I Thought I'd Seen It All --DeWese

Hurricanes?

Yep. I wrote a column on a laptop at Disney World in the middle of a hurricane. Had to write real fast before the battery died. It was August of 2004.

Tornadoes? 

I wrote a column in Kansas City in 1988 in a powerful thunderstorm that was tossing hail and spinning tornadoes everywhere around me.

Heart failure?

Then, there was the time recently when I had heart failure and emergency surgery on a Sunday afternoon to install a pacemaker. Naturally, a column was due, so I wrote it from my hospital bed on Monday in the intensive care ward.

Attila the Nun?

Out of the 267 columns I have written, my bride of 46 years was 1) not speaking to me during 112 columns; 2) standing behind me and yelling at me for 41 columns; and 3) demanding that I drive her to the mall for 43 columns. I wrote three columns on a laptop in my car parked in a mall parking lot.

Oh No, Say It Ain’t So

Worldwide economic meltdown?

Just one column was written in these catastrophic economic conditions. This one. 

I am writing this on October 9, 2008, exactly two days late of my deadline. It took me 48 hours to work up my nerve to even start the darn thing. 

The Dow went below 8,600 today. The value of the Dow has dropped more than 40 percent in just three weeks. Some publicly held printing industry companies have lost more than 50 percent of their value in the past couple of weeks.

I looked up some of them and their earnings are the same. They haven’t reported any fires or train wrecks. No. Those stocks are getting killed by forces beyond their control. 

It happened real fast—this financial crisis. One minute I’m pickin’ my tomatoes, and the next minute the president is announcing the need for a $700 million, whoops, $700 billion bailout for a bunch of Wall Street investment banks that are holding bad paper on thousands of home and commercial mortgages, which are in default and either in or about to be in foreclosure. By the way, Marvelle Stump, if you are still reading this, foreclosure is nothing like foreplay.

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