Birney Imes: One mother in law’s take on city planning

The other night, my mother in law, who has a genius for distilling a complex issue into its essence, said as she was polishing off her daily Dispatch crossword, “Columbus has too many people finding fault with it instead of finding good.”

Steve Mullen: A bridge that helped revive a city

It’s too outdated to handle traffic. It has been derided as a bridge to nowhere — or at least nowhere that anyone wants to go. Some wonder why we shouldn’t just knock it down, rather than fix it up.

Rufus Ward: Lions and Tygers and Bears

First during deer season and now during turkey season radio talk shows and hunters are all discussing black panthers and if they are really found in Mississippi. Naturalists all agree that the black panther is not to be found in North America. However, Mississippi is within the traditional range of the Florida panther and within the last two years a deer feeder’s game camera recorded a night photo of a panther in central Louisiana.

Birney Imes: Charles Lindbergh lands in Maben

“No attempt at jokes today. A . . . slim, tall, bashful, smiling American boy is somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where no lone human being has ever ventured before. . . . If he is lost it will be the most universally regretted loss we ever had.” —Will Rogers

Steve Mullen: Teamwork, and vision, needed for downtown

For decades, management types have been warned to avoid a “silo” mentality in their businesses — imagine those tall Midwestern grain silos, which hold everything in and keep everything else out. Simply put, people tend to cluster within their own area, or their own department, inside a business. As the thinking goes, while individual departments within the same business might look similar, they don’t communicate — they’re trapped within their own silo. So, good ideas don’t spread and the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. The business doesn’t innovate, or grow.

Rufus Ward: A Titanic Columbus link

This week marks the 98th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic and there is a little known Columbus link. Dr John D. Richards grew up in Columbus, went to medical school and then moved to New York City around the turn of the century. In New York he became prominent as a physician, a polo player and a trainer of polo ponies.

Birney Imes: Snapping turtle for supper

Every week or so Ed Phillips hosts a wild game feast at his shop on Old West Point Road for a group of men that include lawyers, businessmen, tradesmen, landed gentry and the occasional ne’er-do-well.

Steve Mullen: Picking the Civil War’s nit

Here we are, halfway through Confederate Heritage Month, and I didn’t even realize it was going on — that is, until the fracas over governor’s proclamations in Virginia and Mississippi.

Birney Imes: Furor over dustup much ado about nothing, says Amos C.

The other day over a late lunch I asked my friend Amos C. his thoughts on the city hall dustup between Mayor Robert Smith and Councilman Kabir Karriem.

Garthia Elena Burnett: Even a good marriage has bumps along the way

Someone once told me, “Getting married isn’t for the faint of heart.”

Jay Lacklen: All purple and fragrant

Of all Mother Nature’s gifts to mankind proffered to apologize for a long and miserable winter, none in Columbus catches my attention as stringently as wisteria.

Birney Imes: Looking for Ted Kooser

When my brother Frank was paralyzed and laid up in a hospital in California, we took turns sitting with him. While Beth was there, she read to him from a book by Ted Kooser. She had gone in a bookstore in Santa Monica looking for something to read and, as she remembers, the book jumped off the shelf into her hand. She’d never heard of the guy.

Steve Mullen: Pardon our progress …

Welcome, visitors to Columbus! Jump on board our red double-decker tour bus here, for a quick trip around our historic city. This isn’t the tour we had originally planned, but recent events have caused a slight change to the program.

Birney Imes: In other news …

Not all the news last week was bad. Sometime Columbus resident (We share him with Brooklyn, NY.) Robert Ivy was named a master architect by the architecture fraternity Alpha Rho Chi. Robert, who is editor in chief of Architectural Record, is only the seventh architect to be accorded this honor.

Jay lacklen: Saigon

Saigon, the defunct capital of South Vietnam, no longer exists except fondly in the memory of several hundred thousand American soldiers.

Steve Mullen: A pop quiz for the first quarter: The answers

If this column seems more incoherent than usual, the you probably missed last week’s questions about the top local news stories of the first three months of 2010.

Ask Rufus: Streetcars in Columbus

A reader asked about the streetcars or electric trolley line that once served Columbus. For an answer, I called on Columbus architect and historian Sam Kaye, who knows more about the old trolley lines than anyone else.

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