The Blank Check
“A veteran—whether active duty, retired, or national guard or reserve—is someone who, at one point in their life, wrote a blank check made payable to ‘The United States of America,’ for an amount of “up to and including THEIR LIFE.” – Unknown Though I don’t agree entirely with the statement above, I appreciate its sentiment….Read More
An Idea for Our Immigration Problem
Policies that address multiple problems in a positive way are seldom executed. But there may be a way to approach three serious issues in a way that benefits everyone. It is widely reported than more than 100,000 people crossed our southern border illegally in the month of March 2019. We are not prepared for this…Read More
Our National Anthem
I’m sitting in a crowded gym with parents, grandparents, cheerleaders, students, and others. My interest is a handsome young man with long, curly hair, killer blue eyes that warm his grandmother’s heart, and a pretty good follow-through that reminds me of his father. He’s my grandson. Directly in front of me a large American flag…Read More
They Come in Search of a Better Life
Sometime in middle part of the nineteenth century a skinny young man named McMahan crammed himself into a famine ship in Northern Ireland. In the course of the following days his body was ravaged further by the hunger he fled. His life was threatened by typhus and dysentery. Many fellow travelers died at his side….Read More
My Experience Living and Editing The Little Orangemen
There was a time in Gaston County when young teenage boys from poor mill villages gathered on street corners after school. There we waited for a truck or a van or Coach Bennie Cunningham’s big station wagon to pick us up for football practice. We jostled and joked about our athletic skills, sometimes in the…Read More
Filter of Hope
I am sitting at my desk with a glass of cold water nearby. My doctor tells me to “stay hydrated,” and I’m on it. But did you know that nearly 800 million people have little or no access to clean drinking water? This is especially true in very poor countries like Haiti. My granddaughter, Morgan Bryant, has made many…Read More
New Book: The Little Orangemen
In 1960 I was thirteen years old and living in the small town of Cramerton, North Carolina. That fall I played football for the Cramerton Pop Warner football team. I was bigger than the average boy my age, certainly over five feet, nine inches tall, which made me an awkward-looking giant among my eighth-grade peers….Read More
A Tribute to a WWII Soldier
Today marks the day that President Roosevelt said would live in infamy, the day the Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor: December 7, 1941. As a friend of mine might say, “What were they thinking?” Prior to that surprise attack, many in America were disinterested in engaging in what they believed to be a foreign war….Read More
Grateful for Their Service, Sacrifice
When my father, the Rev. Clarence McMahan, turned eighteen on April 10, 1945, he was immediately drafted into the United States Navy. Following boot camp, he was assigned to the massive naval base at Norfolk, Virginia where an important skill got him a job well above his Seaman First Class pay grade. He could type….Read More
My Books
