Author Archives: Philip E Jenks

September 10, 2020 – Fifty-six years ago today I joined the Air Force. Nine of us adolescents were sworn in at an induction center in Syracuse and bused to Hancock Field for the flight to San Antonio’s Lackland Air Force … Continue reading →

September 6, 2018 – Herbert L. Block – Herblock as he signed his work – was my favorite editorial cartoonist when I was growing up. I decided as a young teenager that my fall-back goal in life (if for some … Continue reading →

September 4, 2018 – I was curious what President Truman was doing on my birthday, 72 years ago. I found this remarkable statement written on September 4, 1946, decrying the evils of discrimination and the harm it does to our … Continue reading →

August 18, 2021 – This week I had another one of those Jungian dreams in which I am still in the Air Force. In the dream, I am dressed in baggy fatigues, wearing a one-size-fits-all combat helmet, standing wearily in … Continue reading →

Acts 5:1-15 (NRSV) Ananias and Sapphira But a man named Ananias, with the consent of his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property; with his wife’s knowledge, he kept back some of the proceeds, and brought only a part and laid it … Continue reading →

August 11, 2018 – Dad would have been 100 today. It was not an age he expected to reach and when he died 20 years ago at 80, no other Jenks male in our line had lived so long. But … Continue reading →

  This cartoon, drawn circa 1970 amid the intensity of my college years,* captures what most of us Boomers knew back then: We humans were suffocating the life out of God’s green earth. And not all Boomers were mired at … Continue reading →

August 3, 2019 – My social media world is a fairly insulated community of flatulent former flower children, church nerds, and enlightened Boomers. Thus I might get the impression that everyone thinks Donald Trump is a lying, semi-literate narcissist with … Continue reading →

  The way Harry Truman saw it in August 1945, there was a sickening possibility that the Second World War would end in an unprecedented bloodbath. The only alternative to a mutual massacre of American and Japanese troops, he believed, … Continue reading →

August 1, 2018 – Senator Edward M. Kennedy died nine years ago this month. At the time I fantasized what it might have been like when Teddy crossed over. Would he have been greeted by his long-dead brothers? And what … Continue reading →