THE FIRST OPIUM WAR

                In the late 1700’s, England began its love affair with tea.  Most of the tea was imported from China.  The British were so obsessed with the beverage that the fast “clipper’ ships were invented to get the freshest tea leaves back to the home country.  The famous Cutty Sark Read more…

THE PARDO PUSH

                  On March 10, 1967, F-4 Phantom fighter pilot Capt. Bob Pardo was on a mission to bomb a steel mill north of Hanoi.  Fellow pilot Earl Aman was hit by flak in his fuel tank. Pardo’s jet was also hit, in the wing.  Aman would not make it back Read more…

VERGINIA

                In 451 B.C., a Roman patrician named Appius Claudius fell in lust for a plebeian woman named Verginia (also spelled Virginia). She was the daughter of an esteemed centurion named Verginius and betrothed to Lucius Icilius.  Gifts and bribes would not woo the girl, so Claudius turned to subterfuge.  Read more…

ANNA COLEMAN LADD

                Anna Coleman Watts was born on July 15, 1878 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.  She studied sculpture in Paris and Rome.  Her first important work was called “Triton’s Babies”.  In was displayed at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915.  It is now part of a fountain in Boston.  Read more…