Today's Features

Jim Miller would be the first to tell you that his well-plotted path from boy journalist of Shelby County to adult author took a few side trips, the last of which ultimately if unwittingly landing him at his destination.

Miller, who grew up in the Clark Station area of Shelby, became Author James W. Miller as the result of a devastating hurricane that swept away his life and blew him forward and into the pages of his first book, Where The Water Kept Rising.

With this column, my 96th, the number of all my columns written for The Sentinel-News finally has equaled my age. I shall continue to write, subject to the editor’s tolerance, in order to reach 100 columns before my 100th birthday, hopefully well before.

We all are reminded about the inconsistency, in fact utter unreliability, of recent memory. A typical example is opening the refrigerator door to get a dish out of the microwave.

However, long-time memory seems to have an indelible quality. Once recorded, it can be forever recalled.

The mood at Smith-McKenney in Village Plaza today will be one of bittersweet emotions as employees wrap up their last day of business before being taken over by CVS.

“I’ve been doing this for a long time, forty years, and I know these people – we’re like a family, and it’ll be tough, leaving,” owner Greg Hayes said. “But the cycle goes on, you know, and the one thing that’s constant in life is change.”

‘No plan survives contact with the enemy.’

 Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (1800-1891)

The bloody Battle of the Somme, which commenced on July 1, 1916, has continued to fascinate me. My English father, Sgt. Reginald George Bareham, was one of 19,240 British soldiers – nearly 20 percent of the entire British fighting force – who were killed that day on the French countryside in one of the pre-eminent battles of World War I.

I was born a week later, on July 8.