The Miller Spotlight

Anybody out there got connections with KCUR (the regional NPR station in Kansas City)? Just had an empowering 45-minute interview with the manager of Kansas Public Radio. Will let you know when it's aired, where it will be available on line, and how you can help get it (or something similar) into the larger NPR arena in the weeks to come. Dan Skinner was great to work with. Definitely not like a couple of challenging characters I encountered in 1993-94--some so right-winged with ulterior motives than mine--which I "wrote up" in Enlarging Boston's Spotlight . He'll have to edit out about 2/3 of the content, including a time or two when I got deeper into sub-topics than I intended, like collusion in the publishing industry. That's the beauty of not being live, though, as I usually was in the scores of interviews I did over twenty years ago. I spent a lot of time talking about issues with Protestants not having big enough pockets, about the gender oppr...

A few weeks ago, I got a box from the mother of a convicted felon. This box was full of belongings of my mother.  Keepsakes from her past high school graduation reunions that she'd attended with such joy for decades. Photos went as far back as 1990.  Letters galore from some of her friends, too. So how did it end up in the hands of a convict?  Long, long story.  Like so many of mother's stories, some that would make your hair stand on end. Suffice it to say that the felon's mother found it among other items he'd left in her home that he'd managed to take from my mother's after he invaded it under the guise of being a legitimate craftsman, a fact that people in the community who knew him years earlier vowed was true. His mother figured out the stuff belonged to my mother and that he'd somehow gotten it into his pile of belongings "by mistake" after Ron and I succeeded in getting this crook and ne'er-do-well out Mom's old run-down house...