I’m always confused by people banning books while protesting their freedom of speech on social media. I hear the excuse that it’s about protecting children. (I wholeheartedly agree children need to be protected, so don’t come at me.) Restricting a book, where the original words and ...

It is officially fall. We’ve passed the equinox. The trees are ablaze in red and gold. Frost has come. The harvest season is nearing its end. Before the age of cross-continental transport, our grandparents preserved the harvest for the winter. They used cold storage root cellars for ...

There are more than 300,000 traffic crashes in NYS each year. If you are a responsible driver and obey the traffic laws, you may avoid a crash. Yet, even the most careful drivers are sometimes involved in crashes caused by events that are not planned or by errors of other drivers. If you are ...

The late John Duquette, an honest-to-god Saranac Lake historian — and I might add, Ruth Fortune’s dad — supplied all the historical material for Saranac Lake’s 1992 Centennial book. In my column here 15 years ago, I quoted from a piece John had written many years before about the ...

By the time I was a pre-teen, it seemed all my peers were an accomplished lot. Some played musical instruments like they were ready to either turn pro or join the London Philharmonic. Others were skilled woodworkers, mechanics, cooks and seamstresses. There were singers, athletes, and ...