Thursday, June 4, 2015

Download MP3 (right click to save)

Velcro Man! That's what my wife and I nicknamed one of our good friends. And Jack, if you happen to be listening, I'm sorry you have to hear about this through the radio. Jack is Velcro Man! Everywhere we look in his house, his vehicle, his studio, we find a problem solved by Velcro; that special fabric tape that has hundreds of little hooks on one side and loops on the other side. Man, when you can connect them, they stick together!

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Download MP3 (right click to save)

My thumb is not and probably never will be green, but I think my friend Mel was born with a green thumb. He has one of the most beautiful fruit and vegetable gardens I think I've ever seen. And more than once I've literally asked him to take me on a tour of his garden. Now, city boy always learns a lot in that garden. On the last time, I think, we toured (which was a while back) he showed me a garden spider at work, for example. Actually, it wasn't at work, it was at dinner. It was just finishing filet of grasshopper; the latest insect to be caught in his web.

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Download MP3 (right click to save)

My wife and I knew we were going to be spending our lives together a long time before we announced it to the rest of the world. But our schooling demanded that we have a long courtship and a long engagement, which honestly we're grateful for unto this day. Except for the two summers we had to be apart a lot. They were tough! You know what helped though? The letters.

Thursday, May 28, 2015

Download MP3 (right click to save)

Back in Kindergarten we all had to play a little instrument in this band our teacher put together. I got to feeling the kids with the musical ability got nice things to play. Looking back, I realize that those of us who were musically incompetent were assigned to "play the sticks." I got two drum sticks. All we had to do was hit the floor with them. See? Yeah, it didn't take a whole lot of ability.

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Download MP3 (right click to save)

Sometimes I think my schedule looks like an episode of Mission Impossible. Some years ago, I was speaking for the Billy Graham Crusade Committee for two pre-crusade leadership rallies. They were in two completely different locations on the same Saturday morning. One was in the heart of Philadelphia and one was in an outlying suburb. They were scheduled back-to-back, and we had to make a very flying trip when I finished speaking in the city to get to the suburbs.

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Download MP3 (right click to save)

My wife and I had a very long honeymoon; well, let's just say for a lot of years now. Our honeymoon was in its early years when we got some very scary news. The doctor said that my wife might have a very serious disease. She had a routine physical for her job, and the chest x-rays revealed some suspicious dark spots on her lung. We got that report on a Friday, and we had to wait until Monday to get the final results. It might have been one of the longest weekends of our lives!

Monday, May 25, 2015

Download MP3 (right click to save)

When your life moves as fast as mine does, your food has to often move pretty fast too. As in those drive-thru orders at fast food restaurants. Now, I know the menu pretty well, and this particular day my order was pretty predictable, including my drink, which was usually an iced tea.

Friday, May 22, 2015

Download MP3 (right click to save)

Patty's true love, Tom, was coming to visit in a few days. She was excited, but not excited enough to clean her room of course. See, Tom lives in Ohio. Patty's a friend of ours who lived down the street from us in New Jersey. All week long Mom had gotten on to Patty for not cleaning her room, at least so she could find the floor.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

Download MP3 (right click to save)

I was going through the all too frequent ritual of standing by an airport luggage carousel waiting for Big Bertha. (No, that's not someone I was traveling with. That's what I've named my suitcase because we've spent so much time together.) And suddenly the monotony was broken for all of us by this really cute scene. Here comes one of those luggage carts that look sort of like a big grocery cart without the big basket. Pushing it was this very little boy, barely able to walk and about one-fourth the size of the cart.

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Download MP3 (right click to save)

Back in the good old days my wife and I would go camping with our kids when they were young. We did some camping after they were grown up too. But it was actually easier without the kids. You know the routine. We'd get the three little Hutchcrafts ready for bed, make sure no bears were going to eat them during the night, and then we would snap all the snaps and tuck them into their sleeping bags, tied up all the flaps and zipped all the zippers on the tent door. Finally, able to settle into our sleeping bags, having found the most comfortable piece of ground underneath that we could.

