Almost 50 years ago, I spent about six months living on an idyllic little island where I acted as a caretaker. Zuckerberg Island is situated at the confluence of the Kootenay and Columbia Rivers in Castlegar, British Columbia, the town were I grew up. Eli Sopow, a high school friend, was editing the Kootenay...
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The Green New Deal has already created a stir in Congress and in the minds of many Americans who have been quick to condemn it as a communist plot. After 10 years of living among them, I have learned that fear largely drives the collective consciousness of Americans: fear of skin color, immigrants, and...
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My third documentary film, Codename Project 9, had its first public screening at the Expressions Cafe in Nelson, B.C., on August 6, 2018, 73 years after the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. The film documents the role that the Trail smelter played in making the bomb, providing glimpses of...
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Twenty years ago, I found myself in a coal mine two kilometers under the Atlantic Ocean in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Recently I was reminded of the experience and the article I wrote about it. The Cape Breton Post reprinted the piece under the headline “City Slicker Goes Under Ground.” The article begins as...
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KLCC radio interview – aired Nov. 25, 2015 Street Rhythms – Register-Guard – Dec. 3, 2015 My show “Street Rhythms ­– A Photographic Journey” opened on Nov. 8, 2016, for a two-month exhibition at the Eugene Public Library. The 27 photographs in the collection are images of people from around the world that were...
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Our Times, Canada’s labour magazine, has included a two-page review essay on my films in its fall 2015 edition. Headlined “Rekindling Resistance,” writer Rachel E Beattie provides a wide-ranging assessment of the short films and concludes that the “triumphant note embedded in those stories” helps inspire action today and “remind labour activists of that spirit...
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John D’Arcangelo, a former teacher and long-time resident of Trail, B.C., has thoughtfully included one of my childhood memories in his recently published book A Time to Remember. My short entry recounts my dad Mike Verzuh’s recollection of a hockey game in which Cominco president S.G. Blaylock intervened to ensure that the game would go on. The book,...
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On Sunday, May 24, 2015, we celebrated the life of Francesco Edward “Buddy” DeVito, a long-time family friend and later a personal friend of mine. Buddy had died about six months earlier on October 29, 2014, at age 94, but his widow Maureen Mitchell wanted to wait a while before spreading his ashes in...
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“Allan M. was a quiet kid; a sissy, according to some of his school mates. He had few friends, wasn’t good at sports, least of all the potentially violent ones like football or hockey. He was a loner, not in the habit of opening up. As the yearbook put it: ‘This tall fair lad...
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The attached article on Zuckerberg’s Island is one of my early attempts at literary non-fiction in which I recount the story of a young visitor who popped up on my doorstep one day in the summer of 1973 while I was acting as the island caretaker on behalf of a grandson of Alexander Zuckerberg....
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