Culture

Bedtime stories opened Brian Briggs’ young eyes to the world of visual storytelling and often enlarged them to orbs of wide-eyed wonderment, ruining the primary objective of the nighttime custom—sleep inducement. His late mother, Jane Davidson, an artist of impressionism, would read books by illustrator/ painter/author Howard Pyle and others to Brian at their home

Jim Renke nearly lost his right index finger while operating a press brake at a metal fabrication shop in California decades ago. He was nearly 20 at the time, a community college student toiling in the summer for pizza and gas money for the fall semester. A press brake bends metal bars or sheets—and always

Well before he wrote lines for television characters Laverne and Shirley, penned jokes for Chevy Chase, and screen-wrote the movie The ’Burbs—starring Tom Hanks, Bruce Dern, and Carrie Fisher—a young Dana Olsen entertained an audience of two at home. Older sisters Virginia and Jane. “They told me I was funny,” says Olsen, a Northwestern University