You’d think that a building big enough to hold a couple dozen Mack trucks would be easy to find. Uh-uh. The Mack Trucks Museum is hidden away on the back side of Allentown’s Queen City Airport, nestled on a hilltop overlooking the scenic Lehigh Parkway.
There’s a reason for the subterfuge that makes finding this gem a little like participating in a road rally where you have to find and follow clues to reach the prize – it used to be the Test Center and Track where Mack developed their new …

There’s an old joke that holds that when Squanto saw the Mayflower drop anchor off Plymouth Rock, his first reaction was “There goes the neighborhood.” I’ve never believed that Native Americans lived in peace with each other before the white man arrived, and we destroyed a paradise. There is ample evidence that the original tribes had their share of problems and wars. We just brought better weapons.
But there is also ample evidence that they had an extensive civilization that matched anything the Europeans brought to the North American continent. They …

I read a story recently bemoaning the fact that the northern states seem to have forgotten the Civil War, aka the “War Between The States,” the “War Between Brothers” or the “Great Tea Party Rebellion.” Ok, I made up that last one.
But seriously, “northern states” in the context of this story must mean “states that are not Pennsylvania.” Because, and we’re not just whistling “Dixie” here, you can’t raise the Stars and Bars at a redneck revival in this state without seeing it flap over a Civil War memorial, graveyard, …

Approach Fonthill on a gloomy afternoon in late March and you can easily imagine Jane Austen or one of her heroines opening the large, heavy front door, dressed in a gray cloak and headed out to consummate another doomed love affair.
Approach the foreboding Gothic structure in the dark shadows of twilight and your imagination is more likely to picture Barnabas Collins or Vincent Price answering the bell, and all of a sudden your imaginary novel takes on a bit more, um, bite.
But while there is a room in Fonthill called …

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 …

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 …

As the mother of two young boys and calendar coordinator for her Mom’s Cub, Jennifer Jones has become somewhat of a regular at America On Wheels in Allentown. As her sons marveled at the room-sized, ‘O-Gauge’ model train platform in a second-floor gallery at the museum of over-the-road transportation, Jones said she keeps abreast of new exhibits and visits several times a year.
“We love it,” she said as the boys watched the trains and checked out the historic Soap Box Derby cars mounted on the nearby wall. “We enjoy it …

As you climb the steep steps from Hazard Square in the center of Jim Thorpe and look up the hill to the mansion that, let’s face it, looms over the borough, you may get a sense of déjà vu if you have ever visited America’s most popular tourist destination – Disney World.
The Harry Packer Mansion was the model for Disney’s Haunted Mansion and if you let your imagination run a bit, you might just see someone – or something – peeking at you from behind the curtains on the upper …

The first time I visited the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. was on a misty, chilly night when I was helping to chaperone about 100 of my son’s energetic and occasionally over-dramatic high school classmates. I didn’t really know much about the memorial, so when we approached out of the fog and I saw the 19 larger-than-life statues emerge as if they were trekking through a rice paddy, it was an eerie and evocative moment.
The Korean War memorial is still one of my favorite stops when I’m in …