My days are getting more and more like this everyday!

 

Excerpt from The Loner

 

Excerpt from The Loner 

The Jacksonville East Lawn Cemetery is located four miles north of town. Maggie’s grandparents are buried there. In the near future, Charles and Catherine Haggerty will join Maggie. My parents are there, too. One hundred steps to the northern corner of the cemetery. My grandparents, on the other hand, never ventured far from Benton. Their final resting place is only three miles from the old dealership.

With a slight breeze at my back and the early morning sun reflecting off my face, I looked south across the valley. Back in the early 1950s, you could locate the old farmhouse in a fraction of a second.

Not anymore. New homes now filled the valley, all the way to the forest line. I stood next to Maggie’s gravesite and looked south, following the tree line to the old railroad track — the stretch of track I hopped and skipped my way to town on as a young boy.

Some say you can never go back. I think that might be true, although I do not have a clue who made such a claim.

I remember the hunting and the fishing. The yellow bus I took to school. The old high school basketball gym and those awful, prehistoric, oversized leather balls we used to play with. I remember cruising up and down Main Street, pulling into the drive-up hamburger joint, and ordering just about everything on the menu at one time or another.

Life was so simple then, long before I boarded that runaway train and never returned.

Note: All my books are free to read on my blog. Search for The Loner, The Legend of Bucket Smith, The Dancer, and Billy's Victory in the February/2026 issues, while the chapters of Where Eagles Fly can be found in the June/2025 posts.

Happy reading!

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 Priceless Captures Photography by Amelia

Tucson Old Timers at mid-point of 59th season

 

The 60-and-over Tucson Old Timers (TOTS) are at the mid-point of their 59th season. The amateur baseball organization has been around since 1968, and here in 2026, they are still swinging away as 35 players between the ages of 61 and 88 saw action during the hot month of June.

The club owned a combined .428 batting average in June, collecting 230 hits in 538 official at-bats. Randy Livingston led the club in hits with 20, Doug Harding in runs-scored with 13, and Jon Beady continued his assault on TOTS pitching with a .783 batting average, going 18 for 23, and was the club-leader in RBI with 12.

Five newcomers also entered with a bang in June. Scott Bultman went 10 for 20, Paul Montes went 5 for 13, Don Halla went 4 for 14, Dave DeChamps received his TOTS hat and went 6 for 11, while Michael Price, the newest and youngest member of the club, went 5 for 8. The five rookies combined for 16 RBI.

Three pitchers, Glen Vann, Mike Dawson, and Joe Opocensky, posted 2-1 records for the month. Dawson logged the most innings with 28. Opocensky was the strikeout king with eight.