We always take credit for the good and attribute the bad to fortune.

I was on the high school track team, believe it or not, and played baseball, poorly but passionately.

That was the overwhelming thing to me, the joy of carrying my portable typewriter to an event and trying to describe it.

Most of those old settlers told it like it was, rough and rocky. They named their towns Rimrock, Rough Rock, Round Rock, and Wide Ruins, Skull Valley, Bitter Springs, Wolf Hole, Tombstone. It's a tough country. The names of Arizona towns tell you all you need to know.

You know, most reporters can't go back to the towns they wrote stories about. I never wrote that kind of story.

I have spent a good part of my life looking for the perfect barbecue. There is no point in looking in places like Texas, where they put some kind of ketchup on beef and call it barbecue. Barbecue is pork, which narrows the search to the South, and if it's really good pork barbecue you are looking for, to North Carolina.

Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.