Hank Nuwer Alaska Yarns

One essay project is a memoir on a savage attack on me with a baseball bat at Cheektowaga Town Park by a street hoodlum named Dale August Fechter. . .’m also writing about multiple disgraced priests at Buffalo’s Diocesan Preparatory seminary, again as a memoir.  

  By Hank Nuwer   Alaskans and Alaskan visitors by automobile evermore owe a debt to General Wilds Preston Richardson for building the roads more traveled. A native Texan, he was born March 20, 1861, three weeks before Confederate troops fired the first shot of...

Robert Cole Caples is an enigmatic man. Seldom photographed, a lover of privacy: he became one of Nevada’s best-loved artists. By Hank Nuwer (1973) Much of the information available on Caples exists preserved in an intriguing essay by writer Walter Van Tilburg Clark...

By HANK NUWER,  It’s a story as old as the story of human progress. A new discovery or innovation heralded for its efficacy is suspected to have harmful effects that require ingenuity on the part of researchers to find an antidote to the unintended causes. I consider...

Weekends fly by all too fast, don’t they? One week ago Saturday my wife Gosia and I enjoyed the incredible vistas on the highway south of Delta Junction and north of Paxson. The next day I took Gosia for her first trip on the Dalton Highway, but we did not drive too...

lthough I fly frequently, I don’t know any unruly passengers.  Except one, I admit.  Me.  This incident occurred the time I boarded a flight to Minneapolis and buried my nose in an airline magazine.  Vaguely, as I read, the flight attendant greeted passengers with the...

By Hank Nuwer                   Likely you’ll be reading this column about the same time you and I will be contemplating what direction the elected president will take our great nation the next four years.                   Your candidate, my candidate, either won or...

KA-BOOM! I labored at my computer on a bitterly cold February day as a black truck crashed into my Union City, Ind. house. The truck smacked the siding just beneath the window behind me. It shook up both the house and my composure. Hey wait! Is the driver pulling...

During the fall of 1993, the Cordova Times published a letter from a concerned parent of a Cordova High School ninth grader.  The mother said she wanted an end to the “degrading” practice of hazing — or “freshman initiation” — as “the tradition” euphemistically was...