Born in 1952, I have no direct memory of the 1918 “Spanish Flu” pandemic that took the lives of up to 100 million people. My memory of that disease is a borrowed one from my Aunt Molly who told me the story of how Great Aunt Jo, a baby nurse who worked for wealthy...

Growing up in a close-knit community where kinship lines often overlapped; attending a Catholic primary school where Mass was a daily requirement; and serving as an altar boy following my First Communion in 1959, makes it likely that I attended almost every funeral...

In September 1970 when I began college at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, it was as a Fine Arts and Theater major—a choice for which I was underprepared, especially when compared to my classmates, all of whom had graduated from large urban schools where a...