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Rocket fever
Seeing Artemis II on the pad gave me Rocket Fever. OK, it doesn’t take much. I’m all about Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and I remember watching Apollo 17, Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz as a kid and, of course, the shuttle missions.
If you want to lead up to Artemis, then a great podcast series is “13 Minutes to the Moon” from the BBC. The first series celebrated the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 in 2019. The second tackled Apollo 13 in 2021. I’m listening to the third series, which came out a few months ago, on the space shuttle.
It’s got some great in-depth interviews with key players like Michael Collins (Apollo 11) and Jim Lovell (Apollo 8 and 13) before they died — both were among the most personable of the astronaut corps — as well as great audio, deep research and, for lack of a better world, dramatic flair. I thought I knew just about everything about the 1960s and 1970s space program, and “13 Minutes” taught me a thing or two.
Start with Apollo 11, go to Apollo 13. You’ll be glad you did.
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Pencil, paper, tea
Writing old-school with notepad and pencil and peppermint brew at a tea bar. Kind of like the feeling.
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A month away from the Moon
We could be less than a month away from NASA’s human mission to the Moon for the first time since December 1972. Some of my earliest memories are watching a late Apollo mission on TV. You better believe I’m going to dig this so much when it actually happens, which I highly doubt will be exactly a month away. These things always slip.
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A new anniversary
Just wrote and submitted my first story in 2026. Just hit me this marks the 38th year as a professional journalist, thanks to getting a full-time job when I was still a sophomore in college in the late ’80s.
That’s thousands of stories and millions of words, in daily newspapers and weekly newspapers and monthly magazines and instant pixels, from Connecticut to northern Maine to New York and California and now in Pittsburgh. And lots of bylines in The Hollywood Reporter and Reuters.
I’ve been blessed to stay a journalist after all these years and after all the changes that have swept the field. The job is still interesting and fun as it was when I started. I had my year in the wilderness where I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life, when I moved here. I’m glad that I found my way back. And I’m grateful our friend — the late, great Robin Glassman — told my Dad about an internship in Waterbury, Connecticut, that she thought I would be suited for.
Turns out, I was.
That internship morphed into a full-time job at the daily newspaper by the end of the summer that allowed me to pay for college without loans, forge a career and, looking back, a calling. I paid my dues. But a lot of credit goes to the women and men who often taught, sometimes corrected and always inspired me while I worked for and with them.
That began with Robin, who knew me from when I was a kid and saw something in me as a 20-year-old that I didn’t. I wanted to be a journalist growing up but at the time of the interview I was in a rebellious phase, not really thinking about journalism nor college but instead hanging out with friends, being a volunteer firefighter in my hometown, training the months to be an EMT, and seeing a career track of becoming a paid firefighter/paramedic like two of my friends.
By the time I left the interview, I was hooked on journalism.
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RIP
What a great actor, especially in “The Wire,” one of the greatest shows in TV history. If you’ve seen it, then you know what Isiah Whitlock Jr. could do with just one four-letter word.
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The way to start a year
Every Jan. 1, the first song I hear every year is Artie Shaw’s “Begin the Beguine.” It’s a habit I picked up long ago, the early ’90s, when I found an Artie Shaw LP in my grandfather’s possessions headed out to the trash 20 years after he died.
Cole Porter. Artie Shaw. What better way to start a year?
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My last book of 2025
Three hours left and I finished my final book of 2025, “Beware the Curves,” a long-forgotten 70-year-old detective novel by Erle Stanley Gardner in his pseudonym A.A. Fair. Ever since I finished three years of Welsh classes in 2023, I have delved back into reading books even more intentionally than before. I need to do my part to preserve the printed word.
Gardner’s best known for Perry Mason, which bores me. But he wrote 30 snappy novels from 1939 to 1970 about two L.A. detectives named Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, a 60-something widow and a 30-something disbarred lawyer. A few weeks ago I read a mention about the Cool and Lam novels and found one reissued at the Carnegie Public Library.
I was hooked. I spent my teens and 20s reading pulp fiction, but it had been decades until the Kindle and I read the Continental Op and reread the rest of Hammett and Chandler and Cain and Thompson. A colleague has been reading and watching classic detective stories, and that inspired me to find some I hadn’t read. Cool and Lam were ahead of their time. Gardner was likely the most productive writer ever but he seemed to have a lot of fun writing them. They are fun to read.
Most are long out of print but I was able to find five through interlibrary loans. I found a few more on Archive.org. They have not disappointed. Nor has Ethan, who has also been reading Cool and Lam.
I expect the ‘26 reading list will include more, though it feels like it will get harder to find the other 24 or so I haven’t read
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A Journey to the Michener Art Museum: Typewriters & More
Gee, Paul, did you really drive to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, to see author James Michener’s typewriter? Well, I did go to Manhattan earlier this year to see Robert Caro’s …
Welcome to the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, where they have Michener’s workspace and notes and other memorabilia. I have read a handful of Michener’s books: “The Bridges at Toko-Ri” (I wrote a book report in middle school), “Tales of the South Pacific” (you know it by “South Pacific” the movie and musical), and “Space,” which I read on a trip back East in high school when I was living in Southern California. Gotta be honest, I like vintage Michener, before he wrote super-long, super-dense books. (I’m Team Tolstoy and Team (Herman) Wouk if I want an epic.)
But just like with Caro, I’m fascinated by Michener’s writing process. He wrote on an Olympia SM-3 Deluxe. Olympia is the Mercedes-Benz of typewriters, favored by Michener (even after computers), Harlan Ellison, Charles Bukowski, Patricia Highsmith, Elmore Leonard, Wallace Stegner and Robert Penn Warren, among others.
Pretty good company, if you ask me.
Neil Simon and I had Olympia SM-9s, which are from the late 1960s (just like me) and it’s probably the best of the bunch. Call me a traditionalist, but my first and favorite typewriters have always been Smith Coronas. The feel is just perfect.
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Silent night, holy night, 2025.
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Apollo 8: The Audacious Moon Mission You Should Know About
Apollo 8 is my favorite space mission — yes, I have favorites because I’m a space nerd — and I started watching this YouTube documentary. Apollo 11 will always be in the history books, but Apollo 8 was awesome and audacious, the first time humans had ever been out of Earth’s gravity and then around the moon.
Apollo 8 is a reminder of the big things we used to do in this country. All the more so since 1968 was such a horrible year overall: The deaths of Bobby Kennedy, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and thousands of American soldiers at the height of the Vietnam War; the unrest in America’s cities; and constant bad headlines all the way around.
This really was a race to the Moon: Apollo 8’s mission changed in secret less than three months before launch because NASA was afraid the Russians were going to beat us to the Moon. The crew believed they had about a one-in-three chance of success. One of the crew members, Bill Anders, said one of the only two times he was ever scared on Apollo 8 was at launch. “Unbelievably violent,” he said. The Saturn V didn’t play, that’s for sure.
Jim Lovell, who died this past August at age 97, was a national treasure, which I think everyone can agree on. He and Bill Anders and Frank Borman not only became the first men around the Moon, they hit every mark. And there’s their reading “Genesis” on Christmas Eve live on TV to every corner of Earth, a mic drop of epic proportions. Plus the classic “earthrise” photo, that photo you’ve seen, that was taken by Bill Anders passing the Moon.
I was too young to see Apollo 8. I’m looking forward to two months from now, when Artemis II and its four astronauts, will lift off from Cape Canaveral and go ’round the Moon for the first time since December 1972.
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About Me
Journalist and writer. Loves writing, storytelling, books, typewriters. Always trying to find my line. Oh, and here’s where I am now.
Nows and Forevers 
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