Travel Tales

Toulmin’s Travel Theorem I want to travel again. I’ve been sitting on my couch for 18 months and have watched every decent and half-decent Netflix and Amazon show – twice! Specifically, I want to travel to England to search for the missing Banqueting Hall of Queen Elizabeth I – a subject for another column. Given […]

This sweet, sad, serious song is adapted from the Skye Boat Song, about Bonnie Prince Charlie, written in 1884 by Sir Harold Boulton, and sung to the same tune.  My version below also draws on the beautiful version written by Bear McCreary and sung by Raya Yarbrough for the current TV series Outlander. I wrote […]

If you Google “Songs about Amelia Earhart,” you will find various songs about the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, Fred Noonan, and their Lockheed Electra 10E.  Not to be outdone, I wrote a couple myself.  When I participated in a major Earhart expedition, I was told that my songs and singing in general helped to bring […]

Last week we examined the major plausible theories for the disappearance in July 1937 of Amelia Earhart in her beautiful Lockheed Electra.  But there are other, minor, theories, and some really bizarre ones, as follows. First: Amelia became Tokyo Rose.  This is the silliest theory of all. There was no one person who broadcast as […]

There are three and a half major plausible theories on what happened to Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan, when they disappeared on 2 July 1937: 1. They were captured as spies by the Japanese in the Marshall Islands, and died or were executed in captivity there or on Saipan; 2. Unable to find […]

If you read my previous two articles on Prince Philip, you might think that I join with many other members of the press, who enjoyed taking potshots at the Prince. Nope. Despite his having no official political power, Prince Philip was IMHO one of the greatest public servants and leaders of the last 100 years. […]

Recall from last week’s column that on Tanna island in the Republic of Vanuatu, the Prince Philip Tribe worshipped the Prince as a god.  If you have read any press coverage of the Tribe’s reaction to the recent death of Prince Philip, you will think that the Tribe is in mourning and will likely nominate […]

If you watched the impressive funeral of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, you may have picked up some of the following accepted facts. He was born in 1921 on a dining table in a mansion on Corfu, as a member of the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glückburg and a Prince of Greece and Denmark. When his life […]

Last week I described the astounding life of Josiah Henson and the new Montgomery County Parks Museum that has just opened in his honor.  This week I will tell you how I got involved in his story, researched his family and possible links to explorer Matthew Alexander Henson, and how all this relates to the […]

After several months of delay due to the Covid pandemic, the brand-new Josiah Henson Museum in north Bethesda has just opened to the public.  It is definitely worth a visit!  The Museum tells the story of one of the most astounding and consequential persons to ever live in Montgomery County. Josiah Henson was born into […]