4th September 2024

A 100-Year-Old Penobscot Vet Returns Yearly to Normandy to Commemorate D-Day

In 1943, Charles Norman Shay, a 19-year-old Native from Indian Island, Maine, was a combat medic who was part of the first wave of infantrymen that arrived aboard small landing craft on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France. He saved many men that day, pulling them out of the water and nursing their injuries, while dodging heavy enemy fire.

OC Family Magazine • 23rd February 2018

AWARD WINNER! The 'Other' Woman

Houston, we have a problem. Her name is Carolyn. Carolyn is my ex-husband’s girlfriend. They live together with her two pre-teens and most likely, they’ll marry. I’m OK with that part. You know what they say: “One woman’s junk is another woman’s treasure.”

ICT News • 6th May 2016

The Ties That Bind Heroes

Ninety-two-year-old Roy Huff of Green Bay, Wisconsin, is a World War II veteran. I am a 50-something single mom from California who never fought in a war, unless you count a tumultuous 10-year marriage. So, what on earth could we have in common, besides our Oneida heritage? Cue the grandfathers.

Spectrum Magazine • 18th February 2018

Living Biracial

Every kid, every day, whatever it takes. That's Rainey Briggs' motto. Thirty-seven-year-old Briggs ... is the only African American male elementary school principal in the Madison area.

OC Family Magazine • 3rd May 2020

Husbands Come and Go. But Dogs are Forever.

Then I had to face the truth. The REAL reason I didn’t want a cat was Higgins – my beloved Cocker Spaniel who died last year. Higgins had been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. The ex and I got him when we were dating. I was smitten from Day One. (With Higgins, that is.) He crawled out from the bottom of a puppy pile, this tiny fur ball with red, floppy ears, and stood in the middle of a milk bowl for a quick lap with his tiny tongue. SOLD!

5th January 2023

How a Colorado Herbalist is Growing Philanthropy

Emery Golson has loved to grow things ever since she was a young girl helping her mom in the family garden. “I think that experience really connected me with the earth,” she says. Now everything that the 31-year-old philanthropist, herbalist, wife, and mother of two has a hand in seems to blossom.

St. Mary's College • 18th February 2018

'House of Cards' Star Opens Up

You could say that the 38-year-old Mahershala Ali owes his acting career to his grandfather. A gifted athlete from Hayward, Calif., Ali attended Saint Mary’s College on a basketball scholarship.

OC Family Magazine • 18th February 2018

Tommy Lasorda on Life, Love and Baseball

There's an old saying, "When you try to embrace all of mankind, you sometimes forget your wife." Nothing could be further from the truth for Tommy Lasorda, baseball's favorite blue blood who managed the Los Angeles Dodgers for 20 career-defining years.

OC Family Magazine • 21st February 2018

Sun-Kissed: Summer Ends and So Does My Daughter's Childhood

This summer, my daughter was kissed by the sun, by nature herself. Kisses of a different kind await my newly minted teenager in the summers ahead. Probably while I'm at work ... and not watching.

26th July 2023

Meet the Doctor Bringing Peace and Improved Health to the World

Early in his life, Dr. Norbert Goldfield had his sights set on a career in Renaissance art history. Instead, he went into medicine to honor his parents’ wishes. “I come from a generation where I did what my parents told me to do,” he tells First Nations. For more than 30 years, Dr. Goldfield has worked at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, as a board-certified internist, caring for the “poorest of the poor” in his city.

Southland Golf Magazine • 20th February 2018

Confessions of a Virgin Swinger (OK, OK. It's really a golf story!)

Golf, from a distance, has always bored me. I used to drive by courses and see players tooling around in carts and leaning on clubs in their fancy pants and think, "I wonder what REAL athletes are doing today?"

Native Business Magazine • 7th August 2019

A Blackfeet Woman Builds TPMOCS From Heart and Sole

As a hard-working IP lawyer for Google, Maria Running Fisher Jones is creating some big legal shoes to fill someday. But it’s the little shoes that really fuel the Blackfeet Native’s passion. In 2014, Running Fisher Jones invested $25,000 of her own money to launch TPMOCS ― an all-Native business that creates handmade moccasins for infants and toddlers ― for the sole purpose of creating economic opportunity for her impoverished Tribe. Then it hit her: moccasins! “Our Tribe has been creating th

26th July 2023

'Our Foods Are Beautiful!'

Food is life. Food sustains the body and feeds the spirit. With this knowledge as a framework, First Nations community partner YAKANAL, a New Mexico-based international program, is reconnecting Indigenous people to their land and traditional agriculture.

23rd February 2018

AWARD WINNER! Sorry Situation

Last week, my oldest daughter dropped a bombshell. She did not want to spend the night at her dad’s anymore because she doesn’t sleep well there. “It’s dark and cold” and her sister snores. To my great surprise, I was overcome with compassion for my ex.

Wisconsin Center for Education Research • 8th June 2021

Re-Making the World of Education

Pancake-making robots. A mechanical horse. A life-sized mousetrap. No, these aren’t highlights from the latest episode of “Shark Tank.” But they are real-life inventions of a burgeoning community of artists, do-it-yourselfers and entrepreneurs known as “makers”...

3rd May 2020

Grandma's Teapot

A very old silver teapot sits like a trinket on a table in my hallway, surrounded by pictures and other tchotchkes. Like many things that are old, it goes unnoticed. Not one person who has ever walked by that table has ever commented on the tarnished antique. Nor, shame on me, have I ever made them aware of it.

OC Family Magazine • 22nd February 2018

That Lovin' Feeling: Bill Medley and Daughter Share Righteous Love of Music

McKenna Medley comes by her musical talent righteously. She is the daughter of Bill Medley―the sultry, velvety-voiced singer of the legendary duo “The Righteous Brothers,” whose timeless songs, such as “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” and “Unchained Melody,” belong to everyone’s past and continue to be loved by a whole new generation.

5th January 2023

Ke Kula ‘o Pi’ilani: A One-of-a-Kind Hawaiian Immersion School

On the island of Maui, Hawaiʹi, there exists a school like no other: Ke Kula ‘o Pi’ilani, the only private, independent, and nonprofit Hawaiian language and culture immersion school in the world. It is surrounded by the rising, lush-green cliffs of the ‘Īao Valley, and a powerful river flows through the island to the sea. It is the perfect setting for a curriculum focused on the four themes of fresh water, heavens, land, and ocean.

Wisconsin School News • 1st June 2021

We are listening!

A few years back, Jack Jorgensen and his colleagues were driving back to Madison from the Wisconsin Rural Schools Alliance (WiRSA) Conference in Stevens Point when they had an epiphany.

LA Family Magazine • 22nd February 2018

Josie Bissett: From Melrose to Motherhood

The phone rang at precisely 1:30 p.m. Whoever said that actresses are always tardy and temperamental never interviewed Josie Bissett.