Days before he died in September 2010, Allentown’s Jack McHugh summoned Joe Garrera to his home. McHugh, a beloved principal at the city’s William Allen High School for years and an equally admired community leader during his long retirement, was also an amateur historian and an inveterate collector of presidential memorabilia. He had already bequeathed a substantial amount of material about Franklin Roosevelt to the FDR Library in Hyde Park, N.Y. and now he wanted to make sure the rest of his collection was properly preserved.
He knew that Garrera, executive …

Eastern Pennsylvania just got a dumping of somewhere between 9 to 18 inches of snow, depending on where your shovel hit the pavement, and to be honest on days like this I don’t like to travel farther than the wine store down the street. I’m a warm-weather person. If I go out in the snow and cold, it’s usually to some place with a great heating system and some warm spirits.
I know I was in the minority last summer when many people were complaining about the constant heat and string …

Let’s see, we’re wrapping up the first week of January and another snowjob, er, storm is headed for Pennsylvania. That can mean any of three things:
One, the Farm Show is coming up.
Two, the gang in Harrisburg is back from the holiday break and up to its usual mischief.
Three, it’s January and that’s what happens around here this time of year.
Nah, let’s stick with the first two.
There are a lot of new people in our state capital this week as the Commonwealth gets underway with a new Legislature and prepares to inaugurate …

It’s after noon on Dec. 21 and that means there are only about 48 hours left to finish your Christmas shopping. Guys, we better get started.
I’ve always been fascinated by the difference between men and women when it comes to shopping. I’ve found that guys don’t shop, they buy. I wrote once that if you send a Fortune 500 CEO in the middle of a mall, in 20 minutes he will have bought the place, laid off half the staff, changed three leases and rewritten the rental codes. Put him …

When I was a kid and we lived in suburban Philadelphia, there was a man near Willow Grove who really went all-out with decorating his house every Christmas. My parents would take us over to see the place and it was lit up with an enormous number of lights and moving figures that included Frosty, Snoopy and the Peanuts gang, Rudolph as well as other displays and favorites, including, of course, the Big Guy.
I never knew who the home owner was, but he was clearly a couple decades ahead of …