Former Globetrotter giving back to Staunton home

Contributors

Story by Chris Graham Jerry Venable was a shining star on the basketball court – averaging 15.5 points a game in two years at Kansas State, getting drafted by the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers, playing five years on the most famous hoops team in the world, the Harlem Globetrotters. But the Staunton native concedes that he…

Go ye into the world and smile …

Jim Bishop

Bishop’s Mantle column by Jim Bishop The 2006-07 academic year at Eastern Mennonite University is almost history. To this observer, each seems to go by faster than the previous one. Sunday, the 89th annual commencement at EMU, will be my 36th to cover in my role as public-information officer. I’ve heard many speeches and watched…

Smucker family faces wait and a weight, part two

Jim Bishop

Bishop’s Mantle column by Jim Bishop Dave and Shari Smucker were stymied. Nearly three years had passed, and it didn’t appear hopeful that Aaron, now 3 years old, would ever join their family in Harrisonburg. The couple had made several visits to the youngster’s home in Guatemala, and each time, some technicality prevented them from…

HBO rides to the rescue with ‘Longford’

Carl Larsen

Carly at the Movies column by Carl Larsen A huge nor’easter blew in from the west on Friday, covering our little house on the prairie with booty-high drifts of snow and effectively canceling our weekly pilgrimage to the local cinema palace. Sadly, I turned to the TV set, hoping against hope that there’d be something…

Football, Canadian style

Chris Graham

Story by Chris Graham Jack Bedell is, by day, a poet and college professor in Louisiana. On nights and weekends, though, Bedell is a football fanatic – and his football of choice is Canadian. “Everything that we like in the modern era about the NFL, and then with the rise in popularity of the Arena…

The gethuman.com revolution

Chris Graham

Story by Chris Graham I was on the phone with the phone company – in a manner of speaking. I wasn’t actually talking to a person – and that was the problem. I had two issues that needed addressing: involving service, one, and two, billing. But the options that the company’s byzantine interactive voice response…

Tweaking NCLB: Republican delegation to ask feds to ‘back off’

Chris Graham

The Top Story by Chris Graham When Sen. Emmett Hanger, R-Mount Solon, brought up his concerns with respect to the No Child Left Behind education-accountability initiative during the news conference in 2003 in which he announced his candidacy for re-election to the Virginia General Assembly, it didn’t take long for fellow Republicans to paint a…