat even if you don’t know what it is. They’re white hats that look like the Mexican fedora worn by gangsters, and are most commonly seen on cigar smoking, pencil-mustachioed men dressed in white silk suits with gold?pocket chains and satin handkerchiefs.? You get the picture.…

Thursday, 4 August 2022

“The greatest necessity for the age.” Believe it or not, I started to think about toilet paper, hygienic paper, or bathroom/toilet tissue in a bathroom. Makes sense, doesn’t it? I suspect that the only other places where one thinks about toilet paper are in a grocery store aisle or on a shopping list where it

Wednesday, 3 August 2022

Left: Wallace ‘Wally’ Cleaver – Anthony ‘Tony’ Dow; Top right: Mark Twain – Samuel Clements; Bottom right: Lazarus Dead and then dead again News about someone’s death, unbelievably, can be pretty mysterious. ‘Breaking’ news indicated that Tony died in Los Angeles, and the story was pulled until Tony actually and truly passed away (RIP). Lazarus,