James Spangler

Memorial Day is a time when we think about people who have fought and died in defense of their country.  This year, Lake Effect essayist Jim Spangler is thinking about the life of a former soldier he learned about years ago.

Lake Effect essayist Jim Spangler on how he came to understand the value of a dollar:

"They say we learn more from our mistakes than our successes. And if the failure is really painful, the lesson is never forgotten. Maybe that’s why I can still recall the pain from an incident in 1950 when I was all of about eight years old.

Lake Effect essayist Jim Spangler has been thinking about education - specifically whether colleges and universities are places that teach critical thinking skills: 

“Don’t bring up politics when you are at our house for Christmas,” my daughter warned me. And I didn’t, and neither did anyone else, most likely having been also warned. That way there was no chance of a Christmas-ruining argument over, what else, but the current occupant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Lake Effect essayist Jim Spangler wishes politicians would read more Shakespeare, especially the line in Richard III that goes, “When words are scarce, they are seldom wasted.”

Spangler himself tries to take that lesson to heart in covering three separate topics in the span of one essay, starting with the demise of the family reunion:

Do you remember your first car?  Of course you do.  It’s been a while since Lake Effect essayist Jim Spangler bought his first car, but it’s an event - and a car that still occupies an important place in his memory:

With the car show season in full swing, what could possibly upstage this admitted old car fan from attending the best car show in Milwaukee you ask? Tickets to the same Sunday’s matinee performance of Hamilton in Chicago, my wife answered.

So-called “White Nationalists” demonstrating in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend told reporters they felt emboldened by the election of Donald Trump last fall, and his calls to “take America back.”

Lake Effect essayist Jim Spangler has been thinking about the America to which some would like to return:

There is much talk these days about what old timers call the “good old days.” Now all that has been coopted by some fellow in Washington D.C. as “Make America Great Again.”

There are some people who are always on the move - never staying in one place or one city for very long.  But for many others, a single place - often a single house - holds tremendous significance:

In Ecclesiastes 3 we are told there is a time for everything; a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to tear down and a time to build; a time to speak and a time to be silent, and among others, a time to be born and a time to die. What the good book didn’t mention is a time to move, which has been happening in our neighborhood lately with some frequency.

In his recent young adult book, "Just Fly Away," (and in our interview about it) Andrew McCarthy wrote about that pivotal age, when you just want to know how your life will turn out.  Lake Effect essayist Jim Spangler thinks it’s important to consider history through the eyes of someone who can appreciate the passage of time:

Lake Effect essayist Jim Spangler has been thinking about how we understand each other - or fail to. We’ll let him explain...

It is a natural tendency in this complicated world to simplify, and one way is to divide everything into two separate camps, winners and losers, players and spectators, southerners and northerners and on and on. But I’m not touching Republicans and Democrats. If what passes for political discourse continues, I’m investing my money in the dueling pistol business.

Lake Effect essayist Jim Spangler has lived in Wisconsin for a while now. But while he calls the state home, he does not think of Brookfield as his hometown.

Nearly 80 years ago, John Steinbeck wrote “The Grapes of Wrath” about the uprooting of farmers from the dustbowl to the promised land of California. Time moves on, things change. The Model A Ford has been replaced by the airplane and the moving van, and migration is now corporate relocation. But the basics are still the same, to follow the economic crops across the country in search of a better life.

Regardless of your political view on income disparity in this country, the truth remains that there are haves and have-nots in our society.  Lake Effect essayist Jim Spangler says the have-nots have occupied a little more of his thinking recently:

Winston Churchill once remarked that the game of golf was, in his words, “a good walk ruined.”

Have you sent out your holiday cards yet? Many of us have or will send out cards that comprise a photo collage from the past year. There are dozens of websites that let you put them together with fairly little effort. That’s meant that fewer of us are sending the long update letter along with our holiday cards. But, as essayist Jim Spangler points out, they haven’t gone away entirely.

Are you going home for Christmas this year?  Or are you at home, looking forward to the day that someone else will be coming home for Christmas?  Lake Effect essayist Jim Spangler believes there’s more to coming home for Christmas than simply bridging some distance:

Essayist Jim Spangler spent much of his working life at and around newspapers, during which he met people from many walks of life. But it was as a small town Iowa teenager, working a paper route, that he says he learned some of his first lessons about profit, people, and prejudice:

When I hung up my newspaper bag for the last time 58-years-ago, the Clinton (IA) Herald, my home town daily, was delivered and paid for by every single one of the 68 families on my route. Everyone except Old Ed (black '49 Chrysler). 

For the majority of Major League Baseball teams (including the Brewers), the season comes to an end this weekend. Players will go home to their families, and sports fans will turn their full attention to the playoffs, or to football. Many people will miss watching the games on television, but Lake Effect essayist Jim Spangler is not among them. 

“Why don’t you come up stairs and watch the baseball game on TV?” my wife asked during a recent Milwaukee Brewers broadcast.