A cap for chocolate lovers

While visiting family in Cleveland, I had the pleasure of getting dessert at a Malley’s ice cream parlor. Malley’s is an institution, famous in northeastern Ohio for its candies as well as ice cream. The company produces the “Pronk” bar named for oft-injured Indians slugger Travis Hafner. Indians regalia is a common site around greater […]

The Associated Press in the Internet era

Five years ago today, I quit my job at The Associated Press. After 23 years of assignments from California to New York, I turned in the keys to my company car, said farewell to my staff and walked to the train station in Trenton for a long ride home. Over the next few days, nearly […]

Sic transit Pontiac

General Motors is killing off another storied nameplate, Pontiac. What a shame. The American auto industry is in a fine mess, and given GM’s spiraling problems it’s no big surprise that the carmaker is sending Pontiac to join Oldsmobile on the scrap heap. Still, it smarts to read that the division that made the Firebird […]

The Yahoo! cap – Cool, in a dull sort of way

At a convention last week in Las Vegas, the presenters tried getting our attention by tossing ball caps into the audience whenever anyone gave a correct answer. I was, naturally, taken in completely at the opportunity to score another cap. On Day Two, I finally found a question I could answer and beat the others […]

How to survive over the centuries, media division

Over the course of many years as a bureau chief with The Associated Press, I stamped the AP logo on a wide range of coffee mugs, fanny packs, water bottles, golf balls and other trinkets for the staff and newspaper editors. I’m a sucker for advertising specialty products, and I was always on the lookout […]

Caps I have known — and lost

I’ve been a bit lax in posting of late, so to get back on the board I leave a short note in tribute to my old Weyerhauser “tree-killing” cap. I always wore it when I did yard work around our Seattle home, especially when a tree needed killin’. The cap was simple: a green crown […]

A Labor Day salute to the American Rust Belt

As a tribute to working men and women this Labor Day weekend, I offer this tableau featuring a lunch pail and a U.S. Steel cap. The cap was a gift from my daughter, an engineer with the big Pittsburgh-based steelmaker. This post is also a salute to the Rust Belt, that swath of mostly Midwestern […]

The newspaper cap and a changing industry

This post is a tough one. As a journalist, I’ve accumulated several newspaper caps from hundreds of visits to newsrooms and industry conventions. Collectively, they are among my favorites because they represent the vitality and pride of my profession. But the newspaper industry is in decline, severely so in towns deep in the clenches of […]