Columns

Dateline Panama City Beach.  By the time you read your paper I will be back from spending a month down here at my favorite beach.  We lived near here when I was ages ten through seventeen and I have many great memories of family weekends spent looking for shells and riding the waves.

They may only number in the tens of thousands out of a state of more than 4.3 million people, but it isn’t hard to imagine how much more difficult life would be without our first responders.

While their work is mainly a function of local government, the state plays a role as well in helping law enforcement, firefighters and other emergency workers do their job.

I heard Tom Brokaw speaking on television the other day and he talked of knowing about certain events as a child because his family subscribed to Life Magazine. 

It made me think of all the magazines that have been a part of my life.

My family was not, in retrospect, very sophisticated.  We lived in a rural area; we went to ‘the city’ for the Ice Capades, the zoo, school clothes, and to see Santa on the sixth floor of Shillitos. But we were readers of two daily newspapers most of the time and some popular magazines of the day.

“Buy land,” Mark Twain once said.  “They’re not making any more of it.”

That investment advice has been taken to heart by the Kentucky State Nature Preserves Commission, which formally celebrated 35 years of service last week.

Since it began, the commission has permanently set aside more than 25,000 irreplaceable acres for future generations.  Their 60 nature preserves range from the Blanton Forest near Virginia to Three Ponds along the Mississippi River.