Jim Stark Blog

Halifax Disaster

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. […]

POW

It was called the SERE Course (Survival, Evasion Resistance and Escape). All Navy, Marine and Air Force combat pilots went through the course during the Vietnam years. The Navy had two school sites, one in California on the west coast, and the other in the wilderness of northern Maine. I received orders to the Maine […]

Call Me Lucky

I don’t remember the impact when my motorcycle collided with the deer at 70 mph but assume the deer must have hit the bike broadside rather than me hitting it, because I wasn’t thrown forward. Instead, the bike was knocked out from under me. My first recall of the accident was sliding, not tumbling, down […]

Best Round Ever

When reflecting on my day’s unbelievable round of golf, Yoweee! I thought scoring par at 82 years of age was beyond reach, and certainly not being under par. I remember the day I had my previous lowest round, a 70 at the Indiana University golf course in 2008 at age 70. That day standing on the […]

Underground Railroad

Sparked by an old obituary saved by my Grandmother Stark about my great, great, great grandfather, Ebenezer Stark, launched me on a research project involving 15-years of hours spent in university library stacks and trips to Cleveland where Eben settled as a pioneer with his family from Connecticut in 1814. That was just a year […]