The Mountain Of Truth

One of my favorite fictional characters is “Doc” in John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row”. Not many people know that Doc was based on the real-life figure of Ed Ricketts who categorized specimens from tide pools and then sold them to schools and collectors. Ricketts was an interesting personality in his own right. His significance in marine […]

Playing The Game Of Life

During a long career as a financial planner, I have had the privilege of looking through a window into the intimate lives of hundreds of individuals. Many of these have played the game of life with consummate skill and have achieved considerable success in their chosen endeavors, both financial and non-financial. However, it is also clear […]

Lessons From The Donner Party

The story of the Donner Party, trapped in the Sierra Nevada during one of the worst winters on record (1846), is too well known to require retelling. However, after reading the latest account of their journey by Ethan Rarick, which includes some new research, I realized that the story of the Donner Party’s ordeal contains some […]

The Backpacker’s Guide To Wealth

Having just returned from a few days backpacking in the Superstition Mountain Wilderness in Arizona, please forgive me for waxing lyrical about the unlikely connection between backpacking and wealth. The primary goal of backpacking is to survive a trip to places that are often difficult or impossible to get to by any other means than […]