Tom Lashnits

Tom Lashnits

Tom Lashnits spent 40 years in New York book and magazine publishing before retiring to Bucks County, PA, in 2017. He now volunteers in the school system, produces the baby boomer blog Sightings Over Sixty . . . and is just starting to chase after grandchildren.
Entertainment
Tom Lashnits

Carol Burnett: One Of The Funniest Women Of Our Time

Carol Burnett has something in common with Richard Pryor, Whoopi Goldberg, Neil Simon and Tina Fey. They have all been recipients of the Mark Twain Prize for American humor, awarded annually since 1998 at an event held at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC.. That may seem odd, since she was born in Texas in 1933 to parents who were both alcoholics. Her parents divorced wh

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Entertainment
Tom Lashnits

Elizabeth Taylor: A Great Humanitarian And One Of The Greatest Actresses Of All Time

Elizabeth Taylor was born in February 1932 in a planned community called Hampstead Garden Suburb, in northwest London. Her parents were from Kansas. Her father was an art dealer who got into the business through a wealthy relative. He moved first to New York, where in 1926 he married a young actress, also from Kansas, by the name of Sara Sothern. Then a few years later he was transferred to work i

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Entertainment
Tom Lashnits

Sidney Poitier: The First Black Actor To Win An Academy Award

His parents had a small farm on  Cat Island  in the Bahamas. They traveled around the Caribbean selling tomatoes and other produce from their gardens. In February 1927 they were in Miami. The mother, Evelyn, was seven months pregnant, when she suddenly and unexpectedly went into labor. The boy was born two months premature. He was not expected to survive, but his parents stayed on in Miami for thr

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Entertainment
Tom Lashnits

Alex Haley: One Of The Best-Selling African American Authors Of All Time

He was born on August 11, 1921, in Ithaca, NY, while his father was attending Cornell University to earn a master’s degree in agriculture. His father went on to become a professor at Alabama A&M, and hold other positions at several southern universities. He was the grandson of slaves — both his grandparents on his father’s side had been slaves who had been fathered by white slave owners. He a

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making changes through choice
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Tom Lashnits

What Can We Do About It?

I just read a book called The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan. It chronicles the history of the southern high plains — how they were taken over from the Native Americans, plowed up by settlers, and then scraped dry by the drought of the 1930s. What struck me about the story is how the Euro-American farmers, encouraged by the government and supported by a good economy, tore up the native grasses,

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Tom Lashnits

Retirement: An Attitude Adjustment

My wife and I have attended a series of retirement seminars, hosted by our local senior citizens center called Founders Hall. The moderator told us that we would be covering every aspect of retirement, except for money: How to find new meaning in life. What to do with your time. Whether to stay in your old home, or relocate to a retirement mecca. And yet, the most important lesson I took away from

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Life
Tom Lashnits

Goodbye Sophie: It’s Never Easy To Say Goodbye To A Pet

We didn’t have too much trouble getting Sophie, our 13-year-old mixed breed dog, into the back of the car — she just needed a little help with her back legs. She’s done this many times, making trips to the vet and the dog park, and going on vacation with us. But this trip was a little different. When she was a puppy Sophie hated to go in the car. It would make her anxious to the point that she wo

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Entertainment
Tom Lashnits

Andy Warhol: One Of The Most Controversial But Pioneering Artists Of Our Time

He was born in Pittsburgh in August 1928. He did not have an easy childhood. His parents had immigrated from Ukraine — his father in 1914 and his mother following later in 1921 — and his father worked in the Pennsylvania coal mines. The family lived in a rowhouse in a working class section of the city. As a child he apparently contracted scarlet fever, which caused his skin to be blotchy for the

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Tom Lashnits

Pay It Forward: The Mindset We All Need To Make The World A Better Place

I remember when my folks retired to Florida, back in the 1980s, we saw a used-car lot out on Route 1 with a big sign that advertised: “Buy Here! Pay Here!” We thought it was a joke. Isn’t that the way everybody buys things? We couldn’t figure out what the sign was offering that was so special. But the sign was up for as long as my parents lived there. (We later found out that “Buy Here! Pay Here!”

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Tom Lashnits

Volunteering And Charity For Retirees Gives Many A Sense Of Purpose And Happiness

America is one of the most generous nations in the world. According to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) about 60 percent of Americans regularly engage in some kind of charitable activity, compared to 40 percent in other developed countries. A study from Merrill Lynch and Age Wave found that Americans donated some $358 billion last year, and most of it came not from c

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