I drove past the Farmers Market near my home again today. Truck beds and tents held mounds of vegetables in every summer color. Customer/neighbors strolled from booth to booth, poking this and pointing to that; vendor/neighbors shook out flat paper bags to make room for purchases.

Summer is one of the best times of year. Kids are out of school, there’s more time to spend with family, and the days are longer and more beautiful. For many Missourians, it’s the perfect time to travel and take a long-awaited vacation with loved ones. Personally, my favorite place to travel…

Will Rogers once said, “parades should be classified as a nuisance, and participants should be subject to a term in prison.”

Getting older is costing me a fortune. Just about the time I think I have my financial see-saw equally balanced, some tired, graying old woman plops her pill-toting purse down on the plank and sends my budget flying off the other side.

Ask Rusty 

Freedom, fireworks, barbeques, parades, summer fun and all things red, white and blue – the Fourth of July is one of the best days of the year.

“Can anything worse possibly happen to a car?” Rick’s voice cracks with stress as he tells me about it.

I’ve watched my share of kids sign the dotted line to move on and play sports at colleges all across the country in my career.

Independence Day has lost its name. In a moment of laziness or maybe just forgetfulness, many of us decided to take away the descriptive title and replace it with a calendar number. 

This week, the United States Department of Labor released the most recent jobs numbers that showed our nation had a record number of job openings in April at 9.3 million, surging by almost a million from the month before.

That was one hot Sunday morning in the Tower Grove South neighborhood of St. Louis.

I was enjoying a slice of pie, skimming the headlines in the paper, when my mouth fell open in astonishment:

Now that life in Missouri is back to normal, I have so enjoyed being able to get out in the district and interact with constituents again in recent months. Getting your direct feedback and being able to hear your concerns and opinions without having to log onto Zoom or Teams (or whatever the…

I’ll let you on one of the dirtiest secrets of journalism.

I was enjoying a slice of pie, skimming the headlines in the paper, when my mouth fell open in astonishment:

“On Memorial Day, I don’t want to only remember the combatants. There were also those who came out of the trenches as writers and poets, who started preaching peace, men and women who have made this world a kinder place to live.”

I am a walking weather predictor. A living, wheezing, weather vane. Parts of me have solved the cosmic mysteries of meteorology, and feel compelled to share this knowledge with itchy, achy, bleary-eyed precision.

It’s on Memorial Day that we take time to honor the heroic men and women who have given their lives in defense of the United States of America.

When I came back to Missouri last year, I expected to be covering something in Lincoln County.

Senior high school students have been doing it for decades. At the end of their final year, the class concocts a few elaborate, annoying, sometimes funny ways to mark their exit. 

On August 28, 2020, St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department Officer Tamarris Bohannon responded to a shooting call. This would be the 29-year-old father of three’s last day on the job, as the suspect proceeded to fire at Officer Bohannon, ultimately taking his life, leaving his children wit…

“They couldn’t have picked anyone else to do this, Shawn?”

As we all know, it is physically harder to do things as we age. Especially if you’re like me: my activity level is regulated by absolute necessity. There may have been days—oh, so long ago—when I moved just to move. When “activity” was a fun, healthy word. 

While going through some of my old political science books looking for inspiration for the final chapter of my thesis, I located this quote from a rather ironic source.

It’s a metaphysical fact of rural American life. Every person you’ve ever known in your entire life is hiding at Walmart, just waiting for you to come in looking your absolute worst and in no mood for socializing.