Mark Ray

aarp the magazine

A place for all

Pastor Larry Stoess and his wife, Kathie, create community one meal at a time.

CostcoConnection

Selling like hot cakes

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but some mothers are pretty inventive in their own right. Take Penny Clark. Back in 1982, she sent her 8-year-old son, Joel, around the family's Utah neighborhood selling pancake mix out of a red wagon. This wasn't just any pancake mix, however. It was a version of an old family recipe that called for egg whites, baking soda and vinegar, as the instructions she stapled to each brown paper lunch sack explained.

Joel quickly sold his stock, but Penny decided....

Eagles' Call Magazine

Leading with integrity

You could say that Rex Tillerson’s path to the corner office began on a portage trail in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota and Ontario.

As a 14-year-old Scout from Stillwater, Okla., the future Exxon Mobil CEO traveled to the Charles L. Sommers Canoe Base for a 10-day canoeing adventure. But adventure turned to anxiety the first time he tried to portage a canoe from one lake to another; it seems his 115-pound body was no match for a canoe that weighed upwards of 85 pounds.

Alumni Alive!

Alumni Alive! Summer 2018

A quarterly alumni newsletter I wrote for the Boy Scouts of America

Next Avenue

The play’s the thing for these Kentucky veterans

On any given Thursday evening, a dozen or more veterans, men and women from every conflict since Vietnam, file into a nondescript conference room in Louisville, Ky.’s Vet Center. They don’t come for therapy or to swap war stories, however. Instead, they come to study and stage scenes from William Shakespeare’s plays.

They’ve been coming for nearly two years, ever since retired Army Col. Fred Johnson convinced ...

Eagles' Call Magazine

All the right moves

In 1977, their first season, the Toronto Blue Jays were the worst team in Major League Baseball. They had won 54 games and lost 107--45 1/2 games behind the New York Yankees, the division rivals who won their 21st World Series Championship that October.

But the Blue Jays were about to unleash their secret weapon: first-year general manager, the Yankees' former coordinator of player development. Knowing he couldn't rely on the sort of marquee, high-dollar talent that filled his former team's roster....

Aetna

Ageing population: the ticking time bomb

When Emma Morano died in Italy April 2017, she was the world’s oldest person. She was also the last link to the 19th century, having been born in November 1899.

According to a BBC report, the 117-year-old woman’s life “not only spanned three centuries but also survived an abusive marriage, the loss of her only son, two world wars and more than 90 Italian governments.” She credited her longevity to genetics and a daily habit of eating three eggs, one cooked and two raw.

Scouting magazine

How to harness the positive and negative powers of peer pressure

In the company of friends, adolescents are more likely to experiment with alcohol and drugs, commit crimes and drive recklessly. In fact, when other teens are in the car, a teen’s chances of getting into a wreck more than quadruple. Statistics like that explain why graduated driver’s license programs limit teen passengers, but they don’t explain teens’ risky behavior in the first place. It’s like an adolescent version of the chicken-and-egg question....

CostcoConnection

Grains of truth

The first thing you should know about Bob's Red Mill Natural Foods is that there really is a Bob. He's 88-year-old Bob Moore, he started the company with his wife, Charlee, four decades ago, and he still oversees daily operations at the Milwaukie, Oregon, company.

The second thing you should now is that there really is--or rather was--a red mill.

Eagles' Call Magazine

Class act

On Sept. 25, 1957, Eagle Scout Ernest Green Jr. and eight other African-American students walked through the front doors of Little Rock’s Central High School and onto the pages of history. Their simple action capped of months of planning, weeks of legal battles, a handful of street-level skirmishes, and a high-stakes showdown between the governor of Arkansas and the president of the United States.

Few had expected the integration

Boy Scouts of America

Boy Scouts of America 2013 Annual Report

During the first national Scout
jamboree back in 1937, the most
exciting activity was probably
taking in a Washington Senators
game. During the 2013 National
Scout Jamboree, the most
exciting activity was … well, it was
impossible to determine.

Presbyterians Today

Common values, uncommon rewards

Becca Calendo and Amelia Lorenz, housemates at Chicago's Hesed Community Cooperative, love molasses cookies. So last Christmas they used one of the group's three kitchens to whip up several batches of their favorite recipes. Then they enlisted the rest of the community for a blind taste test. "It was very spontaneous--something we thought of that evening over dinner," Calendo says.

But it was more than that; it was an example of what living in an intentional community can be like....

Scouting magazine

‘Green Bar Bill,’ the Scoutmaster to the World

One December day in 1926, James E. West, the first Chief Scout Executive, ran into Bill Hillcourt, a new Supply Service employee. They were standing by the elevator inside BSA headquarters, which was then in New York City.

“Well, my young man, what do you think of American Scouting?” West asked.
Hillcourt, then 26, emigrated from Denmark, where he’d earned the equivalent of the Eagle Scout rank. He shared his thoughts as the men rode downstairs, but he didn’t stop there....

kentuckyhomesandgardens.weebly.com

In living (history) color

People may dream in color, but they seem to remember in black and white. They think of history as all black-cloaked pilgrims and snow-white Valley Forge winters, as drab and monochromatic as a Mathew Brady portrait or a 1930s newsreel.

The tendency to decolorize the past seems particularly evident in restored historic homes. Walk into a typical antebellum mansion, and you’ll find faded carpets, plain ceilings, and walls that have been whitewashed or painted in muted “colonial” colors. ...

Eagles' Call Magazine

An Eagle's origin story

When they're not busy saving the planet, superheroes offer a window into the human condition, says Sterling Gates, the Eagle Scout who writes DC's The Adventures of Supergirl comic-book series based on the Supergirl TV drama. Batman must deal with the trauma of his parents' murder, Wonder Woman searches for answers in her past and Supergirl strives to meet the standard set by her cousin, Superman, who happens to be the biggest superhero of all.