By PAUL KURTZ OMAHA, Nebraska, June 16, 2019 — My friend of long standing (I think 50-plus years qualifies as “long standing,” right?), Chuck Offenburger, has graciously invited me to report my thoughts as I follow our “VandyBoys” competing for the NCAA Division I baseball championship in the College World Series now underway here. To…
By CARYL P. PRIVETT BIRMINGHAM, Alabama, March 7, 2019 — Reading the new book “Bending Toward Justice,” written by my friend U.S. Senator Doug Jones (D-Alabama), brings back so many memories for me. This book is focused on the last two trials of the perpetrators of the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church here…
Douglas T. Bates III, great friend of Chuck Offenburger since their college years, was asked to preach the sermon on Sunday, Oct. 21, at the United Methodist Church in the middle Tennessee town where he was born, raised and now lives in semi-retirement. He’s not a member of the Methodist Church anymore, or any church,…
We Offenburgers have written many stories about our own cancer journeys. We’ve read and heard the stories of many others in the “Cancer Club,” as we sometimes call it. On Saturday, April 21, 2018, during the Greene County Relay for Life, we heard this tremendous cancer story, told by Lou Blanchfield, of rural Churdan, Iowa.…
By DON NORTH NEW ORLEANS, La., March 6, 2017 — My father, his older sister, and their three younger brothers all left home in Clearwater, Fla., to serve the nation during World War II. In 1943 my father Donald C. North Jr. served on a U.S. Coast Guard cutter in the North Atlantic and in…