Fort Sumter, a Union garrison in Charleston Harbor was fired upon by Confederate forces in 1861, announcing the opening salvo of the Civil War. Union forces retaliated by forming a blockade of ships in the harbor and bombarding Charleston with constant artillery fire. The southern forces in Charleston, starving and woefully short of supplies because […]

The following is the stirring email I received from my eldest son, Eric Stark: Dear friends, I followed up on an invitation by International Violin Competition President Glen Kwok for live musicians from Butler University to consider traveling to Camp Atterbury (near Columbus, IN) to perform a bit of music for the approximately 6,000 Afghans […]

My years in the Navy were spent during the Cold War era of the 1960s during which the USSR and USA had nervous fingers on the trigger of World War III. The Soviets had electronic intelligence-collecting ships, called ELINT Trawlers thinly disguised as fishing boats, stationed offshore at every Navy base from which I flew. […]

This past weekend my wife and I attended a memorial service for a dear friend. The reception afterwards found us sharing a table with our neighbors, the Cramptons, Rev. Philip Amerson and his wife Elaine–one of our favorite couples—and Dr. Charles Webb, the legendary Dean of Indiana University’s highly ranked School of Music. Webb’s conducting, […]

One of the days my wife and I spent motorcycling around Halifax, Nova Scotia, included a visit to the Halifax Museum. Halifax has connections to two devastating disasters, one is well known, but the other of even greater magnitude is not widely recognized. The one more familiar was the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. […]