When Mary was 10 years old, she auditioned for a professional production of South Pacific. One other youngster auditioning that afternoon was called to the stage and sang loudly; her voice reaching the back row of seats where we sat. Then Mary was called. With shoulders squared, her shiny black hair streaming down her back, […]
Yosh Golden
Posted inOpinion
No more internment camps
Hilda, Ingrid, Helen and her younger brother, Siegfried, were new students. The three girls were placed in my eighth-grade class at St. Alphonsus, a large Catholic school in a blue-collar neighborhood in Chicago which welcomed refugee families in the late 1950s. The nuns went about their duties as teachers and integrated the students into the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Storyteller with Springfield ties
Two Sons of China, by Andrew Lam, paperback, 466 pages, Bondfire Books, published December 2013. Available through Amazon, iTunes, and via www.TwoSonsofChina.com. Andrew Lam, M.D., who graduated from Springfield High School in 1994, skillfully crafts his historical novel, Two Sons of China, taking the reader to the 1940s and a China which is suffering from […]
Posted inNews
Fifty years later, celebrating diplomacy on an Iowa farm
The menu served to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and U.S. farmer-business man Roswell Garst in 1959 at Hotel Fort Des Moines was served again at the hotel last Friday, Aug. 28: split pea soup, celery hearts, ripe and green olives, roast prime rib of Iowa corn-fed beef, baked russet potato with sour cream, buttered green […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The play’s the thing
“My radiation oncologist cruelly resisted my pleas. I begged him to irradiate the unaffected breast so it would be big and perky and glow in the dark like the one they zapped.” — “Degrees of Lucky,” Judith Schlessinger Dyer Judy Dyer, who died of breast cancer earlier this month, left behind a one-act drama about […]
Posted inNews
Native ways
When Tom Bedonie attended reservation boarding school, celebrating his Navajo heritage was something to be avoided. If he used his native language, Bedonie says, “I had to eat soap.” Instead of causing him to forget his Navajo ways, the punishment made Bedonie cling tightly to them. That is the reason this fiftysomething Navajo journeys from […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Loneliness
The June day is perfect for a wedding — bright sunshine, water merrily cascading from the large metal statutes in the fountain, a slight breeze playing with the bride’s dark hair and long, slim slip of a wedding gown. The two bridesmaids, clad in short, fashionably black satin dresses, smile and tease their soon-to-be-married friend. […]
Posted inOpinion
A mother’s love
My father, Yoshizo, was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and was 26 at the time of my birth. My mother, Sachie, was born in Portland, Ore., and was 23 when she stepped out of Apt. 1 of Building 2 in Block 20, crossed the sandy walkway, hanging onto my father’s arm on her way […]
Posted inNews
Life interrupted
I travel 500 miles from Springfield to Little Rock, Ark., to tack a note on the conference message board: “I would like to talk with anyone from Rohwer who knew Shizu Yoshimura, Ayako Arishita, or the Nagatanis. Please contact Yosh Golden . . . .” Some 600 people are expected, but more than 1,300 register […]
