July 4, 1976: The Bicentennial of the U.S. My story…

I was living in Philadelphia, the Cradle of Liberty.

I spent the night of the 4th in a Philadelphia jail, after squinting too closely at the badge number of one of Philly’s Finest, who was in the process of dropping a series of f-bombs on a poor foreign tourist couple who barely spoke English and who had the audacity to appear to have been asking the cop for directions. Welcome to Amerika…

The cops, of …

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Nuclear Anniversary

I was running around all day Thursday, and it wasn’t until late in the day that I noticed the date: March 28th. That’s a big day for me. The anniversary of the Three Mile Island fiasco…. er, accident. Thirty-four years this year.

I was there. I lived just a couple of miles away from the plant. As a reporter for Harrisburg Magazine, I covered the entire thing, so I got — literally — the …

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