Most people Downriver know my husband, Bob Ankony, as the “Tan Running Man of Grosse Ile.” Bob has been running the island and throughout Downriver since 1979.Bob runs in all weather, from below zero to above a hundred. Oddly enough, as he gets older, he enjoys running in the heat more and more. He comes alive in hot, humid weather—says the heat acts as a natural lubricant for aging joints—and he loves the idea that wherever he is, he can always run home. On average, he runs 2,800 miles a year.So far, he’s run more than 130,000 miles. That’s more than five laps around the earth—more than half the distance to the moon. And he has logged a lot of those miles in faraway places such as Stalingrad, Moscow, Leningrad, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Okinawa.
What a joy it was yesterday to receive a signed copy of Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story, by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, best-selling author, and Washington Post associate editor David Maraniss.
Saint John Rescue is a vast organization of highly skilled volunteers and professionals. In Ontario, Canada, and many other places around the world, they provide ambulance service, rescue lost hikers, and promote water safety. Each year, they help thousands of people and save hundreds of lives. But one bright Wednesday morning, August 25, 1993, in Niagara Falls, they did something else entirely.
A crater is a typically bowl-shaped depression in the ground caused by a sudden, violent release of energy. And the result of that sudden energetic event is often the loss of lives in the immediate area. More rarely, a crater saves a life. One such crater, in Quang Tri Province, Vietnam, US Army Corps of Engineers grid coordinates 317448, saved five young American soldiers. It also helped advance my understanding and appreciation of physics
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CategoriesFirearms Ballistics, Explosive Energy, Chemical Energy, Nuclear Energy, Craters, Friendly Fire
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On Tuesday, September 13, 1977, I walked into your office and saw you for the first time. That afternoon I called and asked you out.
Just days before we met Voyager I and II were launched. Voyager I has now crossed the point where it is the first man-made object to reach interstellar space, the area where most atoms are not from here but formed from other stars.
Since 1979, my wife, Cathy, and I lived in our lovely quad-level home on Grosse Ile, a small island town twenty miles south of Detroit. Our house was paid off and was always a source of pride—to me after growing up in Detroit, and to my wife, who was raised in the government projects of Norwayne (later the city of Westland). We raised our daughter and two sons, and in April 2014, after spending the winter in balmy Huntington Beach, California, far from the snows and subzero temperatures of Michigan, we decided it was time to move. Two of our children had been living out of state for years, our youngest son was in college, and all of our kids hoped to end up in California.
