1965 was a tumultuous time. The country was still healing from the wounds brought on by a presidential assassination. Alabama state troopers clashed with civil right activists in Selma. The first wave of US Armed Forces was being deployed to the jungles of Viet Nam. In 1965, I fought a demon of my own. My …
As I watched the 2009 baseball postseason, I thought about my long association with the Philadelphia Phillies. As a kid, I was never a sports fan. My brother and father would park themselves in front of the television and rabidly watch anything that remotely resembled a sporting event. Depending on the time of year, our …
This week’s challenge word on the Illustration Friday website is “strong”. “Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.” — Ronald Reagan On a recent trip to Walt Disney World, my wife and I witnessed something we found very unsettling. To alleviate the effects of the central Florida humidity, …
This week’s inspirational word on Inspire Me Thursday is “chair”. My brother was born in 1957. The Pincus family was a nice, sweet, calm family for four and a half years. Then little Josh was born and all hell broke loose. It began when I was brought home from the hospital. My parents thought it …
The word of inspiration on Inspire Me Thursday is “cupcake”. As mentioned many, many times on this blog, I love going to Disney theme parks. I went to Walt Disney World for the first time when I was nineteen. My wife and I went to Walt Disney World on our honeymoon. We took our son …
This week’s illustrationfriday.com challenge is “impatience”. There was nobody that ever lived that was as impatient as my father. Perhaps it started when he was a child. He and his parents lived at eight different addresses on West 52nd Street in Philadelphia. They kept moving up the block. My father told me it was because each …
The inspiration this week on Inspire Me Thursday is “child art”. When I was a kid, my family would go to the Jersey shore at Atlantic City. Every time we’d go to the beach, my mom would recite this poem: “When I was down beside the sea A wooden spade they gave to me to …
“A Brief History of Josh Pincus is Crying, As Seen Through Chinese Food” I love Chinese food. I always have. Given a choice of “What’s for dinner?” (and pizza wasn’t available), I’d always pick Chinese food. My craving for Chinese food began when I was a little kid. Except then, it was Chinese food as …
When I was five or six, my favorite singer was Allan Sherman. I listened to my parents’ Allan Sherman records. They had his first five releases. I knew every lyric to every song. I knew the order of every song on every album. My Mom and Dad roared with laughter at Sherman’s songs and laughed …
This is the story of my great-great uncle, Aloysius Josh Pincus, the man for whom I am named. Just prior to the turn of the twentieth century, Aloysius ran the soda fountain at Blehall’s Pharmacy, a sprawling retail establishment housed on the street level of a massive and ornate building at the corner of 14th …
