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In Virginia City, the morning does not arrive so much as it imposes. It comes creeping over the hills like a bill collector, unwelcome and punctual, and finds a man in no condition to receive it. There are those rare citizens who greet the day with a smile. These people
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When my father, “Bobbie” King, was ten years old, his world opened up. Not all at once, and not in a way he could have explained at the time. It began with a move—away from the brick streets of New Jersey and out to a farm in Wisconsin, where
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Sometime early on in my career as an impressionist of Mark Twain, around 1988, I was invited to speak at the new Lloyd George Federal Building in Las Vegas, and once I passed through security, I saw a spectacular portrait of Judge Lloyd George, whom I supposed was long-gone, but
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Storey County, where the roads are twisted, ambition is straight, and the traffic behaves as if it has read neither the signs nor the prayers, has again decided that salvation lies in adding a little more asphalt and calling it collaboration. At the April 21 meeting of the Board of
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Virginia City has always had a talent for mining things out of the ground, silver in one century, trouble in the next, and occasionally both in the same afternoon. On April 23, just about the time honest citizens were deciding whether to call it an early dinner or a late
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For his fourth birthday in 1930, my dad—Robert “Bobbie” King—received a gift that would stay with him for the rest of his life. It wasn’t much to look at. A record player. A 12-inch record. But in a small New Jersey apartment, it might as well have
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Once upon a time I had the best job in America. At 16 years of age, I was the gas jockey of Orinda Union 76. At closing time, it was my job to swab the bay, which was more fun than you might think. I weighed 140 pounds at the
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A man may learn a great many things in this life, some from books, some from experience, and the rest from watching another fellow make a spectacle of himself. It was my privilege, on one memorable evening, to receive instruction of the latter sort, courtesy of Mr. John Henry Crown
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When my dad was a boy, he brought a horse to school. That sounds like the beginning of a joke—but to him, it was just another Tuesday. He was eight or nine when his mother decided he belonged in Catholic school. My grandmother Julia was a force of nature;
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In the sleepy stretches of Lockwood in Storey County, where the tumbleweeds outnumbered people, and common sense is considered a luxury, two modern-day Prospero apprentices decided to conduct chemical experiments in a motorcar. Joseph Caldwell, a man from Reno with all the cunning of a wet sponge, and Jordan Hall,
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With thanks to the Banned Book Club at St. Patrick’s, I was invited to speak in Huckleberry’s behalf, so I thought I’d like to pass my thoughts along to you, the gentle reader, while they’re fresh on my mind… Olivia Clemens wanted her husband to become
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Some cities rise by industry, some fall by misfortune, and then there is San Francisco, which appears to be doing both at once out of sheer originality. The latest from NASA, which watches us from above like a patient landlord, is that San Francisco is sinking faster than it previously