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Download MP3 (right click to save)

The longer I drive on given days the heavier my eyelids get. Like 99% of the men in the world, I like to do the driving. And once in a while I drive past my primetime alertness shall we say. That's when my wife starts to think of things to keep me awake longer, like turning on the radio.

Monday, May 18, 2015

Download MP3 (right click to save)

Some 16 million people saw Christopher Jones' skydive on YouTube. He bails out of the plane. Everything's going great...until the seizure. After four years of being seizure-free, he was cleared to jump.

Friday, May 15, 2015

Download MP3 (right click to save)

I know about tornadoes. We had one go through our backyard when I was a kid. And then we moved to the East Coast, so I also got the opportunity to get acquainted with hurricanes. But there's one natural disaster I don't know too much about, and that's just fine - earthquakes! What I do know, I've learned from people who have been through them. Like Mike, for example, the man in the seat next to me on a long airplane flight. He had lived in Northridge, California until recently. You might remember that was the epicenter of a major earthquake in 1994.

Thursday, May 14, 2015

Download MP3 (right click to save)

When our oldest son was little he started a hobby that really helped him pay his way through college eventually - collecting baseball cards. He was doing pretty well collecting, when he asked me to start taking him to these shows on the baseball circuit. One summer I was scheduled to speak at Ocean City, New Jersey, and he wanted to go down a day early so we could catch the last day of this huge card show. He walked into a large hall with all the money the little guy could have saved from recent chores and allowances.

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Download MP3 (right click to save)

At one time our offices were on the third floor of an old factory building. There were a lot of stairs, and they had a pretty steep pitch. One of our team members dropped by one day with her beautiful four-month-old daughter, Katie. Mom was tired. And needless to say, the child wasn't able to climb up the stairs to the third floor on her own. Sometimes adults could barely make it. Mom needed to carry Katie in her arms the whole way. The sight of her carrying her daughter? I hate to say it was almost amusing. Mom was out of breath as she tried to recover. But not Katie! No, she was all cute and wide-eyed. She's not sweating; she's not panting. No, she's totally relaxed, totally cool. Of course she didn't have to do any of the work.

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Download MP3 (right click to save)

When I was a kid, someone came up with a new idea for entertainment. No, not hieroglyphics! It's called 3-D movies. They've actually made a comeback in recent years and they might even be more popular than they were back then. Back then, we put on these cardboard sunglasses. Boy, what a fashion statement! Now they are at least plastic. And just like then, things begin walking toward the screen, and then they walk right out of the screen and they walk practically into your face. Of course, when you take those glasses off, it's just a flat old screen again. But when you have those glasses on, you see things you otherwise would never have seen.

Monday, May 11, 2015

Download MP3 (right click to save)

One of the more lovable guys on TV, I think, is the weatherman named Al Roker. You've seen him on The Today Show or The Weather Channel maybe in the morning, or hosting, or covering special events, or he's even got a book about his battle with losing weight.

Thursday, May 7, 2015

Download MP3 (right click to save)

My daughter and I had not been back to that camp in the Tetons since she was a little girl, like five years old. We stayed there as a family way back then, because our good friends from college ran the camp. There she struck up a friendship with their five-year-old who's named Holly. Well, the camp has grown a lot over the years, and so have our daughters who are speeding through their lives.

Monday, May 4, 2015

Download MP3 (right click to save)

One day my oldest son and I wandered into this huge memorabilia store. And in the cases were all kinds of artifacts of his childhood, and even mine. Like there was a Brachiosaurus... No, but I was looking at baseball cards that I once owned, thanks to the pop bottle deposits I collected many years ago. Notice I said I once owned. When we were moving, my Mother threw them away. And so I found myself looking at what might have been. Those same cards are now worth hundreds of dollars.

Friday, May 1, 2015

Download MP3 (right click to save)

Stranded on the highest mountain on earth. Or buried beneath the rubble of a shattered hotel.

After the earthquake that rocked that mountain kingdom of Nepal, thousands of people lost their lives. Many more found their world, their homes, actually their lives wiped away.